ODESSA

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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.^[1]

Although an unknown number of wanted Nazis and war criminals escaped Germany and often Europe, most experts deny that an organisation called ODESSA ever existed. The term itself is only recorded certainly as an American construction, coined to cover a range of planning, arrangements, including those enacted and those simply envisaged, and both known and hypothesised groups. There has been and remains some confusion over the years of the use of the term ODESSA. About 300 Nazis found their way to Argentina with support from Juan Perón after he was democratically elected president of Argentina in 1946.^[2]

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."^[3] 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,^[1] including Die Spinne ("The Spider") run in part by Hitler's commando-chief Otto Skorzeny.^[4] Historian Daniel Stahl in his 2011 essay stated that the consensus among historians is that an organisation called ODESSA did not actually exist.^[5][6]

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 Argentinean government and the 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.^{[7][need quotation to verify]}