The Odessa File

10

MILLER DROVE into Munich at 10 midmorning of January 9 and found 27 Reichenbachstrasse from a map of Munich bought at a newspaper kiosk in the out skirts. Parking down the road, he surveyed the Jewish Community Center before entering. It was a flat-fronted five-story building. The fagade of the ground floor was of uncovered stone blocks; above this the façade was of gray cement over brick. The fifth and top floor was marked by a row of mansard windows set in the red tiled roof. At ground level there was a double door of glass panels 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.

He went up to the third floor and presented himself at the inquiry desk.

While he waited he glanced around the room. There were rows of books, all new, for the original library had long since been burned 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 these.

“Can I help you?” He looked around to the inquiry desk to find it now occupied by a dark-eyed woman in her mid-forties. There was a strand of hair failing over her eyes, which she nervously brushed back into place several times a minute.

Miller made his request: any trace of Olli 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 is a common name. But there is nobody listed.”

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 are missing. They have lists from all over Germany, whereas we only have the lists of those originating in Munich who came back.”

“Where is the Tracing Service?” asked Miller.

“It’s at Arolsen-in-Waldeck. That’s just outside Hanover, Lower Saxony. It’s run by the Red Cross, really.”

Miller thought for a minute. “Would there be anybody else left in Munich who was at Riga? The man I’m really trying to find is the former commandant.”

There was silence in the room. Miller sensed the man by the newspaper rack turn around to look at him. The woman seemed subdued.

“It might be possible there are a few left who were at Riga and now live in Munich. Before the war there were twenty-five thousand Jews in Munich.

About a tenth came back. Now we are about five thousand again, half of them children born since nineteen forty-five. I might find someone who was at Riga. But I’d have to go through the whole list of survivors. The camps they were in are marked against the names. Could you come back tomorrow?”

Miller thought for a moment, debating whether to give up and go home. The chase was getting pointless.

“Yes,” he said at length. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Thank you.” He was back in the street, reaching for his car keys, when he felt a step behind him.

“Excuse me,” said a voice. He turned. The man behind him was the one who had been reading the newspapers.

“You are inquiring about Riga?” asked the man. “About the commandant of Riga? Would that be Captain Roschmann?”

“Yes, it would,” said Miller. “Why?”

“I was at Riga,” said the man. “I knew Roschmann. Perhaps I can help you.” The man was short and wiry, somewhere in his mid-forties, with button-bright brown eyes and the rumpled air of a damp sparrow.

“My name is Mordecai,” he said. “But people call me Motti. Shall we have coffee and talk?” They adjourned to a nearby coffee shop.

Miller, melted slightly by his companion’s chirpy manner, explained his hunt so far, from the back streets of Altona to the Community Center of Munich.

The man listened quietly, nodding occasionally. “Mmmm. Quite a pilgrimage. Why should you, a German, want to track down Roschmann?”

“Does it matter? I’ve been asked that so many times I’m getting tired of it. What’s so strange about a German being angry at what was done years ago?”

Motti shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s unusual for a man to go to such lengths, that’s all. About Roschmann’s disappearance in nineteen fifty-five. You really think this new passport must have been provided by the Odessa?”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” replied Miller. “And it seems the only way to find the man who forged it would be to penetrate the Odessa.”

Motti considered the young German in front of him for some time. “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked at length.

Miller told him he had not checked into any hotel yet, as it was stiff early afternoon. But there was one he knew, that he had stayed in before.

At Motti’s request he went to the coffee-shop telephone and called the hotel for a room.

When he got back to the table, Motti had gone. There was a note under the coffee cup. It said: “Whether you get a room there or not, be in the residents’ lounge at eight tonight.” Miller paid for the coffees and left.

The same afternoon, in his lawyer’s office, the Werwolf read once again the written report that had come in from his colleague in Bonn, the man who had introduced himself to Miller a week earlier as Dr. Schmidt.

The Werwolf had had the report already for five days, but his natural caution had caused him to wait and reconsider before taking direct action.

The last words his superior, General Glucks, had spoken to him in Madrid in late November virtually robbed him of any freedom of action, but like most deskbound men he found comfort in delaying the inevitable. “A permanent solution” had been the way his orders were expressed, and he knew what that meant. Nor did the phraseology of “Dr. Schmidt” leave him any more room for maneuver.

