The Odessa File

6

IT TOOK MILLER a week before he could get an interview with the chief of section in the department of the Hamburg Attorney General’s office responsible for investigation into war crimes. He suspected Dom had found out he was not working at Hoffmann’s behest and had reacted accordingly.

The man he confronted was nervous, ill at ease. “You must understand I have only agreed to see you as a result of your persistent inquiries,” he began.

“That’s nice of you all the same,” said Miller ingratiatingly. “I want to inquire about a man whom I assume your department must have under permanent investigation, called Eduard Roschmann.”

“Roschmann?” said the lawyer.

“Roschmann,” repeated Miller. “Captain of the SS. Commandant of Riga ghetto from nineteen forty-one to nineteen forty-four. I want to know if he’s alive; if not, where he’s buried. If you have found him, if he has ever been arrested, and if he has ever been on trial. If not, where he is now.” The lawyer was shaken.

“Good Lord, I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Why not? It’s a matter of public interest. Enormous public interest.” The lawyer had recovered his poise.

“I hardly think so,” he said smoothly.

“Otherwise we would be receiving constant inquiries of this nature.

Actually, so far as I can recall, yours is the first inquiry we’ve ever had from… a member of the public.”

“Actually, I’m a member of the press,” said Miller.

“Yes, that may be. But I’m afraid as regards this kind of information that only means you are entitled to as much as one would give a member of the public.”

“How much is that?” asked Miller.

“I’m afraid we are not empowered to give information regarding the progress of our inquiries.”

“Well, that’s not right, to start with,” said Miller.

“Oh, come now, Herr Miller, you would hardly expect the police to give you information about the progress of their inquiries in a criminal case.”

“I would. In fact, that’s just what I do. The police are customarily very helpful in issuing bulletins on whether an early arrest may be expected. Certainly they’d tell a journalist if their main suspect was, to their knowledge, alive or dead. It helps their relations with the public.”

The lawyer smiled thinly. “I’m sure you perform a very valuable function in that regard,” he said. “But from this department no information may be issued on the state of progress of our work.”

He seemed to hit on a point of argument. “Let’s face it: if wanted criminals knew how close we were to completing the case against them, they’d disappear.”

“That may be so,” answered Miller. “But the records show your department has only put on trial three privates who were guards in Riga. And that was in nineteen fifty, so the men were probably in pretrial detention when the British handed them over to your department. So the wanted criminals don’t seem to be in much danger of being forced to disappear.”

“Really, that’s a most unwarranted suggestion.”

“All right. So your inquiries are progressing. It still wouldn’t harm your case if you were to tell me quite simply whether Eduard Roschmann is under investigation, and where he now is.”

“All I can say is that all matters concerning the area of responsibility of my department are under constant inquiry. I repeat, constant inquiry. And now I really think, Herr Miller, there is nothing more I can do to help you.”

He rose, and Miller followed suit. “Don’t bust a gut,” he said as he walked out.

It was another week before Miller was ready to move.

He spent it mainly at home, reading six books concerned in whole or in part with the war along the Eastern Front and the things that had been done in the camps in the occupied eastern territories. It was the librarian at his local library who mentioned the Z Commission.

“It’s in Ludwigsburg,” he told Miller. “I read about it in a magazine. Its full name is the Central Federal Agency for the Elucidation of Crimes of Violence Committed during the Nazi Era. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so people call it the Zentrale Stelle for short. Even shorter, the Z Commission. It’s the only organization in the country that hunts Nazis on a nationwide, even an international level.”

“Thanks,” said Miller as he left. “I’ll see if they can help me.”

Miller went to his bank the next morning, made out a check to his landlord for three months’ rent to cover January through March, and drew the rest of his bank balance in cash, leaving a 10-mark note to keep the account open.

He kissed Sigi before she went off to work at the club, telling her he would be gone for a week, maybe more. Then he took the Jaguar from its underground home and headed south toward the Rhineland.

The first snows had started, whistling in off the North Sea, slicing in flurries across the wide stretches of the autobahn as it swept south of Bremen and into the flat plain of Lower Saxony.

He paused once for coffee after two hours, then pressed on across North Rhine-Westphalia. Despite the wind and the descending darkness, he enjoyed driving down the autobahn in bad weather. Inside the XK 150 S he had the impression of being in the cockpit of a fast plane, the dashboard lights glowing dully under the facia, and outside the descending darkness of a winter’s night, the icy cold, the slanting flurries of snow caught for a moment in the harsh beam of the headlights, whipping past the windshield and back into nothingness again.

He stuck to the fast lane as always, pushing the Jag to close to 100 miles an hour, watching the growling hulks of the heavy trucks swish past to his right as he passed them.

