The Odessa File

‘You’ve never heard of them?’ asked Wiesenthal.

‘No. Not until now.’

Simon Wiesenthal g

lanced at his watch.

‘You’d better come back in the morning. I’ll tell you all about them.’

Chapter Nine

PETER MILLER RETURNED TO Simon Wiesenthal’s office the following morning.

‘You promised to tell me about the Odessa,’ he said. ‘I remembered something overnight that I forgot to tell you yesterday.’

He recounted the incident of Dr Schmidt who had accosted him at the Dreesen Hotel and warned him off the Roschmann inquiry.

Wiesenthal pursed his lips and nodded.

‘You’re up against them, all right,’ he said. ‘It’s most unusual for them to take such a step as to warn a reporter in that way, particularly at such an early stage. I wonder what Roschmann is up to that could be so important.’

Then for two hours the Nazi-hunter told Miller about the Odessa, from its start as an organisation for getting wanted SS criminals to a place of safety to its development into an all-embracing freemasonry among those who had once worn the black-and-silver collars, their aiders and abettors.

When the Allies stormed into Germany in 1945 and found the concentration camps with their hideous contents, they not unnaturally rounded on the German people to demand who had carried out the atrocities. The answer was ‘The SS’ – but the SS were nowhere to be found.

Where had they gone? They had either gone underground inside Germany and Austria, or fled abroad. In both cases their disappearance was no spur-of-the-moment flight. What the Allies failed to realise until much later was that each had meticulously prepared his disappearance beforehand.

It casts an interesting light on the so-called patriotism of the SS that, starting at the top with Heinrich Himmler, each tried to save his own skin at the expense of massive sufferings inevitably inflicted on the German people. As early as November 1944 Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate his own safe conduct through the offices of Count Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. The Allies refused to consider letting him off the hook. While the Nazis and the SS screamed at the German people to fight on until the wonder weapons waiting round the corner were delivered, they themselves prepared for their departure to a comfortable exile somewhere. They at least knew there were no wonder weapons, the destruction of the Reich and, if Hitler had anything to do with it, of the entire German nation, was inevitable.

On the eastern front the German Army was bullied into battle against the Russians to take unbelievable casualties, not to produce victory but to produce a delay while the SS finalised their escape plans. Behind the Army stood the SS, shooting and hanging some of the Army men who took a step backwards after already taking more punishment than military flesh and blood is usually expected to stand. Thousands of officers and men of the Wehrmacht died at the end of SS hanging ropes in this way.

Just before the final collapse, delayed six months after the chiefs of the SS knew defeat was inevitable, the leaders of the SS disappeared. From one end of the country to the other they quit their posts, changed into civilian clothes, stuffed their beautifully (and officially) forged papers into their pockets and vanished into the swirling masses of chaotic people who made up Germany in May 1945. They left the granddads of the Home Guard to meet the British and the Americans at the gates of the concentration camps, the exhausted Wehrmacht to go into prisoner-of-war camps and the women and children to live or die under Allied rule in the coming bitter winter of 1945.

Those who knew they were too well known to escape detection for long fled abroad. This was where the Odessa came in. Formed just before the end of the war, its job was to get wanted SS men out of Germany to safety. Already it had established close and friendly links with Juan Peron’s Argentina, which had issued seven thousand Argentinian passports ‘in blank’ so that the refugee merely had to fill in a false name, his own photograph, get it stamped by the ever-ready Argentine consul and board ship for Buenos Aires or the Middle East.

Thousands of SS murderers poured southwards through Austria and into the South Tyrol province of Italy. They were shuttled from safe-house to safe-house along the route, thence mainly to the Italian port of Genoa or further south to Rimini and Rome. A number of organisations, some supposed to be concerned with charitable work among the truly dispossessed, took it upon themselves, for reasons best known to themselves, to decide on some evidence of their own imagining, that the SS refugees were being over-harshly persecuted by the Allies.

Among the chief Scarlet Pimpernels of Rome who spirited thousands away to safety was Bishop Alois Hudal, the German bishop of Rome. The main hiding-out station for the SS killers was the enormous Franciscan monastery in Rome, where they were hidden and boarded until papers could be arranged, along with a passage to South America. In some cases the SS men travelled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Church, and in many cases the charitable organisation Caritas paid for their tickets.

This was the first task of Odessa, and it was largely successful. Just how many thousands of SS murderers who, had they been caught by the Allies, would have died for their crimes, passed to safety will never be known, it was well over eighty per cent of those meriting the death sentence.

