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 alleged 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. This half-fictional organization, only partially based on real events, takes its name from 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. The purpose of such networks was to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, 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 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.
SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks were both believed to have been active in such organizations, but positive proof for these suppositions has not yet been produced. Similarly, 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 ODESSA. 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.



History


According to Simon Wiesenthal, the ODESSA was set up in 1946 to aid fugitive Nazis. But other sources, such as many 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.
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]
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 proved.



SS Captain Eduard Roschmann

Although the movie was based rather loosely on the book, ironically, it was the movie which brought about another exposure of the real-life "Butcher of Riga", Eduard Roschmann. After the movie (which had Roschmann killed) came out, he was arrested by the Argentinian police, skipped bail, and fled to Asunción, Paraguay where he died on 10 August 1977. See List of SS personnel.


Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...ntina.html#WW2