Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

 

 

1972

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

THE ODESSA of the title is neither the city in southern Russia nor the smaller city in Texas. It is a word composed of six initial letters, which in German stand for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angeh4drigen. In English this means "Organization of Former Members of the SS." The SS, as most readers will know, was the army within an army, the state within a state, devised by Adolf Hitter, commanded by Heinrich Himmler, and charged with special tasks under the Nazis who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. These tasks were supposedly concerned with the security of the Third Reich; in effect they included the carrying out of Hitler's ambition to rid Germany and Europe of all elements he considered to be "unworthy of life," to enslave in perpetuity the "subhuman races of the Slavic lands," and to exterminate every Jew, man, woman, and child, on the face of the Continent.

 

 

In carrying out these tasks the SS organized and executed the murder of some fourteen million human beings, comprising roughly six million Jews, five million Russians, two million Poles, half a million gypsies, and half a million mixed others, including, thcugh it is seldom mentioned, close to two hundred thousand nonJewish Germans and Austrians. These were either mentally or physically handicapped unfortunates, or so-called enemies of the Reich, such as Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, editors, reporters, and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, men of conscience and courage, and later Army officers suspected of lack of loyalty to Hitler.

 

 

Before it had been destroyed the SS had made the two initials of its name, and the twin-lightning symbol of its standard, synonymous with inhumanity in a way that no other organization before or since has been able to do.

 

 

Before the end of the war its most senior members, quite aware the war was lost and under no illusions as to how civilized men would regard their actions when the reckoning came, made secret provision to disappear to a new life, leaving the entire German people to carry and share the blame for the vanished culprits. To this end vast sums of SS gold were smuggled out and deposited in numbered bank accounts, false identity papers were prepared, escape channels opened up. When the Allies finally conquered Germany, the bulk of the mass-murderers had gone.

 

 

The organization which they formed to effect their escape was the Odessa.

 

 

When the first talk of ensuring the escape of the killers to more hospitable climes had been achieved, the ambitions of these men developed. Many never left Germany at all, preferring to remain under cover with false names and papers while the Allies ruled; others came back, suitably protected by a new identity. The few very top men remained abroad to manipulate the organization from the safety of a comfortable exile.

 

 

The aim of the Odessa was and remains fivefold: to rehabilitate former SS men into the professions of the new Federal Republic created in 1949 by the Allies, to infiltrate at least the lower echelons of political party activity, to pay for the very best legal. defense for any SS killer hauled before a court and in every way possible to stultify the course of justice in West Germany when it operates against a former Karnerad, to see that former SS men established themselves in commerce and industry in time to take advantage of the economic miracle that has rebuilt the country since 1945, and finally to propagandize the German people to the viewpoint that the SS killers were in fact none other than ordinary patriotic soldiers doing their duty to the Fatherland, and in no way deserving of the persecution to which justice and conscience have ineffectually subjected them. In all these tasks, backed by its considerable funds, it has been measurably successful, and in none more so than in reducing official retribution through the West German courts to a mockery. Changing its name several times, the Odessa has sought to deny its own existence as an organization, with the result that many Germans are inclined to say the Odessa does not exist. The short answer is: it exists, and the Kameraden of the Death's Head insignia are still linked within it.

 

 

Despite its successes in almost all its objectives, the Odessa does occasionally take a defeat. The worst it ever suffered occurred in the early spring of 1964, when a package of documents arrived unannounced and anonymously at the Ministry of Justice in Bonn. To the very few officials who ever saw the list of names on these sheets, the package became known as "The Odessa File.

 

 

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

 

 

As IN THE CASE OF Mr. Forsyth's first novel, The Day of the Jackal, many characters in The Odessa File are real people. Some will be immediately recognized by the reader; others may puzzle the reader as to whether they are true or fictional, and the publishers do not wish to elucidate further because it is in this ability to perplex the reader as to bow much is true and how much false that much of the grip of the story lies.

 

 

Nevertheless, the publishers feel the reader may be interested or assisted to know that the story of former SS Captain Eduard Roscbmann, the commandant of the concentration camp at Riga from 1941 to 1944, from his birth in Graz, Austria, in 1908 to his present exile in South America, is completely factual and drawn from SS and West German records.

 

 

New York

 

 

1972

 

 

THERE was a thin robin's-eggblue dawn coming up over Tel Aviv when the intelligence analyst finished typing his report. He stretched the cramped muscles of his shoulders, lit another filter-tipped Time, and read the concluding paragraphs. ne man on whose debriefing the report was based stood at the same hour in prayer fifty miles to the east at a place called Yad Vashem, but the analyst did not know this. He did not know precisely how the information in his report had been obtained, or how many men had died before it reached him. He did not need to know. All he needed was to be assured the informa- tion was accurate and that his forward-analysis was soundly and logically arrived at.

