The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  Miller awoke on Monday afternoon in a private ward in Frankfurt General Hospital. He lay for half an hour, becoming slowly aware that his head was swathed in bandages and contained a pair of energetic artillery units. He found a buzzer and pressed it, but the nurse who came told him to lie quietly because he had severe concussion.

  So he lay, and piece by piece recollected the events of the previous day until the middle of the morning. After that there was nothing. He dozed off and when he woke it was dark outside and a man was sitting by his bed. The man smiled. Miller stared at him.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I know you,’ said the visitor.

  Miller thought. ‘I’ve seen you,’ he said at length. ‘You were in Oster’s house. With Leon and Motti.’

  ‘That’s right. What else do you remember?’

  ‘Almost everything. It’s coming back.’

  ‘Roschmann?’

  ‘Yes. I talked with him. I was going for the police.’

  ‘Roschmann’s gone. Fled back to South America. The whole affair’s over. Complete. Finished. Do you understand?’

  Miller slowly shook his head.

  ‘Not quite. I’ve got one hell of a story. And I’m going to write it.’

  The visitor’s smile faded. He leaned forward.

  ‘Listen, Miller. You’re a bloody amateur, and you’re lucky to be alive. You’re going to write nothing. For one thing you’ve got nothing to write. I’ve got Tauber’s diary and it’s going back home with me, where it belongs. I read it last night. There was a photograph of an army captain in your jacket pocket. Your father?’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘So that was what it was really all about?’ asked the agent.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, in a way I’m sorry. About your father, I mean. I never thought I’d say that to a German. Now about the file. What was it?’

  Miller told him.

  ‘Then why the hell couldn’t you let us have it? You’re an ungrateful little man. We took a lot of trouble getting you in there, and when you get something you hand it over to your own people. We could have used that information to best advantage.’

  ‘I had to send it to someone, through Sigi. That meant by mail. You’re so clever, you never let me have Leon’s address.’

  Josef nodded.

  ‘All right. But either way you have no story to tell. You have no evidence. The diary’s gone, the file is gone. All that remains is your personal word. If you insist on talking nobody will believe you except the Odessa, and they’ll come for you. Or, rather, they’ll probably hit Sigi or your mother. They play rough, remember?’

  Miller thought for a while.

  ‘What about my car?’

  ‘You don’t know about that. I forgot.’

  Josef told Miller about the bomb in it, and the way it went off.

  ‘I told you they play rough. The car has been found gutted by fire in a ravine. The body in it is unidentified, but not yours. Your story is that you were flagged down by a hitch-hiker, he hit you with an iron bar and went off in it.

  ‘The hospital will confirm you were brought in by a passing motor-cyclist who called an ambulance when he saw you by the roadside. They won’t recognise me again, I was in a helmet and goggles at the time. That’s the official version and it will stay. To make sure, I rang the German Press Agency two hours ago, claiming to be the hospital, and gave them the same story. You were the victim of a hitchhiker who later crashed and killed himself.’

  Josef stood up and prepared to leave. He looked down at Miller.

  ‘You’re a lucky bastard, though you don’t seem to realise it. I got the message your girl-friend passed me, presumably on your instructions, at midday yesterday, and by riding like a maniac I made it from Munich to the house on the hill in two and a half hours dead. Which was what you almost were – dead. They had a guy who was going to kill you. I managed to interrupt him in time.’

  He turned, hand on the doorknob.

  ‘Take a word of advice. Claim the insurance on your car, get a Volkswagen, go back to Hamburg, marry Sigi, have kids and stick to reporting. Don’t tangle with professionals again.’

  Half an hour after he had gone the nurse came back.

  ‘There’s a phone call for you,’ she said.

  It was Sigi, crying and laughing down the line. She had received an anonymous call telling her Peter was in Frankfurt General.

  ‘I’m on my way down, right this minute,’ she said, and hung up. The phone rang again.

