The Odessa File

‘You’re wrong. That’s why I’m not giving you a commission for it. I should think it’s the last thing people want to know about.’

‘But look, Herr Hoffmann, this is different. These people Roschmann killed, they weren’t Poles and Russians. These were Germans, all right, German Jews, but they were Germans. Why wouldn’t people want to know about it?’

Hoffmann spun back from the window, put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his knuckles.

‘Miller, you’re a good reporter. I like the way you cover a story, you’ve got style. And you’re a ferret. I can hire twenty, fifty, a hundred men in this city by picking up the phone, and they’ll all do what they’re told, cover the stories they’re sent to cover. But they can’t dig out a story for themselves. You can. That’s why you get a lot of work from me, and will get a lot more in the future. But not this one.’

‘But why? It’s a good story.’

‘Listen, you’re young. I’ll tell you something about journalism. Half of journalism is about writing good stories. The other half is about selling them. You can do the first, but I can do the second. That’s why I’m here and you’re there. You think this is a story everyone will want to read, because the victims of Riga were German Jews. I’m telling you, that’s exactly why no one will want to read the story. It’s the last story in the world they’ll want to read. And until there’s a law in this country forcing people to buy magazines and read what’s good for them, they’ll go on buying magazines to read what they want to read. And that’s what I give them. What they want to read.’

‘Then why not about Roschmann?’

‘You still don’t get it? Then I’ll tell you. Before the war just about everyone in Germany knew one Jew. The fact is, before Hitler started, nobody hated the Jews in Germany. We had the best record of treatment of our Jewish minority of any country in Europe. Better than France, better than Spain, infinitely better than Poland and Russia where the pogroms were fiendish.

‘Then Hitler started. Telling people the Jews were to blame for the first war, the unemployment, the poverty and everything else that was wrong. People didn’t know what to believe. Almost everyone knew one Jew who was a nice guy. Or just harmless. People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything.

‘So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.

‘

For years people haven’t asked what happened to the Jews of Germany. They just disappeared, nothing else. It’s bad enough to read at every war-crimes trial what happened to the faceless, anonymous Jews of Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystock, nameless, unknown Jews from Poland and Russia. Now you want to tell them chapter and verse what happened to their next-door neighbours. Now can you understand it? These Jews’ – he tapped the diary – ‘these people they knew, they greeted them in the street, they bought in their shops, and they stood around while they were taken away for your Herr Roschmann to deal with. You think they want to read about that? You couldn’t have picked a story that people in Germany want to read about less.’

Having finished, Hans Hoffmann leaned back, selected a fine panatella from a humidor on the desk and lit it from a rolled-gold Dupont. Miller sat and digested what he had not been able to work out for himself.

‘That must have been what my mother meant,’ he said at length.

Hoffmann grunted.

‘Probably.’

‘I still want to find that bastard.’

‘Leave it alone, Miller. Drop it. No one will thank you.’

‘That’s not the only reason, is it? The public reaction. There’s another reason, isn’t there?’

Hoffmann eyed him keenly through the cigar smoke.

‘Yes,’ he said shortly.

‘Are you afraid of them – still?’ asked Miller.

Hoffmann shook his head.

‘No. I just don’t go looking for trouble. That’s all.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Have you ever heard of a man called Hans Habe?’ asked Hoffmann.

‘The novelist? Yes, what about him.’

‘He used to run a magazine in Munich once. Back in the early fifties. A good one too, he was a damn good reporter, like you. Echo of the Week, it was called. He hated the Nazis, so he ran a series of exposures of former SS men living in freedom in Munich.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘To him, nothing. One day he got more mail than usual. Half the letters were from his advertisers, withdrawing their custom. Another was from his bank asking him to drop round. When he did he was told the bank was foreclosing on the overdraft, as of that minute. Within a week the magazine was out of business. Now he writes novels, good ones too. But he doesn’t run a magazine any more.’