The Odessa File

‘He identified him as Ricardo Klement, living in Buenos Aires. The Israelis took over from there. He’s also traced several hundred other Nazi criminals. If anything more is known about your Eduard Roschmann, he’ll know it.’

‘Do you know him?’ asked Miller.

Lord Russell nodded.

‘I’d better give you a letter. He gets a lot of visitors wanting information. An introduction would help.’

He went to the writing desk, swiftly wrote a few lines on a sheet of headed notepaper, folded the sheet into an envelope and sealed it.

‘Good luck; you’ll need it,’ he said, as he showed Miller out.

The following morning Miller took the BEA flight back to Cologne, picked up his car and set off on the two-day run through Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg and Linz to Vienna.

Miller spent the night at Munich, having made slow time along the snow-encrusted autobahns, frequently narrowed down to one lane while a snow-plough or gritting truck tried to cope with the steadily falling snow. The following day he set off early and would have made Vienna by lunchtime had it not been for the long delay at Bad Tolz just south of Munich.

The autobahn was passing through dense pine forests when a series of ‘Slow’ signs brought the traffic to a halt. A police car, blue light spinning a warning, was parked at the edge of the road and two white-coated patrolmen were standing across the road holding back the traffic. On the left-hand, northbound lane the procedure was the same. To the right and left of the autobahn a drive cut into the pine forests, and two soldiers in winter clothing, each with a battery-powered illuminated baton, stood at the entrance to each, waiting to summon something hidden in the forests across the road.

Miller fumed with impatience and finally wound down his window to call to one of the policemen.

‘What’s the matter? What’s the hold-up?’

The patrolman walked slowly over and grinned.

‘The Army,’ he said shortly. ‘They’re on manoeuvres. There’s a column of tanks coming across in a minute.’

Fifteen minutes later the first one appeared, a long gun barrel poking out of the pine trees, like a pachyderm scenting the air for danger, then with a rumble the flat armoured bulk of the tank eased out of the trees and clattered down to the road.

Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank was a happy man. At the age of thirty he had already fulfilled his life’s ambition, to command his own tank. He could remember to the day when his life’s ambition had been born to him. It was January 10th, 1945, when as a small boy in the city of Mannheim he had been taken to the cinema. The screen during the newsreels was full of the spectacle of Hasso von Manteuffel’s King Tiger tanks rolling forward to engage the Americans and British.

He stared in awe at the muffled figures of the commanders, steel-helmeted and goggled, gazing forward out of the turret. For Ulrich Frank, ten years old, it was a turning point. When he left the cinema he had made a vow, that one day he would command his own tank.

It took him nineteen years, but he made it. On those winter manoeuvres in the forests around Bad Tolz, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank commanded his first tank, an American-built M-48 Patton.

It was his last manoeuvre with the Patton. Waiting for the troop back at camp was a row of shining, brand-new French AMX-13s with which the unit was being re-equipped. Faster, more heavily armed than the Patton, the AMX would become his in another week.

He glanced down at the black cross of the new German Army on the side of the turret, and the tank’s personal name stencilled beneath it, and felt a touch of regret. Though he had only commanded it for six months, it would always be his first tank, his favourite. He had named it Drachenfels, the Dragon Rock, after the rock overlooking the Rhine where Martin Luther, translating the Bible into German, had seen the Devil and hurled his ink-pot at him. After the re-equipment he supposed the Patton would go for scrap.

With a last pause on the far side of the autobahn the Patton and its crew breasted the rise and vanished into the forest.

Miller finally made it to Vienna in the mid-afternoon of that day, January 4th. Without checking into a hotel he drove straight into the city centre and asked his way to Rudolf Square.

He found number seven easily enough and glanced at the list of tenants. Against the third floor was a card saying ‘Documentation Centre’. He mounted and knocked at the cream-painted wooden door. From behind it someone looked through the peep-hole before he heard the lock being drawn back. A pretty blonde girl stood in the doorway.

‘Please?’

‘My name is Miller. Peter Miller. I would like to speak with Herr Wiesenthal. I have a letter of introduction.’

He produced his letter and gave it to the girl. She looked uncertainly at it, smiled briefly and asked him to wait.

Several minutes later she reappeared at the end of the corridor on to which the door gave access, and beckoned him.

‘Please come this way.’

Miller closed the front door behind him and followed her down the passage, round a corner and to the end of the flat. On the right was an open door. As he entered a man rose to greet him.

‘Please come in,’ said Simon Wiesenthal.

He was bigger than Miller had expected, a burly man over six feet tall, wearing a thick tweed jacket, stooping as if permanently looking for a mislaid piece of paper. He held Lord Russell’s letter in his hand.