I have spent a few intense days hunting for an old Nazi. In an example of new-new journalism, I have had AI accompany me, but I have to say that things have not gone as I thought: we have to see how AI messes up. It all came from reading Odessa’s Revenge the posthumous sequel to the famous novel by Frederick Forsyth and also having caught an old movie from 2001 on Netflix in which a rather clumsy guy retrains as a journalist.
The film is Connecting the dots (originally and much more significantly The Shipping News), based on the beautiful 1993 novel of the same title by Annie Proulx (Tusquets 2002), which has phrases that continue to resonate with you for a long time, such as “one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music”, “the sky is a network with its mesh jammed with bright stars” or, for what it concerns us: “where are the reporters of yesteryear, those nocturnal, caustic, alcoholic and biting words that really knew how to write?
In the film, the shy and beaten Quoyle (played by Kevin Spacey) ends up in a small Newfoundland fishing village, Killick-Claw, where his family is from, and goes to work at a small local newspaper, The gammy Bird, where they put him to work as an editor even though he only has experience as an inker in a New York newspaper. A seasoned veteran journalist, Billy Pretty (Gordon Pinsent), gives him invaluable career advice to help him prosper. “You have to find the center of your story, its beating heart.” He tells him that he has to start by inventing some headlines, “short, shocking and dramatic.” And it invites you to look at the horizon and say what you see. “Does the horizon fill with dark clouds?” Quoyle proposes. “An impending storm threatens the town,” Pretty corrects. “But,” the other questions, “what if no storm comes?” “Town safe from a deadly storm.”
Our man learns quickly and triumphs with a story, precisely, about Hitler’s old yacht, which, acquired years after the war, would have ended up one day in the local port. The success of the report gives Quoyle the privilege of having his own column on ships, The Shipping News, an issue about which he actually knows nothing, because he is even afraid of the sea: a great metaphor for how far you can go in a diary.
Reflecting on the film, I thought about how I could return to the essence of my profession while making a qualitative leap in the profession. And then came Odessa. Reading the sequel about the Nazi organization led me to reread the original novel published in Spanish in 1973. And an absence caught my attention: was it possible that Otto Skorzeny, the former Waffen-SS colonel who took refuge in Spain and who has always been considered one of the key characters in the Nazi escape network, did not appear in the plot? Skorzeny, Hitler’s former commando chief and famous for his role in freeing Mussolini from his confinement in the Gran Sasso, even put Almudena Grandes at the center of the Odessa web (Organisation Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, Organization of Former Members of the SS) in his novel Dr. García’s patients. How did Forsyth forget to mention it in his, for which he did a thorough investigation in which the escape routes of the perfidious Nazis appeared and cited Eichmann, Mengele, the SS general Bruno Streckenbach, Bishop Hudal or the central brown protagonist of the novel himself, the Austrian captain Eduard Roschmann, commander of the Riga concentration camp, a real character (although among his many crimes the having planned the devastation of Israel with deadly rockets as in Odessa)?
It is true that Forsyth made a mistake in some matters in his novel, such as using SS General Richard Gluecks, who had actually died at the end of the war, as a key character in the shadow Nazi organization. But the fact that Skorzeny did not appear, even when there is a scene in the novel that takes place in Madrid, aroused suspicion in my keen spirit as a journalist, normally very excited when it comes to hunting Nazis. Then I had a sudden inspiration. What if Skorzeny Yeah appeared in Forsyth’s original novel and had been fallen in the Spanish edition, published in the late Franco period?
Through an attentive and kind reader, Evelio Montes, I have learned that in the translation there were major errors and what appear to be acts of censorship. Like when – I’ve checked it – it is said in the version that Peter Miller, the main journalist, wakes up in bed next to his girlfriend, the beautiful striper Sigi, placed so that “the woman’s back pressed against the base of her stomach,” while in the original what is pressing are her buttocks, which, it must be agreed, is a different situation. And of Forsyth’s resounding next phrase, “automatically he began to erect”, not a trace.
I have found other similar omissions, such as the fact that Sigi likes Peter to caress her “her crotch”, her crotch, or the scene in which he begins to kiss her breasts, to which she responds with a series of “long mmmms” (we already knew Jackal that Forsyth knew how to warm his thrillers).
In short, if we are Nazis we are Nazis, but those omissions in the translation made me think that perhaps Skorzeny’s was similar, premeditated. And here comes my appeal to AI. I used the Google one that appears by default when I consult something, in case I want to use it. I decided to try and asked him, as a shortcut, “Does Otto Skorzeny appear in Odessa? The response from the AI, whoever it was, excited me. “Yes, Otto Skorzeny appears and is a key figure in the plot of the novel” (…) “he is described as the organizer of the network to facilitate the escape of Nazi war criminals from Germany to Spain (ratlines), after the defeat of the Third Reich.” Since it does not appear in the Spanish edition, I assumed that someone had hidden Otto. In 1973 the solid colonel was still alive (he died in 1975) and in Madrid, in very good relations with the regime and even with my father. Was there someone pushing to make him disappear from the novel in Spain? Maybe himself? Odessa itself? Was the Spanish version of Forsyth’s book hidden from Skorzeny as the Odessa of the plot protected Roschmann? There was a topic! Finally some news!
I already saw myself with a Pulitzer—shared with the AI, my partner, less material than Sigi, yes, and without any buttocks—for revealing the literary concealment of a Nazi. I saw the headline: “The Spanish edition of ‘Odessa’ poached Otto Skorzeny,” by JA and his AI. Billy Pretty would be proud.
Enthusiasm is dangerous in investigative journalism and my next step, to confirm the shot, was to obtain a copy in English of Odessa and carefully check my (our) exclusive. What would be my surprise to discover that Skorzeny does not appear in the original novel either, jope. I went back to the AI to ask for explanations but when I repeated the question and asked it to specify in which chapter and pages the Nazi appears, hey, pretty, it cheekily replied that “it cannot be specified due to the multiple editions”, and added: “its mention usually appears in the first chapters when the background of Odessa, the figure of Simon Wiesenthal and the post-war context are explained.” “Liar! Psychopath!” I snapped at the screen to the surprise of my colleagues in the editorial office. The AI didn’t even flinch. I thought about deactivating it little by little, cruelly, like astronaut Dave Bowman does with HAL 9000, and I imagined that instead of singing Daisy Bell she intoned SS marches into enemy territory. The whole thing clearly looked like a Nazi cover-up operation in the cloud. But I couldn’t prove it.
To all of these, as a last test, I typed my name and the response that the AI gave me was to mention my bullfighting chronicles (!), “focused on the passion, romanticism and drama of the party.” Well go with the AI!
My next research is going to be on Mengele and The children of Brazilbut I’m going to do it myself.