The Odessa Books in Order

The Odessa series turns on a chilling idea: that a disciplined network of former SS officers, calling itself ODESSA, survives the Second World War and quietly protects Nazi fugitives, money and influence long after 1945.

In The Odessa File, the story opens in West Germany in 1963. Young Hamburg reporter Peter Miller happens on the suicide of Salomon Tauber, a Holocaust survivor, and walks away with the man’s diary. The pages describe life in the Riga ghetto and name Eduard Roschmann, the camp’s sadistic commander who has never faced trial.

Miller’s curiosity hardens into obsession. His hunt for Roschmann draws in real‑life Nazi‑hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Israeli intelligence, and it leads him toward ODESSA, a secret organisation that forges identities, places former SS men in respectable positions and defends them with ruthless discipline. To get close, Miller agrees to go undercover as a supposed ex‑SS officer himself.

Forsyth uses this manhunt to explore how post‑war Germany tried, and often failed, to confront its past. Younger Germans who grew up after the war, older police officers with compromised records, and survivors who still carry their trauma all collide around Miller’s investigation. The book moves between file rooms, safe houses and industrial plants with the pace of a reportage‑driven thriller.

Decades later, Revenge of Odessa, co‑written with Tony Kent, picks up the idea that such a network never fully died. Set in 2025, it follows journalist and podcaster Georg Miller as he connects three seemingly random atrocities—a murdered U.S. senator, a massacre at a Berlin football match and a killing in a German hospital. The pattern points back to a resurgent ODESSA that has adapted to the age of social media, dark money and populist politics.

This newer story keeps Forsyth’s love of technical detail and insider jargon, but the battlefield has shifted. Instead of files locked in dusty German offices, Georg chases encrypted chats, covert compounds in Bavaria and influence campaigns reaching right into Washington. The stakes are less about one fugitive and more about whether liberal democracies can withstand an organised, violent far‑right movement.

You can read either Odessa novel on its own, but together they trace a long arc—from the unfinished business of the Holocaust to the ways old hatreds can be repackaged for a new century. Both books deliver tense investigative plots anchored by dogged reporters named Miller, and both ask what personal justice really means when an entire system has looked the other way.