Skorzeny led Operation Greif in which German soldiers infiltrated Allied lines wearing their enemies' uniforms. As a result, he was charged in at the Dachau Military Tribunal with breaching the Hague Convention , but was acquitted. Skorzeny escaped from an internment camp in , hiding out on a Bavarian farm as well as in Salzburg and Paris before eventually settling in Spain. In , he served as a military advisor to the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Otto Skorzeny was born in Vienna into a middle-class Austrian family which had a long history of military service. In addition to his native German, he spoke excellent French and was proficient in English. In his teens, Skorzeny once complained to his father about the austere lifestyle the family was enduring; his father replied, "There is no harm in doing without things.
It might even be good for you not to get used to a soft life. He was a noted fencer as a member of a German-national Burschenschaft while studying at the Technical University of Vienna. He engaged in fifteen personal combats. The tenth resulted in a wound that left a dramatic duelling scar βknown in academic fencing as a Schmiss German for "smite" or "hit" βon his cheek. A charismatic figure, Skorzeny played a minor role in the Anschluss on 12 March when, according to his own account, he saved the Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas from being shot by Austrian Nazis.
After the Invasion of Poland , Skorzeny, then working as a civil engineer , volunteered for service in the German Air Force the Luftwaffe , but was turned down because he was considered too tall at 1.
In October , he was in charge of a "technical section" of German forces during the Battle of Moscow. His mission was to seize important buildings of the Communist Party , including the NKVD headquarters at Lubyanka , and the central telegraph office and other high priority facilities, before they could be destroyed. He was also ordered to capture the sluices of the Moscow-Volga Canal because Hitler wanted to turn Moscow into a huge artificial lake by opening them.