By six in the evening he was beyond the Hamm Junction, and the glowing lights of the Ruhr began to be dimly discernible to his right through the darkness. He never ceased to be amazed by the Ruhr, mile after mile after mile of factories and chimneys, towns and cities so close as to be in effect one gigantic city a hundred miles long and fifty broad. When the autobahn went into an overpass he could look down to the right and see it stretching away into the December night, thousands of hectares of lights and mills, aglow from a thousand furnaces churning out the wealth of the economic miracle. Fourteen years ago, as he traveled through it by train toward his school holiday in Paris, it had been rubble, and the industrial heart of Germany was hardly even beating. Impossible not to feel proud of what his people had done since then.

Just so long as I don’t have to live in it, he thought as the giant signs of the Cologne Ring began to come up in the light of the headlights. From Cologne he ran southeast, past Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, Mannheim and Heilbronn, and it was late that evening when he cruised to a halt in front of a hotel in Stuttgart, the nearest city to Ludwigsburg, where he spent the night.

Ludwigsburg is a quiet and inoffensive little market town set in the rolling pleasant hills of Wirttemberg, fifteen miles north of the state capital of Stuttgart. Set in a quiet road off the High Street, to the extreme embarrassment of the town’s upright inhabitants, is the home of the Z Commission, a small understaffed, underpaid, overworked group of men whose job and dedication in life is to hunt down the Nazis and the SS guilty during the war of the crimes of mass murder. Before the Statute of Limitations eliminated all SS crimes with the exception of murder and mass murder, those being sought might have been guilty only of extortion, robbery, grievous bodily harm including torture, and a variety of other forms of unpleasantness.

Even with murder as the only remaining charge able to be brought, the Z Commission still had 170,000 names in its files. Not unnaturally, the main effort had been and still is to track down the worst few thousand of the mass-murderers, if and where possible.

Deprived of any powers of arrest, able only to request the police of the various states of Germany to make an arrest when positive identification has already been made, unable to squeeze more than a pittance each year out of the federal government in Bonn, the men of Ludwigsburg worked solely because they were dedicated to the task.

There were eighty detectives on the staff, and fifty investigating attorneys. Of the former group, all were young, below the age of thirtyfive, so that none could possibly have had any implication in the matters under examination. The lawyers were mainly older, but vetted to ensure they too were uninvolved with events prior to 1945.

The lawyers were mainly taken from private practice, to which they would one day return. The detectives knew their careers were finished. No police force in Germany wanted to see on its staff a detective who had once served a term at Ludwigsburg. For detectives prepared to hunt the SS in West Germany, promotion was finished in any other police force in the country.

Quite accustomed to seeing their requests for cooperation ignored in over half the states, to seeing their loaned files unaccountably become missing, to see the quarry suddenly disappear after an anonymous tip-off, the Z men worked on as best they might at a task they realized was not in accordance with the wishes of the majority of their fellow countrymen.

Even on the streets of the smiling town of Ludwigsburg, the men on the staff of the Z Commission went ungreeted and unacknowledged by the citizens, to whom their presence brought an undesired notoriety.

Peter Miller found the commission at 58 Schorndorferstrasse, a large former private house set inside an eight-foot-high wall. Two massive steel gates barred the way to the drive. At one side was a bell handle, which he pulled. A steel shutter slid back, and a face appeared. The inevitable gatekeeper.

“Please?”

“I would like to speak to one of your investigating attorneys,” said Miller.

“Which one?” said the face.

“I don’t know any names,” said Miller. “Anyone will do. Here is my card.” He thrust his press card through the aperture, forcing the man to take it. Then at least be knew it would go inside the building. The man shut the hatch and went away. When he came back, it was to open the gate.

Miller was shown up the five stone steps to the front door, which was closed against the clear but icy winter air.

Inside, it was stuffily hot from the central heating. Another porter emerged from a glass-fronted booth to his right and showed him into a small waiting room. “Someone will be with you right away,” he said and shut the door.

The man who came three minutes later was in his early fifties, mild-mannered and courteous. He handed Miller back his press card and asked, “What can I do for you?” Miller started at the beginning, explaining briefly about Tauber, the diary, his inquiries into what had happened to Eduard Roschmann.

The lawyer listened intently. “Fascinating,” he said at last.

“The point is, can you help me?”

“I wish I could,” said the man, and for the first time since he had started asking questions about Roschmann in Hamburg, Miller believed he had met an official who genuinely would like to help him. “But the point is, although I am prepared to accept your inquiries as completely sincere, I am bound hand and foot by the rules that govern our continued existence here. Which are in effect that no information may be given out about any wanted SS criminal to anyone other than a person supported by the official backing of one of a specific number of authorities.”

