The Odessa File

The Odessa File is a thriller by the English writer Frederick Forsyth, first published in 1972. It is about a young German reporter trying to find a former SS concentration camp commander.

ODESSA is an acronym for a German phrase meaning the organisation of former members of the SS. The novel presents it as an international network set up shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in order to protect former members of the SS after the war.

Peter Miller is the reporter. In November 1963, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, he follows an ambulance to the apartment of Salomon Tauber, a survivor of the camps who has taken his own life, and a friend in the Hamburg police gives him the dead man's diary the next day.

What he reads there sends him after the commander Tauber wrote about, and the hunt runs alongside a story of international arms dealing. The novel ends with a confrontation on a hillside in winter, and it left readers asking the same question they had asked after The Day of the Jackal, which is whether it could be true.