The 1972 Frederick Forsyth thriller The Odessa File, in which a young West German journalist named Peter Miller pursues a clandestine network of former SS officers operating in postwar West Germany under the cover name ODESSA, sold approximately seven million copies in its first decade and was adapted into a 1974 film starring Jon Voight. The novel’s premise was that ODESSA, which Forsyth identified as the acronym of Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen (Organisation of Former SS Members), was a sustained, hierarchically organised, financially substantial, internationally networked secret society of former SS personnel that had functioned as the principal vehicle for the postwar evacuation of senior war criminals to Latin America and the Middle East. The novel embedded the term ODESSA in the popular postwar imagination as the name for the entire postwar Nazi escape network. Forsyth had taken the term from Simon Wiesenthal, who had used it in his 1967 memoir The Murderers Among Us and in subsequent press interviews. Wiesenthal in turn had used the term as the working description of what he believed to be a real and substantial organisation. The popular usage was therefore not Forsyth’s invention; it had a Wiesenthal-derived basis. The Wiesenthal-derived basis, on the documentary record now available from the United States Counter Intelligence Corps files, the Argentine immigration archives, and the Vatican Apostolic Archive, was substantially mistaken. ODESSA, as a hierarchically organised, sustained, financially substantial international organisation, did not exist. The actual postwar evacuation network had a different and more diffuse structure than Wiesenthal had reconstructed. The Forsyth novel was therefore, on the historiographical record now available, a fictionalised reconstruction of a partly invented organisation.
What did exist was a working postwar evacuation operation that drew on multiple distinct organisational components rather than a single hierarchical body. The components included: the Vatican-administered ratlines run principally by Bishop Alois Hudal at Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome and Father Krunoslav Draganović at the College of San Girolamo in Rome (see Vatican and Catholic Clergy in the Ratlines); the Spanish escape network operated through Madrid and Barcelona that drew on Falangist sympathies in the Franco regime; the Argentine reception network operated by Carlos Fuldner under President Juan Perón’s patronage (see Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay as Nazi Destinations); the Middle Eastern network operated principally through Cairo and Damascus that drew on the postwar political alignments of the Arab states with respect to the Mandate Palestine question; and a small number of specifically German-emigré social and financial networks, including the Augsburg-based Stille Hilfe (Silent Aid) charity that had been founded by Princess Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg in 1951 to provide legal and financial assistance to former SS personnel. The components had limited operational coordination among themselves. They produced a working evacuation operation through the cumulative effects of their distinct contributions rather than through a single directing authority.
The Wiesenthal reconstruction
Wiesenthal’s working hypothesis of an ODESSA organisation was developed during his investigative work at the Vienna Documentation Centre in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He had encountered, in a number of his cases, evidence that fugitives had been assisted by other former SS personnel during their escapes. He had inferred from the evidence of mutual assistance that there must be a sustained organisational structure underlying it. He had named the inferred structure ODESSA, deriving the acronym from a German emigré phrase he had heard in his Linz period. He had publicised the hypothesis in his memoir of 1967 and had defended it in subsequent press appearances.
The hypothesis was, in the period it was developed, plausible on the available evidence. The investigative work that produced the evidence had been conducted in the period 1947 to 1965, before the systematic declassification of Allied intelligence files and the opening of the Argentine and Vatican archives. The evidence Wiesenthal had been working with was substantially correct in its individual elements but had been over-interpreted in its overall structure. The documentary record now available indicates that the cases of mutual assistance Wiesenthal had encountered had been the products of multiple distinct networks rather than of a single organisation, and that the appearance of organisational unity had been a function of the limited information available rather than of the underlying reality.
Wiesenthal himself, in later interviews, modified the hypothesis. He acknowledged in interviews from the 1980s onwards that the ODESSA he had originally described was probably not a single organisation, and that the actual postwar evacuation operation had been more diffuse than his original reconstruction had suggested. He continued to use the term as a useful shorthand for the wider operation. The shorthand became, through the Forsyth novel, the popular description of the operation. The popular description was, by the time of Wiesenthal’s later modifications, embedded in the public imagination beyond his power to revise.
The Forsyth novel
The Forsyth novel had a specific origin in a real case. The novel’s central villain, the former SS officer Eduard Roschmann, was a real figure: the wartime commandant of the Riga ghetto in 1942 to 1943 who had supervised the killing of approximately 35,000 Riga Jews. Roschmann had escaped to Argentina in 1948 through a Vatican-administered ratline (see the parent page, The Ratlines). He had lived in Argentina under various identities for approximately twenty-five years before being identified by Wiesenthal in 1972, and had subsequently fled Argentina for Paraguay shortly after the publication of the Forsyth novel had made his identity widely known. He had died in Asunción in August 1977 of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight, two months after his arrival in Paraguay.
