The Odessa File

It took him twenty minutes to find a public telephone. He always kept a pocketful of one-mark pieces for long-distance calls.

When he took the call in Nuremberg and heard the news the Werwolf went into a transport of rage, mouthing abuse down the line at his hired killer. It took several seconds before he could calm down.

‘You’d better find him, you oaf, and quickly. God knows where he’s gone now.’

Mackensen explained to his chief he needed to know what kind of information Bayer could have supplied to Miller before he died.

At the other end of the line the Werwolf thought for a while.

‘Dear God,’ he breathed, ‘the forger. He’s got the name of the forger.’

‘What forger, Chief?’ asked Mackensen.

The Werwolf pulled himself together.

‘I’ll get on to the man and warn him,’ he said crisply. ‘This is where Miller has gone.’

He dictated an address to Mackensen and added, ‘You get the hell up to Osnabrück like you’ve never moved before. You’ll find Miller at that address, or somewhere in the town. If he’s not at the house, keep searching the town for the Jaguar. And this time, don’t leave the Jaguar. It’s the one place he always returns.’

He slammed down the phone, then picked it up again and asked for directory inquiries. When he had the number he sought he dialled a number in Osnabrück.

In Stuttgart, Mackensen was left holding a buzzing receiver. With a shrug he replaced it and went back to his car, facing the prospect of a long, wearying drive followed by another ‘job’. He was almost as tired as Miller, by then twenty miles short of Osnabrück. Neither man had slept for twenty-four hours, and Mackensen had not even eaten since the previous lunch.

Chilled to the marrow from his night’s vigil, longing for a piping hot coffee and a Steinhäger to chase it, he got back into the Mercedes and headed it north on the road to Westphalia.

Chapter Fourteen

TO LOOK AT him there was nothing about Klaus Winzer to suggest he had ever been in the SS. For one thing he was well below the required height of six feet, for another he was short-sighted. At the age of forty he was plump and pale, with fuzzy blond hair and a diffident manner.

In fact he had had one of the strangest careers of any man to have worn the uniform of the SS. Born in 1924, he was the son of a certain Johann Winzer, a pork butcher of Wiesbaden, a large, boisterous man who from the early twenties onwards was a trusting follower of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. From his earliest days Klaus could remember his father coming home from street battles with the Communists and Socialists.

Klaus took after his mother, and to his father’s disgust grew up small, weak, shortsighted and peaceful. He hated violence, sports and belonging to the Hitler Youth. At only one thing did he excel: from his early teens he fell completely in love with the art of handwriting and the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, an activity his disgusted father regarded as an occupation for cissies.

With the coming of the Nazis, the pork butcher flourished, obtaining as a reward for his earlier services to the Party the exclusive contract to supply meat to the local SS barracks. He mightily admired the strutting SS youths, and devoutly hoped he might one day see his own son wearing the black and silver of the Schütz Staffel.

Klaus showed no such inclination, preferring to spend his time poring over his manuscripts, experimenting with coloured inks and beautiful lettering.

The war came, and in the spring of 1942 Klaus turned eighteen years old, the age of call-up. In contrast to his ham-fisted, brawling, Jew-hating father, he was small, pallid and shy. Failing even to pass the medical then required for a desk job with the Army, Klaus was sent home from the recruiting board. For his father it was the last straw.

Johann Winzer took the train to Berlin to see an old friend from his street-fighting days, who had since risen high in the ranks of the SS, in the hopes the man might intercede for his son and obtain an entry into some branch of service to the Reich. The man was as helpful as he could be, which was not much, and asked if there was anything the young Klaus could do well. Shamefacedly, his father admitted he could write illuminated manuscripts.

The man promised he would do what he could, but to be getting on with, he asked if Klaus would prepare an illuminated address on parchment, in honour of a certain SS-Major Fritz Suhren.

Back in Weisbaden, the young Klaus did as he was asked, and at a ceremony in Berlin a wee

k later this manuscript was presented to Suhren by his colleagues. Suhren, then the Commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was being posted to take over command of the even more notorious Ravensbrück.

Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.

At the handing-over ceremony in the RSHA headquarters in Berlin everyone admired the beautifully prepared manuscript, and not least a certain SS-Lieutenant Alfred Naujocks. This was the old man who had carried out the mock attack on Gleiwitz radio station on the German – Polish border in August 1939, leaving the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in German Army uniforms as ‘proof’ of the Polish attack on Germany, Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland the following week.

Naujocks asked who had done the manuscript, and on being told, he requested the young Klaus Winzer be brought to Berlin.

Before he knew what was happening, Klaus Winzer was inducted into the SS, without any formal training period, made to swear the oath of loyalty, another oath of secrecy, and told he would be transferred to a top-secret Reich project. The butcher of Weisbaden, bewildered, was in seventh heaven.

The project involved was then being carried out under the auspices of the RSHA, Amt Six, Section F, in a workshop in Dellbruck Strasse, Berlin. Basically it was quite simple. The SS was trying to forge hundreds of thousands of British five-pound notes and American 100-dollar bills. The paper was being made in the Reich banknote-paper factory at Spechthausen, outside Berlin, and the job of the workshop in Dellbruck Strasse was to try to get the right watermark for British and American currency. It was for his knowledge of papers and inks that they wanted Klaus Winzer.

The idea was to flood Britain and America with phoney money, thus ruining the economies of both countries. In early 1943, when the watermark for the British fivers had been achieved, the project of making the printing plates was transferred to Block 19, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Jewish and non-Jewish graphologists and graphic artists worked under the direction of the SS. The job of Winzer was quality control, for the SS did not trust their prisoners not to make a deliberate error in their work.