The Odessa File

It was in the afternoon of the 11th of October that we arrived, by now barely 4000 strong, at the town of Riga, and the column went straight down to the docks. In the distance we could hear a strange crump as if of thunder along the horizon. For a while it puzzled us, for we had never heard the sound of shells or bombs. Then it filtered through to our minds, dazed by hunger and cold – there were Russian mortars landing in the suburbs of Riga.

When we arrived at the dock area it was crawling with officers and men of the SS. I had never seen so many in one place at the same time. There must have been more of them than there were of us. We were lined up in rows against one of the warehouses and again most of us thought that this was where we would die under the machine guns. But this was not to be.

Apparently the SS were going to use us, the last remainder of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had passed through Riga, as their alibi to escape from the Russian advance, their passage back to the Reich. The means of travel was berthed alongside Quay Six, a freighter, the last one out of the encircled enclave. As we watched, the loading began of some of the hundreds of German Army wounded who were lying on stretchers in two of the warehouses further along the quay …

It was almost dark when Captain Roschmann arrived, and he stopped short when he saw how the ship was being loaded. When he had taken in the sight of the German Army wounded being taken on to the ship he turned round and shouted to the medical orderlies bearing the stretchers, ‘Stop that.’

He strode towards them across the quay and slapped one of the orderlies in the face. He whirled round on the ranks of us prisoners and roared, ‘You scum. Get up on that ship and get these men off. Bring them back down here. That ship is ours.’

Under the prodding of the gun barrels of the SS men who had come down with us, we started to move towards the gang plank. Hundreds of other SS men, privates and NCOs, who till then had been standing back watching the loading, surged forward and followed the prisoners up on to the ship. When we got on the deck we began picking up the stretchers and carrying them back to the quay. Rather, we were about to, when another shout stopped us.

I had reached the foot of the gangway and was about to start up when I heard the shout and turned to see what was happening.

An army captain was running down the quay and he came to a stop quite close to me by the gangway. Staring up at the men above, bearing stretchers they were about to unload, the captain shouted, ‘Who ordered these men to be off-loaded?’

Roschmann walked up behind him and said, ‘I did. This boat is ours.’ The captain spun round on him. He delved in his pocket and produced a piece of paper. ‘This ship was sent to pick up army wounded,’ he said. ‘And army wounded is what it will take.’

With that he turned to the army orderlies and shouted to them to resume the loading. I looked across at Roschmann. He was standing trembling, I thought with anger. Then I saw he was scared. He was frightened of being left to face the Russians. Unlike us, they were armed.

He began to scream at the orderlies, ‘Leave them alone, I have commandeered this ship in the name of the Reich.’ The orderlies ignored him and obeyed the captain of the Wehrmacht. I noticed his face, as he was only two metres away from me. It was grey with exhaustion, with dark smudges under the eyes. There were lines down each side of the nose and several weeks of stubble on his chin. Seeing the loading work begin again, he made to march past Roschmann to supervise his orderlies. From among the crowded stretchers in the snow of the quay I heard a voice shout in the Hamburg dialect. ‘Good on you, Captain. You tell the swine.’

As he was abreast of Roschmann, the SS officer grabbed his arm, swung him round and slapped the army man across the face with his gloved hand. I had seen him slap men a thousand times, but never with the same result. The captain took the blow, shook his head, bunched his fist and landed a haymaker of a right-fisted punch on Roschmann’s jaw. Roschmann flew back several feet and went flat on his back in the snow, a small trickle of blood coming from his mouth. The captain moved towards his orderlies.

As I watched, Roschmann drew his SS officer’s Lüger from its holster, took careful aim and fired between the captain’s shoulders. Everything stopped at the crash from the pistol. The army captain staggered and turned. Roschmann fired again, and the bullet caught the captain in the throat. He spun over backwards and was dead before he hit the quay. Something he had been wearing round his neck flew off as the bullet struck, and when I passed it, after being ordered to carry the body and throw it into the dock, I saw that the object was a medal on a ribbon. I never knew the captain’s name, but the medal was the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster …

Miller read this page of the diary with growing astonishment, gradually turning to disbelief, doubt, belief again, and finally a deep anger. He read the page a dozen times to make sure there was no doubt, then resumed reading the diary.

After this we were ordered to start unloading the Wehrmacht wounded and told to lay them back in the gathering snow on the quayside. I found myself helping one young soldier back down the gang plank on to the quay. He had been blinded and round his eyes was wrapped a dirty bandage torn from a shirt-tail. He was half-delirious and kept asking for his mother. I suppose he must have been about eighteen.

