The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth’s second novel after his bestselling debut, The Day of the Jackal, was published in 1972. It was also a bestseller and was filmed in 1974. But, in retrospect, is it a classic like The Day of the Jackal? Let’s find out.

The Odessa File: Title

The title uses a classic title archetype, the prize. The file being a classic MacGuffin: a “list of all our agents”, in this case a list of all the nazis that the Odessa organisation has helped escape justice and placed in positions of power.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel)

Hang on, what’s ODESSA?

It’s the name Forsyth gave to an organisation that in the novel helps Nazis escape justice and places them in positions of power. The name is an acronym in German: Organisation Der Ehemaligen SSAngehörigen, which in English is “Organisation of Former Members of the SS” .

The Odessa File: Logline

In 1960s Germany, an investigative reporter discovers the identity of the man who murdered his father during the war. He attempts to infiltrate the organisation of war criminals protecting the murderer, seeking revenge.

(For more on loglines, see The Killogator Logline Formula)

The Odessa File: Plot Summary

Warning: Major spoilers are blacked out like this [blackout]secret[/blackout]. To view them, just select/highlight them.

It’s 1963 and President Kennedy has just been assassinated. Peter Miller, a German investigative reporter, hears about the assassination on his car radio after having dinner with his mother. He then follows an ambulance, hoping it might lead to a major accident where he can get a scoop. It turns out that it’s just an old man who’s died, but Miller meets his old schoolfriend who’s a policeman now. They exchange numbers.

Survivors

The next day, the old friend tells Miller that the dead man was a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He gives Miller the old man’s diary. Miller reads the diary, which explains how the man survived the Riga Ghetto, determined to document the atrocities committed there. The worst of the perpetrators was sadistic SS commander, Eduard Roschmann, known as “The Butcher of Riga”. A passage in the diary describes a dispute over evacuation from Riga, during which Roschmann killed a German army captain.

Miller also discovers Tauber committed suicide after spotting Roschmann a few days earlier and realising that his mission to expose him had failed. Miller becomes determined to track Roschmann down and bring him to justice.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Odessa organisation are planning to help the Egyptians destroy Israel. German scientists have helped Egypt build rockets armed with poison gas to fire at Israel, with the aim of mass casualties. The only issue is lack of guidance electronics. Odessa has a man, codenamed Vulkan, whose electronics factory is working on the problem. The Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, is aware of the plan. They’re trying to sabotage it by killing or otherwise warning off the scientists. However, they can’t discover who’s working on the rocket guidance mechanism.

Miller tries to trace Roschmann. He visits the State Attorney General’s office, where he learns efforts to search for former Nazis are discouraged. Worse, many of the ex-SS are now in the police and protecting their erstwhile colleagues. He contacts other experts and nazi-hunters, who give him more information about Odessa. This investigation draws the attention of both Odessa and Mossad. Odessa attempt to warn Miller off, which only makes him more determined.

Infiltration

Mossad agents approach Miller. They want to help him penetrate Odessa, to discover who’s making the rocket guidance mechanism. Miller has no intention of tracing the rocket scientists—all he’s interested in is Roschmann—but sees his chance and so agrees. He says goodbye to his girlfriend, Sigi, telling her he’ll be back in a month or so.

Mossad know a repentant ex-SS officer who’s prepared to train Miller to pass as an SS-Sergeant. They invent a story about how he was involved in war crimes and has been spotted.

Meanwhile, Odessa send their top assassin to track Miller down and kill him, but as he’s training, the assassin can’t find him.

In his new guise, Miller approaches the head of Odessa in Germany. After convincing him of his cover story, he’s sent to meet a forger who supplies Odessa with passports. Foolishly, Miller continues driving his distinctive Jaguar sports car and is spotted in it by Odessa, who immediately realise put two and two together.

Miller meets with the forger. During the meeting, the assassin tries to shoot Miller with a sniper rifle, but accidentally shoots the forger.

Foiled once, the assassin tries again, putting a car-bomb in Miller’s Jaguar, but it fails to explode. Odessa, realising that Miller is after Roschmann, send him a bodyguard.

