Customer Reviews

The Odessa File

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Even the start of the novel is gripping, and it is fraught with coincidences. If John F. Kennedy hadn't been shot, Peter Miller would not have pulled over to listen to the radio announcement. He would have missed the ambulance that he eventually followed. As an investigative journalist he thought he might be following a story. The ambulance's destination was the suicide of an old Holocaust survivor. "No story here," the detective advises him. Shortly thereafter the detective calls to tell him that the old man left behind a diary that describes the unspeakable cruelty he experienced in a concentration camp. Miller reads the story into the night. His attention is turned to one incident he reads over and over again. The diary ends with the old man's plea that someone please say Kaddish, the Jewish Prayer for the dead, for the sake of his soul. The coincidences build from here. The next day Miller decides to hunt a Nazi camp commandant, but not for the reasons we suspect. The story takes Peter Miller through other parts of Germany and Austria where he is being chased by the people he is pursuing. The journalist eventually finds and confronts the Nazi. The ultimate coincidence is revealed. His personal mission has far-reaching consequences.

In the end we learn about the fate of the characters, some fateful and some ordinary. This was the most stirring part for me. A young Israeli paratrooper enters the Hall of Remembrance in Jerusalem. His red beret satisfies the requirement of a yarmulka, and he fulfills the request of the old man whose soul died years earlier in a concentration camp near Riga.

With Forsythe's ability to mix fact with fiction, 1964 was a year in which a number of Nazis were found and brought to justice. Stirring.

This novel is lesenvergnuegen.

Alles Gute!
ECP

After reading "The Day of the Jackal", I thought that there couldn't be a better suspense thriller than this, but I still hadn't read "The Odessa File". Its set in the early 1960's, where a young freelance German journalist comes across the personal diary of an old German Jew who's committed suicide. Reading the diary through the night, the journalist, Peter Miller finds out that the Jew was a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp at Riga, Latvia during World War II. As he reads on, he's shocked by the graphic description by the Jew of the atrocities committed on the camp inmates by the camp commandant, Eduard Roschmann. Millers vows to track down Roschmann and bring him to justice. But while doing so, he comes across a super-secret organization known as Odessa, which protects Nazi ex-SS members from being captured and brought to justice. When Miller starts getting too close to the Odessa, his life is in grave danger. But he decides that it will end with him bringing Roschmann to justice for his crimes, or with his death.

"The Odessa File", as with all other Forsyth books, has a super-shocking twist in the end, where we get to know the real motive behind Miller wanting to find Roschmann. In the process, Forsyth manages to include The Beatles' short stint in Hamburg, the background of the brief Arab-Israeli war and last but not the least, Kennedy's assasination. As usual, Forsyth's factual knowledge is accurate to the point, and his research is deep and minute. "The Odessa File" is undoubtedly Frederick Forsyth at his very best.

THE ODESSA FILE is one of Frederick Forsyth's classics. Cleverly written, meticulously researched, and absolutely readable, THE ODESSA FILE recounts the story of Peter Miller, a young German crime reporter who decides to infiltrate the secret Nazi support network in the early 1960s in order to discover the whereabouts of Captain Eduard Roschmann, "The Butcher of Riga," who sent some 80,000 people to their deaths in the Riga Ghetto.While Miller's outrage at the twisting of Germany by the Nazis is real and intense, his motivations are unclear...until the O. Henry ending.

This is fine historical fiction, melding historical figures (like Roschmann)and fictional characters (like Miller) together seamlessly.THE ODESSA FILE is an intense thriller, and rates as one of the finest and most memorable works of its genre anytime and anywhere.

Master thriller writer Forsyth delivers big-time in this story of an intrepid freelance journalist tracking down an ex-Nazi in postwar Germany. Grounded heavily in research and reality, the story is based upon the disappearance of hundreds of wanted SS war criminals. As plenty of historians have since documented, there were organized efforts to help wanted Nazis disappear, especially to South America (see, for example, Uki Goni's book The Real Odessa). Here, Forsyth imagines the Odessa, a well-funded organization of former SS men who are taking the reins of German industry as it rebuilds, and helping Egypt with rocket technology with which to destroy Israel.

