In an interview on Nazi Hunters

Talk to me about The Odessa File.

Now, Odessa File is Freddie’s second book (I always call him Freddie), and after the enormous success of Day of the Jackal he was thinking of doing something about mercenaries in Africa. His publishers said: ‘Do Nazis first and mercenaries later.’ That’s publishing pretty much to a T. Freddie had been Reuters correspondent in Germany and was aware that there was a significant number of former Nazis ending up in government and Simon Wiesenthal told him about Odessa. So he ended up with two men in mind – his real villain, Edward Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga, and the hero of his book, Peter Miller, who hunts Roschmann for reasons that become apparent at the end – there might be people who haven’t read this book. I read it as a teenager and loved it.

Is it a true story?

Ah, well, the problem with Odessa, which stands for Organisation of Former SS Associates, you can look the German up, is that if you’d been in the SS and were trying not to get hunted you’re not going to call your organisation that, are you? So, basically, it’s bollocks. I’ve spoken to Freddie and he all but admitted it, but because of his book the myth persists. A man called Willhelm Hoettl fed the story to Simon Wiesenthal [the famous Nazi hunter] who fed it to Anthony Terry at the Sunday Times where Freddie picked it up and all these people put their spin on it. It is probably true that there were various groups of former SS people and perhaps even one called Odessa in Southern Germany, but the ball has been tampered with so many times and it now lodges deep in the imagination of anyone trying to think about Nazis in the post-war period. But it is a great book with a lot of accuracy and it’s a perfect depiction of post-war Germany.