The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  On the eastern front the German Army was bullied into battle against the Russians to take unbelievable casualties, not to produce victory but to produce a delay while the SS finalised their escape plans. Behind the Army stood the SS, shooting and hanging some of the Army men who took a step backwards after already taking more punishment than military flesh and blood is usually expected to stand. Thousands of officers and men of the Wehrmacht died at the end of SS hanging ropes in this way.

  Just before the final collapse, delayed six months after the chiefs of the SS knew defeat was inevitable, the leaders of the SS disappeared. From one end of the country to the other they quit their posts, changed into civilian clothes, stuffed their beautifully (and officially) forged papers into their pockets and vanished into the swirling masses of chaotic people who made up Germany in May 1945. They left the granddads of the Home Guard to meet the British and the Americans at the gates of the concentration camps, the exhausted Wehrmacht to go into prisoner-of-war camps and the women and children to live or die under Allied rule in the coming bitter winter of 1945.

  Those who knew they were too well known to escape detection for long fled abroad. This was where the Odessa came in. Formed just before the end of the war, its job was to get wanted SS men out of Germany to safety. Already it had established close and friendly links with Juan Peron’s Argentina, which had issued seven thousand Argentinian passports ‘in blank’ so that the refugee merely had to fill in a false name, his own photograph, get it stamped by the ever-ready Argentine consul and board ship for Buenos Aires or the Middle East.

  Thousands of SS murderers poured southwards through Austria and into the South Tyrol province of Italy. They were shuttled from safe-house to safe-house along the route, thence mainly to the Italian port of Genoa or further south to Rimini and Rome. A number of organisations, some supposed to be concerned with charitable work among the truly dispossessed, took it upon themselves, for reasons best known to themselves, to decide on some evidence of their own imagining, that the SS refugees were being over-harshly persecuted by the Allies.

  Among the chief Scarlet Pimpernels of Rome who spirited thousands away to safety was Bishop Alois Hudal, the German bishop of Rome. The main hiding-out station for the SS killers was the enormous Franciscan monastery in Rome, where they were hidden and boarded until papers could be arranged, along with a passage to South America. In some cases the SS men travelled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Church, and in many cases the charitable organisation Caritas paid for their tickets.

  This was the first task of Odessa, and it was largely successful. Just how many thousands of SS murderers who, had they been caught by the Allies, would have died for their crimes, passed to safety will never be known, it was well over eighty per cent of those meriting the death sentence.

  Having established itself comfortably on the proceeds of mass-murder, transferred from the Swiss banks, the Odessa sat back and watched the deterioration of relations between the Allies of 1945. The early ideas of the quick establishment of a Fourth Reich were discarded in the course of time by the leaders of the Odessa in South America as impractical, but with the establishment in May 1949 of a new Republic of West Germany those leaders of the Odessa set themselves five new tasks.

  The first was the reinfiltration of former Nazis into every facet of life in the new Germany. Throughout the late forties and fifties former members of the Nazis slipped into the civil service at every level, back into lawyers’ offices, on to judges’ benches, into the police forces, local government and doctors’ surgeries. From these positions, however lowly, they were able to protect each other from investigation and arrest, advance each others’ interests and generally ensure that investigation and prosecution of former comrades – they call each other ‘Kamerad’ – went forward as slowly as possible, if at all.

  The second task was to infiltrate the mechanisms of political power. Avoiding the high levels, former Nazis slipped into the grass-roots organisation of the ruling party at ward and constituency level. Again, there was no law to forbid a former member of the Nazis from joining a political party. It may be a coincidence, but unlikely, that no politician with a known record of calling for increased vigour in the investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes has ever been elected in the CDU or the CSU, either at Federal level or at the equally important level of the very powerful Provincial Parliaments. One politician expressed it with crisp simplicity – ‘It’s a question of election mathematics. Six million dead Jews don’t vote. Five million former Nazis can and do, at every election.’

  The main aim of both these programmes was simple. It was and is to slow down if not to stop the investigation and prosecution of former members of the Nazis. In this the Odessa had one other great ally. This was the secret knowledge in the minds of hundreds of thousands that they had either helped in what was done, albeit in a small way, or had known at the time what was going on and had remained silent. Years later, established and respected in their communities and professions, they could hardly relish the idea of energetic investigation into past events, let alone the mention of their name in a faraway courtroom where a Nazi was on trial.

  The third task the Odessa set itself in post-war Germany was to reinfiltrate business, commerce and industry. To this end certain former Nazis were established in businesses of their own in the early fifties, bankrolled by funds from the Zürich deposits. Any reasonably well administered concern founded with plenty of liquidity in the early fifties would take full advantage of the staggering Economic Miracle of the fifties and sixties, to become in turn a large and flourishing business. The point of this was to use funds out of the profits from these businesses to influence press coverage of the Nazi crimes through advertising revenue, to assist financially the crop of SS-orientated propaganda sheets that have come and gone in post-war Germany, to keep alive some of the ultra-right-wing publishing houses and to provide jobs for former Kameraden fallen on hard times.

