NOVELS ABOUT NAZIS: THE ODESSA FILE

I just read, or rather listened to Frederick Forsyth's memoir, THE OUTSIDER.  The man has had a fascinating life.

After a stint in the RAF, he worked as a reporter, first for Reuters then the BBC and finally as a free-lance,.  Being of a rather independent frame of mind, he made a lot of people in the establishment mad, both at the BBC and in the British government, and found himself without a job and broke.

I'll write a book, he thought and remembered an idea he had had while working in France, that the security around Charles DeGaulle was professional and tough. No one could get to le Grand Charles, except for an outsider. Thus was born the assassin he called the Jackal. 

He had a typewriter so he just sat down wrote the thriller. In about four months. He had, he says, no idea how a book was sold so he started going to publisher's offices in London and was turned away continually. Finally he met a publisher at a party and managed to talk his way into a meeting. He got the typed manuscript to the publisher who read it and bought it, demanding a second book "by Christmas."  A career was born.

The next book was THE ODESSA FILE about the mythical organization set up to get SS and other Nazi's bigwigs out of Europe. I had read the book when it came out in the mid-1960's and saw the movie with Jon Voigt and Maximillian Schell. (It was on TCM the other night too & I watched the ending.)

In his memoir, Forsyth describes how he did his research. He read five or six books on the SS and the Third Reich and then he went an found people to talk to. Simon Wiesenthal, for instance, who is a character in the book. One of his sources, I think, a man in the British secret service, talked to him about big Nazis still thought alive and still wanted.

Don't use a fake Nazi, here's a real one SS-captain Eduard Roschmann, who was the
commandant of the ghetto of Riga in Latvia, which is where the German and Austrian Jews were sent. And murdered by the thousands. (And just to fully comprehend how horrible this was, this was done without gas chambers, the bodies toppled into pits dug in the forest.)

 

Peter Miller is a German reporter and stumbles onto a diary written by a survivor of Riga. As a young German, he is horrified at what he learns about the SS. He tracks down Roschmann but the villain manages to escape to South American. The real Roschmann did the same and lived there as a businessman under an alias. He was actually there when the movie came out. You have to wonder if he read the book or saw the  movie.

According to Forsyth, a man in Argentina did go to the movie and realized that he knew Roschmann by his alias.  I don't know if that's true. Wikipedia says that Roschmann's wife, who had been left in Germany found out that her husband had married an Argentinian woman and got mad. She told the German authorities his alias and they began extradition for bigamy. I guess it's like arresting Capone for tax evasion.

Roschmann, who had escaped both the British and the Americans in 1945,  managed to evade extradition back to Germany and evidently died in Paraguay. I wonder if his wife was sorry. Or glad. That'll fix him.