The Odessa File

‘Right. Were all SS men automatically members of Death’s Head units?’

‘No. But the oath was the same.’

Oster rose and stretched.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of anything else you might be asked in general terms. Now let’s get on to the specifics. This is what you would have to know about Flossenburg concentration camp, your first and only posting …’

The man who sat in the window seat of the Olympic Airways flight from Athens to Munich seemed quiet and withdrawn.

The German business man next to him, after several attempts at conversation, took the hint and confined himself to reading Playboy magazine. His next-door neighbour stared out of the window as the Aegean Sea passed beneath them and the airliner left the sunny spring of the eastern Mediterranean for the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites and the Bavarian Alps.

The business man had at least elicited one thing from his companion. The traveller in the window seat was undoubtedly a German, his grasp of the language fluent and familiar, his knowledge of the country without fault. The business man travelling home after a sales mission to the Greek capital had not the slightest doubt that he was seated next to a fellow countryman.

He could hardly have been more wrong. The man next to him had been born in Germany thirty-three years earlier, under the name of Josef Kaplan, son of a Jewish tailor, in Karlsruhe. Three years old when Hitler came to power, seven when his parents had been taken away in a black van, he had been hidden in an attic for another three years until, at the age of ten in 1940, he too had been discovered and taken away in a van. His early teens had been spent using the resilience and the ingenuity of youth to survive in a series of concentration camps until in 1945, with the suspicion of a wild animal burning in his eyes, he had snatched a thing called a Hershey bar from the outstretched hand of a man who spoke to him in a foreign language through his nose, and had run away to eat the offering in a corner of the camp before it was taken away from him.

Two years later, weighing a few pounds more, aged seventeen and hungry as a rat, with that creature’s suspicion and mistrust of everyone and everything, he had come on a ship called the President Warfield, alias the Exodus, to a new shore many miles from Karlsruhe and Dachau.

The passing years had mellowed him, matured him, taught him many things, given him a wife and two children, a commission in the Army, but never eliminated the hatred he felt for the country to which he was travelling that day. He had agreed to go, to swallow his feelings, to take up again as he had done twice before in the previous ten years, the façade of amiability and bonhomie that was necessary to effect his transformation back into a German.

The other requirements had been provided by the Service: the passport in his breast pocket, the letters, cards and documentary paraphernalia of a citizen of a West European country, the underclothes, shoes, suits and luggage of a German commercial traveller in textiles.

As the heavy and freezing clouds of Europe engulfed the plane he reconsidered his mission, fed into him in days and nights of briefing by the quiet-spoken colonel on the kibbutz that produced so little fruit and so many Israeli agents. To follow a man, to keep an eye on him, a young German four years his junior, while that man sought to do what several had tried and failed, to infiltrate the Odessa. To observe him and measure his success, to note the persons he contacted and was passed on to, check on his findings, ascertain if the German could trace the recruiter of the new wave of German scientists headed for Egypt to work on the rockets. Never to expose himself, never to take matters into his own hands. Then to report back with the sum total of what the young German had found out before he was ‘blown’ or discovered, one of which was bound to happen. He would do it; he did not have to enjoy doing it, that was not part of the requirement. Fortunately, no one required that he like becoming a German again. No one asked him to enjoy mixing with them, talking their language, smiling and joking with them. Had it been asked, he would have refused it. For he hated them all, the young reporter he was ordered to follow included. Nothing, he was certain, would ever change that.

The following day Oster and Miller had their last visit from Leon. Apart from Leon and Motti, there was a new man, sun-tanned and fit looking, much younger than the others. Miller adjudged the new man to be in his mid-thirties. He was introduced simply as Josef. He said nothing throughout.

‘By the way,’ Motti told Miller, ‘I drove your car up here today. I’ve left it on a public parking lot down in the town, by the market square.’

He tossed Miller the keys, adding. ‘Don’t use it when you go to meet the Odessa. For one thing it’s too noticeable, for another you’re supposed to be a bakery worker on the run after being spotted and identified as a former camp guard. Such a man would not have a Jaguar. When you go, travel by rail.’

Miller nodded his agreement, but privately he regretted being separated from his beloved Jaguar.

‘Right. Here is your driving licence, complete with your photograph as you now look. You can tell anyone who asks that you drive a Volkswagen, but you have left it in Bremen, as the number could identify you to the police.’

Miller scanned the driving licence. It showed himself with his short hair but no moustache. The one he now had could simply be explained as a precaution, grown since he was identified.

‘The man who, unbeknown to him, is your guarantor, left from Bremerhaven on a cruise ship on the morning tide. This is the former SS colonel, now a bakery-owner, and your former employer. His name is Joachim Eberhardt. Here is a letter from him to the man you are going to see. The paper is genuine, taken from his office. The signature is a perfect forgery. The letter tells its recipient that you are a good former SS man, reliable, now fallen on misfortune after being recognised, and it asks the recipient to help you acquire a new set of papers and a new identity.’

Leon passed the letter across to Miller. He read it and put it back in its envelope.

‘Now seal it,’ said Leon. Miller did so.

‘Who’s the man I have to present myself to?’ he asked.

Leon took a sheet of paper with a name and address on it.

‘This is the man,’ he said. ‘He lives in Nuremberg. We’re not certain what he was in the war, for he almost certainly has a new name. However, of one thing we are quite certain. He is very high up in the Odessa. He may have met Eberhardt, who is a big wheel in the Odessa in North Germany. So here is a photograph of Eberhardt the baker. Study it, in case your man asks for a description of him from you. Got that?’

Miller looked at Eberhardt’s photograph and nodded.

‘When you are ready,’ he said, ‘I suggest a wait of a few days until Eberhardt’s ship is beyond the reach of ship-to-shore radio-telephone. We don’t want the man you will see to get through a telephone call to Eberhardt while the ship is still off the German coast. Wait till it’s in mid-Atlantic. I think you should probably present yourself on Thursday morning next.’

Miller nodded.

‘All right. T

hursday it is.’

‘Two last things,’ said Leon. ‘Apart from trying to trace Roschmann, which is your desire, we also would like some information. We want to know who is now recruiting scientists to go to Egypt and develop Nasser’s rockets for him. The recruitment is being done by the Odessa, here in Germany. We need to know specifically who the new chief recruiting officer is. Secondly, stay in touch. Use public telephones and phone this number.’