“In other words, you can tell me nothing?” said Miller.

“Please understand,” said the lawyer, “this office is under constant attack. Not openly-no one would dare. But privately, within the corridors of power, we are incessantly being sniped at-our budget, such powers as we have, our terms of reference. We are allowed no latitude where the rules are concerned.

Personally, I would like to engage the alliance of the press of Germany to help, but it’s forbidden.”

“I see,” said Miller. “Do you then have any newspaper-clippings reference library?”

“No, we don’t.”

“Is there in Germany at all a newspaper-clippings reference library that is open to an inquiry by a member of the public?”

“No. The only newspaper-clippings libraries in the country are compiled and held by the various newspapers and magazines. The most comprehensive is reputed to be that of Der Spiegel magazine. After that, Komet has a very good one.”

“I find this rather odd,” said Miller. “Where in Germany today does a citizen inquire about the progress of investigation into war crimes, and for background material on wanted SS criminals?”

The lawyer looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’m afraid the ordinary citizen can’t do that,” he said.

“All right,” said Miller. “Where are the archives in Germany that refer to the men of the SST?

“There’s one set here, in the basement,” said the lawyer. “And ours is all composed of photostats. The originals of the entire card index of the SS were captured in nineteen forty-five by an American unit. At the last minute a small group of the SS stayed behind at the castle where they were stored in Bavaria and tried to bum the records. They got through about ten per cent before the American soldiers rushed in and stopped them. The rest were all mixed up. It took the Americans, with some German help, two years to sort out the rest. “During those two years a number of the worst SS men escaped after being temporarily in Allied custody. Their dossiers could not be found in the mess. Since the final classification the entire SS index has remained in Berlin, still under American ownership and direction. Even we have to apply to them if we want something more. Mind you, they’re very good about it; no complaints at all about cooperation from that quarter.”

“And that’s it?” asked Miller. “Just two sets in the whole country?”

“That’s it,” said the lawyer. “I repeat, I wish I could help you.

Incidentally, if you should get anything on Roschmann, we’d be delighted to have it.” Miller thought. “If I find anything, there are only two authorities that can do anything with it. The Attorney General’s office in Hamburg, and you. Right?”

“Yes, that’s all,” said the lawyer.

“And you’re more likely to do something positive with it than Hamburg.” Miller made it a flat statement.

The lawyer gazed fixedly at the ceiling. “Nothing that comes here that is of real value gathers dust on a shelf,” he observed.

“Okay. Point taken,” said Miller and rose. “One thing, between ourselves, are you still looking for Eduard Roschmann?”

“Between ourselves, yes, very much.”

“And if he were caught, there’d be no problems about getting a conviction?”

“None at all,” said the lawyer. “The case against him is tied up solid. He’d get hard labor for life without the option.”

“Give me your phone number,” said Miller.

The lawyer wrote it down and banded Miller the piece of paper. “There’s my name and two phone numbers. Home and office. You can get me any time, day or night. If you get anything new, just call me from any phone box on direct-dial. In every state police force there are men I can call and know I’ll get action if necessary. There are others to avoid. So call me first, right?”

Miller pocketed the paper. “I’ll remember that,” he said as he left.

“Good luck,” said the lawyer.

It’s a long drive from Stuttgart to Berlin, and it took Miller most of the following day. Fortunately it was dry and crisp and the tuned Jaguar ate the miles northward past the sprawling carpet of Frankfurt, past Kassel and Gottingen to Hanover. Here he followed the branch off to the right from autobahn E4 to E8 and the border with East Germany.

There was an hour’s delay at the Marienborn Checkpoint while he filled out the inevitable currency-declaration forms and transit visas to travel though 110 miles of East Germany to West Berlin; and while the blue-uniformed customs man and the green-coated People’s Police, fur-hatted against the cold, poked around in and under the Jaguar. The customs man seemed torn between the frosty courtesy required of a servant of the German Democratic Republic towards a national of revanchist West Germany, and one young man’s desire to examine another’s sports car.

Twenty miles beyond the border, the great motorway bridge reared up to cross the Elbe, where in 1945 the British, honorably obeying the rules laid down at Yalta, had halted their advance on Berlin. To his right, Miller looked down at the sprawl of Magdeburg and wondered if the old prison still stood. There was a further delay at the entry into West Berlin, where again the car was searched, his overnight case emptied onto the customs bench, and his wallet opened to see he had not given all his Westmarks away to the people of the worker’s paradise on his progress down the road. Eventually he was through and the Jaguar roared past the Avus circuit toward the glittering ribbon of the Kurfurstendamm, brilliant with Christmas decorations. It was the evening of December 17.

