The Odessa File

He worked away for a few more minutes.

‘I read the diary last night at home. Remarkable document.’

‘Were you surprised?’ asked Miller.

‘Surprised? No, not by the contents. We all went through much the same sort of thing. With variations, of course. But so precise. Tauber would have made a perfect witness. He noticed everything, even the small details. And noted them – at the time. That is very important to get a conviction before German or Austrian courts. And now he’s dead.’

Miller considered for a while. He looked up.

‘Herr Wiesenthal, so far as I know you’re the first Jew I have ever really had a long talk with who went through all that. One thing Tauber said in his diary surprised me – he said there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?’

‘No,’ said the Nazi-hunter flatly. ‘Tauber was right.’

‘How can you say that if we killed millions of people?’

‘Because you, personally, were not there. You did not kill anyone. As Tauber said, the tragedy is that the specific murderers have not been brought to justice.’

‘Then who,’ asked Miller, ‘really did kill those people?’

Simon Wiesenthal regarded him intently.

‘Do you know about the various branches of the SS? About the sections within the SS who really were responsible for killing those millions?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Then, I’d better tell you. You’ve heard about the Reich Economic Administration Main Office, charged with exploiting the victims before they died?’

‘Yes, I read something about it.’

‘Their job was in a sense the middle section of the operation,’ said Herr Wiesenthal.

‘That left the business of identifying the victims among the rest of the population, rounding them up, transporting them and, when the economic exploitation was over, finishing them off.

‘This was the task of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, which actually killed the millions already mentioned. The rather odd use of the word “Security” in the title of this office stems from the quaint Nazi idea that the victims posed a threat to the Reich, which had to be made secure against them. Also in the functions of the RSHA were the tasks of rounding up, interrogating and incarcerating in concentration camps other enemies of the Reich like Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Quakers, reporters and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, resistance fighters in the occupied countries, and later army officers like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, both murdered for suspicion of harbouring anti-Hitler sentiments.

‘The RSHA was divided into six departments, each called an Amt. Amt One was for administration and personnel; Amt Two was equipment and finance. Amt Three was the dreaded Security Services and Security Police, headed by Reinhard Heyrich, assassinated in Prague in 1942, and later by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, executed by the Allies. Theirs were the teams who devised the tortures used to make suspects talk, both inside Germany and in the occupied countries.

‘Amt Four was the Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Müller (still missing) and whose Jewish section, department B.4, was headed by Adolf Eichmann, executed by the Israelis in Jerusalem after being kidnapped from Argentina. Amt Five was the Criminal Police and Amt Six the Foreign Intelligence Service.

‘The two successive heads of Amt Three, Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner, were also the overall chiefs of the whole RSHA, and throughout the reigns of both men the head of Amt One was their deputy. He is a three-star general of the SS Bruno Streckenbach, who today has a well-paid job with a department store in Hamburg and lives in Vogelweide.

‘If one is going to specify guilt, therefore, most of it rests on these two departments of the SS, and the numbers involved are thousands, not the millions who make up contemporary Germany. The theory of the collective guilt of sixty million Germans, including millions of small children, women, old-age pensioners, soldiers, sailors and airmen, who had nothing to do with the holocaust, was originally conceived by the Allies, but has since suited the former members of the SS extremely well. The theory is the best ally they have, for they realise, as few Germans seem to do, that so long as the collective guilt theory remains unquestioned nobody will start to look for specific murderers; at least, not look hard enough. The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.’

Miller digested what he had been told. Somehow the very size of the figures involved baffled him. It was not possible to consider fourteen million people as each and every one an individual. It was easier to think of one man, dead on a stretcher under the rain in a Hamburg street.

‘The reason Tauber apparently had for killing himself,’ Miller asked, ‘do you believe it?’

Herr Wiesenthal studied a beautiful pair of African stamps on one of the envelopes.

‘I believe he was right in thinking no one would believe him, that he saw Roschmann on the steps of the Opera. If that’s what he believed then he was right.’

‘But he didn’t even go to the police,’ said Miller.

Simon Wiesenthal snipped the edge off another envelope and scanned the letter inside. After a pause he replied.

‘No. Technically he should have done. I don’t think it would have done any good. Not in Hamburg at any rate.’

‘What’s wrong with Hamburg?’