The Odessa File

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 stop away too long after a week’s leave. If you want anything photostatted, ask the clerk.’ He gestured to a clerk sitting on a dais at the other end of the reading room, no doubt to ensure 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, appreciation 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 25th, 1908, in the Austrian town of Graz, a citizen of Austria, son of a highly respectable and honest brewery worker. He attended kindergarten, junior 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 organisations in neutral Austria. A year later Hitler annexed Austria and rewarded the Austrian Nazis with swift promotions all round.

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 over-running 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 seconded 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 HQ 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 21st, 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 photo-copied 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 two and placed the lot in a tray behind him, from where the sheets were whisked away 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 grey 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,’ he said to the other man, who was glancing sideways at Miller. The grey-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 kerb and headed back towards the centre 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 towards the first checkpoint at Drei Linden, the man with the grey coat was sitting in his neat and tidy flat off Savigny Platz, dialling 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 file of Eduard Roschmann. Then he had three sheets photo-copied. After the message that went round 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 afterwards 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 … Happy Christmas, Kamerad.’

Chapter Seven

CHRISTMAS DAY WAS on the Wednesday of that week and it was not until after the Christmas period that the man in West Germany who had received the news from Berlin about Miller passed it on. When he did so it was to his ultimate superior.