Having established itself comfortably on the proceeds of mass-murder, transferred from the Swiss banks, the Odessa sat back and watched the deterioration of relations between the Allies of 1945. The early ideas of the quick establishment of a Fourth Reich were discarded in the course of time by the leaders of the Odessa in South America as impractical, but with the establishment in May 1949 of a new Republic of West Germany those leaders of the Odessa set themselves five new tasks.

The first was the reinfiltration of former Nazis into every facet of life in the new Germany. Throughout the late forties and fifties former members of the Nazis slipped into the civil service at every level, back into lawyers’ offices, on to judges’ benches, into the police forces, local government and doctors’ surgeries. From these positions, however lowly, they were able to protect each other from investigation and arrest, advance each others’ interests and generally ensure that investigation and prosecution of former comrades – they call each other ‘Kamerad’ – went forward as slowly as possible, if at all.

The second task was to infiltrate the mechanisms of political power. Avoiding the high levels, former Nazis slipped into the grass-roots organisation of the ruling party at ward and constituency level. Again, there was no law to forbid a former member of the Nazis from joining a political party. It may be a coincidence, but unlikely, that no politician with a known record of calling for increased vigour in the investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes has ever been elected in the CDU or the CSU, either at Federal level or at the equally important level of the very powerful Provincial Parliaments. One politician expressed it with crisp simplicity – ‘It’s a question of election mathematics. Six million dead Jews don’t vote. Five million former Nazis can and do, at every election.’

The main aim of both these programmes was simple. It was and is to slow down if not to stop the investigation and prosecution of former members of the Nazis. In this the Odessa had one other great ally. This was the secret knowledge in the minds of hundreds of thousands that they had either helped in what was done, albeit in a small way, or had known at the time what was going on and had remained silent. Years later, established and respected in their communities and professions, they could hardly relish the idea of energetic investigation into past events, let alone the mention of their name in a faraway courtroom where a Nazi was on trial.

The third task the Odessa set itself in post-war Germany was to reinfiltrate business, commerce and industry. To this end certain former Nazis were established in businesses of their own in the early fifties, bankrolled by funds from the Zürich deposits. Any reasonably well administered concern founded with plenty of liquidity in the early fifties would take full advantage of the staggering Economic Miracle of the fifties and sixties, to become in turn a large and flourishing business. The point of this was to use funds out of the profits from these businesses to influence press coverage of the Nazi crimes through advertising revenue, to assist financially the crop of SS-orientated propaganda sheets that have come and gone in post-war Germany, to keep alive some of the ultra-right-wing publishing houses and to provide jobs for former Kameraden fallen on hard times.

The fourth task was and still is to provide the best possible legal defence for any Nazi forced to stand trial. In later years a technique was developed whereby the accused at once engaged a brilliant and expensive lawyer, had a few sessions with him and then announced they could not afford to pay him. The lawyer could then be appointed defence counsel by the court according to the provisions of the legal-aid laws. But in the early and mid-fifties, when hundreds of thousands of German POWs streamed home from Russia, unamnestied SS criminals were sifted out and taken to Camp Friedland. Here girls circulated among them, handing out to each a small white card. On it was the man’s designated defence lawyer.

The fifth task is propaganda. This takes many forms, from encouraging the dissemination of right-wing pamphlets to lobbying for a final ratification of the Statute of Limitations, under whose terms an end would be put to all culpability in law of the Nazis. Efforts are made to assure the Germans of today that the death figures of the Jews, Russians, Poles and others were but a tiny fraction of those quoted by the Allies – a hundred thousand dead Jews is the usual figure mentioned – and to point out that the cold war between the West and the Soviet Union in some way proves Hitler to have been right.

But the mainstay of the Odessa propaganda is to persuade the sixty million West Germans of today – and with a large degree of success – that the SS were in fact patriotic soldiers like the Wehrmacht and that solidarity between former comrades must be upheld. This is the weirdest ploy of them all.

During the war the Wehrmacht kept its distance from the SS, which it regarded with repugnance, while the SS treated the Wehrmacht with contempt. At the end millions of young Wehrmacht men were hurled into death or captivity at Russian hands, from which only a small proportion returned, and this so that the SS men could live prosperously elsewhere. Thousands more were executed by the SS, including 5000 in the aftermath of the July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, in which less than fifty men were implicated.