The Odessa File Quotes

there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation." [p.28]

To understand everything is to forgive everything.

There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us,

one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if … or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries.

When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive.

The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.

there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?

To understand everything is to forgive everything.’ When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget. There

the SS had made the two initials of its name, and the twin-lightning symbol of its standard, synonymous with inhumanity in a way that no other organisation before or since has been able to do.

Throughout its history the SS made a profit on its operations.

People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything. ‘So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.

I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.

There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I; we have all failed, and failed miserably.

There is a French adage, “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

But the words did not come. They never do, when one needs them.

I understand so far,’ said Miller. ‘But why a passport? Why not a driving licence, or an ID card?’ ‘Because shortly after the founding of the republic the German authorities realised there must be hundreds or thousands wandering about under false names. There was a need for one document that was so well researched that it could act as the yardstick for all the others. They hit on the passport. Before you get a passport in Germany, you have to produce the birth certificate, several references and a host of other documentation. These are thoroughly checked before the passport is issued. ‘By contrast, once you have a passport, you can get anything else on the strength of it. Such is bureaucracy. The production of the passport convinces the civil servant that, since previous bureaucrats must have checked out the passport holder thoroughly, no further checking is necessary. With a new passport, Roschmann could quickly build up the rest of the identity – driving licence, bank accounts, credit cards. The passport is the open sesame to every other piece of necessary documentation in present-day Germany.

But if ever these lines should be read in the land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say a khaddish for me?

Ryanne watched as her heart filled with love at seeing her niece and nephew, but as Odessa’s world brightened, hers seemed to get a little darker.

This same complex but well-oiled machinery went into high gear during 1948 when Perón’s Nazi rescue group began working in Europe, principally out of Berne and Genoa. In a period of under two months that year, Immigration files similar to Stojadinovic’s were opened for four notorious SS officers: Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Josef Schwammberger and Erich Priebke. They arrived on separate ocean liners many months apart, but the paperwork for their journeys began together – in the case of Mengele and Priebke, simultaneously, as we have seen.

However, all works of history lean on a smaller bank of key resources as a gateway into the research: The Nazi Hunters and Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb; The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski; Hunting Evil by Guy Walters; Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev; Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File by Alan Levy; Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice by Gerald Steinacher; The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau; the seminal Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt; and the equally spectacular Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth. The best research we came across concerning the validity of claims about the existence of an ODESSA group can be found in The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina by Uki Goni.