The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  Mackensen glanced at his road map inside the phone booth and estimated the distance.

  ‘I’ll be there at one o’clock,’ he said.

  *

  The door opened at the second ring and a gust of warm air flowed out of the hall. The man who stood in front of him had evidently come from his study, the door of which Miller could see standing open and leading off the hallway.

  Years of good living had put weight on the once-lanky SS officer. His face had a flush, either from drinking or from the country air, and his hair was grey at the sides. He looked the picture of middle-aged, upper-middle-class, prosperous good health. But although different in detail, the face was the same Tauber had seen and described. He surveyed Miller without enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  It took Miller another ten seconds before he could speak. What he had rehearsed just went out of his head.

  ‘My name is Miller,’ he said, ‘and yours is Eduard Roschmann.’

  At the mention of both names something flickered through the eyes of the man in front of him, but iron control kept his face muscles straight.

  ‘This is preposterous,’ he said at length. ‘I’ve never heard of the man you are talking about.’

  Behind the façade of calm the former SS officer’s mind was racing. Several times in his life since 1945 he had survived through sharp thinking in a crisis. He recognised the name of Miller well enough, and recalled his conversation with the Werwolf weeks before. His first instinct was to shut the door in Miller’s face, but he overcame it.

  ‘Are you alone in the house?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Yes,’ said Roschmann, truthfully.

  ‘We’ll go into your study,’ said Miller flatly.

  Roschmann made no objection, for he realised he was now forced to keep Miller on the premises and stall for time, until …

  He turned on his heel and strode back across the hall-way. Miller slammed the front door after him and was at Roschmann’s heels as they entered the study. It was a comfortable room, with a thick padded door which Miller closed behind him, and a log fire burning in the grate.

  Roschmann stopped in the centre of the room and turned to face Miller.

  ‘Is your wife here?’ asked Miller. Roschmann shook his head.

  ‘She has gone away for the weekend to visit relatives,’ he said. This much was true. She had been called away the previous evening at a moment’s notice and had taken the second car. The first car owned by the pair was by ill chance in the garage for repairs. She was due back that evening.

  What Roschmann did not mention, but what occupied his racing mind, was that his bulky, shaven-headed chauffeur/bodyguard Oskar had cycled down to the village half an hour earlier to report the telephone being out of order. He knew he had to keep Miller talking until the man returned.

  When he turned to face Miller the young reporter’s right hand held an automatic pointed straight at his belly. Roschmann was frightened, but covered it with bluster.

  ‘You threaten me with a gun in my own house?’

  ‘Then call the police,’ said Miller, nodding at the telephone on the writing desk. Roschmann made no move towards it.

  ‘I see you still limp a little,’ remarked Miller. ‘The orthopaedic shoe almost disguises it, but not quite. The missing toes, lost in an operation in Rimini camp. The frostbite you got wandering through the fields of Austria caused that, didn’t it?’

  Roschmann’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he said nothing.

  ‘You see, if the police come, they’ll identify you, Herr Direktor. The face is still the same, the bullet wound in the chest, the scar under the left armpit where you tried to remove the Waffen-SS blood-group tattoo, no doubt. Do you really want to call the police?’

  Roschmann let out the air in his lungs in a long sigh.

  ‘What do you want, Miller?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said the reporter. ‘Not at the desk, there in the armchair where I can see you. And keep your hands on the arm-rests. Don’t give me an excuse to shoot, because, believe me, I’d dearly love to.’

  Roschmann sat in the armchair, his eyes on the gun. Miller perched on the edge of the desk facing him.

  ‘So now we talk,’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Riga. About eighty thousand people, men, women and children, whom you had slaughtered up there.’

  Seeing he did not intend to use the gun, Roschmann began to regain his confidence. Some of the colour returned to his face. He switched his gaze to the face of the younger man in front of him.

  ‘That’s a lie. There were never eighty thousand disposed of in Riga.’

  ‘Seventy thousand? Sixty?’ asked Miller. ‘Do you really think it matters precisely how many thousand you killed.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Roschmann eagerly. ‘It doesn’t matter, not now, not then. Look, young man, I don’t know why you’ve come after me. But I can guess. Someone’s been filling your head with a lot of sentimental clap-trap about so-called war crimes and suchlike. It’s all nonsense. Absolute nonsense. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Then you were in the Army for military service?’

  ‘Yes. One of the first national servicemen of the post-war army. Two years in uniform.’

  ‘Well then, you know what the Army is like. A man’s given orders, he obeys those orders. He doesn’t ask whether they are right or wrong. You know that as well as I do. All I did was to obey my orders.’

  ‘Firstly, you weren’t a soldier,’ said Miller quietly. ‘You were an executioner. Put more bluntly, a murderer, and a mass-murderer. So don’t compare yourself with a soldier.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Roschmann earnestly. ‘It’s all nonsense. We were soldiers just like the rest. We obeyed our orders just like the rest. You young Germans are all the same. You don’t want to understand what it was like then.’

  ‘So tell me, what was it like?’

