The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘I hope my English is good enough,’ said Miller at last, when no reaction seemed to be coming from the retired prosecutor.

  Lord Russell seemed to wake from a private reverie.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, better than my German after all these years. One forgets, you know.’

  ‘This Roschmann business …’ began Miller.

  ‘Yes, interesting, very interesting. And you want to try and find him. Why?’

  The last question was shot at Miller and he found the old man’s eyes gazing keenly from under the eyebrows.

  ‘Well, I have my reasons,’ he said stiffly. ‘I believe the man should be found and brought to trial.’

  ‘Humph. Don’t we all. The question is, will he be? Will he ever be?’

  Miller played it straight back.

  ‘If I can find him, he will be. You can take my word on that.’

  The British peer seemed unimpressed. Little smoke signals shot out of the pipe as he puffed, rising in perfect series towards the ceiling. The pause lengthened.

  ‘The point is, my lord, do you remember him?’

  Lord Russell seemed to start.

  ‘Remember him? Oh yes, I remember him. Or at least the name. Wish I could put a face to the name. An old man’s memory fades with the years, you know. And there were so many of them in those days.’

  ‘Your Military Police picked him up on December 20th, 1947, in Graz,’ Miller told him.

  He took the two photo-copies of Roschmann’s picture from his breast pocket and passed them over. Lord Russell gazed at the two pictures, full-face and profile, rose and began to pace the sitting-room, lost in thought.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I’ve got him. I can see him now. Yes, the file was sent on from Graz Field Security to me in Hanover a few days later. That would be where Cadbury got his despatch from. Our office in Hanover.’

  He paused and swung round on Miller.

  ‘You say your man Tauber last saw him on April 3rd, 1945, driving west through Magdeburg in a car with several others?’

  ‘That’s what he said in his diary.’

  ‘Mmmm. Two and a half years before we got him. And do you know where he was?’

  ‘No,’ said Miller.

  ‘In a British prisoner-of-war camp. Cheeky. All right, young man, I’ll fill in what I can …’

  The car carrying Eduard Roschmann and his colleagues from the SS passed through Magdeburg and immediately turned south towards Bavaria and Austria. They made it as far as Munich before the end of April, then split up. Roschmann by this time was in the uniform of a corporal of the German Army, with papers in his own name but describing him as an army man.

  South of Munich the American Army columns were sweeping through Bavaria, mainly concerned not with the civilian population, which had merely become an administrative headache, but with rumours that the Nazi hierarchy intended to shut themselves up in a mountain fortress in the Bavarian Alps around Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden and fight it out to the last man. The hundreds of unarmed, wandering German soldiers were paid scant attention as Patton’s columns rolled through Bavaria.

  Travelling by night across country, hiding by day in woodsmen’s huts and barns, Roschmann crossed the Austrian border that had not even existed since the annexation of 1938 and headed south and onwards for Graz, his home town. In and around Graz he knew people on whom he could count to shelter him.

  He passed round Vienna and had almost made it when he was challenged by a British patrol on the 6th of May. Foolishly he tried to run for it. As he dived into the undergrowth by the roadside a hail of bullets cut through the brushwood, and one passed clean through his chest, piercing one lung. After a quick search in the darkness the British Tommies passed on, leaving him wounded and undiscovered in a thicket. From here he crawled to a farmer’s house half a mile away.

  Still conscious, he told the farmer the name of a doctor he knew in Graz, and the man cycled through the night and the curfew to fetch him. For three months he was tended by his friends, first at the farmer’s house, later at another house in Graz itself. When he was fit enough to walk the war was three months over and Austria under four-power occupation. Graz was in the heart of the British Zone.

  All German soldiers were required to do two years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and Roschmann, deeming it the safest place to be, gave himself up. For two years from August 1945 to August 1947, while the hunt for the worst of the wanted SS murderers went on, Roschmann remained at ease in the camp. For on giving himself up he had used another name, that of a former friend who had gone into the Army and had been killed in North Africa.