The Forsyth novel was, in its specifics on Roschmann, broadly accurate. The wider organisational hypothesis, the existence of a sustained ODESSA organisation operating under hierarchical command, was the novel’s specifically fictional element. Forsyth had been working with the Wiesenthal hypothesis as the foundational organisational background for his thriller. He had not been claiming, in the strict sense, to be writing a documentary account. He had been writing a novel. The novel’s commercial success had the unintended consequence of embedding in the popular imagination an organisational hypothesis that had limited foundation in the documented record.
The Forsyth novel had one operational consequence beyond the public-image effects: the publication of Roschmann’s photograph and identifying information in the novel and in the subsequent film produced sufficient pressure on the Argentine government to make Roschmann’s continued residence in Argentina untenable. Roschmann fled to Paraguay shortly after the film’s release in 1974. He died there three years later. The novel produced, indirectly, the closure of one of the major outstanding cases.
The Stille Hilfe
The Augsburg-based Stille Hilfe (Silent Aid) was the closest single organisational entity in the postwar period to the popular conception of ODESSA. It was founded in 1951 by Princess Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg, a member of the German aristocratic family that had been the senior patrons of various right-wing causes during the Weimar period and the Nazi era, with the stated charitable purpose of providing legal and financial assistance to former SS personnel facing trial or in detention. The organisation was registered as a charitable association under West German law and operated openly under that registration. Its membership and donor base were small, perhaps two thousand individuals at its peak in the early 1960s. Its operational budget was modest, perhaps forty to fifty thousand Deutschmarks per year at the prevailing exchange rate.
The Stille Hilfe provided the legal defence funding for a number of the major postwar West German trials of former SS personnel, including the defence of Klaus Barbie at the Lyon trial of 1987 (which was the most prominent of the Stille Hilfe-funded cases). The organisation also provided financial assistance to fugitives in safe havens, including small monthly payments to several of the senior figures in Argentina and Paraguay during their periods of safe residence. The total aggregate financial contribution of the Stille Hilfe to the postwar fugitive operations was, on the available accounting, modest: perhaps a million Deutschmarks over the period 1951 to 1990. The organisation was, however, the single sustained institutional entity that approximated the popular conception of ODESSA. Its existence was not a secret. Its activities were generally known to the West German prosecutorial authorities. It was registered, operated openly, and produced an annual report to the West German charity regulator throughout its existence.
The Stille Hilfe declined into operational irrelevance from the 1980s onwards as its membership aged and as its principal beneficiaries died or were imprisoned. It was the subject of a 2001 West German parliamentary inquiry and a 2008 documentary film by the German filmmaker Eric Friedler. It continues to exist on paper as of 2026 but has not had operational activity since approximately 2005. Princess Helene Elisabeth von Isenburg herself died in 1974. Her successor as president, Gudrun Burwitz (the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, born 1929, married into the Burwitz family), ran the organisation from 1980 onwards until her death in May 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
The Spanish network
The Spanish network operated through Madrid and Barcelona under the patronage of senior figures in the Franco regime, including Foreign Minister Alberto Martín-Artajo and the Falangist Press Office under Juan Aparicio. The network’s principal figure was Otto Skorzeny, the Austrian-born former SS officer who had led the German commando rescue of Mussolini in 1943 and who had become, in the postwar period, the most prominent senior SS officer to live openly in Madrid under his own name. Skorzeny had escaped from American military detention in Bavaria in 1948 and had reached Madrid through a combination of the Vatican-administered ratlines and his own personal contacts. He had set up a security consultancy and engineering firm in Madrid that operated until his death in 1975. The firm provided cover employment for a number of fugitive former SS personnel who passed through or settled in Spain. Skorzeny was also active in advising the Egyptian government on military matters in the early 1950s, a role that gave him connections into the Middle Eastern network.
The Spanish network was operationally smaller than the Vatican-administered network. Approximately fifty to seventy senior fugitives passed through it in the period 1947 to 1955, of whom perhaps half settled in Spain and the remainder used Spain as a transit point to Argentina or to the Middle East. The Spanish authorities under Franco did not extradite any senior fugitive at any point during the Franco period. The post-Franco Spanish authorities, after 1975, were more cooperative with extradition requests but the question had become largely academic by that point as the principal surviving fugitives were either too old for proceedings or had died.
