What is The Odessa File about?

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.

ODESSA itself may or may not have existed as a formal organization (historians dispute this, and Simon Wiesenthal, who appears in the novel, later expressed doubts). As a thriller device it works because it names something that was undeniably real: the network of assistance, both formal and informal, that helped SS men avoid prosecution, relocate to South America, and in some cases continue to hold respectable positions in European institutions. The novel is, among other things, a piece of moral journalism.

Forsyth's procedural strengths are fully deployed here. The undercover infiltration sequence — Miller training with Mossad, constructing a false identity as a former SS man, penetrating ODESSA — is meticulously plotted. The historical research is dense and the factual scaffolding is, like The Day of the Jackal, unusually solid for thriller fiction. Readers who want action-driven plotting will find this slower than the Jackal; readers interested in the postwar Nazi question will find it essential.