The Odessa File
Page 12
‘In other words, you can tell me nothing?’ said Miller.
‘Please understand,’ said the lawyer, ‘this office is under constant attack. Not openly, no one would dare. But privately, within the corridors of power, we are incessantly being sniped at, our budget, such powers as we have, our terms of reference. We are allowed no latitude where the rules are concerned. Personally, I would like to engage the alliance of the Press of Germany to help, but it’s forbidden.’
‘I see,’ said Miller. ‘Do you then have any newspaper-cuttings reference library?’
‘No we don’t.’
‘Is there in Germany at all a newspaper-cuttings reference library that is open to an inquiry by a member of the public?’
‘No. The only newspaper-cutting libraries in the country are compiled and held by the various newspapers and magazines. The most comprehensive is reputed to be that of Der Spiegel magazine. After that, Komet has a very good one.’
‘I find this rather odd,’ said Miller. ‘Where in Germany today does a citizen inquire about the progress of investigation into war crimes, and for background material on wanted SS criminals?’
The lawyer looked slightly uncomfortable.
‘I’m afraid the ordinary citizen can’t do that,’ he said.
‘All right,’ said Miller, ‘where are the archives in Germany that refer to the men of the SS?’
‘There’s one set here, in the basement,’ said the lawyer. ‘And ours is all composed of photostats. The originals of the entire card index of the SS were captured in 1945 by an American unit. At the last minute a small group of the SS stayed behind at the castle where they were stored in Bavaria and tried to burn the records. They got through about ten per cent before the American soldiers rushed in and stopped them. The rest were all mixed up. It took the Americans with some German help two years to sort out the rest.
‘During those two years a number of the worst SS men escaped after being temporarily in Allied custody. Their dossiers could not be found in the muddle. Since the final classification the entire SS-Index has remained in Berlin, still under American ownership and direction. Even we have to apply to them if we want something more. Mind you, they’re very good about it; no complaints at all about cooperation from that quarter.’
‘And that’s it?’ asked Miller. ‘Just two sets in the whole country?’
‘That’s it,’ said the lawyer. ‘I repeat I wish I could help you. Incidentally, if you should get anything on Roschmann, we’d be delighted to have it.’
Miller thought.
‘If I find anything, there are only two authorities that can do anything with it. The Attorney General’s office in Hamburg, and you. Right?’
‘Yes, that’s all,’ said the lawyer.
‘And you’re more likely to do something positive with it than Hamburg.’ Miller made it a flat statement. The lawyer gazed fixedly at the ceiling.
‘Nothing that comes here that is of real value gathers dust on a shelf,’ he observed.
‘OK. Point taken,’ said Miller and rose. ‘One thing, between ourselves, are you still looking for Eduard Roschmann?’
‘Between ourselves, yes, very much.’
‘And if he were caught, there’d be no problems about getting a conviction?’
‘None at all,’ said the lawyer. ‘The case against him is tied up solid. He’d get hard labour for life without the option.’
‘Give me your phone number,’ said Miller.
The lawyer wrote it down and handed Miller the piece of paper.
‘There’s my name and two phone numbers. Home and office. You can get me any time, day or night. If you get anything new, just call me from any phone box on direct-dial. In every state police force there are men I can call and know I’ll get action if necessary. There are others to avoid. So call me first, right?’
Miller pocketed the paper.
‘I’ll remember that,’ he said as he left.
‘Good luck,’ said the lawyer.
It’s a long drive from Stuttgart to Berlin and it took Miller most of the following day. Fortunately it was dry and crisp and the tuned Jaguar ate the miles northwards past the sprawling carpet of Frankfurt, past Kassel and Göttingen to Hanover. Here he followed the branch-off to the right from autobahn E4 to E8 and the border with East Germany.
