Batalla de las Ardenas

Batalla de las Ardenas is invoked as the setting for one of Otto Skorzeny’s most famous wartime operations and for a rumor that helped shape his postwar reputation. The novel distinguishes the operation’s actual purpose from the assassination story attached to it, making the battle a point where military deception, incomplete information, and later legend converge.

The operation and its purpose

As the fourth anniversary of the battle approaches in December 1948, Manuel Arroyo Benítez considers Skorzeny’s record while imagining—but deciding against—a plan to capture him in Madrid. During the offensive, Skorzeny had attempted to disrupt Allied lines by leading 3,500 men disguised as American soldiers. The operation, personally designed by Adolf Hitler, briefly confused Allied forces before their command recognized that some officers were directing troops the wrong way.

How rumor became legend

The disguised Germans were identified, arrested, and summarily shot. Before their deaths, some said that their objective had been to kill Dwight D. Eisenhower. The novel presents that claim as a rumor among the troops, not as Skorzeny’s orders: the men themselves did not know the mission’s purpose, and the story gained plausibility from Skorzeny’s fame and the lack of information surrounding the operation. Eisenhower was not even in that sector on the day in question.

Postwar reputation

Although the assassination story was false, Skorzeny’s ability to infiltrate Allied lines angered the Americans and placed him at the top of their list of wanted Nazis. At his Nuremberg trial, his lawyer secured testimony from a British squadron leader who had also infiltrated enemy lines in German uniform, in an operation that had served as Hitler’s model. That testimony undermined the prosecution and Skorzeny was acquitted; it did not, however, erase the danger associated with his name in Allied propaganda. By December 1948, the title of Europe’s most dangerous man was already understood as a fabrication, but the gap between fact and legend remained politically useful—and consequential to Manuel’s thinking about the risks of arresting Skorzeny in Franco’s Spain.