The Odessa File

The pretty secretary poked her head round the door.

‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

*

It was after the lunchtime break that Miller returned to the office. Simon Wiesenthal had in front of him a number of sheets spread out, extracts from his own Roschmann file. Miller settled himself in front of the desk, got out his notebook and waited.

Simon Wiesenthal began to relate the Roschmann story from the 8th January 1948.

It had been agreed between the British and American authorities that after Roschmann had testified at Dachau he would be moved on to the British Zone of Germany, probably Hanover, to await his own trial and almost certain hanging. Even while in prison in Graz he had begun to plan his escape.

He had made contact with a Nazi escape organisation working in Austria called the ‘Six-point Star’, nothing to do with the Jewish symbol of the six-pointed star, but so called because the Nazi organisation had its tentacles in six major Austrian provincial cities.

At 6 a.m. on the 8th Roschmann was woken and taken to the train waiting at Graz station. Once in the compartment, an argument started between the Military Police sergeant who wanted to keep the handcuffs on Roschmann throughout the journey and the Field Security sergeant who suggested taking them off.

Roschmann influenced the argument by claiming that he had diarrhoea from the prison diet and wished to go to the lavatory. He was taken, the handcuffs removed and one of the sergeants waited outside the door until he had finished. As the train chugged through the snowbound landscape Roschmann made three requests to go to the lavatory. Apparently during this time he prised the window in the lavatory open, so that it slid easily on its runners.

Roschmann knew he had to get out before the Americans took him over at Salzburg for the last run by car to their own prison at Munich, but station after station went by and still the train was going too fast. It stopped at Hallein, and one of the sergeants went to buy some food on the platform. Roschmann again said he wanted to go the lavatory. It was the more easy-going FSS sergeant who accompanied him, warning him not to use the toilet while the train was stationary. As the train moved slowly out of Hallein Roschmann jumped from the window into the snowdrifts. It was ten minutes before the sergeants beat down the door, and by then the train was running fast down the mountains towards Salzburg.

Police inquiries later established that he staggered through the snow as far as a peasant’s cottage and took refuge there. The following day he crossed the border from Upper Austria into Salzburg province and contacted the Six-point Star organisation. They brought him to a brick factory, where he passed as a labourer, while contact was made with the Odessa for a passage to the south of Italy.

At that time the Odessa was in close contact with the recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, into which scores of former SS soldiers had fled. Four days after contact was made, a car with French number plates was waiting outside the village of Ostermieting, and took on board Roschmann and five other Nazi escapers. The Foreign Legion driver, equipped with papers that enabled the car to cross borders without being searched, brought the six SS men over the Italian border to Merano, being paid in cash by the Odessa representative there, a hefty sum per head of his passengers.

From Merano, Roschmann was taken down to an internment camp at Rimini. Here, in the camp hospital, he had the five toes of his right foot amputated, for they were rotten with frostbite he had picked up while wandering through the snow after escaping from the train. Since then he had worn an orthopaedic shoe.

His wife in Graz got a letter from him in October 1948 from the camp at Rimini. For the first time he used the new name he had been given. Fritz Bernd Wegener.

Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the Franciscan monastery in Rome, and when his papers were finalised he set sail from the harbour at Naples for Buenos Aires. Throughout his stay at the monastery in the Via Sicilia he had been among scores of comrades of the SS and the Nazi party, and under the personal supervision of Bishop Alois Hudal, who ensured that they lacked for nothing.

In the Argentinian capital he was received by the Odessa and lodged with a German family called Vidmar in the Calle Hippolito Irigoyen. Here he lived for months in a furnished room. Early in 1949 he was advanced the sum of 50,000 American dollars out of the Bormann funds, and went into business as an exporter of South American hardwood timber to Western Europe. The firm was called Stemmler and Wegener, for his false papers from the Vatican in Rome firmly established him as Fritz Bernd Wegener, born in the South Tyrol province of Italy.

He also engaged a German girl as his secretary, Irmtraud Sigrid Müller, and in early 1955 he married her, despite already having his first wife Hella living in Graz. In the spring of 1955 Eva Peron, wife of the dictator of Argentina and the power behind the throne, died of cancer. The writing was on the wall for the Peron regime, and Roschmann spotted it. If Peron fell, much of the protection accorded by him to ex-Nazis might be removed by his successors. With his new wife Roschmann left for Egypt.

He spent three months there in the summer of 1955, and came to West Germany in the autumn. Nobody would have known a thing but for the anger of a woman betrayed. His first wife, Hella Roschmann, wrote to him from Graz, care of the Vidmar family in Buenos Aires during that summer. The Vidmars, having no forwarding address for their former lodger, opened the letter and replied to the wife in Graz, telling her that he had gone back to Germany, but had married his secretary.

His wife then informed the police of his new identity. In consequence, the police started a search for Roschmann on a matter of bigamy. Immediately a look-out was posted for a man calling himself Fritz Bernd Wegener in West Germany.

‘Did they get him? asked Miller.

Wiesenthal looked up and shook his head.

‘No, he disappeared again. Almost certainly under a new set of false papers, and almost certainly in Germany. You see, that’s why I believe Tauber could have seen him. It all fits with the known facts.’

‘Where’s the first wife, Hella Roschmann?’ asked Miller.

‘She still lives in Graz.’

‘Is it worth contacting her?’

Wiesenthal shook his head.

‘I doubt it. Needless to say, after being “blown” Roschmann is not likely to reveal his whereabouts to her again. Or his new name. For him it must have been quite an emergency when his identity of Wegener was exposed. He must have acquired his new papers in a devil of a hurry.’

‘Who would have got them for him?’ asked Miller.

‘The Odessa, certainly.’

‘Just what is the Odessa? You’ve mentioned it several times in the course of the Roschmann story.’