There was an hour delay at the Marienborn checkpoint while he filled out the inevitable currency declaration forms, was issued with transit visas to travel through 110 miles of East Germany to West Berlin; and while the blue-uniformed Customs men and the green-coated People’s Police, furhatted against the cold, poked around in and under the Jaguar. The Customs man seemed torn between the frosty courtesy required of a servant of the German Democratic Republic towards a national of revanchist West Germany, and one young man’s desire to examine another’s sports car.
Twenty miles beyond the border the great motorway bridge reared up to cross the Elbe where in 1945 the British, honourably obeying the rules laid down at Yalta, had halted their advance on Berlin. To his right Miller looked down at the sprawl of Magdeburg and wondered if the old prison still stood. There was a further delay at the entry into West Berlin, where again the car was searched, his overnight case emptied on to the Customs bench and his wallet opened to see he had not given all his West marks away to the people of the workers’ paradise on his progress down the road. Eventually he was through and the Jaguar roared past the Avus circuit towards the glittering ribbon of the Kurfur-stendamm, brilliant with Christmas decorations. It was the evening of December 17th.
He decided not to go blundering into the American Document Center the same way he had the Attorney General’s office in Hamburg or the Z-Commission in Ludwigsburg. Without official backing, he had come to realise, no one got anywhere with Nazi files in Germany.
The following morning he called Karl Brandt from the main post office. Brandt was aghast at his request.
‘I can’t,’ he said down the phone. ‘I don’t know anyone in Berlin.’
‘Well, think. You must have come across someone from the West Berlin force at one of the colleges you attended. I need him to vouch for me when I get there,’ shouted Miller back.
‘I told you I didn’t want to get involved.’
‘Well, you are involved.’ Miller waited a few seconds before putting in the body blow. ‘Either I get a look at that archive officially or I blow in and say you sent me.’
‘You wouldn’t do that,’ said Brandt.
‘I bloody well would. I’m fed up with being pushed from pillar to post round this damn country. So find somebody who’ll get me in there officially. Let’s face it, the request will be forgotten within the hour, once I’ve seen those files.’
‘I’ll have to think,’ said Brandt, stalling for time.
‘I’ll give you an hour,’ said Miller. ‘Then I’m calling back.’
He slammed down the receiver. An hour later Brandt was as angry as ever, and more than a little frightened. He heartily wished he had kept the diary to himself and thrown it away.
‘There’s a man I was at detective college with,’ he said down the phone. ‘I didn’t know him well, but he’s now with Bureau One of the West Berlin force. That deals with the same subject.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Schiller. Volkmar Schiller, detective inspector.’
‘I’ll get in touch with him,’ said Miller.
‘No, leave him to me. I’ll ring him today and introduce you to him. Then you can go and see him. If he doesn’t agree to get you in, don’t blame me. He’s the only one I know in Berlin.’
Two hours later Miller rang Brandt back. Brandt sounded relieved.
‘He’s away on leave,’ he said. ‘They tell me he’s doing Christmas duty, so he’s away until Monday.’
‘But it’s only Wednesday,’ said Miller. ‘That gives me four days to kill.’
‘I can’t help it. He’ll be back on Monday morning. I’ll ring him then.’
Miller spent four boring days hanging round West Berlin waiting for Schiller to come back off leave. Berlin was completely involved as the Christmas of 1963 approached with the issue by the East Berlin authorities for the first time since the Wall had been built in August 1961 of passes enabling West Berliners to go through the Wall and visit relatives living in the eastern sector. The progress of the negotiations between the two sides of the city had held the headlines for days. Miller spent one of his days that weekend by going through the Heine Strasse checkpoint into the eastern half of the city (as a West German citizen was able to do on the strength of his passport alone) and dropping in on a slight acquaintance, the Reuter correspondent in East Berlin. But the man was up to his neck in work on the Wall-passes story, so after a cup of coffee he left and returned to the west.
On Monday morning he went to see Detective Inspector Volkmar Schiller. To his great relief the man was about his own age, and seemed, unusually for an official of any kind in Germany, to have his own cavalier attitude to red tape. Doubtless he would not get far, thought Miller, but that was his problem. He explained briefly what he wanted.
