The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Miller.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the librarian.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ said Miller turning to Dorn, ‘that a section of the State Attorney General’s office has been beavering away for fifteen years on my tax money, and all they’ve got to show for it is two postage stamps?’

  Dorn was a rather establishment figure.

  ‘I’m sure they’re doing their best,’ he said huffily.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Miller.

  They parted in the main hall two floors up and Miller went out into the rain.

  The building in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv that houses the headquarters of the Mossad excites no attention, even from its nearest neighbours. The entrance to the underground car park of the office block is flanked by quite ordinary shops. On the ground floor is a bank, and in the entrance hall, before the plate-glass doors that lead into the bank, is a lift, a board stating the business of the firms on the floor above and a porter’s desk for inquiries.

  The board reveals that inside the block are the offices of several trading companies, two insurance firms, an architect, an engineering consultant and an import-export company on the top floor. Inquiries for any of the firms below the top floor will be met courteously. Questions asked about the top-floor company are politely declined. The company on the top floor is the front for the Mossad.

  The room where the chiefs of Israeli intelligence meet is bare and cool, white-painted, with a long table and chairs round the walls. At the table sit the five men who control the branches of intelligence. Behind them on the chairs sit clerks and stenographers. Other non-members can be seconded for a hearing if required, but this is seldom done. The meetings are classified top secret, for all confidences may be aired.

  At the head of the table sits the Controller of the Mossad. Founded in 1937, its full name Mossad Aliyah Beth, or Organisation for the Second Immigration, the Mossad was the first Israeli intelligence organ. Its first job was to get Jews from Europe to a safe berth in the land of Palestine.

  After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 it became the senior of all intelligence organs, its Controller automatically the head of all the five.

  To the controller’s right sits the chief of the Aman, the military intelligence unit whose job is to keep Israel informed of the state of war-readiness of her enemies. The man who held the job at that time was General Aharon Yaariv.

  To the left sits the chief of the Shabak, sometimes wrongly referred to as the Shin Beth. These letters stand for Sherut Bitachon, the Hebrew for security service. The full title of the organ that watches over Israel’s internal security, and only internal security, is Sherut Bitchon Klali, and it is from these three words that the abbreviation Shabak is taken.

  Beyond these two men sit the last two of the five. One is the director-general of the research division of the Foreign Ministry, charged specifically with the evaluation of the political situation in Arab capitals, a matter of vital importance to the security of Israel. The other is the director of a service solely occupied with the fate of Jews in the ‘countries of persecution’. These countries include all the Arab countries and all the Communist countries. So that there shall be no overlapping of activities, the weekly meetings enable each chief to know what the other departments are doing.

  Two other men are present as observers, the Inspector-General of Police, and the Head of the Special Branch, the executive arms of the Shabak in the fight against terrorism inside the country.

  The meeting on that day was quite normal. Meir Amit took his place at the head of the table, and the discussion began. He saved his bombshell until the last. When he had made his statement, there was silence, as the men present, including the aides scattered round the walls, had a mental vision of their country dying as the radio-active and plague warheads slammed home.

  ‘The point surely is,’ said the head of the Shabak at last, ‘that those rockets must never fly. If we cannot prevent them making warheads, we have to prevent the warheads ever taking off.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Amit, taciturn as ever, ‘but how?’

  ‘Hit them,’ growled Yaariv. ‘Hit them with everything we’ve got. Ezer Weizmann’s jets can take out Factory 333 in one raid.’

  ‘And start a war with nothing to fight with,’ replied Amit. ‘We need more planes, more tanks, more guns, before we can take Egypt. I think we all know, gentlemen, that war is inevitable. Nasser is determined on it, but he will not fight until he is ready. But if we force it on him now, the simple answer is that he, with his Russian weaponry, is more ready than we are.’

  There was silence again. The head of the Foreign Ministry Arab section spoke.

  ‘Our information from Cairo is they think they will be ready in early 1967, rockets and all.’

  ‘We will have our tanks and guns by then, and our new French jets,’ replied Yaariv.

  ‘Yes, and they will have those rockets from Helwan. Four hundred of them. Gentlemen, there is only one answer. By the time we are ready for Nasser, those rockets will be in silos all over Egypt. They’ll be unreachable. For once in their silos and ready to fire, we must not simply take out ninety per cent of them, but all of them. And not even Ezer Weizmann’s fighter pilots can take them all, without exception.’

  ‘Then we have to take them in the factory at Helwan,’ said Yaariv with finality.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Amit, ‘but without a military attack. We shall just have to try to force the German scientists to resign before they have finished their work. Remember, the research stage is almost at an end. We have six months. After that the Germans won’t matter any more. The Egyptians can build the rockets, once they are designed down to the last nut and bolt. Therefore I shall step up the campaign against the scientists in Egypt and keep you informed.’

  For several seconds there was silence again as the unspoken question ran through the minds of all those present. It was one of the men from the Foreign Ministry who finally voiced it.

  ‘Couldn’t we discourage them inside Germany again?’

  General Amit shook his head.

