The Odessa File

8

MILLER found the house, in a quiet residential street off the main road of the London borough of Wimbledon, without difficulty.

Lord Russell himself answered the ring at the door, a man in his late sixties wearing a woolen cardigan and a bow tie. Miller introduced himself.

“I was in Bonn yesterday,” he told the peer, “lunching with Mr. Anthony Cadbury. He gave me your name and a letter of introduction to you. I hoped I might have a talk with you, sir.” Lord Russell gazed down at him from the step with perplexity. “Cadbury? Anthony Cadbury? I can’t seem to remember…”

“A British newspaper correspondent,” said Miller. “He was in Germany just after the war. He covered the war-crimes trials. Josef Kramer and the others from Belsen. You recall those trials.”

“Course I do. Course I do. Yes, Cadbury, yes, newspaper chap. I remember him now. Haven’t seen him in years. Well, don’t let’s stand here. It’s cold and I’m not as young as I was. Come in, come in.” Without waiting for an answer be turned and walked back down the hall.

Miller followed, closing the door on the chill wind of the last day of 1963. He hung his coat on a hook in the hall at Lord Russell’s bidding and followed him through into the back of the house, where a welcoming fire burned in the sitting-room grate.

Miller held out the letter from Cadbury. Lord Russell took it, read it quickly, and raised his eyebrows.

“Humph. Help in tracking down a Nazi? Is that what you came about?” He regarded Miller from under his eyebrows. Before the German could reply, Lord Russell went on, “Well, sit down, sit down. No good standing around.” They sat in flower-print-covered armchairs on either side of the fire.

“How come a young German reporter is chasing Nazis?” asked Lord Russell without preamble. Miller found his gruff directness disconcerting.

“I’d better explain from the beginning,” said Miller.

“I think you better had,” said the peer, leaning forward to knock out the dottle of his pipe on the side of the grate. While Miller talked he refilled the pipe, lit it, and was puffing contentedly away when the German had finished.

“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.

“Hell, 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 toward 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 twentieth, nineteen forty-seven, in Graz,” Miller told him.

He took the two photocopies 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 dispatch from. Our office in Hanover.” He paused and swung around on Miller. “You say your man Tauber last saw him on April third, nineteen forty-five, 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 toward 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 bad become merely an administrative headache, but with rumors 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.

Traveling by night across country, biding 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 onward for Graz, his home town. In and around Graz he knew people on whom he could count to shelter him.

He passed around Vienna and had almost made it when he was challenged by a British patrol on May 6.

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 laborer in the fields.

Then, on December 20, 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 around 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 skeptical, 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 have 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 8, 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 diarrhea. 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 organizations prepared to help ex-Nazis escape. Sixteen months later, in May nineteen forty-nine, 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 eighth of January nineteen forty-eight. 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.

He spent the night at Munich, having made slow time along the snow-encrusted autobahns, frequently narrowed down to one lane while a snowplow or sanding 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 autobalm 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. In the lefthand, 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 maneuvers. 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 armored 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 in him. It was January 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 turrets. For Ulrich Frank, eleven years old, it was a turning point. When he left the cinema be 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 maneuvers in the forests around Bad Tolz, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank commanded his first tank, an American-built M-48 Patton.

It was his last maneuver 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 reequipped. 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 stenciled beneath it, and felt a touch of regret. Though he had commanded it for only six months, it would always be his first tank, his favorite. 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 inkpot at him. After the reequipment, he supposed the Patton would go for scrap.

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

Miller finally made it to Vienna in midafternoon of that day, January 3.

Without checking into a hotel, he drove straight into the city center and asked his way to Rudolf Square.

He found number 7 easily enough and glanced at the list of tenants. Against the third floor was a card saying DOCUMENTATION CENTER. He mounted and knocked at the cream-painted wooden door, From behind it someone looked through the peephole before he heard the lock being drawn back. A pretty blond 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 onto 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, around a comer, and to the end of the apartment. 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 organizations 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 reread Lord Russell’s letter.

“My friend 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 began to explain briefly.

“I think you’d better 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 as another period had been 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?” Simeon Wiesenthal was gazing out into the court of the apartment house, watching the snowflakes dropping down the narrow shaft to the ground three floors below.

“Have you got the diary?” he asked at length. Miller reached down, took it out of his briefcase, 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 own money. 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 over the weekend?”

“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.

“I collect the stamps,” he said, “so I don’t like to damage the envelopes.” He worked away for a few more minutes. “I read the diary last night at home. Remarkable document.”