He decided not to go blundering into the American Document Center the same way he had into the Attorney General’s office in Hamburg or the Z Commission in Ludwigsburg. Without official backing, he had come to realize, no one got anywhere with Nazi files in Germany.

The following morning he called Karl Brandt from the main post office.

Brandt was aghast at his request. “I can’t,” he said into the phone. “I don’t know anyone in Berlin.”

“Well, think. You must have come across someone from the West Berlin force at one of the colleges you attended. I need him to vouch for me when I get there,” shouted Miller back.

“I told you I didn’t want to get involved.”

“Well, you are involved.” Miller waited a few seconds before putting in the body blow. “Either I get a look at that archive officially, or I breeze in and say you sent me.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” said Brandt.

“I damn well would. I’m fed up with being pushed from pillar to post around this lousy country. So find somebody who’ll get me in there officially.

Let’s face it, the request will be forgotten within the hour, once I’ve seen those files.”

“I’ll have to think,” said Brandt, stalling for time.

“I’ll give you an hour,” said Miller. “Then I’m calling back.”

He slammed down the receiver. An hour later Brandt was as angry as ever and more than a little frightened. He heartily wished he had kept the diary to himself and thrown it away.

“There’s a man I was at detective college with,” he said into the phone. “I didn’t know him well, but he’s now with Bureau One of the West Berlin force. That deals with the same subject.”

“What’s his name?”

“Schiller. Volkmar Schiller, detective inspector.”

“I’ll get in touch with him,” said Miller.

“No, leave him to me. I’ll call him today and introduce you to him. Then you can go and see him. If he doesn’t agree to get you in, don’t blame me.

He’s the only one I know in Berlin.”

Two hours later Miller called Brandt back. Brandt sounded relieved. “He’s away on leave,” he said.

“They tell me he’s doing Christmas duty, so he’s away until Monday.”

“But it’s only Wednesday,” said Miller. “That gives me four days to kill.”

“I can’t help it. He’ll be back on Monday morning. I’ll ring him then.”

Miller spent four boring days hanging around West Berlin, waiting for Schiller to come back from leave. Berlin was completely involved, as the Christmas of 1963 approached, with the issue by the East Berlin authorities, for the first time since the Wall had been built in August 1961, of passes enabling West Berliners to go through the Wall and visit relatives living in the eastern sector. The progress of the negotiations between the two sides of the city had held the headlines for days. Miller spent one of his days that weekend by going through the Heinestrasse Checkpoint into the eastern half of the city (as a West German citizen was able to do on the strength of his passport alone) and dropped in on a slight acquaintance, the Reuters correspondent in East Berlin. But the man was up to his neck in work on the Wall-passes story, so after a cup of coffee he left and returned to the west.

On Monday morning he went to see Detective Inspector Volkmar Schiller. To his great relief the man was about his own age and seemed, unusually for an official of any kind in Germany, to have his own cavalier attitude to red tape. Doubtless he would not get far, thought Miller, but that was his problem. He explained briefly what he wanted.

“I don’t see why not,” said Schiller. “The Americans are pretty helpful to us in Bureau One. Because we’re charged by Willy Brandt with investigating Nazi crimes, we’re in there almost every day.” They took Miller’s Jaguar and drove out to the suburbs of the city, to the forests and the lakes, and at the bank of one of the lakes arrived at Number 1, Wasserkuferstieg, in the suburb of Zehlendorf, Berlin 37. The building was a long, low, single-story affair set amid the trees ; “Is that it? said Miller incredulously.

“That’s it,” said Schiller. “Not much, is it? The point is, there are eight floors below ground level. That’s where the archives are stored, in fireproof vaults.” They went through the front door to find a small waiting room with the inevitable porter’s lodge on the right. The detective approached it and proffered his police card. He was handed a form, and the two of them repaired to a table and filled it out.

The detective filled in his name and rank, then asked, “What was the chap’s name again?”

“Roschmann,” said Miller. “Eduard Roschmann.”

The detective filled it in and handed the form back to the clerk in the front office.

“It takes about ten minutes,” said the detective. They went into the larger room set out with rows of tables and chairs. After a quarter of an hour another clerk quietly brought them a file and laid it on the desk. It was about an inch thick, stamped with the single title: ROSCHMANN, EDUARD.

Volkmar Schiller rose. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way,” he said.

