“ He was a very dangerous person….He only looked out for his own advantage. He was very crafty and impenetrable. You couldn’t pin anything on him. But he was a swindler nonetheless.” Edith Frischmuth (former member of the Austrian Resistance)

Unlike many Nazi colleagues whose careers finished at the end of a rope or in exile, the former Austrian SS officer and SD operative returns to Austria in late 1947, ready to embark on a series of equally opaque activities. Taking advantage of the rivalry created by the growing Cold War, Höttl resumes plying his wares, initially with the American Counter Intelligence Agency (CIC), and German based Organization Gehlen, and later with whomever happened to show interest. Eventually outed as a dubious source and cast back into the cold, he returns to his academic roots, founding a school and assuming its directorship, while managing to publish three stylized versions of his wartime recollections. Despite suspected involvement in the ‘Ratlines’, a mechanism set up to aid Nazi fugitives flee to safer havens, entanglement in a Soviet-American spy scandal, a death sentence handed down by a Hungarian court, and numerous demands to testify at the trials of former colleagues, including that of Adolf Eichmann, Höttl nevertheless slithers through the jaws of justice to emerge as a ‘qualified Zeitzeuge’, catering to an enduring media circus willing to pay for his flawed reflections right up until his final breath.

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