 

 

Corroborative details arriving in this office indicate the substantial accuracy of the named agent's claim with regard to the location of the factory. If the appropriate action is taken, it may safely be assumed the West German authorities will concern themselves with its dismantlement.

 

 

It is recommended that the substantial record of the facts be placed soon in the hands of these authorities. It is felt by this agency that this would be the best way of ensuring an attitude at the highest level in Bonn that will ensure the continuance of the Waldorf deal.

 

 

To all intents and purposes therefore the Right Honourable members of the Committee may be assured the project known as Vulkan is in the process of being dismantled. Consequent on this, our best authorities assure us the rockets can never fly in time. Finally, that being so, it may be concluded that if and when war with Egypt comes, that war will be fought and won by conventional weapons, whxh is to say by the Republic of Israel.

 

 

The analyst signed the foot of the document and dated it: February 23, 1964. Then he pressed a bell to summon a dispatch rider who would take it to the office of the Prime Minister.

 

 

Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what he was doing on November 22, 1963, at the precise moment he heard President Kennedy was dead. Ken- nedy was hit at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, Daflas time, and the announcement that he was dead came at about half past one in the same time zone. It was twothirty in New York, seven-thirty in the evening in London, and eight-thirty on a chilly, sleet-swept night in Hamburg.

 

 

Peter Miller was driving back into the town center after visiting his mother at her home in Osdorf, one of the outer suburbs of the city. He always visited her on Friday evenings, partly to see if she had everything she needed for the weekend and partly because he felt he had to visit her once a week. He would have telephoned her if she had a telephone, but as she had none, he drove out to see her. That was why she refused to have a telephone.

 

 

As usual, he had the radio on, and was listening to a music show being broadcast by Northwest German Radio. At half past eight he was in the Osdorf Way, ten minutes from his mother's flat, when the music stopped in the middle of a bar and the voice of the announcer came through, taut with tension.

 

 

"Achtung, Achtung. Here is an announcement. President Kennedy is dead. I repeat, President Kennedy is dead." Miller took his eyes off the road and stared at the dimly illuminated band of frequencies along the upper edge of the radio, as if his eyes would be able to deny what his ears had heard, assure him he was tuned in to the wrong radio station, the one that broadcast nonsense.

 

 

"Jesus," he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal, and swung to the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona toward the center of Hamburg, other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.

 

 

Along his own side he could see the brake lights glowing on as the drivers ahead swung to the right to park at the curb and listen to the supplementary information pouring from their radios. On the left the headlights of the cars heading out of town wavered wildly as they too swung away toward the pavement. Two cars overtook him, the first hooting angrily, and he caught a glimpse of the driver tapping his forehead in Miller's direction in the usual rude sign, indicating lunacy, that one German driver makes to another who has annoyed him.

 

 

He'll learn soon enough, thought Miller.

 

 

The light music on the radio had stopped, replaced by the "Funeral March," which was evidently all the disk jockey had on hand. At intervals he read snippets of further information straight off the teleprinter, as they were brought in from the newsroom. The details began to fill in: the open-car ride into Dallas, the rifleman in the window of the School Book Depository. No mention of an arrest.

 

 

The driver of the car ahead of Miller climbed out and walked back towards him. He approached the lefthand window, then realized that the driver's seat was inexplicably on the right and came round the car. He wore a nylon-fur-collared jacket. Miller wound down his window.

 

 

"You heard it?" asked the man, bending down to the window.

 

 

"Yeah," said Miller.

 

 

"Absolutely fantastic," said the man. All over Hamburg, Europe, the world, people were walking up to complete strangers to discuss the event.

 

 

"You reckon it was the Communists?" asked the man.

 

 

"I don't know." "It could mean war, you know, if it was them," said the man.

 

 

"Maybe," said Miller. He wished the man would go away. As a reporter he could imagine the chaos sweeping across the newspaper offices of the country as every staff man was called back to help put out a crash edition for the morning breakfast tables. There would be obituaries to prepare, the thousands of instant tributes to correlate and typeset, the telephone lines jammed with yelling men seeking more and ever more details because a man with his head shattered lay dead in a city in Texas.

 

 

He wished in a way he were back on the staff of a daily newspaper, but since he had become a freelance three years earlier he bad specialized in news features inside Germany, mainly connected with crime, the police, the underworld. His mother hated the job, accusing him of mixing with "nasty people," and his arguments that be was becoming one of the most sought-after reporter-investigators in the country availed nothing in persuading her that a reporter's job was worthy of her only son.