One day freelance German photojournalist Peter Miller comes into possession of the diary of an old concentration camp survivor who has recently committed suicide. The diary details the man's physical and mental torture in Riga, and claims that the camp commandant is still alive and living in Germany. Miller is simultaneously appalled at the atrocities described and eager for a big scoop, and so sets out to track down SS Captain Roschman (the real life "Butcher of Riga"). He quickly discovers to his surprise that the newsmagazines aren't interested in the story, it's explained to him that no one wants to pay to read about horrors perpetrated on Jews in some other country.

Miller decides to proceed on his own, and the book turns into a kind of procedural thriller as he doggedly pursues sources of information across Germany and it starts to dawn on him that no one is particularly interested in hunting down ex-Nazis. The combination of former Nazi influence in the police, along with the the realpolitik of the situation (live ex-Nazis vote, dead Jews do not), mean that the official channels are largely window dressing. Turning to other sources, like Simon Wiesenthal, Miller eventually finds himself in the company of a vigilante group of Jews dedicated to eliminating ex-Nazis. They, and their Mossad masters, want him to infiltrate Odessa by posing as an former SS man. What he doesn't know is that Odessa is on to him, and has assigned their "cleaner" to take care of him.

The final part of the book is stuffed with high tension as Miller gets possession of a blockbuster piece of intelligence about the Odessa, and closer and closer to Roschman. Meanwhile, the SS killer gets closer and closer to Miller... It all culminates in a nail-biting finale with one of the best twists at the end I've ever come across. The core story is top-level thriller stuff, absolutely outstanding. I could have done without Miller's girlfriend character, who seemed to exist mainly as a bit of T&A and an attempt to give Miller a little dimension. I also could have done without the subplot involving the rockets for Egypt, as it distracted from the more interesting story of Miller's hunt. Still, these are minor quibbles about an outstanding book.

In the 1960's German Journalist Peter Miller stumbles upon the diary of a German Jew who had been shipped to a concentration camp in Riga, Latvia during World War Two. Reading the diary Miller is enraged at the abuses of the sadistic camp commandant and vows to find him and bring him to justice. What Miller finds instead is the organisation known as Odessa, a super-secret society made up of former members of the SS to protect their own. As Miller gets closer and closer to the truth, his life is put in jeoperady. Finally, with the aide of Jewish Nazi-hunters, he begins a plan that will end either with the Riga commandant at the end of a rope, or his own grisly death. Thrilling from the first page, 'The Odessa File' contains the same heart-pounding suspense that filled Forsyth's earlier work, 'The Day of the Jackel,' and has one of the greatest twist endings in modern fiction. For anyone who enjoys thrilling fiction mixed with historical fact, 'The Odessa File' will not disappoint.

I picked this up to read again, after having read it almost twenty years ago. It did not disappoint! This is how all "what-if" thrillers should be written. Once you pick this story up it grabs you and won't let go until the end. Forsyth does a great job of detailing the Odessa organization, how it was formed, and the fear it engendered in Germany almost twenty years after the war. The plot is very exciting, but best of all believable. Refreshingly, the hero is not a one dimensional character. Peter Miller is a complex figure who has his own reason for pursuing Eduard Roschmann. If you've never read this book, pick it up! If you've read it before, consider picking it up again. I highly recommend it!

The first two chapters of "The Odessa File" are as brilliant as spy fiction has ever gotten; after that, it's just very, very good.

The opening chapter sets into motion a world of underground Nazis and underworld reporters against the compelling backdrop of the assassination of President Kennedy; Forsyth even finds a way of getting the Beatles involved.

The second chapter, a recounting of the diary of a former concentration camp inmate, offers some of the most stunning testimony of man's inhumanity to man. Yet the dead man, Salomon Tauber, still can write: "With the passing of the years I have learned again to love; to love the rocks and trees, the sky above and the river flowing past the city, the stray dogs and cats, the weeds growing between the cobblestones, and the children who run away from me in the street because I am so ugly."

From there, the novel may slide a bit, but how can it be otherwise? A reporter who reads the journal, Peter Miller, takes it upon himself to find the man behind Tauber's tortures, former SS officer Eduard Roschmann A.K.A. "The Butcher of Riga," and bring him to justice. Yes, people are right when they say "Day Of The Jackal" worked better as a story from front-to-back. Maybe the book could have done more with Miller's plan to infiltrate the Nazi underworld, the "ODESSA" of the novel's title, an idea developed more in the 1974 film adaptation starring Jon Voight. There are a couple of contrivances, not as egregious as are found in some other Forsyth books I can mention, but they are there.