“I’ll find my own way back. Mustn’t stay away too long after a week’s leave. If you want anything photostated, ask the clerk.” He gestured to a clerk sitting on a dais at the other end of the reading room, no doubt to ensure that no visitors tried to remove pages from the files.

Miller rose and shook hands. “Many thanks.”

“Not at all.”

Ignoring the other three or four readers hunched over their desks, Miller put his head between his hands and started to peruse the SS’s own dossier on Eduard Roschmann.

It was all there. Nazi Party number, SS number, application form for each, filled out and signed by the man himself, result of his medical check, evaluation of him after his training period, self-written curriculum vitae, transfer papers, officer’s commission, promotion certificates, right up to April 1945. There were also two photographs, taken for the SS records, one full-face, one profile. They showed a man of six feet, one inch, hair shorn close to the head with a parting on the left, staring at the camera with a grim expression, a pointed nose, and a lipless slit of a mouth. Miller began to read….

Eduard Roschmann was born on August 25, 1908, in the Austrian town of Graz, a citizen of Austria, son of a highly respectable brewery worker. He attended kindergarten, school, and high school in Graz. He attended college to try to become a lawyer, but failed. In 1931, at the age of twenty-three, he began work in the brewery where his father had a job and in 1937 was transferred to the administrative department from the brewery floor. The same year he joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS, both at that time banned organizations in neutral Austria. A year later Hitler annexed Austria and rewarded the Austrian Nazis with swift promotions all around.

In 1939, at the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the Waffen SS, was sent to Germany, trained during the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1940, and served in a Waffen SS unit in the overrunning of France.

In December 1940 he was transferred back from France to Berlin -here somebody had handwritten in the margin the word “Cowardice?”-and in January 1941 was assigned to the SD, Amt Three of the RSHA.

In July 1941 he set up the first SD post in Riga, and the following month became commandant of Riga ghetto. He returned to Germany by ship in October 1944 and, after handing over the-remainder of the Jews of Riga to the SD of Danzig, returned to Berlin to report. He returned to his desk in Berlin headquarters of the SS and remained there awaiting reassignment.

The last SS document in the file was evidently never completed, presumably because the meticulous little clerk in Berlin SS headquarters reassigned himself rather quickly in May 1945.

Attached to the back of the bunch of documents was one last one apparently affixed by an American hand since the end of the war. It was a single sheet bearing the typewritten words: “Inquiry made about this file by the British Occupation authorities in December 1947.” Beneath this was the scrawled signature of some GI clerk long since forgotten, and the date December 21, 1947.

Miller gathered the file and eased out of it the self-written life story, the two photographs, and the last sheet. With these he approached the clerk at the end of the room.

“Could I have these photocopied please?”

“Certainly.” The man took the file back and placed it on his desk to await the return of the three missing sheets after copying. Another man also tendered a file and two sheets of its contents for copying. The clerk took these also and placed them all in a tray behind him, whence the sheets were whisked away through an aperture by an unseen hand.

“Please wait. It will take about ten minutes,” the clerk told Miller and the other man. The pair retook their seats and waited, Miller wishing he could smoke a cigarette, which was forbidden; the other man, neat and gray in a charcoal winter coat, sitting with hands folded in his lap.

Ten minutes later there was a rustle behind the clerk, and two envelopes slid through the aperture. He held them up. Both Miller and the middle-aged man rose and went forward to collect.

The clerk glanced quickly inside one of the envelopes. “The file on Eduard Roschmann?” he queried.

“For me,” said Miller and extended his hand.

“These must be for you,” the clerk said to the other man, who was glancing sideways at Miller.

The gray-coated man took his own envelope, and side by side they walked to the door. Outside, Miller ran down the steps and climbed into the Jaguar, slipped away from the curb, and headed back toward the center of the city.

An hour later he rang Sigi. “I’m coming home for Christmas,” he told her.

Two hours later he was on his way out of West Berlin. As his car headed toward the first checkpoint at Drei Linden, the man with the gray coat was sitting in his neat and tidy flat off Savigny Platz, dialing a number in West Germany. He introduced himself briefly to the man who answered.

“I was in the Document Center today. Just normal research, you know the sort I do. There was another man in there. He was reading through the Me of Eduard Roschmann. Then he had three sheets photocopied. After the message that went around recently, I thought I’d better tell you.” There was a burst of questions from the other end.

“No, I couldn’t get his name. He drove away afterward in a long black sports car. Yes, yes, I did. It was a Hamburg number plate.” He recited it slowly while the man at the other end took it down.

“Well, I thought I’d better. I mean, one never knows with these snoopers.”

“Yes, thank you, very kind of you…. Very well, I’ll leave it with you…. Merry Christmas, Kamerad.”