The Odessa File: Frederick Forsyth’s Thriller of a Reporter Hunting an SS Officer in 1960s Germany
The novel opens on the night President Kennedy is assassinated in Texas. Peter Miller, a young German investigative reporter used to writing about facts and their explanations, finds himself caught up in a case far outside his speciality.
Author: Frederick Forsyth (1938–2025)
Title: The Odessa File (1972)
Format: English Kindle edition (Arrow), 429 pages
Scope: Historical thriller
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B0031RS1ZK (ASIN B0031RS1ZK)
A Diary From the Camps
A suicide in a Hamburg suburb catches Miller’s attention. After reading carefully the diary of the dead man, a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps, he becomes obsessed with hunting down a former SS officer: Eduard Roschmann. Young, and without really understanding what he is getting into, he starts to investigate.
Into ODESSA
His inquiries bring him into contact with witnesses and survivors who give him their view of what happened. Once he knows his goal is to find Roschmann and hand him over to the authorities, he contacts Israeli agents who help him infiltrate ODESSA, the organisation that helped former SS members escape justice. The trail leads him to one of the forgers who supplied fugitive Nazis with new papers, a man who kept photographs and details of the new identities as life insurance.
Werwolf and Vulkan
Hunted by the organisation’s killer and by those protecting the secret Vulkan project, Miller does not realise how important this particular officer is to ODESSA. Once he has the file and has located Roschmann, he lives under threat of death, until the two men finally meet face to face for a decisive conversation.
A Real Villain
Eduard Roschmann was not invented. He was the SS commandant of the Riga ghetto in Latvia, known as the "Butcher of Riga", and like many Nazi criminals he escaped justice after the war. Forsyth’s novel, and the film that followed it, made his name widely known. Shortly afterwards he was identified living in Argentina; facing extradition, he fled to Paraguay, where he died in 1977. Few thrillers can claim to have had such a direct effect on the real world.
Forsyth’s Method
Forsyth (1938–2025) had worked as a journalist for Reuters and the BBC before turning to fiction, and it shows. After the huge success of The Day of the Jackal (1971), he applied the same approach here: meticulous research, real places and organisations, and fictional characters moving through a world that feels documented rather than imagined. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, whom Forsyth consulted, appears in the novel as himself, helping Miller with his investigation.
The Film
The novel was filmed in 1974 by Ronald Neame, with Jon Voight as Peter Miller and Maximilian Schell as Roschmann. It follows the book closely and is still a solid, tense thriller, although the novel’s wealth of detail about forged identities, safe houses and the inner workings of the organisation is inevitably reduced.
A Word on History
Whether ODESSA ever existed as a single, structured network is still debated by historians; the escape routes that helped Nazis reach South America were often looser and more improvised. Forsyth’s version is a novelist’s dramatisation, but the underlying fact, that many war criminals lived freely for decades, is all too true, and that is what gives the book its moral force.
Where to Start With Forsyth
If you have not read him before, The Day of the Jackal is the obvious first choice, with The Odessa File as the perfect second. Both share the same strengths: tight plotting, a ticking clock and a sense that every detail has been checked, which is why they remain models of the genre half a century later.
Why Read It
Full of mystery and suspense, the story holds the reader’s attention throughout, with an ending that is anything but predictable. It is one of the novels that defined the modern documentary thriller.
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