Finally they were all taken off, and we prisoners were ordered on board. The whole lot of us were taken down into the two holds, one forward and one aft, until we were so cramped we could hardly move. Then the hatches were battened down and the SS began to come aboard. We sailed just before midnight, the captain evidently wishing to be well out into the Gulf of Latvia before dawn came to avoid the chance of being spotted and bombed by the patrolling Russian Stormoviks …

It took three days to reach Danzig, well behind German lines. Three days in a pitching, tossing hell below decks, without food or water, during which a quarter of the 4000 prisoners died. There was no food to vomit, and yet everyone was retching dry from seasickness. Many died of the exhaustion of vomiting, others from hunger or cold, others from suffocation, others because they simply lost the will to live, lay back and surrendered to Death. And then the ship was berthed again, the hatches were opened and gusts of ice-cold winter air came rushing into the foetid, stinking holds.

When we were unloaded on to the quay at Danzig the dead bodies were laid out in rows alongside the living, so that the numbers should tally with those that had been taken on board at Riga. The SS were always very precise about numbers.

We learned later that Riga had fallen to the Russians on October 14th, while we were still at sea …

Tauber’s pain-racked Odyssey was reaching its end. From Danzig the surviving inmates were taken by barge to the concentration camp of Stutthof, outside Danzig, and until the first weeks of 1945 he worked daily in the submarine works of Burggraben by day and lived in the camp by night. Thousands more at Stutthof died of malnutrition. He watched them all die, but somehow stayed alive.

In January 1945, as the advancing Russians closed on Danzi

g, the survivors of Stutthof camp were driven westward on the notorious Death March through the winter snow towards Berlin. All across eastern Germany these columns of wraiths, being used as a ticket to safety in Western hands by their SS guards, were being herded westwards. Along the route, in snow and frost, they died like flies.

Tauber survived even this, and finally the remnant of his column reached Magdeburg, west of Berlin, where the SS finally abandoned them and sought their own safety. Tauber’s group was lodged in Magdeburg prison, in the charge of the bewildered and helpless old men of the local Home Guard. Unable to feed their prisoners, terrified of what the advancing Allies would say when they found them, the Home Guard permitted the fittest of them to go scrounging for food in the surrounding countryside.

The last time I had seen Eduard Roschmann was when we were being counted on Danzig quayside. Warmly wrapped against the winter cold, he was climbing into a car. I thought it would be my last glimpse of him, but I was to see him one last time. It was April 3rd, 1945.

I had been out that day towards Gardelegen, a village east of the city, and had gathered a small sackful of potatoes with three others. We were trudging back with our booty when a car came up behind us heading west. It paused to negotiate a horse and cart on the road, and I glanced round with no particular interest to see the car pass. Inside were four SS officers, evidently making their escape towards the west. Sitting beside the driver, pulling on the uniform jacket of an army corporal, was Eduard Roschmann.

He did not see me, for my head was largely covered by a hood cut from an old potato sack, a protection against the cold spring wind. But I saw him. There was no doubt about it.

All four men in the car were apparently changing their uniforms even as the vehicle headed west. As it disappeared down the road a garment was thrown from one window and fluttered into the dust. We reached the spot where it lay a few minutes later and stooped to examine it. It was the jacket of an SS officer, bearing the silver twin-lightning symbols of the Waffen-SS and the rank of captain. Roschmann of the SS had disappeared …

Twenty-four days after this came the liberation. We had ceased to go out at all, preferring to stay hungry in the prison than venture along the streets, where complete anarchy was loose. Then on the morning of April 27th all was quiet in the town. Towards mid-morning I was in the courtyard of the prison talking to one of the old guards, who seemed terrified and spent nearly an hour explaining that he and his colleagues had nothing to do with Adolf Hitler and certainly nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews.

I heard the sound of a vehicle drive up outside the locked gates, and there was a hammering on them. The old Home Guard went to open them. The man who stepped through, cautiously, with a revolver in his hand, was a soldier in full battle uniform, one that I had never seen before.

He was evidently an officer, for he was accompanied by a soldier in a flat round tin hat who carried a rifle. They just stood there in silence, looking round at the courtyard of the prison. In one corner were stacked about fifty corpses, those who had died in the past two weeks and whom no one had the strength to bury. Others, half-alive, lay round the walls trying to soak up a little of the spring sunshine, their sores festering and stinking.