Miller calls up a burglar he knows, and they break into the forger’s house. There, Miller finds a file which contains the identities of all the SS-men the forger has made passports for. Amongst them is Roschmann. Miller asks Sigi to meet with him and bring a gun and handcuffs from his apartment. When Sigi arrives, she’s appalled by Miller’s plan to confront Roschmann, but he appeases her by agreeing to get engaged.

Confrontation

Miller plans to phone Roschmann, but the phone-line to his villa is down, so Miller drives straight there. Luckily for him, Roschmann’s bodyguard is away investigating the phone outage and Roschmann himself comes to the door. Miller holds Roschmann at gunpoint.

Roschmann [blackout] tries to appeal to Miller that everything he did was for the good of Germany. He questions why Miller, as a fellow Aryan, even cares about dead Jews. Miller explains that the German Army captain Roschmann killed during the evacuation from Riga was Miller’s father. Realising he can’t persuade Miller, Roschmann begs for his life. Miller handcuffs Roschmann to the fireplace, planning to call the police to come and pick him up.[/blackout]

As Miller [blackout] turns to leave, Roschmann’s bodyguard returns to the house and easily overpowers him, knocking him unconscious. As the phones are out, Roschmann tells the bodyguard to drive to the village and call Odessa to tell them what’s happened. The bodyguard takes Miler’s car but is killed when the car-bomb finally goes off. Roschmann realises it’s too late to stop the release of the Odessa File and runs, taking a flight to Argentina.[/blackout]

Odessa’s [blackout] assassin arrives and is about to kill Miller when a Mossad agent arrives and kills the assassin.[/blackout]

While Miller [blackout] is recovering in hospital, a Mossad agent warns him not to reveal anything he discovered. He marries Sigi and retires from investigative journalism.[/blackout]

The West German authorities [blackout] shut down the factory producing the missile guidance system, thwarting Odessa’s plan. The Odessa File itself enables the police to arrest many of the ex-SS war criminals, severely damaging the organisation.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis)

The Odessa File: Analysis

The Odessa File has a Mission plot (see Spy Novel Plots). The Protagonist’s self-imposed mission is to infiltrate the Odessa organisation, find Roschmann and bring him to justice.

The ‘Mission’ Plot

The Protagonist:

  1. Is given a mission to carry out by their Mentor.
  2. Will be opposed by the Antagonist as they try to complete the mission.
  3. Makes a plan to complete the Mission.
  4. Trains and gathers resources for the Mission.
  5. Involves one or more Allies in their Mission (Optionally, there is a romance sub-plot with one of the Allies).
  6. Attempts to carry out the Mission, dealing with further Allies and Enemies as they meet them.
  7. Is betrayed by an Ally or the Mentor (optionally).
  8. Narrowly avoids capture by the Antagonist (or is captured and escapes).
  9. Has a final confrontation with the Antagonist and completes (or fails to complete) the Mission.

Deus Ex Machina

Three times in The Odessa File, Miller avoids being killed only through pure luck. The assassin sent after him shoots the wrong person, then fails to blow Miller’s car up, and finally, with Miller unconscious on the floor, is about to kill him when a Mossad agent intervenes. The last is maybe not quite a deus ex machina, but it feels like one.

To be a deus ex machina, a scene has to meet four criteria:

  • A solution to a problem – Miller is about to be shot.
  • The protagonist’s plight appears hopeless – Miller is unconscious on the floor
  • Unexpected – the Mossad agent appears from nowhere
  • Outside the control of the characters – later it turns out that Sigi phoned the Mossad agent at Miller’s request, so it’s not quite outside Miller’s control, just hidden from the reader.

It’s not really a good ending, and unsurprisingly the movie altered it.

This is something Frederick Forsyth does a lot—the ending of The Day of the Jackal also turns on a borderline deus ex machina.

MacGuffin

The actual Odessa file giving the names and aliases of all the Nazis who Odessa have placed in influential positions in Germany is a MacGuffin: an item the plot revolves around, but plays no direct role in the story. In the final chapter infodump, Forsyth says the men in the file were arrested or forced to flee.

Structure

Structurally, The Odessa File is a strange novel.