  The fourth task was and still is to provide the best possible legal defence for any Nazi forced to stand trial. In later years a technique was developed whereby the accused at once engaged a brilliant and expensive lawyer, had a few sessions with him and then announced they could not afford to pay him. The lawyer could then be appointed defence counsel by the court according to the provisions of the legal-aid laws. But in the early and mid-fifties, when hundreds of thousands of German POWs streamed home from Russia, unamnestied SS criminals were sifted out and taken to Camp Friedland. Here girls circulated among them, handing out to each a small white card. On it was the man’s designated defence lawyer.

  The fifth task is propaganda. This takes many forms, from encouraging the dissemination of right-wing pamphlets to lobbying for a final ratification of the Statute of Limitations, under whose terms an end would be put to all culpability in law of the Nazis. Efforts are made to assure the Germans of today that the death figures of the Jews, Russians, Poles and others were but a tiny fraction of those quoted by the Allies – a hundred thousand dead Jews is the usual figure mentioned – and to point out that the cold war between the West and the Soviet Union in some way proves Hitler to have been right.

  But the mainstay of the Odessa propaganda is to persuade the sixty million West Germans of today – and with a large degree of success – that the SS were in fact patriotic soldiers like the Wehrmacht and that solidarity between former comrades must be upheld. This is the weirdest ploy of them all.

  During the war the Wehrmacht kept its distance from the SS, which it regarded with repugnance, while the SS treated the Wehrmacht with contempt. At the end millions of young Wehrmacht men were hurled into death or captivity at Russian hands, from which only a small proportion returned, and this so that the SS men could live prosperously elsewhere. Thousands more were executed by the SS, including 5000 in the aftermath of the July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, in which less than fifty men were implicated.

  How former members of the Germa
n Army, Navy and Air Force can conceivably regard ex-SS men as meriting from them the title of Kamerad, let alone their protection and solidarity from prosecution, is a mystery. Yet herein lies the real success of the Odessa.

  By and large Odessa has succeeded in its tasks of impeding West German efforts to hunt down and bring to trial the SS murderers. It has succeeded by virtue of its own ruthlessness, occasionally against its own kind if they look like making a full confession to the authorities, Allied mistakes between 1945 and 1949, the Cold War, and the usual German cowardice when faced with a moral problem, in stark contrast to their courage when faced with a military task or a technical issue like the reconstruction of post-war Germany.

  *

  When Simon Wiesenthal had finished, Miller laid down the pencil with which he had made copious notes and sat back.

  ‘I hadn’t the faintest idea,’ he said.

  ‘Very few Germans have,’ conceded Wiesenthal. ‘In fact very few people know much about the Odessa at all. The word is hardly ever mentioned in Germany and just as certain members of the American underworld will stoutly deny the existence of the Mafia, so many former members of the SS will deny the existence of the Odessa. To be perfectly frank, the term is not used as much nowadays as formerly. The new word is “The Comradeship” just as the Mafia in America is called the Cosa Nostra. But what’s in a name? The Odessa is still there, and will be while there is an SS criminal to protect.’

  ‘And you think these are the men I’m up against?’ asked Miller.

  ‘I’m sure of it. The warning you were given in Bad Godesberg could not have come from anyone else. Do be careful, these men can be dangerous.’

  Miller’s mind was on something else.

  ‘When Roschmann disappeared in 1955, you said he would need a new passport?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Why the passport particularly?’

  Simon Wiesenthal leaned back in his chair and nodded.

  ‘I can understand why you are puzzled. Let me explain. After the war in Germany, and here in Austria, there were tens of thousands wandering about with no identification papers. Some had genuinely lost them, others had thrown them away for good reason.

  ‘To obtain new ones, it would normally be necessary to produce a birth certificate. But millions had fled from the former German territories overrun by the Russians. Who was to say if a man was, or was not, born in a small village in East Prussia, now miles behind the Iron Curtain? In other cases the buildings in which the certificates were stored had been destroyed by bombing.

  ‘So the process was very simple. All one needed were two witnesses to swear that one was who one said, and a fresh personal ID card was issued. In the case of prisoners-of-war, they often had no papers either. On their release from camp, the British and American camp authorities would sign a release paper to the effect that Corporal Johann Schumann was certified as released from prisoner-of-war camp. These chits were then taken by the soldier to the civilian authorities who issued an ID card in the same name. But often the man had only told the Allies his name was Johann Schumann. It could have been something else. No one checked. And so he got a new identity.

  ‘That was all right in the immediate aftermath of the war, which was when most of the SS criminals were getting their new identities. But what happens to a man who is blown wide open in 1955, as was Roschmann? He can’t go to the authorities and say he lost his papers during the war. They would be bound to ask how he had got by during the ten-year interim period. So he needs a passport.’

  ‘I understand so far,’ said Miller. ‘But why a passport? Why not a driving licence, or an ID card?’