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Schiller. ‘The Americans are pretty helpful to us in Bureau One. Because we’re charged by Willy Brandt with investigating Nazi crimes, we’re in there almost every day.’
They took Miller’s Jaguar and drove out to the suburbs of the city, to the forests and lakes, and at the bank of one of the lakes arrived at Number One, Wasser Käfer Stieg, in the suburb of Zehlendorf, Berlin 37.
The building was a long, low, single-storey affair set amid the trees.
‘Is that it?’ said Miller incredulously.
‘That’s it,’ said Schiller. ‘Not much, is it? The point is, there are eight floors below ground level. That’s where the archives are stored, in fire-proof vaults.’
They went through the front door to find a small waiting room with the inevitable porter’s lodge on the right. The detective approached it and proffered his police card. He was handed a form and the pair of them repaired to a table and filled it out. The detective filled in his name and rank, then asked, ‘What was the chap’s name again?’
‘Roschmann,’ said Miller. ‘Eduard Roschmann.’
The detective filled it in and handed the form back to the clerk in the front office.
‘It takes about ten minutes,’ said the detective. They went into the larger room, set out with rows of tables and chairs. After a quarter of an hour another clerk quietly brought them a file and laid it on the desk. It was about an inch thick, stamped with the single title ‘Roschmann, Eduard’.
Volkmar Schiller rose.
‘If you don’t mind I’ll be on my way,’ he said. ‘I’ll find my own way back. Mustn’t stop away too long after a week’s leave. If you want anything photostatted, ask the clerk.’ He gestured to a clerk sitting on a dais at the other end of the reading room, no doubt to ensure no visitors tried to remove pages from the files. Miller rose and shook hands.
‘Many thanks.’
‘Not at all.’
Ignoring the other three or four readers hunched over their desks, Miller put his head between his hands and started to peruse the SS’s own dossier on Eduard Roschmann.
It was all there. Nazi Party number, SS number, application form for each, filled out and signed by the man himself, result of his medical check, appreciation of him after his training period, self-written curriculum vitae, transfer papers, officer’s commission, promotion certificates, right up to April 1945. There were also two photographs, taken for the SS records, one full-face, one profile. They showed a man of six feet one inch, hair shorn close to the head with a parting on the left, staring at the camera with a grim expression, a pointed nose and a lipless slit of a mouth. Miller began to read …
Eduard Roschmann was born on August 25th, 1908, in the Austrian town of Graz, a citizen of Austria, son of a highly respectable and honest brewery worker. He attended kindergarten, junior and high school in Graz. He attended college to try to become a lawyer but failed. In 1931 at the age of twenty-three he began work in the brewery where his father had a job and in 1937 was transferred to the administrative department from the brewery floor. The same year he joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS, both at that time banned organisations in neutral Austria. A year later Hitler annexed Austria and rewarded the Austrian Nazis with swift promotions all round.
In 1939 at the outbreak of war he volunteered for the Waffen-SS, was sent to Germany, trained during the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1940 and served in a Waffen-SS unit in the over-running of France. In December 1940 he was transferred back from France to Berlin – here somebody had handwritten in the margin the word ‘Cowardice?’ – and in January 1941 was seconded to the SD, Amt Three of the RSHA.
In July 1941 he set up the first SD post in Riga, and the following month became commandant of Riga ghetto. He returned to Germany by ship in October 1944 and after handing over the remainder of the Jews of Riga to the SD of Danzig, returned to Berlin to report. He returned to his desk in Berlin HQ of the SS and remained there awaiting reassignment.
The last SS document in the file was evidently never completed, presumably because the meticulous little clerk in Berlin SS headquarters reassigned himself rather quickly in May 1945.
Attached to the back of the bunch of documents was one last one apparently affixed by an American hand since the end of the war. It was a single sheet bearing the typewritten words:
‘Inquiry made about this file by the British occupation authorities in December 1947.’
