The ODESSA Nazi exile network really did exist, and it made Chile its unofficial headquarters when Pinochet took power in the 1973 coup.

ODESSA's primary function in reality was the laundering of billions of absconded Nazi assets all over the world. Besides funding pet projects like the depraved Colonia Dignidad, its most prominent investment vehicle was probably Horst Paulmann's Cencosud - which grew meteorically from a couple of grimy delis in the 1970s to South America's largest retail conglomerate today.

Though Paulmann denied any links to Nazism for years, his father, Karl Paulmann, was the highest ranking SS official in Kassel during the Third Reich. The ODESSA Network, as the movie portrays, was largely an SS project and continued to work closely with SS fugitives in subsequent decades.

villager

(26,001 posts)

5. And let's not forget the Dulles Brothers took them in *here*, as well.

Reply to forest444 (Reply #4)

Sat Mar 12, 2016, 01:13 AM

Mar 2016

Operation Paperclip, anyone?

The infection of the body politic -- through the assassinations and thrown elections of the past decades -- begins to reach its apotheosis....

forest444

(5,902 posts)

6. That's right. Thanks for bringing that up.

Reply to villager (Reply #5)

Sat Mar 12, 2016, 01:30 AM

Mar 2016

Many if not most of the CIA wrongdoing that has sullied U.S. standing abroad for the past 60 years can be traced directly to that decision.

Who did Allen Dulles work with most closely on Paperclip? Why, Prescott Bush.

Bush, a very early advocate of the limited hangout policy that later became the preferred CIA m.o., believed that rather than hiding Paperclip from the public altogether, they should be informed of its more benign side: the importation of the Third Reich's famed rocket scientists (Werner von Braun and so on). To this day, many Americans believe that was the extent of it (Prescott was a genius).

And who did Prescott Bush hire to do radio ads on behalf of Paperclip? Yup: Ronald Reagan. It was his first government job.

villager

(26,001 posts)

7. "There you go again,"

Reply to forest444 (Reply #6)

Sat Mar 12, 2016, 01:41 AM

Mar 2016

as mouthpiece Reagan might have said.

And it really was all of a piece, wasn't it?

What's happened since the war, and how we got to the present moment, none of it "coincidence" at all....

mountain grammy

(26,619 posts)

9. one of the creepiest and scariest moments in movie history..

Reply to villager (Original post)

Sat Mar 12, 2016, 01:12 PM

Mar 2016

I cringe every time I watch it.

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