“Were you surprised?” asked Miller.

“Surprised? No, not by the contents. We all went through much the same sort of thing. With variations, of course. But so precise. Tauber would have made a perfect witness. He noticed everything, even the small details. And noted them-at the time. That is very important to get a conviction before German or Austrian courts. And now he’s dead.”

Miller considered for a while. He looked up. “Herr Wiesenthal, so far as I know, you’re the first Jew I have ever really had a long talk with, who went through all that. One thing Tauber said in his diary surprised me: he said there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?”

“No,” said the Nazi-hunter flatly. “Tauber was right.”

“How can you say that, if we killed fourteen million people?”

“Because you, personally, were not there. You did not kill anyone. As Tauber said, the tragedy is that the specific murderers have not been brought to justice.”

“Then who,” asked Miller, “really did kill those people?”

Simon Wiesenthal regarded him intently. “Do you know about the various branches of the SS? About the sections within the SS that really were responsible for killing those millions?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then I’d better tell you. You’ve heard about the Reich Economic Administration Main Office, charged with exploiting the victims before they died?”

“Yes, I read something about it.”

“Its job was in a sense the middle section of the operation,” said Herr Wiesenthal. “That left the business of identifying the victims among the rest of the population, rounding them up, transporting them, and, when the economic exploitation was over, finishing them off. This was the task of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, which actually killed the fourteen million already mentioned. The rather odd use of the word ‘Security’ in the title of this office stems from the quaint Nazi idea that the victims posed a threat to the Reich, which had to be made secure against them. Also in the functions of the RSHA were the tasks of rounding up, interrogating, and incarcerating in concentration camps other enemies of the Reich like Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, editors, reporters, and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, resistance fighters in the occupied countries, and later Army officers like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, both murdered for suspicion of harboring anti-Hitler sentiments.

“The RSHA was divided into six departments, each called an Amt. Amt One was for administration and personnel; Amt Two was equipment and finance. Amt Three was the dreaded Security Service and Security Police, headed by Reinhardt Heydrich, assassinated in Prague in 1942, and later by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, executed by the Allies. Theirs were the teams who devised the tortures used to make suspects talk, both inside Germany and in the occupied countries.

“Amt Four was the Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Milller (still missing), whose Jewish Section, department B4, was headed by Adolf Eichmann, executed by the Israelis in Jerusalem after being kidnapped from Argentina. Amt Five was the Criminal Police, and Amt Six the Foreign Intelligence Service.

“The two successive heads of Amt Three, Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner, were also the overall chiefs of the whole RSHA, and throughout the reigns of both men the head of Amt One was their deputy. He is Lieutenant General of the SS Bruno Streckenbach, who today has a well-paid job with a department store in Hamburg and lives in Vogelweide.

“If one is going to specify guilt, therefore, most of it rests on these two departments of the SS, and the numbers involved are thousands, not the millions who make up contemporary Germany. The theory of the collective guilt of sixty million Germans, including millions of small children, women, old-age pensioners, soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who had nothing to do with the holocaust, was originally conceived by the Allies, but has since suited the former members of the SS extremely well. The theory is the best ally they have, for they realize, as few Germans seem to do, that so long as the collective-guilt theory remains unquestioned nobody will start to look for specific murderers-at least, look hard enough. The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective-guilt theory.”

Miller digested what he had been told. Somehow the very size of the figures involved baffled him. It was not possible to consider fourteen million people as each and every one an individual. It was easier to think of one man, dead on a stretcher under the rain in a Hamburg street.

“The reason Tauber apparently had for killing himself,” Miller asked, “do you believe it?”

Herr Wiesenthal studied a beautiful pair of African stamps on one of the envelopes. “I believe he was right in thinking no one would believe that he saw Roschmann on the steps of the Opera. If that’s what he believed, then he was right.”

“But he didn’t even go to the police,” said Miller.

Simon Wiesenthal snipped the edge off another envelope and scanned the letter inside. After a pause he replied, “No. Technically he should have. I don’t think it would have done any good. Not in Hamburg, at any rate.”

“What’s wrong with Hamburg?”

“You went to the State Attorney General’s office there?” asked Wiesentbal mildly.

“Yes, I did. They weren’t terribly helpful.”

Wiesenthal looked up. “I’m afraid the Attorney General’s department in Hamburg has a certain reputation in this office,” he said. “Take for example the man mentioned by me just now, SS General Bruno Streckenbach. Remember the name?”

