But I explained we were close friends and my call was social. I was allowed in. Harold Harris was puzzled until I pointed out we had met socially the previous evening. His perfect manners caused him not to summon the burly commissionaire, but to ask what he could do for me. I replied: I have a manuscript of a novel.
His eyes glazed over in horror, but I had got this far, so I plunged on.
“I know you have no time, so I will not take it up, Mr. Harris. Well, maybe five minutes, tops.”
With this, I advanced to his desk and placed the brief synopsis upon it.
“All I ask is that you glance at this and, if you think it is worthless, then chuck me out.”
Looking as if root canal surgery would be more welcome, he started to read. He finished the three pages and started again. He read it three times.
“Where is the manuscript now?” he asked.
I told him with which publisher it had lain for eight weeks. He stared pointedly at the ceiling.
“It is quite out of the question for a publisher to read a manuscript while a copy resides with another publisher,” he told me.
Asking him not to move, which he had no intention of doing, I was out of the office and down the stairs. I could not afford taxis, but I hailed one anyway and drove to the other publisher. It was the lunch hour. I could raise only the hall porter with my demand for my manuscript back, and he found a junior secretary on her sandwich break who retrieved my paper parcel from the reject pile and gave it back to me with a pitying smile. I returned to Great Portland Street and handed it over.
He read the whole thing over the weekend and rang on Monday morning.
“If you can be here at four this afternoon, with your agent, we can discuss a contract,” he said.
I had no agent, but I was there anyway. With my ignorance of publishing, royalties, and contracts, he could have skinned me alive. But he was an old-fashioned gentleman and gave me a fair document with an advance of five hundred pounds. Then he said:
“I am toying with the idea of offering you a three-novel contract. Do you have any other ideas?”
The thing about journalists is that they lie well. It comes from practice. It is also why they have great empathy with, or antagonism for, politicians and senior civil servants. Common territory.
“Mr. Harris, I am brimming with ideas,” I told him.
“Two synopses, one page each. By Friday noon,” he suggested.
Back on the street, I had a major problem. The story about the Jackal was supposed to be a one-off, something to tide me through a bad patch. I had not the slightest intention of becoming a novelist. So I tried to analyze the story that had been accepted and to recall what I knew about from personal experience and could use as background. I came up with two conclusions.
The Day of the Jackal was a manhunt story, and I knew a lot about Germany. While in East Berlin, I had heard about a mysterious organization of former Nazis who helped, protected, and warned each other in order never to have to face West German judicial hunters and answer for their crimes. It was called ODESSA, but I had thought it was part of the relentless East German propaganda against the Bonn government.
Perhaps not. Ten years earlier, the Israeli Mossad had hunted down Adolf Eichmann, living under a pseudonym outside Buenos Aires. Perhaps another hunt-down of a disappeared mass murderer?
And I knew about Africa and white mercenaries hired to fight in jungle wars. Perhaps a return to the rain forests, not to another civil war but to a mercenary-led coup d’état?
I wrote both down, as required, on a single sheet of A4 paper and presented them to Harold Harris that Friday. He skimmed through them and decided without a second’s hesitation.
“Nazis first, mercenaries second. And I want the first manuscript by December next year.”
I did not know at the time that he was Jewish, lapsed but from an Orthodox parentage. Nor that in April 1945 he had been a young German-speaking officer in British Army Intelligence. Nor that he had been summoned across Schleswig-Holstein to interrogate a mysterious but suspicious prisoner. He had not yet arrived in his jeep when the prisoner bit on a cyanide capsule and killed himself. That man was Heinrich Himmler.
I had one last problem before signing the three-novel contract. Apart from the coming five hundred pounds, I was still broke.
“There will be living costs and research and traveling and lodgings,” I said. “Could I have something to tide me through?”
He scrawled something on a sheet of paper and gave it to me.
“Take this to accounts,” he said. “Good luck and stay in touch. Oh, and get an agent. I recommend Diana Baring.”
The piece of paper I clutched was quite an act of faith. It was an authority to draw six thousand pounds against future royalties. In 1970, that was rather a lot of money.
Back on the street again, I started to think. Who the hell knows about Nazis? Then I recalled a book called The Scourge of the Swastika, which I had read years earlier. It was by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been a senior British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials during the forties. I would have to track him down and see if he could help.
Before then, I had yet another lucky break. I had met a man called John Mallinson, who prided himself on being an agent, albeit without clients. I did not look him up, but coincidentally we met again at the flat of a friend. I told him what had happened in Great Portland Street. He became quite excited.
“What about the film rights?” he asked. I had not a clue. He scoured the Hutchinson contract. “They’re still yours. Appoint me as your film agent and I’ll find a buyer.”
By November, he had done exactly that. The film deal was done with Romulus Films of Park Lane, headed by John Woolf. But his right-hand man in all things was John Rosenberg, and it was with him that we dealt. The offer was £17,500 plus a small percentage of net profits, or £20,000 outright sale in perpetuity.
Most people are good at some things and useless at others. I am pathetic at money. I had never seen £20,000, so I took it. I have no idea how many millions the film has made over the years. I can only excuse myself with the thought that I had no idea the book would sell over a hundred copies or the film would ever be made. Even the way it was made was a fluke.