“A stubborn young man, truculent and headstrong, probably obstinate, and with an undercurrent of genuine and personal hatred in him for the Kamerad in question, Eduard Roscbmann, for which no explanation seems to exist. Unlikely to listen to reason, even in the face of personal threat….” The Werwolf read the doctor’s summing up again and sighed. He reached for the phone and asked his secretary, Hilda, for an outside line. When he had it he dialed a number in Dusseldorf.

After several rings it was answered, and a voice said simply, “Yes.”

“There’s a call for Herr Mackensen,” said the Werwolf.

The voice from the other end said simply, “Who wants him?” Instead of answering the question directly, the Werwolf gave the first part of the identification code. “Who was greater than Frederick the Great?”

The voice from the other end replied, “Barbarossa.” There was a pause, then: “This is Mackensen,” said the voice.

“Werwolf,” replied the chief of the Odessa in West Germany. “The holiday is over, I’m afraid. There is work to be done. Get over here by tomorrow morning.”

“When?” replied Mackensen.

“Be here at ten,” said the Werwolf. “Tell my secretary your name is Keller. I will ensure you have an appointment in that name.”

He put the phone down. In Dusseldorf, Mackensen rose and went into the bathroom of his flat to shower and shave. He was a big, powerful man, a former sergeant of the Das Reich division of the SS, who bad learned his killing when hanging French hostages in Tulle and Limoges, back in 1944.

After the war he had driven a truck for the Odessa, running human cargoes south through Germany and Austria into the South Tirol province of Italy.

In 1946, stopped by an overly suspicious American patrol, he had slain all four occupants of the jeep, two of them with his bare hands: From then on, he too was on the run.

Employed later as a bodyguard for senior men of the Odessa, he had been saddled with the nickname

“Mack the Knife,” although, oddly, he never used a knife, preferring the strength of his butcher’s hands to strangle or break the necks of his “assignments.” Rising in the esteem of his superiors, he had become in the mid-fifties the executioner of the Odessa, the man who could be relied on to cope quietly and discreetly with those who came too close to the top men of the organization, or those from within who elected to squeal on their comrades.

By January 1964 he had fulfilled twelve assignments of this kind.

The call came on the dot of eight. It was taken by the reception clerk, who put his head around the comer of the residents’ lounge, where Miller sat watching television.

He recognized the voice on the end of the phone.

“Herr Miller? It’s me, Motti. I think I may be able to help you. Rather, some friends may be able to. Would you like to meet them?”

“I’ll meet anybody who can help me,” said Miller, intrigued by the maneuvers.

“Good,” said Motti. “Leave your hotel and turn left down Schillerstrasse. Two blocks down on the same side is a cake and coffee shop called Lindemann. Meet me in there.”

“When? Now?” asked Miller.

“Yes. Now. I would come to the hotel, but I’m with my friends here. Come right away.” He hung up.

Miller took his coat and walked out through the doors. He turned left and headed down the pavement.

Half a block from the hotel something hard was jabbed into his ribs from behind, and a car slid up to the curb.

“Get into the back seat, Herr Miller,” said a voice in his ear.

The door beside him swung open and with a last dig in the ribs from the man behind, Miller ducked his bead and entered the car. The driver was up front; the back seat contained another man, who slid over to make room for him. He felt the man behind him enter the car also; then the door was slammed and the car slid from the curb.

Miller’s heart was thumping. He glanced at the three men in the car with him, but recognized none of them.

The man to his right, who had opened the door for him to enter, spoke first. “I am going to bind your eyes,” he said simply, producing a sort of black sock. “We would not want you to see where you are going.” Miller felt the sock being pulled over his head until it covered his nose. He remembered the cold blue eyes of the man in the Dreesen Hotel and recalled what the man in Vienna had told him. “Do be careful, these men can be dangerous.” Then he remembered Motti and wondered how one of them could have been reading a Hebrew newspaper in the Jewish Community Center.

The car drove for twenty-five minutes, then slowed and stopped. He heard some gates being opened; the car surged forward again and stopped finally. He was eased out of the back seat, and with a man on each side he was helped across a courtyard. For a moment he felt the cold night air on his face; then he was back inside again. A door slammed behind him, and he was led down some steps into what seemed to be a cellar. But the air was warm and the chair into which he was lowered was well upholstered.