  ‘Miller? This is Hoffmann. I just saw a piece on the agency tapes. You got a bang on the head. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, Herr Hoffmann,’ said Miller.

  ‘Great. When are you going to be fit?’

  ‘In a few days. Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a story that’s right up your street. A lot of daughters of wealthy papas in Germany are going down to the ski slopes and getting screwed by these handsome young ski-instructors. There’s a clinic in Bavaria that gets them back out of trouble – for a fat fee and no word to Daddy about it. Seems some of the young studs take a rake-off from the clinic. A great little story. Sex amid the Snow, Orgies in Oberland. When can you start?’

  Miller thought.

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Excellent. By the way, that thing you were on. Nazi-hunting. Did you get the man? Is there a story at all?’

  ‘No, Herr Hoffmann,’ said Miller slowly. ‘No story.’

  ‘Didn’t think so. Hurry up and get well. See you in Hamburg.’

  Josef’s plane from Frankfurt via London came into Lod Airport, Tel Aviv, as dusk was settling on Tuesday evening. He was met by two men in a car and taken to headquarters for debriefing by the colonel who had signed the cable from Cormorant. They talked until almost two in the morning, a stenographer noting it all down. When it was over the colonel leaned back, smiled and offered his agent a cigarette.

  ‘Well done,’ he said simply. ‘We’ve checked on the factory and tipped off the authorities – anonymously of course. The research section will be dismantled. We’ll see to that, even if the German authorities don’t. But they will. The scientists apparently didn’t know who they were working for. We’ll approach them all privately and most will agree to destroy their records. They know if the story broke, the weight of opinion in Germany today is pro-Israeli. They’ll get other jobs in industry and keep their mouths shut. So will Bonn, and so will we. What about Miller?’

  ‘He’ll do the same. What about those rockets?’

  The colonel blew a column of smoke and gazed at the stars in the night sky outside.

  ‘I have a feeling they’ll never fly now. Nasser has to be ready by the summer of ’67 at the latest, and if the research work in that Vulkan factory is destroyed, they’ll never mount another operation in time to fit the guidance systems to the rockets before the summer of ’67.’

  ‘Then the danger’s over,’ said the agent. The colonel smiled.

  ‘The danger’s never over. It just changes shape. This particular danger may be over. The big one goes on. We’re going to have to fight again, and maybe after that, before it’s over. Anyway, you must be tired. You can go home now.’

  He reached into a drawer and produced a polythene bag of personal effects, while the agent deposited on the desk his false German passport, money, wallet, keys and in a side room changed clothes, leaving the German clothes with his superior.

  At the door the colonel looked the figure up and down with approval and shook hands.

  ‘Welcome home, Major Uri Ben Shaul.’

  The agent felt better back in his own identity, the one he had taken in 1947 when he first came to Israel and enlisted in the Palmach.

  He took a taxi back home to his flat in the suburbs and let himself in with the key that had just been returned to him with his other effects.

  In the darkened bedroom he could make out the sleeping form of Rivka, his wife, the light blanket rising and fa
lling with her breathing. He peeked into the children’s room and looked down at their two boys. Shlomo who was six, and the two-year-old baby, Dov.

  He wanted badly to climb into bed beside his wife and sleep for several days, but there was one more job to be done. He set down his case and quietly undressed, taking off even the underclothes and socks. He dressed in fresh ones taken from the clothes chest, and Rivka slept on, undisturbed.

  From the closet he took his uniform trousers, cleaned and pressed as they always were when he came home, and laced up the gleaming black calf-boots over them. His khaki shirts and ties were where they always were, with razor-sharp creases down the shirt where the hot iron had pressed. Over them he slipped his battle jacket, adorned only with the glinting steel wings of a paratroop officer and the five campaign ribbons he had earned in Sinai and in raids across the borders.

  The final article was his red beret. When he had dressed he took several articles and stuffed them into a small bag. There was already a dim glint in the east when he got back outside and found his small car still parked where he had left it a month before in front of the block of flats.