The Middle Eastern network
The Middle Eastern network operated principally through Cairo and Damascus, with smaller operations in Tehran. The Cairo branch was the more substantial. It had been established by the Egyptian Free Officers’ regime under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the early 1950s as a working partnership with the West German military advisers Nasser had been recruiting for the rebuilding of the Egyptian armed forces. The German military advisers had included a substantial number of former Wehrmacht and SS personnel; the Egyptian government had not made any operational distinction between former Wehrmacht and former SS personnel in its recruitment, and had welcomed both. The senior fugitives who passed through or settled in the Cairo branch included Aribert Heim (the Butcher of Mauthausen, who lived in Cairo from 1963 to his death in 1992), Hans Eisele (the Buchenwald camp doctor, who lived in Cairo from 1955 to 1967), Johann von Leers (the senior Goebbels propagandist, who lived in Cairo from 1956 to 1965), and Walter Rauff for a period before his eventual move to Chile.
The Damascus branch was smaller and was principally associated with Alois Brunner, who lived in Damascus under the protection of Syrian intelligence from 1954 until his death sometime in the early 2010s (see the parent page, Those Who Escaped Justice). The Syrian government’s protection of Brunner was active rather than passive; the Syrian intelligence services prevented multiple Mossad attempts on Brunner’s life over the period 1961 to 1980, of which the most serious had cost Brunner an eye in 1961 and several fingers in 1980 in letter-bomb attacks.
What the actual operation looked like
The actual postwar evacuation operation, considered as a single composite system, had three principal characteristics. The first was institutional diversity: it operated through the parallel and partly overlapping networks described above, with limited central coordination. The second was operational competence: it produced, over the period 1947 to 1953, the successful evacuation of approximately two to three hundred senior figures and approximately nine to ten thousand lower-ranking personnel, against the active opposition of the Allied prosecutorial authorities. The third was political opportunism: it drew on the postwar political alignments of the various host countries (Argentina, Spain, Egypt, Syria, Paraguay, Bolivia, and others) to produce safe havens for figures whose continued availability was understood by the host governments as having anti-Communist or wider Cold War political value.
The operation did not have the hierarchical organisational structure that Wiesenthal had inferred and that Forsyth had fictionalised. It had the looser structure of a set of distinct networks with overlapping personnel and shared operational practices. The looser structure was, in its actual operational effects, more difficult to disrupt than a single hierarchical organisation would have been. A single ODESSA organisation, had it existed, would have been vulnerable to the disruption of its central leadership. The actual operation, distributed across multiple distinct networks, was not vulnerable to disruption at any single point and continued to function effectively even as individual components (such as the Hudal operation at the Anima) came under sustained pressure and ceased operations.
Why the popular myth persists
The popular myth of ODESSA as a sustained hierarchical organisation has persisted in the postwar imagination for several reasons. The first is the commercial success of the Forsyth novel and the subsequent film, which embedded the term in the public consciousness as a working description of the postwar evacuation operation. The second is the dramatic appeal of a sustained hierarchical secret society as a narrative element in popular fiction; the looser structure of the actual operation is less dramatically satisfying. The third is the sustained interest of various commentators, particularly in the years immediately after the publication of the Forsyth novel, in maintaining the ODESSA hypothesis as a working description of the operation despite the documentary evidence against it. The fourth is the residual uncertainty in some specific cases about whether particular networks of mutual assistance among former SS personnel constituted, in their specific contexts, a single organisation or a set of distinct networks.
The historical assessment now available is that the popular myth of ODESSA was a misunderstanding of a real but differently structured operation. The misunderstanding was understandable in the period before the systematic declassification of the relevant Allied and Argentine archives. The misunderstanding has been substantially corrected in the historiographical literature since approximately 2000, particularly in the work of Gerald Steinacher, Uki Goñi, and the historical commission established by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2006. The popular usage of the term ODESSA is, however, likely to persist as the working description of the postwar evacuation operation regardless of the historiographical correction. The term is convenient, memorable, and broadly suggestive of the underlying reality even if it misrepresents the organisational structure. The term will, in all likelihood, continue to be used. The underlying reality, as now reconstructed from the documentary record, has been described above. The two should be held alongside each other.
See also
- Simon Wiesenthal
- Argentina Brazil and Paraguay as Nazi Destinations
- Heinrich Himmler
- The Vatican and Catholic Clergy in the Ratlines
- Klaus Barbie
- Alois Brunner
Sources
- Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice, Oxford University Press, 2011
- Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Granta, 2002
- Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us, McGraw-Hill, 1967
- Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File, Hutchinson, 1972 (novel; for context only)
- Eric Friedler, dir, Schweigen und Schwur (Stille Hilfe documentary), German television, 2008
- Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988
- Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, Oxford University Press, 2018
- Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009