“Of course,” said Miller. What about him?”

For answer Simon Wiesenthal riffled through a pile of papers on his desk, abstracted one, and gazed at it. “Here he is,” he said. “Known to West German justice as Document 141 JS 747/61. Want to hear about him?”

“I have time,” said Miller.

“Right. Here goes. Before the war Gestapo chief in Hamburg. Climbed rapidly from then on to a top position in the SD and SP, the Security Service and Security Police sections of the RSHA. In 1939 he led an extermination squad in Nazi-occupied Poland. At the end of 1940 he was head of the SD and SP sections of the SS for the whole of Poland, the so-called General Government, sitting in Cracow. Thousands were exterminated by SD and SP units in Poland during that period, mainly through Operation AB.

“At the start of 1941 he came back to Berlin, promoted to Chief of Personnel for the SD. That was Amt Three of the RSHA. His chief was Reinhardt Heydrich, and he became his deputy. Just before the invasion of Russia he helped to organize the extermination squads that went in behind the Army. As head of staffing he picked the personnel himself, for they were all from the SD branch.

“Then he was promoted again, this time to head of personnel for the entire six branches of the RSHA, and remained deputy chief of the RSHA under first Heydrich, who was killed by Czech partisans in Prague in 1942-that was the killing that led to the reprisal at Lidice-and then under Ernst Kaltenbrunner. As such he had all-embracing responsibility for the choice of personnel of the roving extermination squads and the fixed SD units throughout the Nazi-occupied eastern territories until the end of the war.”

Miller looked stunned. “They haven’t arrested him?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The police of Hamburg, of course.”

For answer Simon Wiesenthal rummaged in a drawer and produced another sheet of paper. He folded it neatly down the center from top to bottom and laid it in front of Miller so that only the left side of the sheet was facing upward.

“Do you recognize those names?” he asked.

Miller scanned the list of ten names with a frown. “Of course. I’ve been a police reporter in Hamburg for years. These are all senior police officers of the Hamburg force. Why?”

“Spread the paper out,” said Wiesenthal.

Miller did so. Fully expanded, the sheet read:

Miller looked up. “Christ,” he said.

“Now do you begin to understand why a lieutenant general of the SS is walking around Hamburg today? They can’t arrest him. He was their commanding officer once.” Miller looked at the list in disbelief. “That must have been what Brandt meant about inquiries into the former SS not being very popular in the Hamburg police.”

“Probably,” said Wiesenthal. “Nor is the Attorney General’s office the most energetic in Germany. There’s one lawyer on the staff at least who is trying, but certain interested parties have tried to have him dismissed several times.”

The pretty secretary poked her head around the door. “Tea or coffee?” she asked.

After a lunchtime break, Miller returned to the office. Simon Wiesenthal had in front of him a number of sheets spread out, extracts from his own Roschmann file. Miller settled himself in front of the desk, got out his notebook, and waited.

Simon Wiesenthal began to relate the Roschmann story from January 8, 1948.

It had been agreed between the British and American authorities that after Roschmann had testified at Dachau he would be moved on to the British Zone of Germany, probably Hanover, to await his own trial and almost certain hanging. Even while in prison in Graz he bad begun to plan his escape.

He had made contact with a Nazi escape organization working in Austria called the Six-Point Star, nothing to do with the Jewish symbol of the six-pointed star, but so called because the Nazi organization had its tentacles in six major Austrian cities, mainly in the British Zone.

At 6:00 a.m. on the eighth, Roschmann was awakened and taken to the train waiting at Graz station.

Once he was in the compartment, an argument started between the Military Police sergeant, who wanted to keep the handcuffs on Roschmann throughout the journey, and the Field Security sergeant, who suggested taking them Off.

Roschmann influenced the argument by claiming that he had diarrhea from the prison diet and wished to go to the lavatory. He was taken, the handcuffs were removed, and one of the sergeants waited outside the door until he had finished. As the train chugged through the snowbound landscape Roschmann made three requests to go to the lavatory. Apparently during this time he prized the window in the lavatory open, so that it slid easily on its runners.

Roschmann knew he had to get out before the Americans took him over at Salzburg for the last run by car to their own prison at Munich, but station after station went by, and still the train was going too fast.

It stopped at Hallein, and one of the sergeants went to buy some food on the platform. Roschmann again said he wanted to go to the lavatory. It was the more easygoing FSS sergeant who accompanied him, warning him not to use the toilet while the train was stationary. As the train moved slowly out of Hallein, Roschmann jumped from the window into the snowdrifts. It was ten minutes before the sergeants beat down the door, and by then the train was running fast down the mountains toward Salzburg.

