The Odessa File

bury shot him a shrewd glance under his bushy eyebrows.

‘But you want to know now?’

‘We have to know sooner or later. May I ask you something? Do you hate the Germans?’

Cadbury chewed for a few minutes, considering the question seriously.

‘Just after the discovery of Belsen a crowd of journalists attached to the British Army went up for a look. I’ve never been so sickened in my life, and in war you see a few terrible things. But nothing like Belsen. I think at that moment, yes, I hated them all.’

‘And now?’

‘No. Not any longer. Let’s face it, I married a German girl in 1948. I still live here. I wouldn’t if I still felt the way I did in 1945. I’d have gone back to England long ago.’

‘What caused the change?’

‘Time. The passing of time. And the realisation that not all Germans were Josef Kramers. Or, what was his name, Roschmann? Or Roschmanns. Mind you, I still can’t get over a sneaking sense of mistrust for people of my own generation among your nation.’

‘And my generation?’ Miller twirled his wineglass and gazed at the light refracting through the red liquid.

‘They’re better,’ said Cadbury. ‘Let’s face it, you have to be better.’

‘Will you help me with the Roschmann inquiry? Nobody else will.’

‘If I can,’ said Cadbury. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Do you recall him being put on trial in the British Zone?’

Cadbury shook his head.

‘No. Anyway, you said he was Austrian by birth. Austria was also under four-power occupation at the time. But I’m certain there was no trial against Roschmann in the British Zone of Germany. I’d remember the name if there were.’

‘But why would the British authorities request a photocopy of his career from the Americans in Berlin?’

Cadbury thought for a moment.

‘Roschmann must have come to the attention of the British in some way. At that time nobody knew about Riga. The Russians were at the height of their bloody-mindedness in the late forties. They didn’t give us any information from the east. Yet that was where the overwhelming majority of the worst crimes of mass-murder took place. So we were in the odd position of having about eighty per cent of the crimes against humanity committed east of what is now the Iron Curtain, and the ones responsible for them were about ninety per cent in the three western zones. Hundreds of guilty men slipped through our hands because we knew nothing about what they had done a thousand miles to the east.

‘But if an inquiry was made about Roschmann in 1947 he must have come to our attention somehow.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Miller. ‘Where would one start to look, among the British records?’

‘Well, we can start with my own files. They’re back at my house. Come on, it’s a short walk.’

Fortunately, Cadbury was a methodical man and had kept every one of his despatches from the end of the war onwards. His study was lined with box-files along two walls. Besides these, there were two grey filing cabinets in one corner.

‘I run the office out of my home,’ he told Miller as they entered the study. ‘This is my own filing system, and I’m about the only one who understands it. Let me show you.’

He gestured to the filing cabinets.

‘One of these is stuffed with files on people, listed under the names in alphabetical order. The other concerns subjects listed under subject headings, alphabetically. We’ll start with the first one. Look under Roschmann.’

It was a brief search. There was no folder with Roschmann’s name on it.

‘All right,’ said Cadbury. ‘Now let’s try subject headings. There are four that might help. There’s one called Nazis, another labelled SS. Then there’s a very large section headed Justice, which has subsections one of which contains cuttings about trials that have taken place. But they’re mostly criminal trials that have taken place in West Germany since 1949. The last one that might help is about War Crimes. Let’s start going through them.’

Cadbury read faster than Miller, but it took them until nightfall to wade through the hundreds of cuttings and clippings in all four files. Eventually Cadbury rose with a sigh and closed the War Crimes file, replacing it in its proper place in the filing cabinet.

‘I’m afraid I have to go out to dinner tonight,’ he said. ‘The only thing left to look through are these.’ He gestured to the box-files on shelves along two of the walls.