ODESSA

Template:Otheruses2 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.”

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.

Dr. Alois Hudal, Roman Catholic bishop – and,
during the 1930s, an honorary member of the Nazi Party.
Title page of the book The Foundations of National Socialism (1937).

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.

Argentina’s pro-Nazi policies

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. 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. 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."

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.

See also

• The Odessa File
• SIDE
• Operation Paperclip
• Underground Reich
• Ratlines
• HIAG
• David Emory
• OSI

References

• "A la caza del ultimo Nazi". El Mundo. October 30, 2005.
• Uki Goñi (2002): The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina. New York; London: Granta Books. ISBN 1-86207-581-6 (hardcover); ISBN 1-86207-552-2 (paperback, 2003)
• Gitta Sereny (1974): Into That Darkness. From Mercy Killings to Mass Murder. Republished (1983) as Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71035-5.
• Martin A. Lee (1997): The Beast Reawakens. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-51959-6.
• Paul Manning (1980) Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. Lyle Stuart, Inc., ISBN 0-8184-0309-8, also available online

External links

• Information on ODESSA—From the Jewish Virtual Library
• ZDF.de (2002). “Mythos Odessa: Wahrheit oder Legende?” Template:De icon (“The Myth of ODESSA: Truth or Legend?”)
• ODESSA and Nazis in Latin America—From The Straight Dope syndicated column’s website