  Although it was only February 26th, three days before the end of the last month of winter, the air was mild again and gave promise of a brilliant spring.

  He drove eastwards out of Tel Aviv and took the road to Jerusalem. There was a stillness about the dawn that he loved, a peace and a cleanliness that never ceased to cause him wonder. He had seen it a thousand times on patrol in the desert, the phenomenon of a sunrise, cool and beautiful, before the onset of a day of blistering heat and sometimes of combat and death. It was the best time of the day.

  The road led across the flat, fertile countryside of the littoral plain towards the ochre hills of Judea, through the waking village of Ramleh. After Ramleh there was in those days a detour round the Latroun Salient, five miles to skirt the front positions of the Jordanian forces. To his left he could see the morning breakfast fires of the Arab Legion sending up thin plumes of blue smoke.

  There were a few Arabs awake in the village of Abu Gosh, and when he had climbed up the last hills to Jerusalem the sun had cleared the eastern horizon and glinted off the Dome of the Rock in the Arab section of the divided city.

  He parked his car a quarter of a mile from his destination, the mausoleum of Yad Vashem, and walked the rest; down the avenue flanked by trees, planted to the memory of the gentiles who had tried to help, and to the great bronze doors that guard the shrine to six million of his fellow Jews who died in the holocaust.

  The old gatekeeper told him it was not open so early in the morning, but he explained what he wanted and the man let him in. He passed through into the hall of remembrance and glanced about him. He had been there before to pray for his own family, and still the massive grey granite blocks of which the hall was built overawed him.

  He walked forward to the rail and gazed at the names written in black on the grey stone floor, in Hebrew and Roman letters. There was no light in the sepulchre but that from the Eternal Flame, flickering above the shallow black bowl from which it sprang.

  By its light he could see the names across the floor, score upon score: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald … There were too many to count, but he found the one he sought. Riga.

  He did not need a yarmulka to cover himself, for he still wore his red beret which would suffice. From his bag he took a fringed silk shawl, the tallith, the same kind of shawl Miller had found among the effects of the old man in Altona, and not understood. This he draped round his shoulders.

  He took a prayer-book from his bag and opened it at the right page. He advanced to the brass rail that separates the hall into two parts, gripped it with one hand and gazed across it at the flame in front of him. Because he was not a religious man he had to consult his prayer-book frequently, as he recited the prayer already five thousand years old.

  ‘Yisgaddal,

  Veyiskaddash,

  Shemay rabbah …’

  And so it was that twenty-one years after it had died in Riga, a major of paratroops of the Army of Israel, standing on a hill in the Promised Land, finally said kaddish for the soul of Salomon Tauber.

  It would be agreeable if things in this world always finished with all the ends neatly tied up. This is very seldom the case. People go on, to live and die in their own appointed time and place. So far as it has been possible to establish, this is what happened to the main characters.

  Peter Miller went home, married and stuck to reporting the sort of things that people want to read over breakfast and in the hairdresser’s. By the summer of 1970 Sigi was carrying their third child.

  The men of the Odessa scattered. Eduard Roschmann’s wife returned home and later received a cable from her husband telling her he was in Argentina. She refused to follow him. In the summer of 1965 she wrote to him at their old address, the Villa Jerbal, to ask him for a divorce before the Argentinian courts.

  The letter was forwarded to his new address, and she got a reply consenting to her request, but before the German courts, and enclosing a legal document agreeing to a divorce. She was awarded this in 1966. She still lives in Germany, but has retaken her maiden name of Müller, of which there are tens of thousands in Germany. The man’s first wife, Hella, still lives in Austria.

  The Werwolf finally made his peace with his furious superiors in Argentina, and settled on a small estate he bought from the money realised by the sale of his effects, on the Spanish island of Formentera.

