The Odessa File

The trial went well. Professor Yoklek testified as to the warheads of plague and radio-active waste, and the judges were scandalised. Making the best of a bad job, the Israeli government used the trial to expose the Egyptian intent to commit genocide. Shocked, the judges acquitted the two accused.

But back in Israel there was a reckoning. Although the German Chancellor Adenauer had personally promised Ben-Gurion he would try to stop German scientists taking part in the Helwan rocket-building, Ben-Gurion was humiliated by the scandal. In a rage he rebuked General Isser Harel for the lengths to which he had gone in his campaign of intimidation. Harel riposted with vigour, and handed in his resignation. To his surprise Ben-Gurion accepted it, proving the point that no one in Israel is indispensable, not even the Controller of Intelligence.

That night, June 20th, 1963, Isser Harel had a long talk with his close friend, General Meir Amit, then the head of military intelligence. General Amit could remember the conversation clearly, the taut angry face of the Russian-born fighter, nicknamed Isser the Terrible.

‘I have to inform you, my dear Meir, that as from now Israel is no longer in the retribution business. The politicians have taken over. I have tendered my resignation and it has been accepted. I have asked that you be named my successor, and I believe they will agree.’

The ministerial committee that presides in Israel over the activities of the intelligence networks agreed. At the end of June, General Meir Amit became Controller of Intelligence.

The knell had also sounded, however, for Ben-Gurion. The hawks of his cabinet, headed by Levi Eshkol and his own Foreign Minister, Golda Meir, forced his resignation, and on June 26th, 1963, Levi Eshkol was named Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion, shaking his snowy head in anger, went down to his kibbutz in the Negev in disgust. But he stayed on as a member of the Knesset.

Although the new government had ousted David Ben-Gurion, it did not reinstate Isser Harel. Perhaps it felt that Meir Amit was a general more likely to obey orders than the choleric Harel, who had become a legend in his own lifetime among the Israeli people, and relished it.

Nor were Ben-Gurion’s last orders rescinded. General Amit’s instructions remained the same, to avoid any more scandals in Germany over the rocket scientists. With no alternative, he turned the terror campaign against the scientists already inside Egypt.

These Germans lived in the suburb of Meadi, seven miles south of Cairo on the northern bank of the Nile. A pleasant suburb, except that it was ringed by Egyptian security troops, and its German inhabitants were almost prisoners in a gilded cage. To get at them Meir Amit used his top agent inside Egypt, the riding-school owner Wolfgang Lutz, who found himself from September 1963 onwards forced to take suicidal risks, which sixteen months later would lead to his undoing.

For the German scientists, already shaken badly by the series of bomb parcels sent from Germany, autumn 1963 became a nightmare. In the heart of Meadi, ringed by Egyptian security guards, they began to get letters threatening their lives, posted from inside Cairo.

Dr Josef Eisig received one which described his wife, his two children and the type of work he was engaged on with remarkable precision, then told him to get out of Egypt and go back to Germany. All the other scientists got the same kind of letter. On September 27th a letter blew up in the face of Dr Kirmayer. For some of the scientists this was the last straw. At the end of September Dr Pilz left Cairo for Germany, taking the unfortunate Fräulein Wenda with him.

Others followed, and the furious Egyptians were unable to stop them, for they could not protect them from the threatening letters.

The man in the back of the limousine that bright winter morning in 1964 knew that his own agent, the supposedly pro-Nazi German, Lutz, was the writer of the letters and the sender of the explosives.

But he also knew the rocket programme was not being halted. The information he had just received proved it. He flicked his eye over the decoded message once again. It confirmed simply that a virulent strain of bubonic bacillus had been isolated in the contagious diseases laboratory of Cairo Medical Institute, and that the budget of the department involved had been increased tenfold. The information left no doubt that despite the adverse publicity Egypt had received over the Ben Gal trial in Basel the previous summer, they were going ahead with the genocide programme.

Had Hoffmann been watching he would have been forced to give Miller full marks for cheek. Leaving the penthouse office he took the lift down to the fifth floor and dropped in to see Max Dorn, the magazine’s legal affairs correspondent.

‘I’ve just been up to see Herr Hoffmann,’ he said dropping into a chair in front of Dorn’s desk. ‘Now I need some background. Mind if I pick your brains?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Dorn, assuming Miller had been commissioned to do a story for Komet.

‘Who investigates war crimes in Germany?’

The question took Dorn aback.

‘War crimes?’

‘Yes. War crimes. Which authorities are responsible for investigating what happened in all the various countries we overran during the war and finding and prosecuting the individuals guilty of mass-murder?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. Well, basically it’s the various Attorney Generals’ offices of the provinces of West Germany.’

‘You mean, they all do it?’

Dorn leaned back in his chair, at home in his own field of expertise.

‘There are sixteen provinces in West Germany. Each has a state capital and a State Attorney General. Inside each SAG’s office there is a department responsible for investigation into what are called “crimes of violence committed during the Nazi era”. Each state capital is allocated an area of the former Reich or of the occupied territories as its special responsibility.’

‘Such as?’ asked Miller.

‘Well, for example, all crimes committed by the Nazis and the SS in Italy, Greece and Polish Galicia are investigated by Stuttgart. The biggest extermination camp of all, Auschwitz, comes under Frankfurt. You may have heard there’s a big trial coming up in Frankfurt next May of twenty-two former guards from Auschwitz. Then the extermination camps of Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor and Maidanek are investigated by Dusseldorf/Cologne. Munich is responsible for Belzec, Dachau, Buchenwald and Flossenburg. Most crimes in the Soviet Ukraine and the Lodz area of former Poland come under Hanover. And so on.’

Miller noted the information, nodding.

‘Who is supposed to investigate what happened in the three Baltic states?’ he asked.

‘Hamburg,’ said Dorn promptly, ‘along with crimes in the areas of Danzig and the Warsaw sector of Poland.’