Beneath this was the scrawled signature of some GI clerk long since forgotten, and the date December 21st, 1947.
Miller gathered the file and eased out of it the self-written life story, the two photographs and the last sheet. With these he approached the clerk at the end of the room.
‘Could I have these photo-copied please?’
‘Certainly.’ The man took the file back and placed it on his desk to await the return of the three missing sheets after copying. Another man also tendered a file and two sheets of its contents for copying. The clerk took these two and placed the lot in a tray behind him, from where the sheets were whisked away by an unseen hand.
‘Please wait. It will take about ten minutes,’ the clerk told Miller and the other man. The pair retook their seats and waited, Miller wishing he could smoke a cigarette, which was forbidden, the other man, neat and grey in a charcoal winter coat, sitting with hands folded in his lap.
Ten minutes later there was a rustle behind the clerk and two envelopes slid through the aperture. He held them up. Both Miller and the middle-aged man rose and went forward to collect. The clerk glanced quickly inside one of the envelopes.
‘The file on Eduard Roschmann?’ he queried.
‘For me,’ said Miller, and extended his hand.
‘These must be for you,’ he said to the other man, who was glancing sideways at Miller. The grey-coated man took his own envelope and side by side they walked to the door. Outside Miller ran down the steps and climbed into the Jaguar, slipped away from the kerb and headed back towards the centre of the city. An hour later he rang Sigi.
‘I’m coming home for Christmas,’ he told her.
Two hours later he was on his way out of West Berlin. As his car headed towards the first checkpoint at Drei Linden, the man with the grey coat was sitting in his neat and tidy flat off Savigny Platz, dialling a number in West Germany. He introduced himself briefly to the man who answered.
‘I was in the Document Center today. Just normal research, you know the sort I do. There was another man in there. He was reading through the file of Eduard Roschmann. Then he had three sheets photo-copied. After the message that went round recently I thought I’d better tell you.’
There was a burst of questions from the other end.
‘No, I couldn’t get his name. He drove away afterwards in a long black sports car. Yes, yes I did. It was a Hamburg number plate.’
‘Well, I thought I’d better. I mean, one never knows with these snoopers. Yes, thank you, very kind of you … Very well, I’ll leave it with you … Happy Christmas, Kamerad.’
Chapter Seven
CHRISTMAS DAY WAS on the Wednesday of that week and it was not until after the Christmas period that the man in West Germany who had received the news from Berlin about Miller passed it on. When he did so it was to his ultimate superior.
The man who took the call thanked his informant, put the office phone down, leaned back in his comfortable leather-padded executive chair and gazed out of the window at the snow-covered rooftops of the Old Town.
‘Verdammt and once again verdammt,’ he whispered. ‘Why now of all times? Why now?’
To all of the citizens of his city who knew him he was a clever and brilliantly successful lawyer in private practice. To the score of his senior executive officers scattered across West Germany and West Berlin he was the chief executive inside Germany of the Odessa. His telephone number was strictly ex-directory and his code-name was the Werwolf.
Unlike the monster figure of the mythology of Hollywood and the horror films of Britain and America, the German werwolf is not an odd man who grows hair on the backs of his hands during the full moon. In old Germanic mythology the werwolf is a patriotic figure who stays behind in the homeland when the Teuton warrior-heroes have been forced to flee into exile by the invading foreigner, and who leads the resistance against the invader from the shadows of the great forests, striking by night and disappearing, leaving only the spoor of the wolf in the snow.
At the end of the war a group of SS officers, convinced the destruction of the invading Allies was merely a matter of months, trained and briefed a score of groups of ultra-fanatical teenage boys to remain behind and sabotage the Allied occupiers. They were formed in Bavaria, then being overrun by the Americans. These were the original Werwolves. Fortunately for them, they never put their training into practice, for after discovering Dachau the GIs were just waiting for someone to start something.