It's still a brilliant story, delivered with a minimum of sentiment and a feeling of lived-in journalistic accuracy. Most of all, it's exciting from chapter-to-chapter, a brisk gallop of a narrative. The final confrontation between Miller and Roschmann is justly famous and well-known; I suspect George Lucas was taking notes.

I've read the book three times now since 1981, and while it's a little less than I remember, it's still tops in its genre in so many ways. People who think spy fiction is all about James Bond and Tom Clancy owe it to themselves to read "Odessa File;" they will be edified, or at the very least, highly entertained.

The Odessa File

From the moment the diary of a broken and desolate concentration camp survivor lands up in the hands of reporter Peter Miller, the reader is pulled along into a world of crazed Nazi revanchists, wily and vengeful Mossad infiltrators, obstructionist German bureaucrats, and a pathetic, browbeaten printer who's just a little too clever for his own good. Miller is warned off, shoved around, ambushed, and almost blown up, but he manages eventually (with a little help from Simon Wiesenthal) to find his way into the heart of the shadowy organization known as the ODESSA.

THE ODESSA FILE plays off in Germany during the 60's and examines the persistent rumors and tempting evidence that points to the existence of a secretive organization that masterminded the escape of Nazi war criminals and perpetuated Nazi ideals the world over. The story revolves around a cache of documents known as The Odessa File that protected the identities of former members of Hitler's dreaded SS since shortly before the end of World War II. The book is of course a piece of fiction, but many of the characters aren't fictitious at all. SS Captain Eduard Roschmann, for instance, really was the Butcher of Riga, and he really did sneak past the mob of tribunals and other judiciary apparatuses that sprung up after the war (at least as far as anyone knows). Peter Miller, is the reporter who hunts him down, we may assume him to be completely fictious, but as for everyone in between - who knows?

Therein lies much of the novel's suspense. What really happened to the German-designed rockets that Nasser was supposed to have ready in time for the Six Day War? How did the SS acquire new identities for its members so quickly after the war's end and where did it get the money needed to do so? Could the head of the company that made your coffee machine be a former officer of the SS and a wanted war criminal? Frederick Forsyth has truly mastered the art of intertwining reality with fiction and vice versa and his ability to do so is what gives this book it's thrilling atmosphere.

THE ODESSA FILE is the novel that established Forsyth as the heavyweight champion of his genre, political espionage. The story's characters are vividly imagined (if they are imagined at all), and in the 27 years since its first publication, they've lost none of their energy. The book is compact, credible, as politically sophisticated as his first novel, The Day of the Jackal, skillfully researched and much more neatly written. Assuming peace doesn't unexpectedly arrive in the Middle East, The Odessa File will still be delivering knockout punches long after the average thriller has called off the fight.

This novel makes me wish I had discovered Forsyth sooner (this is the first Forsyth I have read). He writes with a crisp, concise style that combined with his considerable skill in pacing and character development makes this book a first-rate thriller. Add to that the historical insight that emerges throughout this book and the result is a truly fine novel. Occasionally the narrative slows down when Forsyth expends too much description on the protagonist's cross-country drives, but even those interruptions fail to break the suspense that mounts throughout this story. This is one of the best thrillers I have read - I give it an A.

I have something to confess. This is my first Frederick Forsyth novel. For years, my father had had almost all his books in his private collection, but I never thought of touching them, thinking to myself, "Just another pulp writer..." Oh, was I wrong!

Forsyth delved extensively into the Nazi mythos and came up with a brilliant thriller that could almost pass off as non-fiction. The whole book chronicles the long and wild chase across the whole of Germany for a Nazi war criminal.

The chase is intertwined with a convulated plot involving biological weapons, the Mossad, the Waffen-SS and of course, the shadowy Odessa. Thoroughly researched and the explanations in each background are vivid and clear.

Nevertheless, if you are in a mood for an exciting thrill ride from start to finish, this is the book for you. Forsyth fans were equally thrilled when this book was released. You might also want to check out the movie version of the novel, starring Jon Voight.