  ‘Because shortly after the founding of the republic the German authorities realised there must be hundreds or thousands wandering about under false names. There was a need for one document that was so well researched that it could act as the yardstick for all the others. They hit on the passport. Before you get a passport in Germany, you have to produce the birth certificate, several references and a host of other documentation. These are thoroughly checked before the passport is issued.

  ‘By contrast, once you have a passport, you can get anything else on the strength of it. Such is bureaucracy. The production of the passport convinces the civil servant that, since previous bureaucrats must have checked out the passport holder thoroughly, no further checking is necessary. With a new passport, Roschmann could quickly build up the rest of the identity – driving licence, bank accounts, credit cards. The passport is the open sesame to every other piece of necessary documentation in present-day Germany.’

  ‘Where would the passport come from?’

  ‘From the Odessa. They must have a forger somewhere who can turn them out,’ surmised Herr Wiesenthal.

  Miller thought for a while.

  ‘If one could find the passport forger, one might find the man who could identify Roschmann today?’ he suggested.

  Wiesenthal shrugged.

  ‘One might. But it would be a long shot. And to do that one would have to penetrate the Odessa. Only an ex-SS man could do that.’

  ‘Then where do I go from here?’ said Miller.

  ‘I should think your best bet would be to try and contact some of the survivors of Riga. I don’t know whether they would be able to help you further, but they’d certainly be willing. We are all trying to find Roschmann. Look …’

  He flicked open the diary on his desk.

  ‘There’s reference here to a certain Olli Adler from Munich who was in Roschmann’s company during the war. It may be she survived and came home to Munich.’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘If she did, where would she register?’

  ‘At the Jewish Community Centre. It still exists. It contains the archives of the Jewish community of Munich, since the war, that is. Everything else was destroyed. I should try there.’

  ‘Do you have the address?’

  Simon Wiesenthal checked through an address book.

  ‘Reichenbach Strasse, Number Twenty-Seven, Munich,’ he said. ‘I suppose you want the diary of Salomon Tauber back?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I do.’

  ‘Pity. I’d like to have kept it. A remarkable diary.’

  He rose and escorted Miller to the front door.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, ‘and let me know how you get on.’

  Miller had dinner that evening in the House of the Golden Dragon, which had been in business as a beer-house and restaurant in the Steindelgasse without a break from 1566, and thought over the advice. He had little hope of finding more than a handful of survivors of Riga still in Germany or Austria, and even less hope that any might help him track Roschmann beyond November 1955. But it was a hope, a last hope.

  He left the next morning for the drive back to Munich.

  Chapter Ten

  MILLER DROVE INTO Munich at mid-morning of January 8th, and found 27, Reichenbach Strasse from a map of Munich bought at a newspaper kiosk in the outskirts. Parking down the road he surveyed the Jewish Community Centre before entering. It was a flat-fronted five-storey building. The façade of the ground floor was of uncovered stone blocks; above this the façade was of a grey cement over brick. The fifth and top floor was marked by a row of mansard windows set in the red tile roof. At ground level there was a double door of glass panels, set at the extreme left end of the building.

  The building contained a kosher restaurant, the only one in Munich, on the ground floor, the leisure rooms of the old people’s home on the one above. The third floor contained the administration and records department, and the upper two housed the guest rooms and sleeping quarters of the inmates of the old people’s home. At the back was a synagogue.

  The whole building was destroyed on the night of Friday, February 15th, 1970, when petrol bombs were poured into it from the roof. Seven died, suffocated by smoke. Swastikas were daubed on the synagogue.

  He went up to the third floor and presented himself at the inquiry desk. While he waited he glan
ced round the room. There were rows of books, all new, for the original library had long since been burnt by the Nazis. Between the library shelves were portraits of some of the leaders of the Jewish community stretching back hundreds of years, teachers and rabbis, gazing out of their frames above luxuriant beards, like the figures of the prophets he had seen in his scripture textbooks at school. Some wore phylacteries bound to their foreheads and all were hatted.

  There was a rack of newspapers, some in German, others in Hebrew. He presumed the latter were flown in from Israel. A short dark man was scanning the front page of one of the latter.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He looked round to the inquiry desk to find it now occupied by a dark-eyed woman in her mid-forties. There was a strand of hair falling over her eyes, which she nervously brushed back into place several times a minute.

  Miller made his request: any trace of Ollie Adler, who might have reported back to Munich after the war?

  ‘Where would she have returned from?’ asked the woman.

  ‘From Magdeburg. Before that Stutthof. Before that from Riga.’

  ‘Oh dear, Riga,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t think we have anyone on the lists who came back here from Riga. They all disappeared, you know. But I’ll look.’

  She went into a back room and Miller could see her going steadily through an index of names. It was not a big index. She returned after five minutes.

  ‘I’m sorry. Nobody of that name reported back here after the war. It’s a common name. But there is nobody listed under it.’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘I see. That looks like it, then. Sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘You might try the International Tracing Service,’ said the woman. ‘It’s really their job to find people who went missing. They have lists from all over Germany, whereas we only have the lists of those originating in Munich who came back.’