The Odessa File is a thriller by English writer Frederick Forsyth, first published in 1972, about the adventures of a young German reporter attempting to discover the location of a former SS concentration-camp commander.

[1] In November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Peter Miller, a German freelance crime reporter, follows an ambulance to the apartment of Salomon Tauber, a Holocaust survivor who has committed suicide.

Miller's attention is especially drawn to one passage in which Tauber describes having seen Roschmann shoot a German Army captain who was wearing a distinctive military decoration.

Miller is approached by a group of Jewish vigilantes with ties to the Mossad, who have vowed to find and kill German war criminals and have been attempting to infiltrate ODESSA.

He does disclose that with Roschmann in Argentina, West German authorities (at the urging of the Israelis) will shut down his industrial facility that was producing missile guidance systems for the Egyptian Army.

ODESSA's plan throughout the novel – to obliterate the State of Israel by combining German technological knowledge with Egyptian biological weapons – has been thwarted.

After the film was released to the public, he was arrested by the Argentine police, skipped bail, and fled to Asunción, Paraguay, where he died on 10 August 1977.