  There were so many tens of thousands of German soldiers wandering about without any identity papers at all that the name given by the man himself was accepted by the Allies as genuine. They had neither the time nor the facilities to conduct a probing examination of army corporals. In the summer of 1947 Roschmann was released and felt it safe to leave the custody of the camp. He was wrong.

  One of the survivors of Riga camp, a native of Vienna, had sworn his own vendetta against Roschmann. This man haunted the streets of Graz, waiting for Roschmann to return to his home, the parents he had left in 1939 and the wife he had married while on leave in 1943, Hella Roschmann. The old man roamed from the house of the parents to the house of the wife, waiting for the SS man to return.

  After release Roschmann remained in the countryside outside Graz, working as a labourer in the fields. Then on December 20th, 1947, he went home to spend Christmas with his family. The old man was waiting. He hid behind a pillar when he saw the tall, lanky figure with the pale blond hair and cold blue eyes approach his wife’s house, glance round a few times, then knock and enter.

  Within an hour, led by the former inmate of the camp at Riga, two hefty British sergeants of the Field Security Service, puzzled and sceptical, arrived at the house and knocked. After a quick search Roschmann was discovered under a bed. Had he tried to brazen it out, claiming mistaken identity, he might had made the sergeants believe the old man was wrong. But hiding under a bed was the giveaway. He was led off to be interviewed by Major Hardy of the FSS, who promptly had him locked up in a cell while a request went off to Berlin and the American index of the SS.

  Confirmation arrived in forty-eight hours, and the balloon went up. Even while the request was in Potsdam asking for Russian help in establishing the dossier on Riga, the Americans asked for Roschmann to be transferred to Munich on a temporary basis, to give evidence at Dachau where the Americans were putting on trial other SS men who had been active in the complex of camps around Riga. The British agreed.

  At six in the morning of January 8th, 1948, Roschmann, accompanied by a sergeant of the Royal Military Police and another from Field Security, was put on a train at Graz bound for Salzburg and Munich.

  Lord Russell paused in his pacing, crossed to the fireplace and knocked out his pipe.

  ‘Then what happened?’ asked Miller.

  ‘He escaped,’ said Lord Russell.

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He escaped. He jumped from the lavatory window of the moving train, after complaining the prison diet had given him diarrhoea. By the time his two escorts had smashed in the lavatory door, he was gone into the snow. They never found him. A search was mounted, of course, but he had gone, evidently through the snowdrifts to make contact with one of the organisations prepared to help ex-Nazis escape. Sixteen months later in May 1949 your new republic was founded and we handed over all our files to Bonn.’

  Miller finished writing and laid his notebook down.

  ‘Where does one go from here?’ he asked.

  Lord Russell blew out his cheeks.

  ‘Well, now, your own people, I suppose. You have Roschmann’s life from birth to the 8th of January 1948. The rest is up to the German authorities.’

  ‘Which ones?’ asked Miller, fearing what the answer would be.

  ‘As it concerns Riga, the Hamburg Attorney General’s office, I suppose,’ said Lord
Russell.

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘They didn’t help much?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Lord Russell grinned. ‘Not surprised, not surprised. Have you tried Ludwigsburg?’

  ‘Yes. They were nice, but not very helpful. Against the rules,’ said Miller.

  ‘Well, that exhausts the official lines of inquiry. There’s only one other man. Have you ever heard of Simon Wiesenthal?’

  ‘Wiesenthal? Yes, vaguely. The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it.’

  ‘He lives in Vienna. Jewish chap, came from Polish Galicia originally. Spent four years in a series of concentration camps, twelve in all. Decided to spend the rest of his days tracking down wanted Nazi criminals. No rough stuff, mind you. He just keeps collating all the information about them he can get, then when he’s convinced he has found one, usually living under a false name, not always, he informs the police. If they don’t act, he gives a press conference and puts them in a spot. Needless to say, he’s not terribly popular with officialdom in either Germany or Austria. He reckons they are not doing enough to bring known Nazi murderers to book, let alone chase the hidden ones. The former SS hate his guts and have tried to kill him a couple of times; the bureaucrats wish he would leave them alone, and a lot of other people think he’s a great chap, and help him where they can.’

