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Odessa is the name of a city in Ukraine.
ODESSA (German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen; "Organization of Former SS-Members") was an alleged Nazi fugitive network set up towards the end of World War II by a group of former SS officers.
With alleged ties to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican, ODESSA allegedly operated out of Buenos Aires and helped Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke and many other war criminals find refuge in Latin America. SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was believed to have been active in this organization, but this supposition has never been proved. Similarly, General Reinhard Gehlen's entire organisation that was employed and protected by US Intelligence within a few months of the end of the war, has come under suspicion.
Did ODESSA exist?
According to Simon Wiesenthal, ODESSA was set up in 1946 to aid fugitive Nazis.
Other sources, such as many interviews by the ZDF (German TV station) with former SS men, suggest that ODESSA never was the single world-wide secret organization that Wiesenthal described, but that there were several organizations, both overt and covert (including the CIA and several Latin American governments), that helped ex-SS men.
To some extent whether ODESSA was a criminal conspiracy that protected and smuggled out war criminals or an informal network by which various German and Allied elements protected "useful" former SS anti-communists from war crimes charges is purely a matter of viewpoint since, short of finding a genuine documentary constitution for it, any facts or actions would fit both descriptions equally.
Uki Goñi, in his book The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina (ISBN 1862075816) suggests that this more complex story is the real truth.
See also: Operation Paperclip, The Odessa File
Quote
- "We knew what we did. It was necessary that we used every son of a bitch as long as he was an anti-communist" by Harry Rositzke, CIA-Russia expert (from the ZDF article)
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