On the evening of Tuesday September 11, 1962, a new white Mercedes 300 SE pulled away from the offices of a company called Intra in Munich.

As he gunned the car's six-cylinder, fuel-injected engine, the 49-year-old driver, Heinz Krug, should have felt life was going well. He was happily married with two lovely children.

He was also making a lot of money. His firm — whose declared business was 'internal and external trade in goods of all kinds, as well as the development of technical devices' — had recently signed a deal to earn Intra some two million marks, worth about £10 million today. Of that, Krug was taking home a healthy 20 per cent.

But Heinz Krug had a big problem. Because of that lucrative deal, he was receiving menacing notes and phone calls in the middle of the night, threatening that something very bad would happen to him unless he cancelled the contract.

Krug knew who was behind the notes and calls — the Israelis. For Krug was no ordinary German businessman; he was also a distinguished rocket scientist who had worked with Wernher von Braun developing the Nazis' top-secret and deadly V1 and V2 rockets during the war.

And now, some 17 years later, Krug, like many other German scientists, was selling both his expertise and vital rocket parts to the Egyptians. This was to help the Arab country, under its dictator General Nasser, to develop a weapons programme to threaten the existence of the young state of Israel.

In its typical fashion, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad reacted to this danger with determined aggression.

In August 1962, under the codename Operation Damocles, Mossad embarked on a campaign of threats, abductions and letter bombs, aimed against anybody helping the Egyptians develop rockets.

Urgently needing protection, Krug turned to a figure once renowned as 'the most dangerous man in Europe' — a war hero and former Waffen-SS officer called Otto Skorzeny — to be his new bodyguard.

Standing at 6ft 4in and with a huge duelling scar across his left cheek, Skorzeny's greatest wartime coup had been his rescue of the recently deposed Mussolini in July 1943, in which he had led a unit of SS men on a daring glider-borne raid on a mountain-top hotel.

The mission earned the Austrian a Knight's Cross (the highest Nazi military medal), the epithet of 'Hitler's Favourite Commando', and the respect of the Allies. It was also strongly suspected that in 1938 he took part in firebombing Jewish shops and smashing up synagogues in Vienna.

It was Skorzeny whom Krug was driving to see that Tuesday evening in 1962. At some point, he was joined in the car by the bear-like form of Skorzeny himself.

The Austrian former SS man explained he had three more bodyguards driving a car behind the Mercedes, and that they would all make for a nearby forest where they could hatch plans.

If Krug finally felt safe, he was very much mistaken. For when the cars arrived at the forest, Krug found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol.

His eyes would have registered some astonishment before Skorzeny pulled the trigger — and he may have even have had time to wonder why a former SS man was working as a hitman for the Israelis, a people he and his fellow Nazis had tried to eradicate.

Krug's other supposed bodyguards, who were, in fact, Mossad agents, poured acid over the businessman's corpse. After the chemical had done its gruesome work, the remains were buried.

Whatever was left of Krug was never found, although his mud-spattered Mercedes was discovered in the Munich suburb of Solln. The only clue to his fate was an anonymous phone call to the police, which said Krug had been killed.

When it was revealed this week by Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Krug's assassin was none other than Otto Skorzeny, many historians were surprised.

Skorzeny was, after all, a legendary Nazi, renowned not only for wartime escapades, but also because he was at the heart of so many post-war Fascist networks and groups. And although it has long been known Skorzeny was happy to work with, and peddle intelligence to, any secret service, including the American CIA and the West German BND, the idea that such a committed Nazi could be an Israeli executioner seems almost incredible.

So, if it is indeed true, how did it happen? According to interviews with former Mossad officers, and those with access to the service's archives, Skorzeny's recruitment by the Israelis was the result of mutual cynicism and calculation.

In early 1962, Skorzeny and his young wife, Countess Ilse von Finckenstein, were approached in an upmarket bar in Madrid by a sophisticated and glamorous German couple, who claimed they had just been mugged, and had lost their passports, money and all their luggage.

Skorzeny and his wife appeared to take pity on the pair, and asked them to join them in more than a few cocktails.

The Skorzenys then invited the couple back to their home, and it soon looked as if the two men were about to embark on a session of wife-swapping. But the former SS-officer suddenly pulled out a gun, and stated: 'I know who you are, and I know why you're here. You are Mossad, and you've come to kill me.'

He was partly right. The couple were indeed Mossad agents, but told him they hadn't come to murder him.

'If we had come to kill you,' the male agent said, 'you would have been dead weeks ago.'

The man continued: 'Our offer to you, is just for you to help us.'

Skorzeny would have been suspicious. At the time of the meeting, Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires by Mossad in 1960, was on trial for his life in Israel. How was Skorzeny to know that this was not a trap?

N evertheless, he seemed to trust the man in his house that evening, not least because — in return for exploiting his murderous skills and trusted position among former Nazis — the Israeli claimed he could ensure the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal would drop Skorzeny from his wanted list.

That would enable him to return to his native Austria.

Flown to Israel on a secret flight, Skorzeny was briefed in a meeting with Mossad boss Isser Harel, the spymaster who masterminded the Eichmann kidnapping.

Skorzeny was asked to use his connections to fly to Egypt and acquire as much intelligence about the German scientists and businessmen helping General Nasser to develop rockets at the base known as Factory 333 near Heliopolis. It seems as if Skorzeny did as he was required — and more.

On one trip to Egypt, he arranged for the delivery of a parcel-bomb that killed five Egyptians working on rockets.

The intelligence he gathered for the Israelis also led to the near-blinding by letter bomb of Hannelore Wende, the secretary of leading scientist Wolfgang Pilz, as well as further unsuccessful assassination attempts on two other German scientists.

And of course, in September that year, Skorzeny reportedly killed Heinz Krug.

Although Operation Damocles was hardly the most moral of intelligence operations, it appears to have been successful, as by the middle of 1965, many German scientists had left Egypt, fearing for their lives. Two years later, Nasser's programme collapsed.

'Israel must admit, on some sort of official level, its responsibility for past incidents and express its regrets,' Wolfgang Pilz insisted at the time. His appeal fell on barren ground, with the Israelis predictably denying any involvement.

But now the truth is out, it appears even more startling than any historian might have suspected. When I asked Nazi-hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff if he believed that Skorzeny — who died in 1975 aged 67 — was involved, he told me that it was 'true'.

And when I asked him whether he would still demand justice for a Nazi such as Skorzeny, even if he had aided the state of Israel, his reply was simple and emphatic: 'Yes.'

georgianewsday.com