Firstly, the German-rocket-scientists-in-Egypt subplot is perfunctory, almost disconnected from the main investigating-nazis plot and resolved in a couple of paragraphs of infodump in the final chapter.

Secondly, Miller spends the first half of the novel reading background material and travelling around meeting people who investigate Nazis, which I suspect is a lightly fictionalised version of Frederick Forsyth’s own research trip. He then spends several chapters being trained to pass as an ex-SS fugitive, giving Forsyth a chance to squeeze more of his research in. The reader is two-thirds through the novel before Miller starts trying to infiltrate Odessa. He’s then rumbled by the Nazis almost immediately and spends only the last few chapters on Roschmann’s trail and having lucky escapes from Odessa’s assassin.

It all feels like Forsyth falling in love with his research material and wrapping a sketchy plot around it. Or, more charitably, this is Forsyth’s ‘non-fiction’ style and the illusion of reality he tries to create.

The Illusion of Reality

Part of Forsyth’s brand is the illusion of reality. He’s always at great pains to give the impression that he has inside information and that the reader is learning about something that really happened. He often includes real people, actual events and workable techniques in his stories (the Day of the Jackal passport scam, for example, which apparently no longer works, but did at the time).

Forsyth also uses a lot of bald exposition and what amounts to infodumping in his stories. Forsyth had been a journalist and writes in that style, as if reporting on real-life events. As I already mentioned, the first half of the novel appears to be a lightly fictionalised account of Forsyth’s own research trips.

It’s an illusion of non-fiction.

Is The Odessa File a True Story?

The Odessa File has a preface that insists that Odessa is a real organisation, the plot or something very similar happened, names have been changed to protect the innocent, etc. etc. This is similar to the preface of The Eagle has Landed, which claims to be a true story, and as with The Eagle Has Landed, it’s a ruse. The author is simply using the false document technique to help the reader suspend disbelief.

There are though true elements to the story.

  • Lots of Nazis escaped justice at the end of World War Two, some moving to South America, and others selling their skills to the USA in return for leniency.
  • Denazification fizzled out pretty quickly and there were plenty of ex-Nazis in influential positions in 1960s/70s Germany.
  • The primary antagonist, Eduard Roschmann, was a real SS war-criminal, responsible for similar crimes as those fictionalised in the novel and still at large at the time.
    • Ironically, the publicity surrounding the novel, and even more so the movie, led to him fleeing Argentina for Paraguay and eventually to his death in 1977.
  • Two real SS generals, Richard Glücks and Hans-Adolf Prützmann, are mentioned as leaders of Odessa.
  • There were German rocket scientists who built rockets for Egypt, until being warned off or, in a couple of cases, killed by Mossad.
    • There’s no evidence that they planned to add nerve gas or biological warheads, and when the Egyptians eventually got Russian missiles instead they used them with boring old high explosive warheads.

Similarities to The Quiller Memorandum

In The Quiller Memorandum, which predates The Odessa File by almost a decade, the author, Adam Hall, also uses ineffective post-war denazification and an organisation of ex-Nazis plotting to use biological weapons as the basis of his plot. The equivalent Nazi organisation to Odessa in The Quiller Memorandum is called Phönix. Hall’s protagonist, Quiller, doesn’t infiltrate the organisation though, but tries to destroy it.

The Odessa File: My Verdict

Not as good as The Day of the Jackal, but if you like Forsyth’s journalistic technique, you’ll enjoy The Odessa File.

The Odessa File: The Movie

Mary Tamm in The Odessa File

A movie of The Odessa File, directed by Ronald Neame and starring Jon Voight as Miller and Mary Tamm as Sigi, was released in 1974. The plot is much the same as the novel, although expanding Sigi’s role, compressing the first half to the point it’s almost dispensed with, going almost directly to Peter’s attempt to infiltrate Odessa, and simplifying the ultimate confrontation between Peter and Roschmann. It’s not surprising that they did this, but it does reduce the almost-non-fiction feel of the novel.

Here’s the trailer:

Want to Read or Watch It?

The Odessa File novel is available on US Amazon here and UK Amazon here.

The movie is also available on US Amazon here and UK Amazon here.

Agree? Disagree?

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