At the beginning of the month I was invited to see the play Wiesenthal by Tom Dugan at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London – a stone’s throw, if that is an appropriate phrase, from Cable Street – but I found myself unable to go. But it set me off thinking about the first time I heard the name of the legendary Nazi-hunter: and that would have been in the pages of Frederick Forsyth’s second novel, The Odessa File, and I would have been about 12. (Everyone was reading it, and its predecessor, The Day of the Jackal.)
Because it was so very long ago when I was 12, I had forgotten all but the barest bones of the plot, which involves a secret group dedicated to getting ex-SS officers out of Germany, and a concentration camp commander known as “the butcher of Riga”. I thought I’d re-read it, just for the heck of it.
Revisiting the book for the first time in half a century gave me more of a jolt than I expected. It starts like this: a Hamburg journalist comes across the diary of a 56-year-old Jew, who looks 76, and has (and only as I type these words do I realise the savage irony) gassed himself in his flat on (coincidentally) the night of JF Kennedy’s assassination. The journalist finds his diary of his times in a concentration camp in Latvia, which also contains the reason for his suicide: he was a Kapo, and was forced by the Commandant to kill his wife. He can’t live with this any longer. He also feels he can’t go to Israel: he feels too morally stained. I remember being moved, almost as physically as you can be by a punch to the stomach, the closing words of the diary: “But if ever these lines should be read in the land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say khaddish for me?” Because I am not Jewish, I didn’t have the faintest idea what “khaddish” meant, but I got the gist, and somehow these words kind of rammed home the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. When I re-read those words I felt that punch to the stomach again.
Forsyth was more of a storyteller than a writer, but he put in as many factual elements as he could to make the story plausible. One such factual element was Wiesenthal, who appears as a character: for which, presumably, he had given permission. (The Riga camp commander, whose name I will not utter, was also a real person.) The striking thing about the novel, though, was that Forsyth, who in his later years portrayed himself as a growling mastiff of the establishment Right, was clearly motivated by a deep hatred of Nazism, and genuine anguish at what happened to the Jewish people as a result of it. There was a moral clarity to the book; and now I come to think of it, it’s partly because of this early exposure to the evil of the Holocaust that I write for this paper today.
Two other things struck me: Forsyth makes it very clear that opposition to the state of Israel was entirely motivated by hatred of Jews, and not a humanitarian desire to found a Palestinian state. In the book, there’s much about a plot based on historical events hatched by Egypt to get ex-Nazi rocket scientists to develop a proper guidance system for ballistic missiles, loaded with either strontium-90 or plague bacilli, to kill everyone in Israel. The establishment of a Palestinian state isn’t mentioned, because that wasn’t even a notion then.
And the other thing that struck me, in passing: the scale of the Nazis’ theft of the Jewish population’s resources. Now we get to today. I did a bit of maths. Six million people, whose money and property were all seized by the Nazis – that’s a lot. I assumed a figure of around a net average worth of about £50, which is a low estimate. Sure, loads were poor, but many others were not. Anyway £50 per household in 1945 equates to about £120 billion in today’s money; and very little of that money has been recovered; some of it may still reside in Swiss banks. Add to this the billions in aid to Hamas – much of which, admittedly, has been appropriated by its leadership to live in luxury in Qatar – as well as all the support from the Soviet Union and then Russia for Israel’s enemies, Iran’s funding for Hezbollah etc. and you realise the hating Jews movements around the world are well-funded.
Forsyth published a sequel, The Revenge of Odessa, in 2025, when he was an old man (it was co-written with Tony Kent), and it brings us up to the present day, with a resurgent AfD and turmoil in the White House. The plot itself – that the descendants of the SS are still active and working towards a Nazi takeover of Germany – is somewhat implausible, thank goodness, but it suggests a strong link between Nazism in its original form and Islamist terrorism in its modern form. And seeing as both want to kill every Jew on Earth, well, why shouldn’t there be?
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