✡️ Israel’s Secret History of Hiring Nazi War Criminals: The Myth of Justice and the Reality of Betrayal

From the inventor of the gas vans to Hitler’s favorite commando, Mossad recruited Nazis as assets and assassins — all while proclaiming “Never Again” to the world.

See that man next to Hitler. That was his favorite commando. Later, Israel hired him.

🚨 You won’t read this in The New York Times, or see it on CNN. These outlets glorify Israel as a nation of justice and memory — but hide its secret history of working with Nazis. My work exists to tell you the truth that power does not want you to know.

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Family, let me be blunt: the “state” that claims to speak for Holocaust memory, that drapes itself in the language of “Never Again,” once hired and protected Nazi war criminals when it suited its interests.

Israel has built an entire global image around being the relentless avenger of Jewish blood — the nation that hunted Eichmann, that vowed to chase Nazis to the ends of the earth. But the historical record tells another story. When it came to Cold War expedience, when it came to defeating Arab and Muslim states, when it came to protecting its own short-term security interests, Israel made deals with the very men who designed and executed the Holocaust.

This is not speculation. It is documented history, buried in Mossad archives, whispered about for decades, and confirmed by the very men who ran Israel’s intelligence services. And it reveals a hypocrisy so deep that it should shatter the myth of Israel’s moral exceptionalism forever.

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The Myth of Relentless Nazi-Hunting

When Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina in 1960, smuggled to Jerusalem, and put on trial for his role as the bureaucratic architect of the Holocaust, Israel proclaimed to the world that it would never rest until all Nazis were brought to justice. David Ben-Gurion himself declared that Eichmann’s trial was not just about one man but about the principle that the Jewish state would never forgive, never forget, and never compromise with those who shed Jewish blood.

The Eichmann trial was broadcast worldwide. Holocaust survivors gave searing testimony. On May 31, 1962, Eichmann was hanged, and Israel’s reputation as the avenger of the Holocaust was cemented.

But beneath the surface, something else was happening. Even as Mossad agents kidnapped Eichmann, other Mossad officers were cutting deals with former Nazis, turning them into informants, and — in some cases — assassins for Israel.

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Walther Rauff: The Gas Van Engineer

The first deal came almost immediately after the Nakba and ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948.

Walther Rauff was one of the most vile Nazi perpetrators still alive in 1949. As an SS officer, he invented the gas vans — mobile death chambers where Jewish men, women, and children were locked inside and suffocated to death by exhaust fumes. Thousands were murdered in these rolling crematoria, a precursor to the fixed gas chambers of Auschwitz.

After the war, Rauff escaped justice and found work in Syria as a military adviser. Israel’s intelligence service at the time, Mamad (precursor to Mossad), approached him. They knew who he was. They knew what he had done. And still, they recruited him.

Rauff agreed to provide information on Syria in exchange for protection and payment. The precedent was set. The Jewish state was willing to employ the architect of the gas vans — a Holocaust criminal of the highest order — if it meant access to intelligence on an Arab adversary.

To me, it calls into question the very national myth of why Israel was created as a colonial settler nation. We were told it was to escape Nazis, but they were hiring Nazis. How can you hire them and escape from them? I’m confused.

This was the first betrayal: After forcing 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes, in the name of escaping Nazis, Israel was cutting deals with the men who had murdered their families.

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The Egyptian Rocket Panic

Fast forward to the early 1960s. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, announced that his new rocket program could hit any target in Israel. With German scientists — many with Nazi pasts — flocking to Cairo to build long-range missiles, Israel’s leaders panicked.

Mossad tried sabotage. They sent letter bombs to German scientists working in Egypt. Some were injured, but the program continued. They tried assassinations. They failed. Egypt’s rocket program was protected by a man named Hermann Valentin, a former SS sergeant.

To crack the program, Mossad decided they needed someone who could reach Valentin from the inside. Someone he respected. That meant turning to his old commander: Otto Skorzeny.

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Otto Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando, Israel’s Asset

Otto Skorzeny was not a low-level Nazi. He was one of Hitler’s favorites — a Waffen-SS lieutenant colonel, decorated for his daring raid to rescue Mussolini in 1943. Known as “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Skorzeny was tall, scarred from dueling, and notorious across the continent.

