The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  ‘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 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 round 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 25,000 Jews in Munich. About a tenth came back. Now we are about 5000 again, half of them children born since 1945. 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 Mordechai,’ he said. ‘But people call me Motti. Shall we have a 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 Centre 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 1955. You really think his 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 in to any hotel yet, as it was still 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.

  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 Gluecks had spoken to him in Madrid in late November virtually robbed him of any freedom of action, but like most desk-bound 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 manoeuvre.

  ‘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 Roschmann, 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 dialled a number in Düsseldorf.

  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. ‘The holiday is over, I’m afraid. There is work to be done. Get over here by tomorrow evening.’

  ‘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 Düsseldorf, 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 had 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 Tyrol 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 organisation, 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 round the corner of the residents’ lounge, where Miller sat watching television.

  He recognised 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 manoeuvres.

  ‘Good,’ said Motti. ‘Leave your hotel and turn left down Schiller Strasse. Two blocks down on the same side is a cake-and-coffee shop called Linde-mann. 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 kerb.

  ‘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 head 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 kerb.

  Miller’s heart was thumping. He glanced at the three men in the car with him, but recognised 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. ‘We would not want you to see where you are going.’

  Miller felt a sort of black sock 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. ‘Be careful, the men of the Odessa can be dangerous.’ Then he remembered Motti, and wondered how one of them could have been reading a Hebrew newspaper in the Jewish Community Centre.

  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 easy armchairs. In the centre was a circular carpet and a coffee table.

  Motti was standing smiling quietly, almost apologetically, beside the committee table. The two men who had brought him, 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 the fourth man. He supposed the car driver had remained upstairs to lock up.

  The fourth man was evidently in command. He sat at ease 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 apologise 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. There 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 pulled back 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 1945 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 for 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 leant 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 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 accept a man at all, they check 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 behaviour 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 yet, 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 onwards. 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. There’s one other thing. We need to know who is the new recruiting officer of the Odessa for German scientists now being sent to Egypt to develop Nasser’s rockets for him. The former one, Brandner, resigned and disappeared last year after we coped with his assistant Heinz Krug. Now they have a new one.’

  ‘That sounds more like information of use to Israeli intelligence,’ said Miller. Leon glanced at him shrewdly.

  ‘It is,’ he said shortly. ‘We occasionally co-operate 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 circumci
sed 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 breathed a long sigh.

  ‘This time I think we may be able to get away with it,’ he said.

  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 round here. It will be better out of sight for the next few weeks. Your hotel bill will be paid and your luggage brought round here too. In the morning you will write letters to your mother and girlfriend, 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. As he ate the cold chicken and potato salad, Miller wondered what he had let himself in for.

  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. Round 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 round 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.