ODESSA is an American codename (from the German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as ratlines. Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
Author Uki Goñi maintains that archival evidence paints a picture that "does not even include an organization actually named Odessa, but it is sinister nonetheless, and weighted in favour of an actual organized escape network." Historian Guy Walters, in his 2009 book Hunting Evil, stated he was unable to find any evidence of the existence of the ODESSA network as such, although numerous other organisations such as Konsul, Scharnhorst, Sechsgestirn, Leibwache, and Lustige Brüder have been named, Historian Daniel Stahl in a 2011 essay stated that the consensus among historians is that an organisation called ODESSA did not actually exist.
Goñi's book The Real Odessa describes the role of Juan Perón in providing cover for Nazi war criminals with cooperation from the Vatican, the Argentinian government and Swiss authorities through a secret office set up by Perón's agents in Bern. Heinrich Himmler's secret service had prepared an escape-route in Madrid in 1944. In 1946, this operation moved to the Presidential palace in Buenos Aires. Goñi states that the operation stretched from Scandinavia to Italy, aiding war criminals and bringing in gold that the Croatian treasury had stolen.
Origins of the term
The codeword Odessa—as used by the Allies—appeared for the first time in a memo dated 3 July 1946, by the United States Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) whose principal role was to screen displaced persons for possible suspects. The CIC discovered that ODESSA was used at the KZ Bensheim-Auerbach internment camp for SS prisoners who used this watchword in their secret attempts to gain special privileges from the International Red Cross, wrote historian Guy Walters. Neither the Americans nor the British were able to verify the claims extending any further than that.
History
According to Simon Wiesenthal, the ODESSA was set up in 1944 to aid fugitive Nazis. However, a documentary produced by the German TV station ZDF also suggested that the ODESSA was never the single world-wide secret organisation that Wiesenthal described, but several organisations, both overt and covert, that helped ex-SS men. The truth may have been obscured by antagonism between the Wiesenthal Organisation and West German military intelligence. It is known that Austrian authorities were investigating the organization several years before Wiesenthal went public with his information.
Similarly, historian Gitta Sereny wrote in her book Into That Darkness (1974), based on interviews with the former commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, Franz Stangl, that an organisation called ODESSA had never existed although there were Nazi aid organisations:
This view is supported by historian Guy Walters in his book Hunting Evil, where he also indicates 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 used by former Nazis who wished to continue the fight."
Nazi concentration camp supervisors denied the existence of an organisation called ODESSA. The US War Crimes Commission reports and the American Office of Strategic Services neither confirmed nor denied claims about the existence of such an organisation. Wechsberg, who after emigrating to the United States had served as an OSS officer and member of the US War Crimes Commission, however, claimed that in interviews of outspoken German anti-Nazis some asserted that plans were made for a Fourth Reich before the fall of the Third, and that this was to be implemented by reorganising in remote Nazi colonies overseas: "The Nazis decided that the time had come to set up a world-wide clandestine escape network."