He had led commando operations behind enemy lines, kidnapped Hungary’s leader in 1944, and unleashed deception units wearing stolen American uniforms against Allied forces. After the war, he escaped trial, lived comfortably in Spain under Franco’s protection, and became a celebrated figure among Nazi veterans.

By all rights, Mossad should have hunted him, captured him, or executed him. Instead, in 1962, they recruited him.

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The Assassination of Heinz Krug

The Mossad didn’t just recruit Skorzeny. They turned him into a killer for Israel.

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist named Heinz Krug disappeared in Munich. Krug was one of the Peenemünde group of Nazi rocket engineers — colleagues of Wernher von Braun — now working for Egypt to build missiles aimed at Israel.

Krug thought he was meeting with Skorzeny, his fellow Nazi, to discuss protection. Instead, he met his death.

Skorzeny, now a Mossad asset, pulled the trigger himself. Krug’s body was dissolved in acid and lime by Skorzeny and his Israeli handlers. The killing was supervised by Yitzhak Shamir, future prime minister of Israel, then head of Mossad’s special operations.

This was no rogue action. It was state policy. Israel hired Hitler’s commando to assassinate German scientists, and Skorzeny delivered.

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Bombs, Lists, and Front Companies

Skorzeny’s service did not end with Krug’s murder. He provided Mossad with detailed lists of German scientistsworking for Egypt and the front companies in Europe supplying the rocket program. He helped orchestrate letter bombs and intimidation campaigns, one of which killed five Egyptians at a rocket facility.

He flew to Egypt, mailed explosives, and spied on his fellow Germans. And all of it was done on behalf of the Jewish state.

Skorzeny’s motivations remain murky. Some say he feared ending up like Eichmann, kidnapped and executed. Some say it was pure adventurism. Others note he asked Mossad for one favor: to convince Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, to remove him from his list of war criminals. Wiesenthal refused. Mossad faked a letter to make Skorzeny believe he had been cleared.

Whatever the reason, Hitler’s favorite commando died not as Israel’s target, but as its tool. He cooperated with Mossad until his death from cancer in 1975. At his funeral in Spain and Austria, veterans raised Nazi salutes over his medals. Among them, quietly attending, was his Mossad handler, Joe Raanan.

Yes, the Israeli agent went to the funeral of a Nazi where he was honored as a Nazi.

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Hermann Valentin: The Flipped SS Sergeant

The real goal of recruiting Skorzeny was to reach his former subordinate, Hermann Valentin.

Valentin, once an SS sergeant, had become the security chief of Egypt’s German rocket program. He was considered the biggest obstacle to Israeli sabotage. Through Skorzeny’s influence, Mossad approached Valentin — posing as British MI6 officers — and won him over.

At first, Valentin was cautious. But Skorzeny flattered him, fabricating a story about a wartime promotion to the German General Staff. Valentin was so proud that he agreed to work with his “British” contacts.

Soon, he was providing detailed intelligence on Egypt’s program: the failure of its guidance systems, the frustrations of German scientists, the Egyptians’ fear of misfired rockets hitting Arab cities or even Jerusalem’s holy sites. His reports calmed Israeli leaders, who realized Egypt was years away from having usable missiles.

Valentin continued feeding Mossad information, effectively dismantling the Egyptian program from within.

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The Hypocrisy Laid Bare

By the mid-1960s, Israel’s Nazi problem was clear. On the one hand, the state was the loudest voice in the world demanding justice for Holocaust crimes. On the other, its intelligence agency was working hand-in-hand with Nazis — men who had burned synagogues, gassed Jews, and fought for Hitler — as assets, informants, and assassins.

Simon Wiesenthal refused to play along. He told Mossad officials flatly that Skorzeny was a war criminal. He would not whitewash his name. But Mossad did not care. They needed him. And so, Israel, the supposed eternal avenger of the Holocaust, protected one of Hitler’s top men.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Israel’s history: justice for show, betrayal in secret.