That winter, the Hollywood giant Fred Zinnemann flew over to discuss a project with John Woolf. It was to film a successful play called Abelard and Heloise. There had always been a problem. The film could not be made while the play was onstage anywhere. That December, it closed in England and was not staging anywhere else.
The day before Zinnemann arrived, it was decided the play would reopen in a British provincial city. The Hollywood director’s trip was fruitless after all. Desperately embarrassed, John Woolf was apologizing in his office, knowing his guest had to face a rainy London weekend with nothing to read. Frantically, he reached for something John Rosenberg had placed on his desk.
“We have just bought this,” he said. Mr. Zinnemann took it and left. He was back on Monday. “This is my next movie,” he told a delighted Romulus Films.
I knew none of all this until later. As I look back, it was not really The Day of the Jackal, the one-off to clear my debts, that changed my life. It was Harold Harris and his three-novel contract. It just occurred to me that if I could make a good living dashing off this nonsense, why get my head blown off in an African rain ditch?
But the more immediate problem was trying to find Lord Russell of Liverpool to ask him about underground Nazis. And I had the problem of what to call them. I needed two titles. In German, ODESSA stood for Organization of Former Members of the SS. As far as the world was concerned, Odessa was a city in Ukraine or a town in Texas. Well, here was a third one. The Odessa File.
For the mercenaries I recalled a quote from Shakespeare. “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.” I had heard someone had used Cry Havoc, but not Th
e Dogs of War. So I filched it from the Bard.
THE ODESSA
Lord Russell of Liverpool had retired to a small cottage at Dinard, a town on the French coast facing the Atlantic, and that was where I found him. I had no introduction, so I just turned up and knocked. When I explained what I needed, he was helpfulness itself.
Though he was a mine of information about the war and the Nuremberg trials, these had been twenty years earlier. I sought details about secret pro-Nazi elements still in existence in 1971. He referred me to the wellspring of Nazi-hunting, the Vienna-based researcher Simon Wiesenthal. With a letter of introduction, I headed south to Austria.
Like David Ben-Gurion, Simon Wiesenthal began by conceding he could spare me twenty minutes of his time, but when I explained what I sought, he became so enthusiastic that we spent days poring over his records. The germ of my idea was not for a Nazi fugitive who had fled to South America, but one who had changed his name and disappeared right in the heart of Germany, with help from equally covert friends. The response of Herr Wiesenthal was that the right choice might be difficult, not because there were so few but that there were thousands of them.
It seemed there were two mutual-help brotherhoods still very much active in the Germany of 1971. There was the Kameradschaft, or Comradeship, and the ODESSA, which was in no way fictional.
“What I seek,” I explained, “is to invent a mass murderer of the Nazi era who, like so many, had stripped off his uniform at the very end, adopted another persona, and disappeared into postwar German society, returning to office, influence, and respectability under another name. Like a concentration camp commander.”
He beamed and gestured to a shelf of files behind his desk.
“Why invent one? I have a dozen real ones.”
We pored through the files and settled on Eduard Roschmann, former camp commander at Riga, Latvia, and known as the Butcher of Riga. He had been a real monster, but one among many.
And I learned of that amazing day in the spring of 1945 when a single US Army jeep, driving north through Bavaria with just four soldiers on board, had seen plumes of smoke rising from the courtyard of a medieval castle.
Driving unchallenged over the drawbridge, they had discovered a dozen SS men in overalls tending a bonfire. They arrested the lot and hosed out the fire. Experts came up from General Patton’s headquarters to discover that what was being burned was the entire SS personnel archive. Only 2 or 3 percent had been consumed by the flames. The rest was now lodged under American care in West Berlin. That included the entire file on Captain (Hauptsturmführer) Eduard Roschmann of Riga, an Austrian-born fanatic now high on the wanted list. Slowly, my story was coming together, but there was less and less to invent; it was beyond fiction, but it was all true.
The real irony was that I could say anything I wanted about this monster. Wherever he was, he was hardly likely to come out of hiding to sue.
Finally, Simon Wiesenthal pointed me back north to Germany with a huge volume of information and even more warnings. I thought his conviction that West German officialdom was comprehensively penetrated by a generation steeped in either participation in, or sympathy for, what had happened between 1933 and 1945 might be just paranoia, but it was nothing of the sort. It all came down to the issue of “which generation.”
A fanatical Nazi aged twenty-five at the end of the war would have been born around 1920. He would have been steeped in Nazi education from age thirteen onward and almost certainly a member of the Hitler Youth from that age. He could well have been a mass murderer by twenty-five.
By the time of my research, he would have been fifty-one or -two; that is, at the prime of life and a high-ranker in any of a hundred official positions. Nor would I receive obstruction only from wanted criminals. Behind them was the even larger army of guilty desk-doers, the bureaucrats without whose organizational flair the Holocaust could never have happened.
This was the generation that now ran Germany, blossoming in its economic miracle. After 1949, the founding under Allied aegis of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany, the chancellor was the undeniably anti-Nazi Konrad Adenauer. But he had a terrible quandary to resolve.