  ‘Yes, the name rings a bell now. Wasn’t he the man who found Adolf Eichmann?’ asked Miller.

  Lord Russell nodded.

  ‘He identified him as Ricardo Klement, living in Buenos Aires. The Israelis took over from there. He’s also traced several hundred other Nazi criminals. If anything more is known about your Eduard Roschmann, he’ll know it.’

  ‘Do you know him?’ asked Miller.

  Lord Russell nodded.

  ‘I’d better give you a letter. He gets a lot of visitors wanting information. An introduction would help.’

  He went to the writing desk, swiftly wrote a few lines on a sheet of headed notepaper, folded the sheet into an envelope and sealed it.

  ‘Good luck; you’ll need it,’ he said, as he showed Miller out.

  The following morning Miller took the BEA flight back to Cologne, picked up his car and set off on the two-day run through Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg and Linz to Vienna.

  Miller spent the night at Munich, having made slow time along the snow-encrusted autobahns, frequently narrowed down to one lane while a snow-plough or gritting truck tried to cope with the steadily falling snow. The following day he set off early and would have made Vienna by lunchtime had it not been for the long delay at Bad Tolz just south of Munich.

  The autobahn was passing through dense pine forests when a series of ‘Slow’ signs brought the traffic to a halt. A police car, blue light spinning a warning, was parked at the edge of the road and two white-coated patrolmen were standing across the road holding back the traffic. On the left-hand, northbound lane the procedure was the same. To the right and left of the autobahn a drive cut into the pine forests, and two soldiers in winter clothing, each with a battery-powered illuminated baton, stood at the entrance to each, waiting to summon something hidden in the forests across the road.

  Miller fumed with impatience and finally wound down his window to call to one of the policemen.

  ‘What’s the matter? What’s the hold-up?’

  The patrolman walked slowly over and grinned.

  ‘The Army,’ he said shortly. ‘They’re on manoeuvres. There’s a column of tanks coming across in a minute.’

  Fifteen minutes later the first one appeared, a long gun barrel poking out of the pine trees, like a pachyderm scenting the air for danger, then with a rumble the flat armoured bulk of the tank eased out of the trees and clattered down to the road.

  Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank was a happy man. At the age of thirty he had already fulfilled his life’s ambition, to command his own tank. He could remember to the day when his life’s ambition had been born to him. It was January 10th, 1945, when as a small boy in the city of Mannheim he had been taken to the cinema. The screen during the newsreels was full of the spectacle of Hasso von Manteuffel’s King Tiger tanks rolling forward to engage the Americans and British.

  He stared in awe at the muffled figures of the commanders, steel-helmeted and goggled, gazing forward out of the turret. For Ulrich Frank, ten years old, it was a turning point. When he left the cinema he had made a vow, that one day he would command his own tank.

  It took him nineteen years, but he made it. On those winter manoeuvres in the forests around Bad Tolz, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank commanded his first tank, an American-built M-48 Patton.

  It was his last manoeuvre with the Patton. Waiting for the troop back at camp was a row of shining, brand-new French AMX-13s with which the unit was being re-equipped. Faster, more heavily armed than the Patton, the AMX would become his in another week.

  He glanced down at the black cross of the new German Army on the side of the turret, and the tank’s personal name stencilled beneath it, and felt a touch of regret. Though he had only commanded it for six months, it would always be his first tank, his favourite. He had named it Drachenfels, the Dragon Rock, after the rock overlooking the Rhine where Martin Luther, translating the Bible into German, had seen the Devil and hurled his ink-pot at him. After the re-equipment he supposed the Patton would go for scrap.

  With a last pause on the far side of the autobahn the Patton and its crew breasted the rise and vanished into the forest.

  Miller finally made it to Vienna in the mid-afternoon of that day, January 4th. Without checking into a hotel he drove straight into the city centre and asked his way to Rudolf Square.