After the triumph of the Eichmann trial, ordinary Israelis believed the myth: that their young state would hunt Nazis to the ends of the earth. That every perpetrator would face justice. That no stone would be left unturned.

But when the Mossad’s own official history was declassified in part, the reality was devastating. One volume was bluntly titled: “Clouds and Wind, but No Rain.”

In other words: promises, but no results.

The files showed that across three decades, Mossad operations against fugitive Nazis were marked by negligence, false leads, half-hearted efforts, and outright apathy. They surveilled apartments where Josef Mengele no longer lived. They chased Martin Bormann years after he was already dead. They mounted letter-bomb operations against Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s assistant in Damascus, that left him only partially injured. They staged attempted twin assassinations of Klaus Barbie and Walther Rauff in South America, aborted after a barking dog.

At the end of the day, Israel’s record was paltry:

• One Nazi captured: Eichmann.

• One Nazi assassinated: Herberts Cukurs, the “Butcher of Riga.”

• One injured: Alois Brunner.

Three out of eleven on their wanted list. A failure rate of historic proportions.

And yet — this same Mossad that could not or would not eliminate Mengele, Brunner, Barbie, and Rauff, found the time and resources to recruit Skorzeny, protect Valentin, and briefly employ Rauff himself.

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The Betrayal of Memory

This is the hypocrisy that shatters Israel’s claim to moral authority.

Every visiting foreign dignitary is escorted to Yad Vashem, where prime ministers intone “Never Again.” Every speech invokes the six million. Every atrocity in Gaza, every bombing of Lebanon, every massacre in Jenin is justified with the refrain: we know what genocide looks like, and we will never allow it again.

And yet, when it served their interest, they cut deals with the very men who built the Holocaust.

• Walther Rauff, inventor of the gas vans, paid for Syrian secrets.

• Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s commando, turned into a Mossad hitman.

• Hermann Valentin, SS sergeant, recruited as an inside source.

This is not “Never Again.” This is “Never Again, unless it benefits us.”

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Gaza: The Continuation of Hypocrisy

Some Mossad officers themselves were Holocaust survivors. Some had lost families in the camps. They knew exactly who these men were. They shook their hands anyway. They protected them anyway.

The survivors who carried tattooed numbers on their arms watched their state protect Nazis in secret while invoking their suffering in public.

And now we arrive at the present.

The same state that once hired Nazi war criminals to fight its Arab neighbors now uses the memory of the Holocaust to justify genocide against Palestinians.

It waves the six million as a shield against criticism, even as it bombs refugee camps, starves children, and disappears civilians into prisons. It invokes Yad Vashem while committing atrocities in Gaza that the Nuremberg judges themselves would have recognized as crimes against humanity.

This is not moral authority. This is moral collapse.

The truth is this: Israel never truly cared about hunting Nazis. It cared about power. It cared about leverage. It cared about survival at any cost. And when Nazis were useful, it hired them. When Nazis were irrelevant, it let them live.

The Holocaust was memory for propaganda.

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The Lesson

Family, the lesson here is devastating.

You cannot trust a state that proclaims itself the eternal defender of memory while making deals with the very perpetrators of genocide. You cannot believe in its cries of justice when its history is littered with betrayal.

You cannot accept its invocations of “Never Again” when right now, in Gaza, it is doing it again — to another people.

The Nazi collaborators that Israel recruited are dead now. But their legacy lives on in the hypocrisy of a state that has always chosen power over principle.

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Why Membership Matters

Family, you will not read this in The New York Times. You will not hear it on CNN. Israel’s collaboration with Nazis is one of the most hidden, shameful parts of its history. And yet it explains everything about the moral rot we see today.

My work exists to drag these truths into the light — no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how explosive. I keep every article free, because truth about Gaza, truth about Epstein, truth about Israel’s crimes should never be behind a paywall. But that means I depend on you.

We are at 2,684 members, just 316 away from 3,000. If you believe fearless journalism must call out Israel’s hypocrisy — hiring Nazis in the 1960s while invoking the Holocaust to justify genocide today — then I need you with me.

Please, right now, become a monthly, annual, or founding member today. Together, we can show the world that truth-telling cannot be silenced.

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Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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