Nazi Party members were so pandemic that had he banned them all, the country would have been ungovernable. So he cut his Faustian pact. Delving into the past when considering appointment or promotions was neither practical nor desirable. According to Simon Wiesenthal, every branch of the public function was impregnated with bureaucrats who had never pulled a trigger but had helped those who did. Research, he said, was not a question of open hostility but of closed doors. Police officers who volunteered to join the Nazi-hunting commissions quite simply terminated their own careers. They became outcasts. And he turned out to be right.
He also pointed me toward clandestine groups who still really believed in the coming of the Fourth Reich one day and whose meetings I could attend with my fluent German. So I did. The more I delved into the murk of pre-1945 Nazism and its post-1945 admirers, the more I came to the view that in all the history of the human race there has never been a creed so foul. It had not a single redeeming feature, appealing only to the nastiest corners of the human soul.
But it was all hidden, back then. The participant generation never spoke of it and the young generation was profoundly ignorant and indeed deeply puzzled by foreign hostility when they met it.
Despite their professed loathing of fascism and Nazism, the Communists of the East, behind the Iron Curtain, offered no help or cooperation whatsoever.
Thus, all investigation of all the crimes committed east of the Iron Curtain during the Nazi time was allocated to different state attorney offices spread across West Germany. Riga came under the state attorneyship of Hamburg. I started there and met a blank wall of closed doors. I was puzzled. Surely they were lawyers? I rang Simon Wiesenthal. He roared with laughter.
“Yes, of course they are lawyers. But whose lawyers?”
I realized many must have been or still were in the Comradeship. But slowly I made contact with either younger men, untainted because they were too young, or anti-Nazis who had lived through it and survived unsullied. They talked, but quietly, furtively, in darkened beer bars, once convinced I was just a British investigative reporter. And slowly the story came together that in 1972 appeared under the title The Odessa File.
Starting in Hamburg, I drifted back south again until I returned to Austria, from which my villain Roschmann had come. In an antique shop, I found an old Jew who had been in Riga under Roschmann and had survived, even the death march west as the Russians advanced. His wife assured me her husband had never spoken of it and never would. But she was wrong.
The old man was courtesy itself and offered me tea. We sat as I explained the plotline of the story I had in mind. I do not know why, but he began to correct me. It was not like that, he said, it was like this. Darkness fell. As his wide-eyed wife brought relay after relay of tea, he talked for twenty hours. In the book, the testimony of Salomon Tauber is recounted to me, detail by detail, by candlelight in a Viennese antique shop. I just moved Herr Tauber to Hamburg.
For a hero, I needed a young investigator of the new generation to inherit the diary of the dead Tauber and do something about it. So I invented Peter Miller, and his investigative trail almost exactly matches my own during that summer of 1971.
I returned to the UK in June for the launch of The Day of the Jackal. It was a very quiet affair. No one had heard of the title or the author. It had not been reviewed. Hutchinson had begun with an audacious five thousand copies, raised to eight thousand as the book buyers of the major stores slowly increased their orders. The PR lady for the launch was Cindy Winkleman, now the mother of the British TV star Claudia.
Then I went back to Germany to tie up the last details. I wrote The Odessa File that autumn and presented it to Harold Harris, as promised, before Christmas. Slowly, Jackal was climbing the charts,
and the second novel had a better media reception. Hollywood succumbed to the wiles of my new agent, Diana Baring, and bought the film rights.
The movie, when it came out in 1974, starring Jon Voight as Peter Miller and Maximilian Schell as the villainous Roschmann, led eventually to the quixotic twist in this tale.
In 1975, in a fleapit cinema on the coast south of Buenos Aires, an Argentinian was watching the Spanish-language version when it occurred to him that Eduard Roschmann, who had reverted to his real name, so convinced was he of his safety, was living down the street. So he denounced him.
Argentina was in one of its brief windows of democratic government under President Isabel Perón, widow of the old tyrant Juan Perón, and, seeking to do the right thing, had Roschmann arrested. West Germany slapped in a request for extradition.
Before the legal formalities had been completed between the West German embassy and the Ministry of Justice, Roschmann—on bail, thanks to a local magistrate—lost his nerve. He ran north for the sanctuary of the pro-Nazi dictator Alfred Stroessner of Paraguay. He reached the border and waited for the ferry across the Paraguay River to safety.
Right in the middle of the river, he had a massive heart attack. Witnesses said he was dead before he hit the floor, or in this case the deck. What followed must have come from a very flaky comedy show.
On the Paraguayan bank, the terminal master refused to accept the body on the grounds it belonged to Argentina. The captain insisted the dead man had paid full fare for his crossing and the cadaver belonged to Paraguay. The ferry schedule insisted the boat depart, so the body went back to Argentina, still lying on the foredeck.
It went back and forth four times, becoming ever more smelly under the tropical sun. Then two detectives arrived from Vienna to identify it. Thanks to the American jeep in Bavaria in 1945, they had fingerprints and dental records from the Roschmann file in the SS personnel archives. They asked for the body to be unloaded at last and the Paraguayans conceded.
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