Correcting the Myth that Otto Skorzeny’s Second Wife was Hjalmar Schacht’s Niece

A common myth I see banded about occasionally is the claim by jewish and/or ‘anti-Fascist’ authors that the legendary Waffen-SS officer and supposed head of the ODESSA Otto Skorzeny – aka ‘Hitler’s Commando’ – ‘married Hjalmar Schacht’s niece’.

For example, Martin Lee writes in ‘The Beast Reawakens’ that Skorzeny hid at a farm in Bavaria rented by Countess Ilse Luthje who was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht in 1949 (1) and subsequently married her in 1950. (2)

To be fair to Lee this was in fact reported as such at the time with ‘The Gazette’ writing that Skorzeny married one ‘Isla Ludwig’ who was Baroness Finkenstein and ‘a niece of Hjalmar Schacht’ in 1954. (3)

The truth however doesn’t appear in the literature on Skorzeny nor on his real and/or alleged exploits but rather in the biographical literature on Schacht.

Schacht’s biographer John Weitz is keen to clear up this myth once and for all when he writes that:

‘Schacht carefully chronicled the details of his life in his widely read autobiography, My First Seventy-Six Years. Thereafter, many authors wrote strange accounts of his doings. Two books accuse him of having collaborated with the well-known Nazi thug and “liberator of Mussolini,” SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who was living in Spain and had supposedly married a niece of Schacht. Schact was said to have earned a fortune in Madrid, where Skorzeny had created an ex-Nazi, ex-SS center of sorts. Schacht was said to have helped Skorzeny locate hidden German funds in Spain and to have helped Skorzeny obtain orders for military equipment and German military experts for Egypt. The so-called niece, a Nazi sympathizer named Ilse von Finkenstein, did indeed marry Otto Skorzeny, but she was not Schacht’s niece. She was vaguely related to the family doctor with whom young Hjalmar Schacht had lived as an upper school student in Hamburg. When Hjalmar and Manci Schacht first arrived on a business trip, the woman attached herself to them and represented herself as their “niece” to Madrid’s ex-Nazis, like former Luftwaffe fighter ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Belgium’s former Nazi chief Leon Degrelle. Perhaps she wanted to assume the dubious prestige of being related to a former minister of the Third Reich.’ (4)

So in other words: Skorzeny’s wife Ilse von Finkenstein wasn’t Schacht’s niece at all but rather someone who had sort of known Schacht earlier in his life.

References

(1) Martin Lee, 1997, ‘The Beast Reawakens’, 1st Edition, Little, Brown & Company: Boston, p. 43

(2) Ibid., p. 59

(3) ‘Skorzeny Weds’, The Gazette, 2nd March 1954, p. 1

(4) John Weitz, 1997, ‘Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schact’, 1st Edition, Little, Brown and Company: Boston, pp. 339-340