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On September 30, 1941, German troops of Army Group Center launched a general offensive on Moscow. Operation Typhoon envisaged the encirclement and defeat of Soviet troops in the Bryansk and Vyazma area, bypassing Moscow from the north and south and taking it in pincers. In early October, German troops, having broken through the Red Army's defenses, encircled four armies near Vyazma and two armies south of Bryansk. The losses were enormous. In fact, there were no troops left in front of Moscow, and the road to the capital was open. The famous super saboteur Otto Skorzeny took part in the offensive on Moscow. The same liberator of Mussolini, kidnapper of Horthy and hunter of Tito. True, in the fall of 1941 he was neither famous nor a saboteur. Skorzeny fought at the front as an officer in the artillery regiment of the SS division "das Reich". In early December, his regiment was stationed near Moscow and shelled the outskirts of the capital. On a clear sunny day, according to Skorzeny himself, he saw the domes of Moscow churches through binoculars. However, he never got to Moscow. And after the war, the retired SS Obersturmbannführer tried to answer in his memoirs why Moscow was not taken. After all, they wanted to and seriously prepared. Until recently, Skorzeny's memoirs were published in Russia in a truncated form, mainly that which concerned his participation in special operations. The Russian version of the memoirs began in December 1941, when the Red Army went on the counteroffensive, and Skorzeny very successfully ended up in a hospital, successfully completing his service as a front-line officer. But in the original, this is preceded by another 150 pages. Today we will touch on this, the initial part of the memoirs of the summer-fall of 1941. Channel "Riddles of History" on other platforms: Vkontakte https://vk.com/public198638758 Telegram https://t.me/zagadki_histori