The Odessa File

Still conscious, he told the farmer the name of a doctor he knew in Graz, and the man cycled through the night and the curfew to fetch him. For three months he was tended by his friends, first at the farmer’s house, later at another house in Graz itself. When he was fit enough to walk the war was three months over and Austria under four-power occupation. Graz was in the heart of the British Zone.

All German soldiers were required to do two years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and Roschmann, deeming it the safest place to be, gave himself up. For two years from August 1945 to August 1947, while the hunt for the worst of the wanted SS murderers went on, Roschmann remained at ease in the camp. For on giving himself up he had used another name, that of a former friend who had gone into the Army and had been killed in North Africa.

There were so many tens of thousands of German soldiers wandering about without any identity papers at all that the name given by the man himself was accepted by the Allies as genuine. They had neither the time nor the facilities to conduct a probing examination of army corporals. In the summer of 1947 Roschmann was released and felt it safe to leave the custody of the camp. He was wrong.

One of the survivors of Riga camp, a native of Vienna, had sworn his own vendetta against Roschmann. This man haunted the streets of Graz, waiting for Roschmann to return to his home, the parents he had left in 1939 and the wife he had married while on leave in 1943, Hella Roschmann. The old man roamed from the house of the parents to the house of the wife, waiting for the SS man to return.

After release Roschmann remained in the countryside outside Graz, working as a labourer in the fields. Then on December 20th, 1947, he went home to spend Christmas with his family. The old man was waiting. He hid behind a pillar when he saw the tall, lanky figure with the pale blond hair and cold blue eyes approach his wife’s house, glance round a few times, then knock and enter.

Within an hour, led by the former inmate of the camp at Riga, two hefty British sergeants of the Field Security Service, puzzled and sceptical, arrived at the house and knocked. After a quick search Roschmann was discovered under a bed. Had he tried to brazen it out, claiming mistaken identity, he might had made the sergeants believe the old man was wrong. But hiding under a bed was the giveaway. He was led off to be interviewed by Major Hardy of the FSS, who promptly had him locked up in a cell while a request went off to Berlin and the American index of the SS.

Confirmation arrived in forty-eight hours, and the balloon went up. Even while the request was in Potsdam asking for Russian help in establishing the dossier on Riga, the Americans asked for Roschmann to be transferred to Munich on a temporary basis, to give evidence at Dachau where the Americans were putting on trial other SS men who had been active in the complex of camps around Riga. The British agreed.

At six in the morning of January 8th, 1948, Roschmann, accompanied by a sergeant of the Royal Military Police and another from Field Security, was put on a train at Graz bound for Salzburg and Munich.

Lord Russell paused in his pacing, crossed to the fireplace and knocked out his pipe.

‘Then what happened?’ asked Miller.

‘He escaped,’ said Lord Russell.

‘He what?’

‘He escaped. He jumped from the lavatory window of the moving train, after complaining the prison diet had given him diarrhoea. By the time his two escorts had smashed in the lavatory door, he was gone into the snow. They never found him. A search was mounted, of course, but he had gone, evidently through the snowdrifts to make contact with one of the organisations prepared to help ex-Nazis escape. Sixteen months later in May 1949 your new republic was founded and we handed over all our files to Bonn.’

Miller finished writing and laid his notebook down.

‘Where does one go from here?’ he asked.

Lord Russell blew out his cheeks.

‘Well, now, your own people, I suppose. You have Roschmann’s life from birth to the 8th of January 1948. The rest is up to the German authorities.’

‘Which ones?’ asked Miller, fearing what the answer would be.

‘As it concerns Riga, the Hamburg Attorney General’s office, I suppose,’ said Lord

Russell.

‘I’ve been there.’

‘They didn’t help much?’

‘Not at all.’

Lord Russell grinned. ‘Not surprised, not surprised. Have you tried Ludwigsburg?’

‘Yes. They were nice, but not very helpful. Against the rules,’ said Miller.

‘Well, that exhausts the official lines of inquiry. There’s only one other man. Have you ever heard of Simon Wiesenthal?’

‘Wiesenthal? Yes, vaguely. The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it.’

‘He lives in Vienna. Jewish chap, came from Polish Galicia originally. Spent four years in a series of concentration camps, twelve in all. Decided to spend the rest of his days tracking down wanted Nazi criminals. No rough stuff, mind you. He just keeps collating all the information about them he can get, then when he’s convinced he has found one, usually living under a false name, not always, he informs the police. If they don’t act, he gives a press conference and puts them in a spot. Needless to say, he’s not terribly popular with officialdom in either Germany or Austria. He reckons they are not doing enough to bring known Nazi murderers to book, let alone chase the hidden ones. The former SS hate his guts and have tried to kill him a couple of times; the bureaucrats wish he would leave them alone, and a lot of other people think he’s a great chap, and help him where they can.’

‘Yes, the name rings a bell now. Wasn’t he the man who found Adolf Eichmann?’ asked Miller.

Lord Russell nodded.