The Odessa File

9

PETER MILLER returned to Simon Wiesenthal’s office the following morning.

“You promised to tell me about the Odessa,” he said. “I remembered something overnight that I forgot to tell you yesterday.” He recounted the incident of Dr. Schmidt, who had accosted him at the Dreesen Hotel and warned him off the Roschmann inquiry.

Wiesenthal pursed his lips and nodded. “You’re up against them, all right,” he said. “It’s most unusual for them to take such a step as to warn a reporter in that way, particularly at such an early stage. I wonder what Roschmann is up to that could be so important.”

Then for two hours the Nazi-hunter told Miller about the Odessa, from its start as an organization for getting wanted SS criminals to a place of safety to its development into an all-embracing free-masonry among those who had once worn the black-and-silver collars, their aiders and abettors.

When the Allies stormed into Germany in 1945 and found the concentration camps with their hideous contents, they not unnaturally rounded on the German people to demand who had carried out the atrocities. The answer was “The SS”-but the members of the SS were nowhere to be found.

Where had they gone? They had either gone underground inside Germany and Austria, or fled abroad. In both cases their disappearance was no spur-of-the-moment flight. What the Allies failed to realize until much later was that each had meticulously prepared his disappearance beforehand.

It casts an interesting light on the so-called patriotism of the SS that, starting at the top with Heinrich Himmler, each tried to save his own skin at the expense of the suffering German people. As early as November 1944 Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate his own safe conduct through the offices of Count Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. The Allies refused to consider letting him off the hook. While the Nazis and the SS screamed at the German people to fight on until the wonder weapons waiting around the comer were delivered, they themselves prepared for their departure to a comfortable exile elsewhere.

They at least knew there were no wonder weapons, and that the destruction of the Reich and, if Hitter had anything to do with it, of the entire German nation, was inevitable.

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 finalized its escape plans. Behind the Army stood the SS, shooting and hanging some of the Army men who took a step backward after already taking more punishment than military flesh and blood is usually expected to stand. Thousands of officers and men of the Wehrmacht died in SS nooses 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 personal papers into their pockets, and vanished into the chaos that was Germany in May 1945. They left the old men 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, it was designed 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 and 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 southward through Austria and into the South Tirol province of Italy.

They were shuttled from safe house to safe house along the route, thence mainly to the Italian port of Genoa or farther south to Rimini and Rome. A number of organizations, 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 in 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 traveled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Vatican, and in many cases the charitable organization 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 would have died for their crimes, bad they been caught by the Allies, passed to safety will never be known, but they were 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 members of the SS into every facet of life in the new Germany.

Throughout the late forties and fifties former members of the SS slipped into the civil service at every level, back into lawyers’ offices, onto 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 other’s interests, and generally ensure that investigation and prosecution of former comrades they called 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 grassroots organization of the ruling party at ward and constituency level. Again, there was no law to forbid a former member of the SS from joining a political party. It may be a coincidence, but unlikely, that no politician with a known record of calling for increased vigor in the investigation and prosecution of SS 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 programs was simple. It was and is to slow down, if not to stop, the investigation and prosecution of former members of the SS. 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 names in a faraway courtroom where an SS man was on trial.

The third task the Odessa set itself in postwar Germany was to reinfiltrate business, commerce, and industry. To this end certain former SS men were established in businesses of their own in the early fifties, bankrolled by funds from the Zurich deposits. Any reasonably well-administered concern founded with plenty of liquidity in the early fifties could 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 SS crimes through advertising revenue, to assist financially the crop of SS-oriented propaganda sheets that have come and gone in postwar 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 defense for any SS man forced to stand trial. In every case where an SS murderer has come before’ a court, his defense lawyers have been among the most brilliant and the most expensive in Germany. But no one ever asks who pays them when their client is a poor man, and they would be the first to deny that they do their work for SS men for free.

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 SS. 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-100,000 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 seventy million Germans of today-and with a large degree of success-that the SS men were in fact patriotic soldiers like the Wehrmacht and that solidarity among 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 five thousand in the aftermath of the July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, in which fewer than fifty men were implicated.

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

By and large the Odessa has succeeded in its tasks of stultifying 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 seem likely to make full confessions to the authorities, of Allied mistakes between 1945 and 1949, of the Cold War, and of the usual German cowardice when faced with a moral problem, in stark contrast to German courage when faced with a military task or a technical issue like the reconstruction of postwar 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 any former member 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 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, after his wife had given away his new name, you said he would need a fresh 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 camp. These papers 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 bow 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 license or an ID card?”

“Because shortly after the founding of the republic the German authorities realized 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 a 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 license, 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,” Wiesenthal said.

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 Center. It still exists. It contains the archives of the Jewish community of Munich-since the war, that is. Everything else was destroyed. I’d try there.”

“Do you have the address?” Simon Wiesenthal checked through an address book. “Reichenbachstrasse, number twenty-seven, Munich,” he said.

“I suppose you want the diary of Salomon Tauber back?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

“Too bad. 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.