HÖTTL, WILHELM (1915–1999). An Austrian Sicherheitsdienst
(SD; Security Service) officer who established contacts with multiple
intelligence organizations in the postwar period, Wilhelm Höttl was
born in Vienna on 19 March 1915, the son of an Austrian civil ser-
vant. A member of the Nazi youth group at the age of 16, he joined
the SS two years later and performed illegal work for the SD. Fol-
lowing the Anschluss of 1938, he continued his SD work on a legal
basis, concentrating on Jewish and Freemason matters, while also
completing his doctorate in history at the University of Vienna. By
December 1940, owing to his “outstanding achievements,” he headed
the intelligence division of the local SD office. The following year,
however, his superior, Friedrich Polte, took issue with his propensity
for scheming, initiated an investigation, and had him transferred to
the eastern front as a war correspondent.
Only with the appointment of fellow Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrun-
ner as head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in January 1943
was Höttl able to resume his intelligence career. The investigation
abruptly dropped, he returned to Vienna to take over the Italian desk,
playing an important supplemental role in the German rescue of Mus-
solini (Operation eiche). His earlier network of 24 key informants in
southeastern Europe was reactivated, and a skilled corps of Hungar-
ian cryptanalysts supplied him with much information. Following
the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, he remained in
Budapest, serving as the chief SD intelligence officer and political
advisor to Edmund Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary in Hun-
gary. Kaltenbrunner maintained after the war that Höttl was his best
source of information on the country.
With German defeat an increasing certainty, Höttl contacted Allen
Dulles, station chief of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
in Bern. In spring 1945, Dulles, whose goal was both a separate
peace with Austria and a split in the ranks of the SD, met several
times with Höttl (code name alpberg). Although the OSS knew of
Höttl’s role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, it was hoped that
he might provide information about the Alpine Redoubt, presumably
an impregnable fortress being readied for the last ferocious battle of
the war but which never materialized. His promise to arrange a meet-
ing between Dulles and Kaltenbrunner remained unfulfilled, and he
surrendered to the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in
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