He staggered through the snow as far as a peasant’s cottage and took refuge there. The following day he crossed the border from Upper Austria into Salzburg province and contacted the Six-Point Star organization. It brought him to a brick factory, where he passed as a laborer, while contact was made with the Odessa for a passage to the south and Italy.

At that time the Odessa was in close contact with the recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, into which scores of former SS soldiers had fled. Four days after contact was made, a car with French number plates was waiting outside the town of Ostermieting and took on board Roschmann and five other Nazi escapers. The Foreign Legion driver, equipped with papers that enabled the car to cross borders without being searched, brought the six SS men over the Italian border to Merano and was paid in cash by the Odessa representative there, a hefty sum per head of his passengers.

From Merano, Roschmann was taken down to an Italian displaced-persons camp at Rimini. Here, in the camp hospital, he bad the five toes of his right foot amputated, for they were rotten with frostbite he had picked up while wandering through the snow after escaping from the train. Since then he had wom an orthopedic shoe.

His wife in Graz got a letter from him in October 1948 from the camp at Rimini. For the first time he used the new name he had been given, Fritz Bernd Wegener.

Shortly afterward he was transferred to the Franciscan Monastery in Rome, and when his papers were finalized he set sail from the harbor at Naples for Buenos Aires. Throughout his stay at the monastery in the Via Sicilia he had been among scores of comrades of the SS and the Nazi Party and under the personal supervision of Bishop Alois Hudal, who ensured that they lacked nothing.

In the Argentinian capital he was received by the Odessa and lodged with a German family called Vidmar in the Calle Hipolito Irigoyen. Here he lived for months in a furnished room. Early in 1949 he was advanced the sum of 50,000 American dollars out of the Bormann funds in Switzerland and went into business as an exporter of South American hardwood timber to Western Europe. The firm was called Stemmler and Wegener, for his false papers from Rome firmly established him as Fritz Bernd Wegener, born in the South Tirol province of Italy.

He also engaged a German girl as his secretary, Irmtraud Sigrid Muller, and in early 1955 he married her, despite his wife Hella, still living in Graz.

But Roschmann was becoming nervous. In July 1952 Eva Peron, the wife of the dictator of Argentina and the power behind the throne, had died of cancer.

Three years later the writing was on the wall for the Peron regime, and Roschmann spotted it.

If Peron fell, much of the protection accorded by him to ex-Nazis might be removed by his successors.

With his new wife, Roschmann left for Egypt.

He spent three months there in the summer of 1955 and came to West Germany in the autumn. Nobody would have known a thing but for the anger of a woman betrayed. His first wife, Hella Roschmann, wrote to him from Graz, care of the Vidmar family in Buenos Aires, during that summer. The Vidmars, having no forwarding address for their former lodger, opened the letter and replied to the wife in Graz, telling her that he had gone back to Germany but had married his secretary.

Furious, the wife informed the police of his new name, Fritz Wegener, and asked for a warrant for his arrest on a charge of bigamy.

Immediately a lookout was posted for a man calling himself Fritz Bernd Wegener in West Germany.

“Did they get him?” asked Miller.

Wiesenthal looked up and shook his head. “No, he disappeared again. Almost certainly under a new set of false papers, and almost certainly in Germany.

You see, that’s why I believe Tauber could have seen him. It all fits with the known facts.”

“Where’s the first wife, Hella Roschmann?” asked Miller.

“She still lives in Graz.”

“Is it worth contacting her?”

Wiesenthal shook his head. “I doubt it. The moment she learned of the bigamy, she spilled the beans to the police as far as she knew anything. There’s nothing more she knows beyond what she has said, for she now hates him like poison and wants him arrested. Needless to say, after being ‘blown,’ Roschmann is not likely to reveal his whereabouts to her again. Or his new name. For him it must have been quite an emergency when his identity of Wegener was exposed. He must have acquired his new papers in a devil of a hurry.”

“Who would have got them for him?” asked Miller.

“The Odessa, certainly.”

“Just what is the Odessa? You’ve mentioned it several times in the course of the Roschmann story.”

“You’ve never heard of them?” asked Wiesenthal.

“No. Not until now.” Simon Wiesenthal glanced at his watch. “You’d better come back in the morning. I’ll tell you all about them.”