  The radio factory went into liquidation. The scientists working on the guidance systems for the rockets of Helwan all found jobs in industry or the academic world. The project on which they had unwittingly been working for Roschmann, however, collapsed.

  The rockets of Helwan never flew. The fuselages were ready, along with the rocket fuel. The warheads were under production. Those who may doubt the authenticity of those warheads should examine the evidence of Professor Otto Yoklek, given at the trial of Yossef Ben Gal, June 10–26, 1963, Basel Provincial Court, Switzerland. The forty pre-production rockets, helpless for want of the electronic systems necessary to guide them to their targets in Israel, were still standing in the deserted factory at Helwan when they were destroyed by bombers during the Six-Day War. Before that the German scientists had disconsolately returned to Germany.

  The exposure to the authorities of Klaus Winzer’s file upset a lot of Odessa apple-carts. The year which began so well ended for them disastrously. So much so, that years later a lawyer and investigator of the Z-Commission in Ludwigsburg was able to say ‘1964 was a good year for us, yes, a very good year’.

  At the end of 1964 Chancellor Erhard, shaken by the exposures, issued a nationwide and international appeal for all those having knowledge of the whereabouts of wanted SS criminals to come forward and tell the authorities. The response was considerable and the work of the men of Ludwigsburg received an enormous fillip which continued for several more years.

  Of the politicians behind the arms deal between Germany and Israel, Chancellor Adenauer of Germany lived in his villa at Rhöndorf, above his beloved Rhine and close to Bonn, and died there on April 19th, 1967. The Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion stayed on as a member of the Knesset (Parliament) until 1970, then finally retired to his home on the kibbutz of Sede Boker, in the heart of the brown hills of the Negev, on the road from Beer Sheba to Eilat. He likes to receive visitors and talks with animation about many things, but not about the rockets of Helwan and the reprisal campaign against the German scientists who worked on them.

  Of the secret service men in the story, General Amit remained Controller until September 1968, and on his shoulders fell the massive responsibility of ensuring his country was provided with pin-point information in time for the Six-Day War. As history records, he succeeded brilliantly.

  On his retirement he became chairman and managing director of the labour-owned Koor Industries of Israel. He still lives very modestly, and his charming wife Yona refuses
as ever to employ a maid, preferring to do all her own house-work.

  His successor, who still holds the post, is General Zvi Zamir.

  Major Uri Ben Shaul was killed on Wednesday, June 7th, 1967, at the head of a company of paratroops fighting their way into Old Jerusalem. He took a bullet in the head from an Arab Legionary, and went down 400 yards east of the Mandelbaum Gate.

  Simon Wiesenthal still lives and works in Vienna, gathering a fact here, a tip there, slowly tracking down the whereabouts of wanted SS murderers, and each month and year brings him a crop of successes.

  Leon died in Munich in 1968 and after his death the group of men he had led on his personal crusade of vengeance lost heart and split up.

  And last, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank, the tank commander who crossed Miller’s path on the road to Vienna. He was wrong about the fate of his tank, the Dragon Rock. It did not go to the scrap-heap. It was taken away on a low-loader, and he never saw it again. Forty months later he would not have recognised it anyway.

  The steel-grey of its body had been painted out and covered with paint the colour of dust-brown to merge with the landscape of the desert. The black cross of the German army was gone from the turret, and replaced by the pale-blue six-pointed star of David. The name he had given it was gone too, and it had been renamed ‘The Spirit of Masada’.

  It was still commanded by a top sergeant, a hawk-nosed black-bearded man called Nathan Levy. On June 5th, 1967, the M-48 began its first and only week of combat since it had rolled from the workshops of Detroit, Michigan, ten years before. It was one of those tanks that General Israel Tal hurled into the battle for the Mitla Pass two days later, and at noon on Saturday, June 10th, caked with dust and oil, scored by bullets, its tracks worn to wafers by the rocks of Sinai, the old Patton rolled to a stop on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.

  THE END

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