American Marc Fraser and his French wife Fiona Marchand flee occupied France from the Gestapo to neutral Switzerland in 1943. With experience in the French Resistance, Allen Dulles, head of American OSS intelligence in Europe, recruits them as agents. ODESSA was the American codename for the name in German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS- Angehörigen, translated as the Organization of Former SS Members. Distinct from the regular military elements of the Third Reich, the Schutzstaffel became the instrument of Nazi genocide and mass murder. The breadth of SS power ranged from the secret police, the Gestapo, the intelligence service the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, combat troops of the Waffen-SS, Eastern Europe paramilitary mobile death squads of the Einsatzgruppen, and the SS- Totenkopfverbände Death's Head units operating the concentration and extermination camps. When WWII ends in Europe in May 1945, Fraser and Marchand pursue a dangerous plan to disrupt the ratlines aiding Nazi war criminals in escaping to South America.