ODESSA
From Metapedia
ODESSA is a fictional organization that appears in Frederic Forsyth’s 1972 novel The ODESSA File. The novel purports ODESSA was an international Nazi organization established before the defeat of Germany for the purpose of protecting former members of the SS after the war. In reality, there has never been an organization called ODESSA. Nothing has ever been written about ODESSA until Forsyth's novel appeared in 1972.
The book became an international bestseller and a box office success featuring US actor John Voight and several German and Austrian actors like Maximillian Schell .
The word “ODESSA” was a German acronym (German: ORGANISATION DER EHEMALIGEN SS-Angehörigen) meaning “Organization of former SS Members”
The book and the film both became an vehicle to keep pressure on the German Governement to rise the financial tribute to the Jews. ODESSA would later be used by professional "Nazi Hunters" like the Jews Simon Wiesenthal or the Klarsfeld's in France to refer to any group which aided the escape of SS members from Europe.
The purpose of such groups - only known as The Rat Line - was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, out of Germany to South America and the Middle East for hunted members. With alleged ties to Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Vatican, they operated out of Buenos Aires and helped Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, Aribert Heim, Eduard Roschmann, and many other SS members to find refuge in Latin America and the Middle East.
Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks were both believed to have been active in such organizations, but these suppositions have never been proven. Similarly, General Reinhard Gehlen’s entire intelligence organization, which was employed and protected by U.S. intelligence within a few months after the end of the war. In Argentina, Rodolfo Freude was allegedly a member of an Nazi aid network. It is alleged that Hans-Ulrich Rudel was active in Argentina. Alois Brunner is alleged to have escaped to Syria.
Persons claiming to represent ODESSA claimed responsibility in a note for the 9 July 1979 car bombing in France aimed at philosemitic and left-wing activists Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
Ongoing
According to Simon Wiesenthal, other sources -- such as many interviews by the ZDF the official German state TV station with former SS men -- suggest that ODESSA never was the single world-wide secret organization that Wiesenthal described, but that there were several organizations, both overt and covert (including the CIA and several Latin American governments), that helped ex-SS men.
Long before the ZDF TV network, historian Gitta Sereny wrote in her 1974 book Into That Darkness, based on interviews with the former commander of the camp at Treblinka, Franz Stangl, that ODESSA had never existed. She wrote: “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 ‘Odessa.’ Not that this matters greatly: there certainly were various kinds of Nazi aid organizations after the war—it would have been astonishing if there hadn’t been.”
In his interviews with Sereny, Stangl denied any knowledge of a group called ODESSA. Recent biographies of Adolf Eichmann (who also escaped to South America) and Heinrich Himmler, the alleged founder of ODESSA, make no reference to such an organization. Sereny attributed the fact that SS members could escape more to postwar chaos and the inability of the Roman Catholic Church, the Red Cross, and the American military to verify the claims of people who came to them for help than to the activities of an underground organization. She identifies a Vatican official, Bishop Aloïs Hudal, not former SS men, as the principal agent in helping Nazis leave Italy for South America.
Uki Goñi, in his 2002 book The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina suggests that Sereny’s more complex, less conspiratorial, story is closer to the truth. The book prompted a US House of Representatives resolution in 2003, urging Argentina to open their hitherto secret documents concerning this matter.
Of particular importance in examining the postwar activities of high-ranking Nazis is Paul Manning’s book Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile which details Martin 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 the fledgling CBS News along with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite in London, and his reporting and subsequent researches present Bormann’s cunning and skill in the organization and planning for the flight of Nazi-controlled capital from Europe during the dimming years of the war (notwithstanding the possibility of Bormann’s death in Berlin on May 1, 1945).
According to Manning, “eventually, over 10,000 former German military made it to South America along escape routes set up by the Deutsche Hilfsverein…”. While in Manning ODESSA itself is incidental, the continuing existence of the Bormann Organization is, according to him, a much larger and more menacing fact. None of this has been convincingly proved.
From December 2002, the Argentine government in Buenos Aires refused calls from the Wiesenthal Center for the release of 58 files dealing with the escape of Nazis to Argentina. In July 2003, two of the files were opened.
Also, Argentina’s government had, in 1938 (on the verge of World War II, and with Hitler’s politics regarding Jews already on the move), sanctioned an immigration law restricting access to any individual scorned or forsaken by his country’s government. This was implicitly targeted for Jews and other minorities fleeing Germany at the time. This law was discovered and denounced by Argentine writer Uki Goñi. This legislation, though already in disuse for many years, was finally repealed on 8 June 2005.