He heard a voice say, “Take off the bandage,” and the sock over his head was removed. He blinked as his eyes got used to the light.

The room he was in was evidently below ground, for it had no windows. But an air extractor hummed high on one wall. It was well decorated and comfortable, evidently a form of committee room, for there was a long table with eight chairs ranged close to the far wall. The remainder of the room was an open space, fringed by five armchairs. In the center were a circular carpet and a coffee table.

Motti was standing, smiling quietly, almost apologetically, beside the committee table. The two men who had brought Miller, both well built and in early middle age, were perched on the arms of the armchairs to his left and right. Directly opposite him, across the coffee table, was a fourth man. Miller supposed the car driver had remained upstairs to lock up.

The fourth man was evidently in command. He sat at case in his chair while his three lieutenants stood or perched around him. Miller judged him to be about sixty, lean and bony, with a hollow-cheeked, hook-nosed face. The eyes worried Miller. They were brown and deep-sunk into the sockets, but bright and piercing, the eyes of a fanatic. It was he who spoke.

“Welcome, Herr Miller. I must apologize for the strange way in which you were brought to my home.

The reason for it was that if you decide you wish to turn down my proposal to you, you can be returned to your hotel and will never see any of us again.

“My friend here”-he gestured to Motti-“informs me that for reasons of your own you are hunting a certain Eduard Roschmann. And that to get closer to him you might be prepared to attempt to penetrate the Odessa.

To do that you would need help. A lot of help. However, it might suit our interests to have you inside the Odessa. Therefore we might be prepared to help you. Do you follow me?” Miller stared at him in astonishment. “Let me get one thing straight,” he said at length. “Are you telling me you are not from the Odessa?” The man raised his eyebrows. “Good heavens, you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.” He leaned forward and drew back the sleeve of his left wrist. On the forearm was tattooed a number in blue ink.

“Auschwitz,” said the man. He pointed to the two men at Miller’s sides.

“Buchenwald and Dachau.” He pointed at Motti. “Riga and Treblinka.” He replaced his sleeve.

“Herr Miller, there are some who think the murderers of our people should be brought to trial. We do not agree. Just after the war I was talking with a British officer, and he told me something that has guided my life ever since. He said to me, ‘If they had murdered six million of my people, I too would build a monument of skulls. Not the skulls of those who died in the concentration camps, but of those who put them there.’ Simple logic, Herr Miller, but persuasive. I and my group are men who decided to stay on inside Germany after nineteen forty-five with one object, and one only, in mind. Revenge, revenge pure and simple. We don’t arrest them, Herr Miller; we kill them like the swine they are. My name is Leon.”

Leon interrogated Miller for four hours before he was satisfied of the reporter’s genuineness. Like others before him, he was puzzled about the motivation but had to concede it was possible Miller’s reason was the one he gave, indignation at what had been done by the SS during the war. When he had finished, Leon leaned back in his chair and surveyed the younger man for a long time.

“Are you aware how risky it is to try and penetrate the Odessa, Herr Miller?” he asked.

“I can guess,” said Miller. “For one thing, I’m too young.”

Leon shook his head. “There’s no question of your trying to persuade former SS men you are one of them under your own name. For one thing, they have lists of former SS men, and Peter Miller is not on that list. For another, you have to age ten years at least. It can be done, but it involves a complete new identity, and a real identity. The identity of a man who really existed and was in the SS. That alone means a lot of research by us, and the expenditure of a lot of time and trouble.”

“Do you think you can find such a man?” asked Miller.

Leon shrugged. “It would have to be a man whose death cannot be checked out,” he said. “Before the Odessa accepts a man at all, it checks him out. You have to pass all the tests. That also means you will have to live for five or six weeks with a genuine former SS man who can teach you the folklore, the technical terms, the phraseology, the behavior patterns. Fortunately, we know such a man.”

Miller was amazed. “Why should he do such a thing?”

“The man I have in mind is an odd character. He is a genuine SS captain who sincerely regretted what was. done. He experienced remorse. Later he was inside the Odessa and passed information about wanted Nazis to the authorities. He would be doing so still, but he was ‘shopped’ and was lucky to escape with his life. Now he lives under a new name, in a house outside Bayreuth.”

