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What it argues
Hamburg, 1963. Young German journalist Peter Miller discovers the diary of a Jewish concentration camp survivor who has just committed suicide. The diary names the commandant of Riga — SS Captain Eduard Roschmann — and details his crimes. Miller becomes obsessed with finding Roschmann, who has never faced justice. His investigation leads him to ODESSA, a secret organization of former SS officers helping each other evade prosecution and remain influential in postwar German society. Mossad, learning of his mission, recruits Miller to help them reach a target of their own.
Forsyth wrote The Odessa File the year after The Day of the Jackal, and it shares that book's documentary approach while shifting the moral register significantly. Where The Jackal is morally neutral about its Jackal, The Odessa File is explicitly about the failure of postwar Germany to reckon with Nazism. The novel is set in 1963 — the year of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which Forsyth weaves into the narrative — and Forsyth uses Miller's investigation to document how many former SS officers had successfully reintegrated into West German professional life.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel documents the extent to which former SS officers successfully reintegrated into West German and international professional life after 1945 — a historical reality, not a thriller invention.
- 2.
ODESSA as an organization may be partly fictional, but the mutual assistance networks among former SS members were real and well-documented.
- 3.
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963-65, which run alongside the novel's events, represent a genuine turning point in West Germany's historical reckoning — Forsyth uses them to frame his moral argument.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Frederick Forsyth was born in 1938 in Ashford, Kent, and worked as a journalist for Reuters and the BBC before turning to fiction. His first novel, The Day of the Jackal, was published in 1971. The Odessa File followed in 1972 and was adapted as a film in 1974 starring Jon Voight. Forsyth's work is characterized by intensive research, procedural accuracy, and a conservative political outlook. His other novels include The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, and The Afghan. He was appointed CBE in 2012 and has written a memoir, The Outsider, about his intelligence community contacts.