  ‘No. That remains out of the question in the prevailing political climate. The orders from our superiors remain the same; no more muscle tactics inside Germany. For us from henceforth the key to the rockets of Helwan lies inside Egypt.’

  General Meir Amit, Controller of the Mossad, was not often wrong. But he was wrong that time. For the key to the rockets of Helwan lay in a factory inside West Germany.

  Chapter Six

  IT TOOK MILLER a week before he could get an interview with the chief of section in the department of the Hamburg Attorney General’s office responsible for investigation into war crimes. He suspected Dorn had found out he was not working at Hoffmann’s behest and had reacted accordingly.

  The man he confronted was nervous, ill-at-ease.

  ‘You must understand I have only agreed to see you as a result of your persistent inquiries,’ he began.

  ‘That’s nice of you all the same,’ said Miller ingratiatingly. ‘I want to inquire about a man whom I assume your department must have under permanent investigation, called Eduard Roschmann.’

  ‘Roschmann?’ said the lawyer.

  ‘Roschmann,’ repeated Miller. ‘Captain of the SS. Commandant of Riga ghetto from 1941 to 1944. I want to know if he’s alive; if not, where he’s buried. If you have found him, if he has ever been arrested and if he has ever been on trial. If not, where he is now.’

  The lawyer was shaken.

  ‘Good Lord, I can’t tell you that,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? It’s a matter of public interest. Enormous public interest.’

  The lawyer had recovered his poise.

  ‘I hardly think so,’ he said smoothly. ‘Otherwise we would be receiving constant inquiries of this nature. Actually so far as I can recall yours is the first inquiry we’ve ever had from … a member of the public.’

  ‘Actually, I’m a member of the Press,’ said Mi
ller.

  ‘Yes, that may be. But I’m afraid as regards this kind of information that only means you are entitled to as much as one would give a member of the public.’

  ‘How much is that?’ asked Miller.

  ‘I’m afraid we are not empowered to give information regarding the progress of our inquiries.’

  ‘Well that’s not right to start with,’ said Miller.

  ‘Oh, come now, Herr Miller, you would hardly expect the police to give you information about the progress of their inquiries in a criminal case.’

  ‘I would. In fact that’s just what I do. The police are customarily very helpful in issuing bulletins on whether an early arrest may be expected. Certainly they’d tell a press inquiry if their main suspect was to their knowledge alive or dead. It helps their relations with the public.’

  The lawyer smiled thinly.

  ‘I’m sure you perform a very valuable function in that regard,’ he said. ‘But from this department no information may be issued of the state of progress of our work.’ He seemed to hit on a point of argument. ‘Let’s face it, if wanted criminals knew how close we were to completing the case against them, they’d disappear.’

  ‘That may be so,’ riposted Miller. ‘But the records show your department has only put on trial three privates who were guards in Riga. And that was in 1950, so the men were probably in pre-trial detention when the British handed over to your department. So the wanted criminals don’t seem to be in much danger of being forced to disappear.’

  ‘Really, that’s a most unwarranted suggestion.’

  ‘All right. So your inquiries are progressing. It still wouldn’t harm your case if you were to tell me quite simply whether Eduard Roschmann is under investigation, and where he now is.’

  ‘All I can say is that all matters concerning the area of responsibility of my department are under constant inquiry. I repeat, constant inquiry. And now I really think, Herr Miller, there is nothing more I can do to help you.’

  He rose, and Miller followed suit.

  ‘Don’t bust a gut,’ he said as he walked out.

  It was another week before Miller was ready to move. He spent it mainly at home, reading six books concerned in whole or in part with the war along the Eastern Front and things that had been done in the camps in the occupied eastern territories. It was the librarian at his local reading library who mentioned the Z-Commission.

  ‘It’s in Ludwigsburg,’ he told Miller. ‘I read about it in a magazine. Its full name is the Central Federal Agency for the Elucidation of Crimes of Violence committed during the Nazi Era. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so people call it the Zentrale Stelle for short. Even shorter, the Z-Commission. It’s the only organisation in the country that hunts Nazis on a nation-wide, even an international level.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Miller as he left. ‘I’ll see if they can help me.’

  Miller went to his bank the next morning, made out a cheque to his landlord for three months’ rent to cover January – March and drew the rest of his bank balance in cash, leaving a ten-mark note to keep the account open.

  He kissed Sigi before she went off to work at the club, telling her he would be gone for a week, maybe more. Then he took the Jaguar from its underground home and headed south towards the Rhineland.

  The first snows had started, whistling in off the North Sea, slicing in flurries across the wide stretches of the autobahn as it swept south of Bremen and into the flat plain of Lower Saxony.

  He paused once for coffee after two hours, then pressed on across North Rhine/Westphalia. Despite the wind he enjoyed driving down the autobahn in bad weather. Inside the XK 150 S he had the impression of being in the cockpit of a fast plane, the dashboard lights glowing dully under the fascia, and, outside, the descending darkness of a winter’s night, the icy cold, the slanting flurries of snow caught for a moment in the harsh beam of the headlights, whipping past the windscreen and back into nothingness again.

