I see that today's papers are full of accounts of Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, and her organisation Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), that is reputed to help Nazis on the run. Predictably, the reports mention how Stille Hilfe co-operates with the 'Odessa', the clandestine Nazi escape network. I'm not qualified to discuss the activities of Stille Hilfe, but I do know a thing or two about the 'Odessa', and I believe the organisation is more the product of fantasy than reality. I apologise that this is a longish post, but it's a subject close to my professional heart, and nothing gets my goat more than when people talk knowledgeably about 'Odessa'.
The most obvious problem with Odessa is the name. If you were organising a super secret escape network for SS men, would you really label yourself with an acronym that stood for 'Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen' – the Organisation of Former SS Members? No, I thought not.
The truth about the Nazi escape organizations, beneath the mushroom clouds of smoke, is that they were similar to an old-boy network, or perhaps even the loose web of terrorist cells and groups that are today placed under the name of al-Qaeda. After the war, there were countless organizations that assisted escaping Nazis, and some of these groups had names – such as ‘Konsul', ‘Scharnhorst', ‘Sechsgestirn', ‘Leibwache', ‘Lustige Brüder' – and some did not. Instead of one big fire under the smoke, there were instead many small ones, the combination of their multiple and toxic emissions suggestive of a single large inferno. Assistance would also be provided on an ad hoc basis, sometimes by an individual or a handful of individuals rather than by a coordinated group.
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