  Roschmann, who had leaned forward to make his point, leaned back in the chair, almost at ease, the immediate danger past.

  ‘What was it like? It was like ruling the world. Because we did rule the world, we Germans. We had beaten every army they could throw at us. For years they had done us down, we poor Germans, and we had shown them, yes, all of them, that we were a great people. You youngsters today don’t realise what it is to be proud of being a German.

  ‘It lights a fire inside you. When the drums beat and the bands played, when the flags were waving and the whole nation was united behind one man, we could have marched to the ends of the world. That is greatness, young Miller, greatness your generation has never known and never will know. And we of the SS were the élite, still are the élite. Of course they hunt us down now, first the Allies and then the wishy-washy old women of Bonn. Of course they want to crush us. Because they want to crush the greatness of Germany, which we represented and still do.

  ‘They say a lot of stupid things about what happened then in a few camps a sensible world would long since have forgotten about. They make a big cry because we had to clean up Europe from the pollution of this Jewish filth that impregnated every facet of German life and kept us down in the mud with them. We had to do it, I tell you. It was a mere sideshow in the great design of a Germany and a German people, pure in blood and ideals, ruling the world as is their right, our right, Miller, our right and our destiny, if those hell-damned Britishers and the eternally stupid Americans had not stuck their prissy noses in. For make no bones about it, you may point that thing at me, but we are on the same side, young man, a generation between us, but still on the same side. For we are Germans, the greatest people in the world. And you would let your judgement of all this, of the greatness that once was Germany’s, and will be again one day, of the essential unity of us, all of us, the German people, you will let your judgement of all this be affected by what happened to a few miserable Jews? Can’t you see, you poor misled young fool, that we are on the same side, you and me, the sam
e side, the same people, the same destiny?’

  Despite the gun, he rose from his chair and paced the carpet between the desk and the window.

  ‘You want proof of our greatness? Look at Germany today. Smashed to rubble in 1945, utterly destroyed and at the prey of the barbarians from the east and the fools in the west. And now? Germany is rising again, slowly and surely, still lacking the essential discipline that we were able to give her, but increasing each year in her industrial and economic power. Yes and military power, one day, when the last vestiges of the influence of the Allies of 1945 have been shaken off, we will be as mighty again as we ever were. It will take time, and a new leader, but the ideals will be the same, and the glory, yes that will be the same too.

  ‘And you know what brings this about? I will tell you, yes I will tell you, young man. It’s discipline and management. Harsh discipline, the harsher the better, and management, our management, the most brilliant quality after courage that we possess. For we can manage things, we have shown that. Look at all this, you see all this? This house, this estate, the factory down in the Ruhr, mine and thousands like it, tens, hundreds, of thousands, churning out power and strength each day, with each turn of the wheel another ounce of might to make Germany mighty once again.

  ‘And who do you think did all this? You think people prepared to spend time mouthing platitudes over a few miserable Yids did all this? You think cowards and traitors trying to persecute good, honest patriotic German soldiers did all this? We did this, we brought this prosperity back to Germany, the same men as we had twenty, thirty years ago.’

  He turned from the window and faced Miller, his eyes alight. But he also measured the distance from the furthest point of his pacing along the carpet to the heavy iron poker by the fire. Miller had noticed the glances.

  ‘Now, you come here, a representative of the young generation, full of your idealism and your concern, and point a gun at me. Why not be idealistic for Germany, your own country, your own people? You think you represent the people, coming to hunt me down? You think that’s what they want, the people of Germany?’

  Miller shook his head.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Well, there you are then. If you call the police and turn me in to them, they might make a trial out of it, I say only “might” because even that is not certain, so long afterwards, with all the witnesses scattered or dead. So put your gun away and go home. Go home and read the true history of those days, learn that Germany’s greatness then and her prosperity today stem from patriotic Germans like me.’

  Miller had sat through the tirade mute, observing with bewilderment and rising disgust the man who paced the carpet in front of him, seeking to convert him to the old ideology. He had wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things, about the people he knew and the millions beyond them who did not want or see the necessity of purchasing glory at the price of slaughtering millions of other human beings. But the words did not come. They never do, when one needs them. So he just sat and stared, until Roschmann had finished.

  After some seconds of silence Miller asked, ‘Have you ever heard of a man called Tauber?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Salomon Tauber. He was a German too. Jewish. He was in Riga from the beginning to the end.’

  Roschmann shrugged.

  ‘I can’t remember him. It was a long time ago. Who was he?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Miller. ‘And this time stay seated.’

  Roschmann shrugged impatiently and went back to the armchair. With his rising conviction that Miller would not shoot, his mind was concerned with the problem of trapping him before he could get away, rather than with an obscure and long-dead Jew.

  ‘Tauber died in Hamburg on November 22nd last year. He gassed himself. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes. If I must.’

  ‘He left behind a diary. It was an account of his story, what happened to him, what you and others did to him, in Riga and elsewhere. But mainly in Riga. But he survived, he came back to Hamburg, and he lived there for eighteen years before he died, because he was convinced you were alive and would never stand trial. I got hold of his diary. It was my starting point in finding you, today, here, under your new name.’

