If this were fiction, it could hardly be a more remarkable story. But a decorated ex-Nazi-turned arms dealer actually sold fighter aircraft to both India and Pakistan, which were facing an arms embargo after the ’65 war.

The episode is recorded in the authoritative books, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, written by former South African MP Andrew Feinstein, and earlier, Private Warriors, written by Ken Silverstein and Daniel Burton-Rose. It is also narrated in detail by retired Indian Navy Vice Admiral Vinod Pasricha in his definitive book on the Sea Hawk aircraft, Downwind, Four Green.

The end of the Second World War left Gerhard Georg Mertins a major in the German Army and a recipient of the Knight’s Cross for bravery after the allied invasion in 1944. Mertins, along with German SS special forces operator Otto Skorzeny, had also participated in the raid to rescue Italian dictator Benito Mussolini after he was removed by the Italian Grand Council of Fascism and the king of Italy and imprisoned.

Mertins and Skorzeny were both also part of a German team sent to train Egypt’s military, with the blessing of the Gehlen organization. The Gehlen organization was named after its founder, General Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi in the custody of the U.S. military intelligence after the Second World War, who was tasked by them to set up an intelligence organization to conduct espionage across the Iron Curtain. This organization was later merged with the West German government’s intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and Gehlen became its boss.

According to Mertins’ hagiographer Heinz Vielain, the former paratrooper set up a company called Merex AG in 1963 at the request of Gehlen to facilitate the sale of weapons to other countries.

Extract: Private Warriors

(Mertins) and Gehlen soon cut a deal. German intelligence would provide Merex information about which Third World countries were looking to buy arms, and the company would sell them what they needed, using false end-user certificates when necessary. “Any complication that arose for Merex were taken care of by [German intelligence],” Vielain wrote. “The most important thing was secrecy, that no one discover the real destination for the weapons.”

In 1966, Merex sold ninety Luftwaffe surplus F-86 Sabre aircraft to the Pakistan Air Force (PAF).

In 1966, Merex sold ninety Luftwaffe surplus F-86 Sabre aircraft to the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). Since there was an arms embargo on Pakistan at the time, Feinstein writes, ‘The required subterfuge was undertaken with the help of the Shah of Iran, who allowed the planes to be delivered to Tehran by Luftwaffe officers and then flown to Pakistan by Iranian pilots dressed up as Pakistani officers.’

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