The
ODESSA network (from the German:
Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning: Organization of
Former SS Members) was a purported international Nazi underground
organization set up towards the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret
escape routes – later known as ratlines – allegedly to allow the SS members to
avoid capture and prosecution for war crimes
and to escape to Argentina, Brazil or the Middle East under false names.
The
codeword Odessa – as known 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 Odessa at the KZ Bensheim-Auerbach internment camp for the former SS
men who used this watchword in their secret attempts to gain special privileges
from the Red Cross, wrote historian Guy
Walters, but neither the Americans nor the British were able to verify the
claims extending any further than that.
The
existence of the organisation is a matter of dispute. Guy Walters, in his book Hunting
Evil, claimed he was unable to find any evidence of the existence of
the network 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 Odessa did not
actually exist. However, books by T.H.
Tetens and Joseph Wechsberg claim to have verified the
organisation's existence and provided details of its operations. Wechsberg
studied Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs on the
Odessa and correlated them with his own experiences in the book The
Murderers Among Us. Today, ODESSA is best known from its appearance in spy
novels and fictional movies.
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODESSA
History
According
to Simon Wiesenthal, the ODESSA was set up in 1944 to aid fugitive Nazis.
Interviews by the ZDF
German TV station with former SS men suggest instead 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 organisation several years before Wiesenthal went public with
his information.
Long
before the ZDF TV network, 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 (see References
following), that the ODESSA had never existed. Sereny 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 (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 the 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.
ODESSA 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 assume 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 the Second
World War, is involved in ODESSA. According to the young man, 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.
ODESSA
is mentioned in the 1978 Robert Ludlum novel The Holcroft Covenant.
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.
ODESSA
was the inspiration for the First Order in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In
1000 Ways To Die, the segment "Master
E-Rased" shows a Nazi soldier who survived WW2 and escaped to the USA
thanks to ODESSA. He was shot in the head in the war and still had the bullet
lodged inside his brain; when he went to go get milk from the refrigerator, he
bumped his head and the said bullet moved and hit a major artery, killing him.
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