The ODESSA is an American codename (from the
German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen,
meaning: Organization of Former SS Members)
coined in 1946 for a possible Nazi underground
escape plan at the end of World War II by
a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating
secret escape routes.
The idea has been widely circulated in fictional
spy novels and movies, notably Frederick Forsyth's
best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File.
The routes are also called ratlines.
The goal was to allow the SS members to escape
to Argentina, Brazil, or the Middle East under
false passports.
This goal was in fact achieved by 300 Nazis
with support from Juan Perón after he came
to power in Argentina in 1946.Though an unknown
number of wanted Nazis and war criminals did
in fact escape Europe, the existence of an
organisation called ODESSA is rejected by
most experts.
However it is widely accepted that there were
escape organisations for Nazis.
Uki Goñi maintains that archival evidence
paints a picture that "does not even include
an organization actually named Odessa, but
it is sinister nonetheless, and weighted in
favour of an actual organized escape network."
Guy Walters, in his 2009 book Hunting Evil,
stated he was unable to find any evidence
of the existence of the ODESSA network as
such, although numerous other organisations
such as Konsul, Scharnhorst, Sechsgestirn,
Leibwache, and Lustige Brüder have been named,
including Die Spinne ("The Spider") run in
part by Hitler's commando chief Otto Skorzeny.
Historian Daniel Stahl in his 2011 essay stated
that the consensus among historians is that
an organisation called ODESSA did not actually
exist.
Uki Goñi's book "The Real Odessa" describes
the role of Juan Peron in providing cover
for Nazi war criminals with cooperation from
the Vatican, the Argentinean government and
the Swiss authorities through a secret office
set up by Peron's agents in Bern.
Heinrich Himmler's secret service had prepared
an escape route in Madrid in 1944, in 1946,
this operation moved to the Presidential palace
in Buenos Aires, Goñi states that the operation
stretched from Scandinavia to Italy, aiding
war criminals and bringing in gold that the
Croatian treasury had stolen.
== Origins of the term ==
The codeword "Odessa" – as used by the Allies
– appeared for the first time in a memo
dated July 3, 1946, by the American Counterintelligence
Corps (CIC) whose principal role was to screen
displaced persons for possible suspects.
The CIC discovered that the word "ODESSA"
was used at the KZ Bensheim-Auerbach internment
camp for SS prisoners who used this watchword
in their secret attempts to gain special privileges
from the Red Cross, wrote historian Guy Walters.
Neither the Americans nor the British were
able to verify the claims extending any further
than that.
== History ==
According to Simon Wiesenthal, the ODESSA
was set up in 1944 to aid fugitive Nazis.
However, a documentary produced by the German
TV station ZDF also suggested that the ODESSA
was never the single world-wide secret organisation
that Wiesenthal described, but several organisations,
both overt and covert, that helped ex-SS men.
The truth may have been obscured by antagonism
between the Wiesenthal organisation and West
German military intelligence.
It is known that Austrian authorities were
investigating the organization several years
before Wiesenthal went public with his information.Similarly,
historian Gitta Sereny wrote in her 1974 book
Into That Darkness, based on interviews with
the former commandant of the Treblinka extermination
camp, Franz Stangl, that an organisation called
ODESSA had never existed although there were
Nazi aid organisations:
The prosecutors at the Ludwigsburg Central
Authority for the Investigation into Nazi
Crimes, who know precisely how the postwar
lives of certain individuals now living in
South America have been financed, have searched
all their thousands of documents from beginning
to end, but say they are totally unable to
authenticate (the) 'Odessa.'
Not that this matters greatly: there certainly
were various kinds of Nazi aid organisations
after the war — it would have been astonishing
if there hadn't been.
This view is supported by historian Guy Walters
in his book Hunting Evil, where he also points
out that networks were used, but there was
not such a thing as a setup network covering
Europe and South America, with an alleged
war treasure.
For Walters, the reports received by the allied
intelligence services during the mid-1940s
suggest that the appellation "ODESSA" was
"little more than a catch-all term used by
former Nazis who wished to continue the fight."Nazi
concentration camp supervisors denied the
existence of an organisation called ODESSA.
The US War Crimes Commission reports and the
American OSS neither confirmed nor denied
claims about the existence of such an organisation.
Wechsberg, who after emigrating to the United
States had served as an OSS officer and member
of the US War Crimes Commission, however,
claimed that in interviews of outspoken German
anti-Nazis some asserted that plans were made
for a Fourth Reich before the fall of the
Third, and that this was to be implemented
by reorganising in remote Nazi colonies overseas:
"The Nazis decided that the time had come
to set up a world-wide clandestine escape
network."
They used Germans who had been hired to drive
U.S. Army trucks on the autobahn between Munich
and Salzburg for the 'Stars and Stripes,'
the American Army newspaper.