“What else would I have to learn?”

“Everything about your new identity. Where he was born, his date of birth, how he got into the SS, where he trained, where he served, his unit, his commanding officer, his entire history from the end of the war onward. You will also have to be vouched for by a guarantor. That will not be easy. A lot of time and trouble will have to be spent on you, Herr Miller.

Once you are in, there will be no pulling back.”

“What’s in this for you?” asked Miller suspiciously.

Leon rose and paced the carpet. “Revenge,” he said simply. “Like you, we want Roschmann. But we want more. The worst of the SS killers are living under false names. We want those names. That’s what’s in it for us.”

“That sounds like information that might be of use to Israeli Intelligence,” said Miller.

Leon glanced at him shrewdly. “It is,” he said shortly. “We occasionally cooperate with them, though they do not own us.”

“Have you ever tried to get your own men inside the Odessa?” asked Miller.

Leon nodded. “Twice,” he said.

“What happened?”

“The first was found floating in a canal without his fingernails. The second disappeared without trace. Do you still want to go ahead?”

Miller ignored the question. “If your methods are so efficient, why were they caught?”

“They were both Jewish,” said Leon shortly. “We tried to get the tattoos from the concentration camps off their arms, but they left scars. Besides, they were both circumcised. That was why, when Motti reported to me on a genuine Aryan German with a grudge against the SS, I was interested. By the way, are you circumcised?”

“Does it matter?” inquired Miller.

“Of course. If a man is circumcised it does not prove he’s a Jew. Many Germans are circumcised as well.

But if he is not, it more or less proves he is not a Jew.”

“I’m not,” said Miller shortly.

Leon nodded with pensive satisfaction. “Certainly that improves your chances. That just leaves the problem of changing your appearance and training you to play a very dangerous role.” It was long past midnight. Leon looked at his watch. “Have you eaten?” he asked Miller. The reporter shook his head.

“Motti, I think a little food for our guest.” Motti grinned and nodded. He disappeared through the door of the cellar room and went up into the house.

“You’ll have to spend the night here,” said Leon to Miller. “We’ll bring a bedroll down to you. Don’t try to leave, please. The door has three locks, and all will be shut on the far side. Give me your car keys, and I’ll have your car brought around here. It will be better out of sight for the next few weeks. Your hotel bill will be paid and your luggage brought around here too. In the morning you will write letters to your mother and girl friend, explaining that you will be out of contact for several weeks, maybe months.

Understood?” Miller nodded and handed over his car keys. Leon gave them to one of the other two men, who quietly left.

“In the morning we will drive you to Bayreuth, and you will meet our SS officer. His name is Alfred Oster. He’s the man you will live with. I will arrange it. Meanwhile, excuse me. I have to start looking for a new name and identity for you.” He rose and left. Motti soon returned with a plate of food and half a dozen blankets, leaving Miller to his cold chicken, potato salad, and growing doubts.

Far away to the north, in the General Hospital of Bremen, a ward orderly was patrolling his ward in the small hours of the morning. Around a bed at the end of the room was a tall screen that shut off the occupant from the rest of the ward.

The orderly, a middle-aged man called Hartstein, peered around the screen at the man in the bed. He lay very still. Above his head a dim light was burning through the night. The orderly entered the screened-off area and checked the patient’s pulse. There was none.

He looked down at the ravaged face of the cancer victim, and something the man had said in delirium three days earlier caused the orderly to lift the left arm of the dead man out of the blankets. Inside the man’s armpit was tattooed a number. It was the dead man’s blood group, a sure sign that the patient bad once been in the SS. The reason for the tattoo was that SS men were regarded in the Reich as more valuable than ordinary soldiers, so when wounded they always had first chance at any available plasma.

Hence the tattooed blood group.

Orderly Hartstein covered the dead man’s face and glanced into the drawer of the bedside table. He drew out the driving license that bad been placed there along with the other personal possessions when the man had been brought in after collapsing in the street. It showed a man of about thirty-nine, date of birth June 18, 1925, and the name of Rolf Gunther Kolb.

The orderly slipped the driving license into the pocket of his white coat and went off to report the death to the night physician.