Jonathan Vincent Voight is an American actor. He has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2019, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Films in which Voight has appeared have grossed more than $5.2 billion worldwide.
Nikolaus Barbie was a German officer of the SS and SD who worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon. After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture. In 1983, the United States apologised to France for the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps helping him escape to Bolivia, aiding Barbie's escape from an outstanding arrest warrant.
The 20 July plot was a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the chancellor and leader of Nazi Germany, and overthrow the Nazi regime on 20 July 1944. The plotters were part of the German resistance, mainly composed of Wehrmacht officers. The leader of the conspiracy, Claus von Stauffenberg, tried to kill Hitler by detonating an explosive hidden in a briefcase. However, due to the location of the bomb at the time of detonation, the blast only dealt Hitler minor injuries. The planners' subsequent coup attempt also failed and resulted in a purge of the Wehrmacht.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, where he was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
Maximilian Schell was a Swiss actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zürich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
ODESSA is an American codename coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as "ratlines". Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
The Night of the Generals is a 1967 World War II mystery film directed by Anatole Litvak and produced by Sam Spiegel. It stars Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasence, Joanna Pettet, and Philippe Noiret. The screenplay by Joseph Kessel and Paul Dehn was loosely based on the beginning of the 1962 novel of the same name by German author Hans Hellmut Kirst. The writing credits also state the film is "based on an incident written by James Hadley Chase", referring to a subplot from Chase's 1952 novel The Wary Transgressor. Gore Vidal is said to have contributed to the screenplay, but was not credited onscreen. The film's musical score was composed by Maurice Jarre.
The ratlines were systems of escape routes for German Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in the Americas, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Switzerland.
A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prominent Nazi hunters include Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld, Ian Sayer, Yaron Svoray, Elliot Welles, and Efraim Zuroff.
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.
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture, and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Sigrid Schultz was a notable American reporter and war correspondent in an era when women were a rarity in both print and radio journalism. Working for the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, she was the first female foreign bureau chief of a major U.S. newspaper.
Eduard Roschmann was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmführer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943. He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities. As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".
Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter was an Austrian lawyer, Nazi politician and a high-ranking member of the SS, a paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party. He participated in the Final Solution extermination of Jews in Europe, and was instrumental in creating an SS division consisting of Ukrainians.
Walter Kutschmann was a German SS-Untersturmführer and Gestapo officer, a member of an Einsatzkommando, based first in Lwów, Poland, and later in Drohobycz. He was responsible for the massacre of 1,500 Polish Jews in Lwów, Poland, in the years 1941–42.
SS-OberscharführerFranz Wolf was a German Nazi senior squad leader serving with the Action T4 forced euthanasia program, and later, at the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied Poland during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, codenamed Operation Reinhard. Leading a normal life in West Germany for the next twenty years, along with thousands of war criminals protected by Konrad Adenauer, Wolf was arrested in 1964, and indicted during the Sobibór trial with participating in the murder of 115,000 Jews. On 20 December 1966, the court in Hagen sentenced him to eight years in prison for taking part in the mass murder of "at least 39,000 Jews".
Shmuel Rodensky was a Russian-born Israeli actor whose stage, film, and television career in Israel and West Germany spanned six decades. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1924 and studied drama at the Eretz Israel Theatre in Tel Aviv. After performing with several theatre companies between 1928 and 1948, he joined Habima Theatre in 1949 and became one of its principal players. He was known as "the Israeli Laurence Olivier". In 1968 Rodensky traveled to Hamburg to join the German-language production of Fiddler on the Roof, playing the lead role of Tevye the Dairyman. He performed this role more than 1,400 times throughout West Germany and Switzerland. His notable film roles include the lead in the 1968 Israeli film Tevye and His Seven Daughters, Simon Wiesenthal in the 1974 Anglo-German film The Odessa File, and Jethro in the 1974 BBC television miniseries Moses the Lawgiver. He was the recipient of numerous honors in both Israel and West Germany, including the Federal Service Cross from the Federal Republic of Germany and the Israel Prize.
Helmuth Groscurth was a German staff and Abwehr officer in the Wehrmacht and a member of the German resistance. As an intelligence officer he was an early proponent of the Brandenburgers, commanded unconventional warfare operations in the Sudetenland, and was an active conspirator against Hitler's agenda. He was later reassigned to the regular army following his criticism of war crimes committed by German forces in Poland. After commanding an infantry battalion in the invasion of France he assumed a variety of staff roles. He was involved in the events of the Bila Tserkva massacre where he attempted to avert the killing of Jewish children.
