
            The movie opens in September 1963 with armored maneuvers in the Israeli desert. A top Israeli military leader confers with a Mossad agent, explaining that the Egyptians are massing 400 rockets in Helwan, arming the warheads with bubonic plague and radioactive Strontium 90. The missiles are targeted on Israeli cities, needing only an advanced guidance system to make them operational. The guidance system is being perfected somewhere in Germany under the sponsorship of ODESSA, an organization of former high-ranking SS officials. It is a race against time.The action switches to Hamburg, Germany in November of the same year. A young and ambitious freelance journalist named Peter Miller (Jon Voight) drives through the streets of Hamburg, which are festively decorated for the holidays. An announcement over Miller's car radio grabs his attention. President John F. Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas. As Miller sadly listens to the news, emergency vehicles speed past. Miller follows them and stops at an old apartment building, where the upstairs windows have been flung open. A policeman friend explains to Miller that a lonely old man has gassed himself and there is no story to be had. Back home in bed with his dancer girlfriend Sigi (Mary Tamm), Miller muses that the first photographs of Kennedy's killer might fetch two million marks. Sigi scolds him as a parasite who profits from other people's misfortune.The next day, Miller meets his police officer friend for lunch and is loaned the diary that had been kept by the deceased old man, Salomon Tauber. The police officer coyly suggests that Miller might find the contents interesting. Miller takes the diary home and discovers that Tauber and his wife Esther were German Jews who had been inmates at the Riga concentration camp. Tauber's diary details the sadistic butchery of camp commandant Eduard Roschman (Maximilian Schell). Tauber's wife had been gassed, but he was determined to survive and be a witness against Nazi war crimes. The diary goes on to detail an incident that Tauber had witnessed on the Riga docks in October 1944. With the Russians rapidly advancing, the Germans were desperately evacuating thousands of wounded troops by ship. Eduard Roschman had suddenly appeared on the docks, seeking to commandeer a ship for his SS troops. He met determined resistance from a courageous Wehrmacht captain who knocked Roschman to the ground. Roschman shot the captain dead, and as he fell his rare Knights Cross bravery medal with Oak Leaf clusters had spilled into the snow.Miller is greatly upset by Tauber's sad tale, and he sets out to investigate further. Despite being discouraged by his girlfriend, his editor and his own mother (Maria Schell), Miller returns to Tauber's apartment building and bribes the hard-boiled manager into letting him see Tauber's meager possessions. The manager discloses that Tauber had only one friend, an old Jewish man named Marx. Miller tracks him down and learns that Tauber had only recently seen Roschman in Hamburg.Upon reporting it to the police, Tauber was completely ignored. He had come up against the ODESSA. Despairing that justice would never be done, Tauber killed himself.Following up on old Marx's revelation, Miller visits the State War Crimes office to look up Roschman's records. Hearing his inquiries, an officious bureaucrat (and ODESSA member) comes out to shoo Miller away, but Miller overhears a telephone conversation about the upcoming annual reunion of the bureaucrat's German army division. Miller determines to crash the party. He runs into trouble when he snaps a flash picture of a shadowy and mysterious speaker. He is thrown from the hall and returns home battered and bloody, his camera smashed.The following day, Miller accompanies Sigi on a Christmas shopping trip. While waiting on the subway platform, Miller is suddenly pushed off the platform into the path of an oncoming train, narrowly escaping with his life. Undeterred, Miller travels to Vienna to look up famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Miller's dogged persistence is starting to seriously alarm the leadership of ODESSA. Miller manages to secure an interview with Wiesenthal, who enlightens him about ODESSA and its mission to protect Nazi war criminals and their activities. Wiesenthal informs Miller that ODESSA provides SS criminals with forged identities. If Miller wants to find Roschman, he needs to find the forger who created his identity papers.Back at his hotel, Miller is approached by an ODESSA emissary who tries to claim Roschman is long dead. When that story falls flat, the man warns Miller to drop his pursuit of Roschman, but Miller angrily refuses. At a highway rest stop, Miller is abducted by a group of men, but they turn out to be Israeli intelligence agents, not ODESSA. They know about his pursuit of Roschman, but they are skeptical about who he is working for. Once they are convinced of his intentions, the Israelis convince Miller to work with them in penetrating ODESSA. The Israelis capitalize on their local intelligence assets to create an alternate identity for Miller, using the name Rolf Gunter Kolb, a former SS