The Odessa File

‘How come a young German reporter is chasing Nazis?’ asked Lord Russell without preamble. Miller found his gruff directness disconcerting.

‘I’d better explain from the beginning,’ said Miller.

‘I think you better had,’ said the peer, leaning forward to knock out the dottle of his pipe on the side of the grate. While Miller talked he refilled the pipe, lit it, and was puffing contentedly away when the German had finished.

‘I hope my English is good enough,’ said Miller at last, when no reaction seemed to be coming from the retired prosecutor.

Lord Russell seemed to wake from a private reverie.

‘Oh, yes, yes, better than my German after all these years. One forgets, you know.’

‘This Roschmann business …’ began Miller.

‘Yes, interesting, very interesting. And you want to try and find him. Why?’

The last question was shot at Miller and he found the old man’s eyes gazing keenly from under the eyebrows.

‘Well, I have my reasons,’ he said stiffly. ‘I believe the man should be found and brought to trial.’

‘Humph. Don’t we all. The question is, will he be? Will he ever be?’

Miller played it straight back.

‘If I can find him, he will be. You can take my word on that.’

The British peer seemed unimpressed. Little smoke signals shot out of the pipe as he puffed, rising in perfect series towards the ceiling. The pause lengthened.

‘The point is, my lord, do you remember him?’

Lord Russell seemed to start.

‘Remember him? Oh yes, I remember him. Or at least the name. Wish I could put a face to the name. An old man’s memory fades with the years, you know. And there were so many of them in those days.’

‘Your Military Police picked him up on December 20th, 1947, in Graz,’ Miller told him.

He took the two photo-copies of Roschmann’s picture from his breast pocket and passed them over. Lord Russell gazed at the two pictures, full-face and profile, rose and began to pace the sitting-room, lost in thought.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I’ve got him. I can see him now. Yes, the file was sent on from Graz Field Security to me in Hanover a few days later. That would be where Cadbury got his despatch from. Our office in Hanover.’

He paused and swung round on Miller.

‘You say your man Tauber last saw him on April 3rd, 1945, driving west through Magdeburg in a car with several others?’

‘That’s what he said in his diary.’

‘Mmmm. Two and a half years before we got him. And do you know where he was?’

‘No,’ said Miller.

‘In a British prisoner-of-war camp. Cheeky. All right, young man, I’ll fill in what I can …’

The car carrying Eduard Roschmann and his colleagues from the SS passed through Magdeburg and immediately turned south towards Bavaria and Austria. They made it as far as Munich before the end of April, then split up. Roschmann by this time was in the uniform of a corporal of the German Army, with papers in his own name but describing him as an army man.

South of Munich the American Army columns were sweeping through Bavaria, mainly concerned not with the civilian population, which had merely become an administrative headache, but with rumours that the Nazi hierarchy intended to shut themselves up in a mountain fortress in the Bavarian Alps around Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden and fight it out to the last man. The hundreds of unarmed, wandering German soldiers were paid scant attention as Patton’s columns rolled through Bavaria.

Travelling by night across country, hiding by day in woodsmen’s huts and barns, Roschmann crossed the Austrian border that had not even existed since the annexation of 1938 and headed south and onwards for Graz, his home town. In and around Graz he knew people on whom he could count to shelter him.

He passed round Vienna and had almost made it when he was challenged by a British patrol on the 6th of May. Foolishly he tried to run for it. As he dived into the undergrowth by the roadside a hail of bullets cut through the brushwood, and one passed clean through his chest, piercing one lung. After a quick search in the darkness the British Tommies passed on, leaving him wounded and undiscovered in a thicket. From here he crawled to a farmer’s house half a mile away.