ODESSA
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For other uses, see Odessa (disambiguation).

ODESSA, which stands for the German phrase Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, which in turn translates as “Organization of Former Members of the SS,” is the name given to an international Nazi network believed to have been set up towards the end of World War II by a group of SS officers in order to prevent their prosecutions for war crimes. A fictional account of the organization was manifest in Frederick Forsyth's 1972 best-seller thriller The Odessa File, which fictionalized an SS network named ODESSA (the above cited Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) that smuggled war criminals to Latin America. However, several authoritative books by professionals involved in the U.S. War Crimes Commission (including T.H. Tetens and Joseph Wechsberg) have verified the organization's existence and given details of its operations. Wechsberg studied Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs on ODESSA and verified them with his own experiences in the book The Murderers Among Us.

The purpose of ODESSA was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, for SS members out of Germany and Austria to South America and the Middle East. With ties to Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Vatican, some ODESSA offices operated out of Buenos Aires and helped such World War II war criminals as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke, Aribert Heim, Edward Roschmann, and many other SS members to find refuge in Latin America and the Middle East. There are too many accounts of ODESSA's secret political activities to discount the organization as 'fictional'.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks were both believed to have been active in ODESSA or similar organizations such as Die Spinne, but counter-claims are often made because of overlaps of participants with the BND or Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German Federal intelligence agency restablished after World War II. General Reinhard Gehlen’s entire intelligence organisation, which was employed and protected by U.S. intelligence within a few months after the end of the war, came under suspicion of being a satellite group of the ODESSAcitation needed, and was eventually ousted from the CIA after problems with Gehlen double-agents working with both the CIA and the KGB simulataneously. In Argentina, Rodolfo Freude was allegedly a member of the network. It is alleged that Hans-Ulrich Rudel was active in the Argentina group of the ODESSA. Alois Brunner is alleged to have escaped to Syria using the resources of the ODESSA.

Persons claiming to represent the ODESSA claimed responsibility in a note for the 9 July 1979 car bombing in France aimed at anti-Nazi activists Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

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History

According to Simon Wiesenthal, the ODESSA was set up in 1946 to aid fugitive Nazis, while interviews by the ZDF German TV station with former SS men, suggested that the ODESSA was never the single world-wide secret organization that Wiesenthal described, but instead that there were several organizations, both overt and covert (including the CIA, several Latin American governments and an Italy based network of Catholic clerics), that helped ex-SS men. The truth may have been obscured by ongoing antagonisms between the Wiesenthal organization and German military intelligence.

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. 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 (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.”1

However, while Nazi concentration camp supervisors denied the existence of ODESSA, US War Crimes Commission reports did not and American OSS officials did not. An interview by Joseph Wechsberg, former American OSS officer and member of the US War Crimes Commission, of outspoken German Anti-Nazis verified that plans were made for a Fourth Reich before the fall of the Third (Wechsberg, p.80), and that this was to be implemented by reorganizing in remote Nazi colonies overseas: "The Nazis decided that the time had come to set up a world-wide clandestine escape network" (Wechsberg p.82). "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... "ODESSA was organized as a thorough, efficient network... Anlaufstellen (ports of call) were set up along the entire Austrian-German border... In Lindau, close to both Austria and Switzerland, ODESSA set up an 'export-import' company with representatives in Cairo and Damascus." (Wechsberg, p.82)

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. 2

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 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.

Uki Goñi, in his 2002 book The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina (see References) suggested that Sereny’s more complex, less conspiratorial, story was 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 was Paul Manning’s book Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile which detailed 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 presented 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 ODESSA and the Deutsche Hilfsverein…” (page 181). While in Manning ODESSA itself was incidental, the continuing existence of the Bormann Organization was, according to him, a much larger and more menacing fact. None of this had yet been convincingly proven.

Argentina’s pro-Nazi policies

See also: Juan Perón

In 1938, on the verge of World War II, and with Hitler’s policies on Jews in transit, Argentina’s government sanctioned a secret immigration law restricting access for any individual scorned or forsaken by his country’s government. This implicitly targeted Jews and other minorities fleeing Germany at the time. This law was discovered and denounced by Argentine writer Uki Goñi, who admits that his own grandfather had participated in upholding it. This legislation, though already in disuse for many years, was repealed on 8 June 2005.

In 1946 the American diplomat Spruille Braden accused the Perón government of various pro-Axis and anti-United Nations policies in Argentina and neighboring countries and massive violations of human rights.3 The Jewish Virtual Library writes that while Juan Perón had sympathized with the Axis powers, "Perón also expressed sympathy for Jewish rights and established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949. Since then, more than 45,000 Jews have immigrated to Israel from Argentina." 4

In 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. However, two of the files were opened in July 2003 and the Argentine government since then has cooperated with the investigations.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (Pimlico 1974), 274
  2. ^ David Cesarini, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (Vintage 2004); Peter Padfield: Himmler: Reichsfuhrer SS (Macmillan 1990)
  3. ^ Neighbor Accused, TIME Magazine, February 18, 1946
  4. ^ Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Argentina.html#WW2

References

External links
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