  He stuck to the fast lane, as always, pushing the Jag to close to 100 miles an hour, watching the growling hulks of the heavy lorries swish past to his right as he overtook.

  By six in the evening he was beyond the Hamm Junction and the glowing lights of the Ruhr began to be dimly discernible to his right through the darkness. He never ceased to be amazed by the Ruhr, mile after mile after mile of factories and chimneys, towns and cities so close as to be in effect one gigantic city a hundred miles long and fifty broad. When the autobahn went into an overpass he could look down to the right and see it stretching away into the December night, thousands of hectares of lights and mills, aglow from a thousand furnaces churning out the wealth of the economic miracle. Fourteen years ago, as he travelled through it by train towards his school holiday in Paris, it had been rubble, and the industrial heart of Germany was hardly even beating. Impossible not to feel proud of what his people had done since then.

  ‘Just so long as I don’t have to live in it,’ he thought as the giant signs of the Cologne Ring began to come up in the light of the headlamps. From Cologne he ran south-east, past Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, Mannheim and Heilbronn, and it was late that evening when he cruised to a halt in front of a hotel in Stuttgart, the nearest city to Ludwigsburg, where he spent the night.

  *

  Ludwigsburg is a quiet and inoffensive little market town set in the rolling pleasant hills of Württemberg, fifteen miles north of the state capital of Stuttgart. Set in a quiet road off the High Street, to the extreme embarrassment of the town’s upright inhabitants, is the home of the Z-Commission, a small, understaffed, underpaid, overworked group of men whose job and dedication in life is to hunt down the Nazis and the SS guilty during the war of the crimes of mass-murder. Before the Statute of Limitations eliminated all SS crimes with the exception of murder and mass-murder, those being sought might have been guilty only of extortion, robbery, grievous bodily harm including torture, and a variety of other forms of unpleasantness.

  Even with murder as the only remaining charge able to be brought, the Z-Commission still had 170,000 names in its files. Not unnaturally, the main effort had been and still is to track down the worst few thousand of the mass-murderers, if and where possible.

  Deprived of any powers of arrest, able only to request the police of the various states of Germany to make an arrest when positive identification has already been made, unable to squeeze more than a pittance each year out of the Federal Government in Bonn, the men of Ludwigsburg worked solely because they were dedicated to the task.

  There were eighty detectives on the staff and fifty investigating attorneys. Of the former group all were young, below the age of thirty-five, so that none could possibly have had any implication in the matters under examination. The lawyers were mainly older, but vetted to ensure they too were uninvolved with events prior to 1945.

  The lawyers were mainly taken from private practice, to which they would one day return. The detectives knew their careers were finished. No police force in Germany wanted to see on its staff a detective who had once served a term at Ludwigsburg. For detectives prepared to hunt the SS in West Germany, promotion was finished in any other police force in the country.

  Quite accustomed to see their requests for cooperation ignored in over half the states, to see their loaned files go unaccountably missing, to see the quarry suddenly disappear after an anonymous tip-off, the Z-Men worked on as best they might at a task they realised was not in accordance with the wishes of the majority of their fellow countrymen.

  Even on the streets of the smiling town of Ludwigsburg the men on the staff of the Z-Commission went ungreeted and unacknowledged by the citizens to whom their presence brought an undesired notoriety.

  Peter Miller found the Commission at 58, Schorndorfer Strasse, a large former private house set inside an eight-foot-high wall. Two massive steel gates barred the way up the drive. To one side was a bell handle which he pulled. A steel shutter slid back and a face appeared. The inevitable gatekeeper.

  ‘P
lease?’

  ‘I would like to speak to one of your investigating attorneys,’ said Miller.

  ‘Which one?’ said the face.

  ‘I don’t know any names,’ said Miller. ‘Any one will do. Here is my card.’

  He thrust his press card through the aperture, forcing the man to take it. Then at least he knew it would go inside the building. The man shut the hatch and went away. When he came back it was to open the gate. Miller was shown up the five stone steps to the front door, closed against the clear but icy winter air. Inside it was stuffily hot from the central heating. Another porter emerged from a glass-fronted booth to his right and showed him into a small waiting room.

  ‘Someone will be with you directly,’ he said, and shut the door.

  The man who came three minutes later was in his early fifties, mild-mannered and courteous. He handed Miller back his press card and asked, ‘What can I do for you?’

  Miller started at the beginning, explaining briefly about Tauber, the diary, his inquiries into what happened to Eduard Roschmann. The lawyer listened intently.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said at last.

  ‘The point is, can you help me?’

  ‘I wish I could,’ said the man, and for the first time since he had started asking questions about Roschmann in Hamburg weeks before, Miller believed he had met an official who genuinely would like to help him. ‘But the point is, although I am prepared to accept your inquiries as completely sincere, I am bound hand and foot by the rules that govern our continued existence here. Which are in effect that no information may be given out about any wanted SS criminal to anyone other than a person supported by the official backing of one of a specific number of authorities.’