The Odessa File

FOREWORD

THE ODESSA of the title is neither the city in southern Russia nor the smaller city in Texas. It is a word composed of six initial letters, which in German stand for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen.

In English this means “Organization of Former Members of the SS.” The SS, as most readers will know, was the army within an army, the state within a state, devised by Adolf Hitter, commanded by Heinrich Himmler, and charged with special tasks under the Nazis who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. These tasks were supposedly concerned with the security of the Third Reich; in effect they included the carrying out of Hitler’s ambition to rid Germany and Europe of all elements he considered to be “unworthy of life,” to enslave in perpetuity the “subhuman races of the Slavic lands,” and to exterminate every Jew, man, woman, and child, on the face of the Continent.

In carrying out these tasks the SS organized and executed the murder of some fourteen million human beings, comprising roughly six million Jews, five million Russians, two million Poles, half a million gypsies, and half a million mixed others, including, though it is seldom mentioned, close to two hundred thousand non-Jewish Germans and Austrians. These were either mentally or physically handicapped unfortunates, or so-called enemies of the Reich, such as Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, editors, reporters, and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, men of conscience and courage, and later Army officers suspected of lack of loyalty to Hitler.

Before it had been destroyed the SS had made the two initials of its name, and the twin-lightning symbol of its standard, synonymous with inhumanity in a way that no other organization before or since has been able to do.

Before the end of the war it’s most senior members, quite aware the war was lost and under no illusions as to how civilized men would regard their actions when the reckoning came, made secret provision to disappear to a new life, leaving the entire German people to carry and share the blame for the vanished culprits. To this end vast sums of SS gold were smuggled out and deposited in numbered bank accounts, false identity papers were prepared, escape channels opened up. When the Allies finally conquered Germany, the bulk of the mass-murderers had gone.

The organization which they formed to effect their escape was the Odessa.

When the first talk of ensuring the escape of the killers to more hospitable climes had been achieved, the ambitions of these men developed. Many never left Germany at all, preferring to remain under cover with false names and papers while the Allies ruled; others came back, suitably protected by a new identity.

The few very top men remained abroad to manipulate the organization from the safety of a comfortable exile.

The aim of the Odessa was and remains fivefold: to rehabilitate former SS men into the professions of the new Federal Republic created in 1949 by the Allies, to infiltrate at least the lower echelons of political party activity, to pay for the very best legal. defense for any SS killer hauled before a court and in every way possible to stultify the course of justice in West Germany when it operates against a former Kamerad, to see that former SS men established themselves in commerce and industry in time to take advantage of the economic miracle that has rebuilt the country since 1945, and finally to propagandize the German people to the viewpoint that the SS killers were in fact none other than ordinary patriotic soldiers doing their duty to the Fatherland, and in no way deserving of the persecution to which justice and conscience have ineffectually subjected them. In all these tasks, backed by its considerable funds, it has been measurably successful, and in none more so than in reducing official retribution through the West German courts to a mockery. Changing its name several times, the Odessa has sought to deny its own existence as an organization, with the result that many Germans are inclined to say the Odessa does not exist. The short answer is: it exists, and the Kameraden of the Death’s Head insignia are still linked within it.

Despite its successes in almost all its objectives, the Odessa does occasionally take a defeat. The worst it ever suffered occurred in the early spring of 1964, when a package of documents arrived unannounced and anonymously at the Ministry of Justice in Bonn. To the very few officials who ever saw the list of names on these sheets, the package became known as “The Odessa File.”