  He found number seven easily enough and glanced at the list of tenants. Against the third floor was a card saying ‘Documentation Centre’. He mounted and knocked at the cream-painted wooden door. From behind it someone looked through the peep-hole before he heard the lock being drawn back. A pretty blonde girl stood in the doorway.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘My name is Miller. Peter Miller. I would like to speak with Herr Wiesenthal. I have a letter of introduction.’

  He produced his letter and gave it to the girl. She looked uncertainly at it, smiled briefly and asked him to wait.

  Several minutes later she reappeared at the end of the corridor on to which the door gave access, and beckoned him.

  ‘Please come this way.’

  Miller closed the front door behind him and followed her down the passage, round a corner and to the end of the flat. On the right was an open door. As he entered a man rose to greet him.

  ‘Please come in,’ said Simon Wiesenthal.

  He was bigger than Miller had expected, a burly man over six feet tall, wearing a thick tweed jacket, stooping as if permanently looking for a mislaid piece of paper. He held Lord Russell’s letter in his hand.

  The office was small to the point of being cramped. One wall was lined from end to end and ceiling to floor in shelves, each crammed with books. The wall facing was decorated with illuminated manuscripts and testimonials from a score of organisations of former victims of the SS. The back wall contained a long sofa, also stacked with books, and to the left of the door was a small window looking down on a courtyard. The desk stood away from the window, and Miller took the visitor’s chair in front of it. The Nazi-hunter of Vienna seated himself behind it and re-read Lord Russell’s letter.

  ‘Lord Russell tells me you are trying to hunt down a former SS killer,’ he began without preamble.

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘May I have his name?’

  ‘Roschmann. Captain Eduard Roschmann.’

  Simon Wiesenthal raised his eyebrows and exhaled his breath in a whistle.

  ‘You’ve heard of him?’ asked Miller.

  ‘The Butcher of Riga? One of my top fifty wanted men,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘May I ask why you are interested in him?’

  Miller started to explain, briefly.

  ‘I think you’d be
tter start at the beginning,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘What’s all this about a diary?’

  With the man in Ludwigsburg, Cadbury and Lord Russell this made the fourth time Miller had had to relate the story. Each time it grew a little longer, another period added to his knowledge of Roschmann’s life-story. He began again and went through until he had described the help given by Lord Russell.

  ‘What I have to know now,’ he ended, ‘is where did he go when he jumped from the train?’

  Simon Wiesenthal was gazing out into the court of the block of flats, watching the snowflakes dropping down the narrow shaft to the ground three floors down.

  ‘Have you got the diary?’ he asked at length. Miller reached down, took it out of his brief-case and laid it on the desk. Wiesenthal eyed it appreciatively.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said. He looked up and smiled. ‘All right, I accept the story,’ he said.

  Miller raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Was there any doubt?’

  Simon Wiesenthal eyed him keenly.

  ‘There is always a little doubt, Herr Miller,’ he said. ‘Yours is a very strange story. I still cannot follow your motive for wanting to track Roschmann down.’

  Miller shrugged.

  ‘I’m a reporter. It’s a good story.’

  ‘But not one you will ever sell to the Press, I fear. And hardly worth your life savings. Are you sure there’s nothing personal in this?’

  Miller ducked the question.

  ‘You’re the second person who has suggested that. Hoffmann suggested the same at Komet. Why should there be? I’m only twenty-nine years old. All this was before my time.’

  ‘Of course.’ Wiesenthal glanced at his watch and rose. ‘It is five o’clock, and I like to get home to my wife these winter evenings. Would you let me read the diary overnight?’

  ‘Yes. Of course,’ said Miller.

  ‘Good. Then please come back on Monday morning and I will fill in what I know of the Roschmann story.’

  Miller arrived on Monday at ten and found Simon Wiesenthal attacking a pile of letters. He looked up as the German reporter came in and gestured him to a seat. There was silence for a while as the Nazi-hunter carefully snipped the edges off the sides of his envelopes before sliding the contents out.