man who has just expired from a stomach tumor.Meanwhile, back in Hamburg, ODESSA has assigned an assassin to kill Miller, but they haven't been able to find him since his "disappearance" near Vienna. One evening as Sigi is leaving the nightclub, she is chased down in the Elbe tunnel by the hired killer. He demands to know Miller's whereabouts. Just in the nick of time, a passing car interrupts the attack. Sigi flags down the auto, conveniently driven by an ODESSA member of the police department. The policeman pressures Sigi to take in a "police woman" who will ensure her safety.The Israelis place Miller in the hands of an expert who rigorously indoctrinates him in the rituals, slogans and beliefs of the SS. Miller's underarm is even disfigured with a red-hot iron bar to conceal the SS blood group tattoo that would have been there. Once he is deemed ready, Miller (posing as Kolb) is sent to contact a known ODESSA member, using the cover story that he was recognized by a Jewish hospital orderly who had been held at Flossenburg concentration camp, where Kolb had served. Kolb is supposedly on the run, looking for refuge with his former comrades.After passing a thorough screening, Miller is sent on to the organization's document forger in Bayreuth. After being dropped off at the Munich train station, Miller calls Sigi in Hamburg and is surprised to hear the police woman answer the phone. The police woman reports the call to her ODESSA employers and they realize that Miller has fooled them. Their assassin is dispatched to intercept Miller when he arrives in Bayreuth.Miller arrives at the forger's shop first, where proprietor Klaus Wenzer (Derek Jacobi) explains that passport photos are required, and the photographer won't arrive until Monday. Miller is sent to a nearby hotel to pass the time. Later that night, the hit man arrives at the shop and instructs Wenzer to contact Miller and tell him the photographer has arrived early. Miller is summoned but approaches the shop warily. He spots the hit man's sleek XKE sports car concealed nearby. Peering through a window, Miller sees the killer waiting in the shop. Miller climbs through an upstairs window and encounters Wenzer's invalid and senile mother, who mistakes Miller's dark clothing for that of a priest. She confides her worries about her son and his dangerous work, and how the ODESSA had killed her husband when he was no longer useful. She tells Miller about a secret file that her son has kept in the safe as insurance against the same fate, detailing the false identities and current photographs of all the ODESSA men he has worked with. She discloses that the safe combination is the same as the shop phone number. Miller sneaks up on the assassin and kills him after a desperate fight. Opening the safe, Miller discovers the incriminating ODESSA file, including the new identity and current image of Eduard Roschman. He takes the gunman's weapon and car and heads for Munich, where he deposits the file in a train station locker for safekeeping.Miller contacts Sigi and tells her to meet him in Heidelberg, but not to tell anyone where she is going. Sigi manages to lock the police woman in her room and flee. After a brief reunion, Miller tells Sigi about the ODESSA file and gives her the key to the locker. He instructs her that in the event he fails to return, she is to retrieve the file and deliver it to Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna. Miller then leaves in search of Roschman.Roschman's new identity is that of Hans Josef Kiefel, the wealthy owner of a large electrical concern. Miller attends the opening of a trade fair at Kiefel Electric and spots the notorious SS butcher. Miller follows him to his secluded castle on a wooded estate, where Roschman is protected by the local police. Miller carefully gains entrance to the castle through a basement door and confronts Roschman at gunpoint in his study. Roschman tries to buy time, alternately trying to deny the grisly truth and defend the Nazi cause, thinking Miller is just a misguided young idealist. But then Miller produces the photo of the handsome Wehrmacht captain Roschman had shot on the Riga docks so long ago, asking Roschman if he remembers the incident. Roschman dismissively owns up to the crime before Miller reveals that the captain was his father.Roschman is stunned, now understanding that he is dealing with something entirely different than he had thought. Roschman takes advantage of Miller's distracted agitation and works his way over to his desk, pulling out a pistol. He fires at Miller before Miller manages to gun him down.It is subsequently revealed that Miller was held for only three weeks and then released. As instructed, Sigi had delivered the ODESSA file to Wiesenthal, resulting in great embarrassment for the West German government and the arrest of many Nazi war criminals. The research facilities of Kiefel Electric, where the missile guidance systems were being developed, mysteriously burned to the ground. The rockets of Helwan never flew.
    

The Odessa File


            
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Maria Schell

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