The Odessa File - Frederick Forsyth (1972)

After the Second World War, there was a quest to hunt for the Nazis to bring them to justice, and yet, a number of them were never caught. Some of them escaped to various countries in South America, others were co-opted by both the Western and Communist countries and some of them tried to stay underground in Germany itself. There has always been the belief that there was an organization called ODESSA (Wikipedia link) that sought to provide an environment in which former SS (the most feared and devoted Nazi) members would be supported and provided escape routes, and such an organization would seem logical as the war was ending, and former SS members knew that they would be persecuted by both the Soviet and Western forces. No less a Nazi hunter than Simon Wiesenthal believed that such an organization existed and accounted for how SS members managed to escape the manhunt.



Frederick Forsyth normally researches his novels in great detail, and you can see the results in this novel itself. The novel details the way in which ODESSA works, and how a reporter manages to get involved with the network. The story is set in 1963, and deals with Peter Miller, a freelance crime reporter who reaches the apartment of a suicide victim - the suicide is that of Salomon Tauber, a Jewish Holocaust-survivor from the Riga concentration camp, which was commanded by Eduard Roschmann, also known as "The Butcher of Riga" (wikipedia). He soon obtains a diary, which records that Tauber had witnessed Roschmann shooting a German Army captain.
After finding that there is not much resolve to convict ex-Nazis, he is approached by former concentration camp survivors and soon, he is determined to get into the ODESSA. After some training, he manages to get inside after meeting a lawyer who works for ODESSA. He slowly starts getting information on the entire system, but a chance mistake means that he is revealed, and now there is a hitman after him. It is now a quest to get away from the hitman while trying to get Roschmann. Will he succeed ?