Hotel Eden-Wolff is the Munich setting for Antoine Argoud’s sudden abduction by the SDECE Action Service. Argoud arrived there from Rome on February 25, 1963, apparently intending to attend a meeting; he never reached it. The seizure began in the hotel hall and ended with his covert transfer across the frontier, making the hotel the first stage of an operation whose consequences reached beyond the abduction itself.

Setting and Role

In the mid-afternoon, Argoud returned to Munich after meeting other OAS leaders in Rome. Rather than go directly to Unerdstrasse, he took a taxi to Hotel Eden-Wolff, where he had booked a room. The account suggests that he had come for a meeting, but gives no further detail about its purpose or participants. The meeting remained unrealized: men approached him in the hall before he could proceed with his plans.

The Abduction

The two men spoke faultless German. Argoud presumed they were German police and reached into his breast pocket for his passport. Instead, they seized both arms, lifted him off his feet, and hurried him outside to a waiting laundry van. When he fought back, one man struck his nose and another hit him in the stomach; a third action, pressing a finger below his ear, knocked him unconscious. The swift shift from an apparently official encounter to physical force defines the hotel’s role in the episode: it is where Argoud’s mistaken reading of his captors left him exposed.

Aftermath and Significance

The abduction continued beyond the hotel. During the following night, the SDECE Action Service took Argoud across the frontier. Twenty-four hours after he had been seized, he was found bound and gagged in a van behind the Paris Judicial Police headquarters at Quai des Orfèvres; his eyes had been bandaged, and dried blood covered his face. The anonymous call announcing the van claimed to speak for the OAS, a piece of misdirection that concealed the Action Service’s role. Argoud was not released until June 1968.

Removing Argoud demoralized the OAS but also opened a path for his little-known deputy, Marc Rodin, to take command of operations aimed at Charles de Gaulle. Hotel Eden-Wolff therefore marks not just the start of an abduction but a consequential transfer of power within the organization.