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The ODESSA, from the Nazi network set up towards the end of World War II by a group of SS officers. The purpose of the ODESSA was purportedly to establish and facilitate secret escape routes, later known as ratlines, to allow SS members to avoid capture and prosecution for war crimes and to escape to Latin America or the Middle East.
The existence of the organisation is a matter of dispute. Books by
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 hit his forehead during an argument with his wife, said bullet moved and hit a major artery, killing him.
It was mentioned in three Phoenix Force novels: Ultimate Terror (1984), The Twisted Cross (1986) and Terror In The Dark (1987).[12] 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.[13]
ODESSA is mentioned in the 1978 Robert Ludlum novel The Holcroft Covenant.
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.[11]
In the realm of fiction, the 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.[10]
Of particular importance in examining the postwar activities of high-ranking Nazis was 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.
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.
In his interviews with Sereny, Stangl denied any knowledge of a group called the ODESSA. Recent biographies of Buenos Aires."[8] Notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele also escaped to South America.[9]
Nazi concentration camp supervisors denied the existence of the ODESSA. The US War Crimes Commission reports and the American [7]
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 use by former Nazis who wished to continue the fight."[5]
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:
[3] According to
ODESSA is best known from its appearance in spy novels and fictional movies. [1]
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