  ‘The diary of a dead man’s not evidence,’ growled Roschmann.

  ‘Not for a court, but enough for me.’

  ‘And you really came here to confront me over the diary of a dead Jew?’

  ‘No, not at all. There’s a page of that diary I want you to read.’

  Miller opened the diary at a certain page and pushed it into Roschmann’s lap.

  ‘Pick it up,’ he ordered, ‘and read it – aloud.’

  Roschmann unfolded the sheet and began to read it. It was the passage in which Tauber described the murder by Roschmann of an unnamed German Army officer wearing the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf cluster.

  Roschmann reached the end of the passage and looked up.

  ‘So what?’ he said, puzzled. ‘The man struck me. He disobeyed orders. I had the right to commandeer that ship to bring the prisoners back.’

  Miller tossed a photograph on to Roschmann’s lap.

  ‘Is that the man you killed?’

  Roschmann looked at it and shrugged.

  ‘How should I know? It was twenty years ago.’

  There was a slow ker-lick as Miller thumbed the hammer back and pointed the gun at Roschmann’s face.

  ‘Was that the man?’

  Roschmann looked at the photograph again.

  ‘All right. So that was the man. So what?’

  ‘That was my father,’ said Miller.

  The colour drained out of Roschmann’s face as if a plug had been pulled. His mouth dropped open, his gaze dropped to the gun barrel two feet from his face and the steady hand behind it.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ he whispered, ‘you didn’t come about the Jews at all.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry for them, but not that sorry.’

  ‘But how could you know, how could you possibly know from that diary that the man was your father? I never knew his name, this Jew who wrote the diary never knew, how did you know?’

  ‘My father was killed on October 11th, 1944, in Ostland,’ said Miller. ‘For twenty years that was all I knew. Then I read the diary. It was the same day, the same area, the two men had the same rank. Above all, both men wore the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf cluster, the highest award for bravery in the field. There weren’t all that many of those awarded, and very few to mere army captains. It would have been millions to one against two identical officers dying in the same area on the same day.’

  Roschmann knew he was up against a man whom no argument could influence. He stared as if mesmerised at the gun.

  ‘You’re going to kill me. You mustn’t do that, not in cold blood. You wouldn’t do that. Please, Miller, I don’t want to die.’

  Miller leaned forward and began to talk.

  ‘Listen to me, you repulsive piece of dog-shit. I’ve listened to you and your twisted mouthings till I’m sick to my guts. Now you’re going to listen to me while I make up my mind whether you die here or rot in some jail for the rest of your days.

  ‘You had the nerve, the crass bloody nerve, to tell me that you, you of all people, were a patriotic German. I’ll tell you what you are. You and all your kind were and are the filthiest crap that was ever elevated from the gutters of this country to positions of power. And in twelve years you smeared my country with your dirt in a way that has never happened throughout our history.

  ‘What you did sickened and revolted the whole of civilised mankind and left my generation a heritage of shame to live down that’s going to take us all the rest of our lives. You spat on Germany throughout your lives. You bastards used Germany and the German people until they could not be used any more and then you quit while the going was good. You brought us so low it would have been inconceivable before your crew came along, and I don’t mean in terms of bomb damage.

&nbs
p; ‘You weren’t even brave. You were the most sickening cowards ever produced in Germany or Austria. You murdered millions for your own profit and in the name of your maniac power-lust, and then you got out and left the rest of us in the shit. You ran away from the Russians, hanged and shot army men to keep them fighting and then disappeared and left my generation to carry the can.

  ‘Even if there could be any oblivion of what you did to the Jews and the others, there can never be any forgetting that your lot ran and hid like the dogs you are. You talk of patriotism, you don’t even know the meaning of the word. And as for daring to call army soldiers and others who fought, really fought, for Germany Kamerad, it’s a bloody obscenity.

  ‘I’ll tell you one other thing, as a young German of the generation you so plainly despise. This prosperity we have today, it’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got a lot to do with millions who work a hard day and never murdered anyone in their lives. And as for murderers like you who may still be among us, as far as I and my generation are concerned we would put up with a little less prosperity if we could be sure scum like you were not still around. Which, incidentally, you are not going to be for very long.’

  ‘You’re going to kill me,’ mumbled Roschmann.

  ‘As a matter of fact I’m not.’

  Miller reached behind him and pulled the telephone over towards where he sat on the desk. He kept his eyes on Roschmann and the gun pointed. He took the receiver off the cradle, slid it on the desk and dialled. When he had finished he picked up the receiver.

  ‘There’s a man in Ludwigsburg wants to have a chat with you,’ he said, and put the telephone to his ear. It was dead.

  He laid it back in the cradle, took it off again and listened for the dialling tone. There was none.

  ‘Have you cut this off?’ he asked.

  Roschmann shook his head.

  ‘Listen, if you’ve pulled the connection out I’ll drill you here and now.’