The couriers had applied for their jobs under
false names, and the Americans in Munich had
failed to check them carefully... (the) ODESSA
was organized as a thorough, efficient network...
Anlaufstellen (ports of call) were set up
along the entire Austro-German border...
In Lindau, close to both Austria and Switzerland,
(the) ODESSA set up an 'export-import' company
with representatives in Cairo and Damascus.
In his interviews with Sereny, Stangl denied
any knowledge of a group called the ODESSA.
Recent biographies of Adolf Eichmann, who
also escaped to South America, and Heinrich
Himmler, the alleged founder of the ODESSA,
made no reference to such an organisation.
However, Hannah Arendt, in her book, Eichmann
in Jerusalem, states that "in 1950, [Eichmann]
succeeded in establishing contact with ODESSA,
a clandestine organisation of SS veterans,
and in May of that year, he was passed through
Austria to Italy, where a priest, fully informed
of his identity, equipped him with a refugee
passport in the name of Richard Klement and
sent him on to Buenos Aires."
Notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele also
escaped to Brazil.Sereny attributed the escape
of SS members to postwar chaos and the inability
of the Catholic Church, the Red Cross and
the American military to verify the claims
of people who came to them for help, rather
than to the activities of an underground Nazi
organisation.
She identified a Vatican official, Bishop
Aloïs Hudal, not former SS men, as the principal
agent in helping Nazis leave Italy for South
America, mainly Brazil.
Of particular importance in examining the
postwar activities of high-ranking Nazis was
Paul Manning's book Martin Bormann: Nazi in
Exile, which detailed Bormann's rise to power
through the Nazi Party and as Hitler's Chief
of Staff.
During the war, Manning himself was a correspondent
for CBS News in London, and his reporting
and subsequent researches presented Bormann's
cunning and skill in the organisation and
planning for the flight of Nazi-controlled
capital from Europe during the last years
of the war—notwithstanding the strong possibility
of Bormann's death in Berlin on 1 May 1945,
especially in light of DNA identification
of skeletal remains unearthed near the Lehrter
Bahnhof as Bormann's.
According to Manning, "eventually, over 10,000
former German military made it to South America
along escape routes set up by (the) ODESSA
and the Deutsche Hilfsverein..." (page 181).
The ODESSA itself was incidental, says Manning,
with the continuing existence of the Bormann
Organisation a much larger and more menacing
fact.
None of this had yet been convincingly proven.
== In popular culture ==
In the realm of fiction, Frederick Forsyth's
best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File
brought the organisation to popular attention.
(The novel was turned into a film starring
Jon Voight.)
In the novel, Forsyth's ODESSA smuggled war
criminals to South America, but also attempted
to protect those SS members who remained behind
in Germany, and plotted to influence political
decisions in West Germany.
Many of the novel's readers assumed that ODESSA
really existed.In the 1976 thriller novel
by Ira Levin titled The Boys from Brazil,
Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp
medical doctor who performed horrific experiments
on camp victims during World War II, is involved
in ODESSA.
According to a young man and spy on his trail,
Mengele is activating the "Kameradenwerk"
for a strange assignment: he is sending out
six Nazis (former SS Officers) to kill 94
men, who share a few common traits.
In the book the terms "Kameradenwerk" and
"ODESSA" are used interchangeably.It was mentioned
in three Phoenix Force novels: Ultimate Terror
(1984), The Twisted Cross (1986) and Terror
In The Dark (1987).
It was also mentioned, sometimes in veiled
terms, in Philip Kerr's 2006 novel, The One
From the Other — one of Kerr's Bernie Gunther
mysteries.
Novelist Eric Frattini has emphasised his
belief in ODESSA and incorporates elements
in his novels, such as the 2010 thriller,
The Mephisto's Gold.The First Order, the main
antagonists from the Star Wars sequel trilogy,
were based on the concept of ODESSA, in particular
the theory that several Nazis escaped into
Argentina.Bormann's survival and the ratline
are also part of the History Channel TV series
Hunting Hitler (2015-2018) in which former
CIA agent Bob Baer, Gerrard Williams (author
of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler)
and Tim Kennedy, a former member of the 7th
Special Forces Group of the US Army, try to
prove that Hitler might have survived WW II
and fled to Argentina.ODESSA and another secret
society was mentioned in Terry Hayes' novel
I am Pilgrim.
In the novel, the main character, disguised
as an FBI agent in Damascus, is searching
for a secret passage and encounters an underground
tunnel with German inscribing on a tunnel
wall.
Names of SS military personnel involved with
the construction of the tunnel are listed.
== See also ==
David Emory
Die Spinne
Nazi Gold
Operation Paperclip
OSI
Seat 12
SIDE
SIS, a secret FBI intelligence agency operating
in South America during and immediately after
World War II
Ratlines
== Notes
