Interestingly, just a few days ago I listened to a (Brazilian Portuguese) podcast interview with Gabriel Waldman, an 85-year-old Hungarian-Brazilian Holocaust survivor, who multiple times on the podcast talked about ODESSA, treating it as a very real organization, and went as far as to say that his
very specific German girlfriend broke up with because
she feared that ODESSA agents would try to hunt him down and kill him(!!!!), no one else in the podcast was aware about the background surrounding ODESSA, and Waldman himself kept talking about it as if it was a real entity.
Since I am not sure if this is available in English, I will try to condense the podcast and how ODESSA is involved in it:
The background behind Waldman is, after moving to Brazil to flee the Hungarian Communist government, for some Greek tragedy divine fate reason, he found a job at a Volkswagen factory in São Bernardo do Campo, and he started dating a German woman from the factory, who just so happened to have been the daughter of
Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, who after the war fled to Brazil, and found a job at
that exact same factory.
Waldman and Stangl met each other, and Waldman said that Stangl was a normal-looking and behaving guy, furthermore, unlike most Nazis who escaped to South America, Stangl did not tried to adopt a fake identity, and used his real, legal name all the times, since Waldman was only a child during the Holocaust, and since mass media is not like how it is now, he was unaware that Stangl was a former high-ranking Nazi, he also says that Stangl was aware that he was Jewish (but maybe not a Holocaust survivor), and most surprisingly, Stangl had no problems with his daughter dating a Jew.
Waldman's own take as to why the commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka had no issues with letting his daughter get engaged to a Jew, and him becoming friends with a Jew, was because from his meetings with him, he believes that Stangl was a disciplined and obedient individual who always obeyed the laws of the authorities of the society that he lived in.
In Stangl's
alleged worldview, in Nazi Germany, race-mixing was illegal, the supremacy of the (Germanic) Aryan race over Slavs, Roma, and Jews was doctrine, and as a member of the SS involved in the T4 euthanasia program, he was ordered to exterminate Jews, which he did so obeying his superiors, but in Brazil where all of this is strictly illegal, he thus obeyed the laws of our country, never wanting to get in trouble.
Later on, Stangl's daughter tearfully broke up with Waldman with little to no explanation, and I recall that this was the last time that he ever saw her, Waldman says that she did this because she wanted to protect him from ODESSA agents, that would try to kill him for dating a German woman, this story was fucking bonkers.
I have been aware of the story of Stangl and other Nazis who fled to here in Brazil for years, but now a Holocaust survivor just so happens to have moved to a specific place in Brazil, and found a job at the specific car factory where Stangl and his daughter worked at, and he started dating her, and later she broke up with him to protect him from ODESSA agents? holy shit.
The podcast is only in Portuguese, and I do not know if it has English subtitles, but I will still link it in here for convenience.
