- With ample funds at his disposal, he bought a country estate
in Ireland the following year and began breeding horses. Skorzeny
died in Madrid on 5 July 1975. His memoirs, Meine Kommandoun-
ternehmen: Krieg ohne Fronten (My Commando Operations: The
Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando), appeared shortly
afterward. According to his sister, his longtime alias was Rolf O. S.
Steinbauer.
SMOLKA, HANS-PETER. An Austrian journalist who became a
Soviet agent, Hans-Peter Smolka was the London correspondent
for the Neue Freie Presse beginning in 1933. Acquiring British
citizenship in 1938 and adopting the name Peter Smollett, he was
recruited the following year by fellow Marxist Kim Philby and given
the Soviet code name abo. Following the failure of a small press
agency launched jointly with Philby, Smolka worked as a Times cor-
respondent and then, in 1941, became head of the Soviet Relations
Division at the British Ministry of Information. On his initiative, a
profusion of pro-Soviet events started to take place in Great Britain,
even though much mistrust persisted in Moscow regarding his bona
fides. After the war, Smolka helped convince the director Alexander
Korda to film The Third Man in his native Vienna. He died in 1980
with his role as a Soviet spy still concealed from public view.
SMOLKA, MANFRED. A former East German border police officer
executed as a spy, Manfred Smolka had fled to the Federal Republic
of Germany (FRG) in 1958 to protest the instructions of his superiors
to shoot attempted escapees on sight. On 22 August 1959, near the
border with Upper Franconia, he was abducted on the territory of
the FRG while trying to rescue his remaining family in the German
Democratic Republic. Under the code name verräter, officials of
the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) concluded that his
death would be justified on “educational grounds.” On 12 July 1960
Smolka was executed in Leipzig for espionage and treason (presum-
ably he had offered his services to the American secret services).
Afterward, MfS chief Erich Mielke, convinced that Smolka’s case
of “desertion and treachery” constituted the “severest of crimes,”
ordered a description of his offenses to be circulated among all
members of the security apparatus. In 1994, the GDR state attorney
424 • SMOLKA, HANS-PETER