Organization of former SS members

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The term organization of former / discharged SS members (ODESSA, Odessa, OdeSS.A or ODESSA) hides the idea that there is a well-organized, powerful umbrella organization under the leadership of Otto Skorzeny (according to the US secret report from 1947) have, among the former SS members, such as B. Adolf Eichmann and other representatives or sympathizers of the Nazi regime , shortly after the end of the Second World War . Under the impression of the inevitable collapse of the Nazi statethey wanted to ensure the survival of their relatives after the end of the war, among other things by fleeing to z. B. South America or through mutual conspiratorial support in defeated Germany.

Evidence of such an umbrella organization was not found, but other types of cooperation between former SS members are known, including the so-called rat lines abroad and the HIAG .

Truth or myth?

The decisive question of whether it was just a plausible-sounding myth or an actually existing organization or whether it is still a matter today cannot be answered clearly.

On April 12, 1972, the former SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Schwend's apartment in Lima was searched. During this house search, the investigators of the Guardia Civil discovered a huge collection of files in the hidden cellar. Among these papers were the minutes of a meeting: the Odessa files . This file deals with a secret meeting of around 100 men in Marbella in July in the early 1960s. According to the protocol, there were also six ex-officers of the SS who were now living in Israel and two of whom had managed to infiltrate the Israeli secret service . According to the protocol, they should all have received an invitation from the OdeSSA organization . A letter accompanying the minutes shows that it was sent to Schwend by one of the participants in the meeting at Schwend's express request. But whether this meeting actually took place is never on record.

In the documentary Myth Odessa: Truth or Legend? (2002) ZDF quoted the well-known "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal as saying: "ODESSA was a conspiratorial secret organization of the SS that served to smuggle war criminals out of Germany and bring them to South America". However, the documentation comes to the conclusion that there was no “global secret organization” of this type, but that there was a large number of smaller conspiratorial structures, associations and clergy that enabled Nazi criminals to escape and go into hiding after the Second World War. This conclusion is also H. Schneppen, who is also the first time findings from the archives of in his investigation comes GDR - state security involves. The Ministry of State Security has apparently taken over the information provided by Wiesenthal, who, for his part, believed the information provided by informants too much.

American secret services such as the CIC , which has been shown to have knowledge of the escape routes shortly after the war, but did not use this knowledge to arrest the fugitives, are still being criticized . Some of the former SS officers even took over offices in the governments of Latin American countries with the knowledge of American authorities. The most prominent example of this connection is Klaus Barbie , who first worked as a double agent for the CIC and then advised the Bolivian military government - he had acquired the necessary knowledge during his time as Gestapo chief in Lyon.

But even members of the Vatican helped SS members to escape. One of them was Bishop Alois Hudal , he supported Erich Priebke , Reinhard Kopps and Franz Stangl in their escape from Germany. But there were other clergymen (e.g. Monsignor Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović , Genoa's Bishop Siri or Father Edoardo Dömöter) who followed suit, and thus hundreds of SS men escaped to Latin America via the so-called monastery line , including some of the largest War criminal.

With the help of such connections, Josef Mengele managed to escape to Brazil, Adolf Eichmann and Ludolf-Hermann von Alvensleben to Argentina, Klaus Barbie to Bolivia and Alois Brunner to Syria.

So there seems to be no evidence of the existence of a central umbrella organization under the name ODESSA. After the collapse of Hitler's empire and the start of the Cold War, there were suddenly a number of networks, institutions, and governments interested in helping SS criminals. Equally unlikely is the frequently discussed version, according to which ODESSA might have been secretly but aggressively and systematically striving for influence in the manner of a secret alliance lodge in order to spread its ideology in politics and society.

The Argentine journalist Uki Goñi also denies the existence of an umbrella organization in his book ODESSA. The real story . His research showed that, with the knowledge of the Swiss government , the church and the Argentine dictator Juan Perón , an open sympathizer of the Nazi regime, there were organized escape routes through Switzerland through which Nazi criminals smuggled from Germany to South America with the help of false passports what established the ODESSA myth.

Less spectacular than ODESSA, but based on rich archive material, the historian Gerald Steinacher examined in his habilitation thesis the intermediate stations of the rat lines up to the departure in Genoa, whereby the border region of South Tyrol played a special role as a Nazi loophole.

The term ODESSA has been used several times in popular literature. The best-known example of this is probably the novel The Odessa Files by the British writer Frederick Forsyth, also made into a film. In the GDR television series The Invisible Visor , the organization is several times the opponent of the main character.

literature

  • Guido Knopp : The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich, 2003 ISBN 978-3-442-15252-0
  • Holger Meding: Escape from Nuremberg? Böhlau, Cologne 1998 ISBN 3-412-11191-0 (as well as three subsequent books by the author about Panama & Argentina)
  • Uki Goñi: Odessa: The real story. Escape aid for Nazi war criminals , translated by Theo Bruns and Stefanie Graefe. Association A, Berlin 2006 ISBN 3-935936-40-0
  • Heinz Schneppen: "Odessa" and the Fourth Reich Metropol, Berlin 2007 ISBN 978-3-938690-52-9
  • Gerald Steinacher: Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy, Fischer, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-18497-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guido Knopp : The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich, 2003 p. 327
  2. ↑ Guido Knopp: The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich, 2003 p. 347
  3. ↑ Guido Knopp: The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2003 pp. 327–329.
  4. ↑ Guido Knopp: The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich, 2003 p. 362
  5. ↑ Guido Knopp: The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2003 pp. 348–359.
  6. ↑ Guido Knopp: The SS - A Warning of History . Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich 2003 p. 348.
  7. ↑ Uki Goñi: Odessa: The True Story. Escape aid for Nazi war criminals. Translated from the English by Theo Bruns and Stefanie Graefe. ISBN 978-3-935936-40-8 [1] .
  8. ↑ Der STERN: Popular presentation of the results by Meding and Goñi ( Memento of the original from December 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stern.de