 

 

As the reports from the radio came through, his mind was racing, trying to think of another "angle" that could be chased up inside Germany and might make a sidebar story to the main event. The reaction of the Bonn government would be covered out of Bonn by the staff men; the memories of Kennedy's visit to Berlin the previous June would be covered from there. There didn't seem to be a good pictorial feature he could ferret out to sell to any of the score of German picture magazines that were the best customers of his kind of journalism.

 

 

The man leaning on the window sensed that Miller's attention was elsewhere and assumed it was out of grief for the dead President. Quickly he dropped his talk of world war and adopted the same grave demeanor.

 

 

"fa, ja, ja," he murmured with sagacity, as if he had seen it coming all along. "Violent people, these Ameri- cans, mark my words, violent people. There's a streak of violence in them that we over here will never understand." "Sure," said Miller, his mind still miles away.

 

 

The man took the hint at last. "Well, I must be getting home," he said, straightening up. "Griiss Gott." He started to walk back to his own car.

 

 

Miller became aware he was going. Va, gute Nacht," he called out of the open window, then wound it up against the sleet whipping in off the Elbe River. The music on the radio continued in funereal vein, and the announcer said there would be no more light music that night, just news bulletins interspersed with suitable music.

 

 

Miller leaned back on the comfortable leather upholstery of his Jaguar and lit up a Roth-Hdndl, a filterless black-tobacco cigarette with a foul smell, another thing that his mother complained about in her disap- pointing son.

 

 

It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if... or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries. But it is probably accurate to say that if Miller had not had his radio on that night he would not have pulled in to the side of the road for half an hour. He would not have seen the ambulance, or heard of Salomon Tauber or Eduard Roschmann, and forty months later the republic of Israel would probably have ceased to exist.

 

 

He finished his cigarette, still listening to the radio, wound down the window, and threw the stub away. At a touch of the button the 3.8-liter engine beneath the long sloping bonnet of the Jaguar XK 150 S thundered once and settled down to its habitual and comforting rumble, like an angry animal trying to get out of a cage. Miller flicked on the two headlights, checked behind, and swung out into the growing traffic stream along Osdorf Way.

 

 

He had got as far as the traffic lights on Stresemannstrasse, and they were standing at red, when he heard the clamor of the ambulance behind him. It came past him on the left, the wail of the siren rising and falling, slowed slightly before heading into the road junction against the red light, then swung across Miller's nose and down to the right into Daimlerstrasse. Miller reacted on reflexes alone. He let in the clutch. and the Jaguar surged after the ambulance, twenty meters behind it.

 

 

As soon as he had done it he wished he had gone straight home. It was probably nothing, but one never knew. Ambulances meant trouble, and trouble could mean a story, particularly if one were first on the scene and the whole thing had been cleared up before the staff reporters arrived. It could be a major crash on the road, or a big wharf fire, a tenement building ablaze, with children trapped inside. It could be any- thing. Miller always carried a small Yashica with flash attachment in the glove compartment of his car because one never knew what was going to happen right in front of one's eyes.

 

 

He knew a man who had been waiting for a plane at Munich airport on February 6, 1958, and the plane carrying the Manchester United football team bad crashed a few hundred meters from where he stood. The man was not even a professional photographer, but be had umlung the camera he was taking on a skiing holiday and snapped the first exclusive pictures of the burning aircraft. The pictorial magazines had paid more than 50,000 marks for them.

 

 

The ambulance twisted into the maze of small and mean streets of Altona, leaving the Altona railway station on the left and heading down toward the river. Whoever was driving the flat-snouted, high-roofed Mercedes ambulance knew his Hamburg and knew how to drive. Even with his greater acceleration and hard suspension, Miller could feel the back wheels of the Jaguar skidding across the cobbles slick with rain.

 

 

Miller watched Menck's auto-parts warehouse rush by, and two streets later his original question was answered. Tbe ambulance drew up in a poor and sleazy street, ill lit and gloomy in the slanting sleet, bordered by crumbling tenements and rooming-houses. It stopped in front of one of these, where a police car already stood, its blue roof light twirling, the beam sending a ghostly glow across the faces of a knot of bystanders grouped round the door.

 

 

A burly police sergeant in a rain cape roared at the crowd to stand back and make a gap in front of the door for the ambulance. Into this the Mercedes slid. Its driver and attendant climbed down, ran round to the back, and eased out an empty stretcher. After a brief word with the sergeant, the pair hastened upstairs.

 

 

Miller pulled the Jaguar to the opposite curb twenty yards down the road and raised his eyebrows. No crash, no fire, no trapped children. Probably just a heart attack. He climbed out and strolled over to the crowd, which the sergeant was holding back in a semicircle around the door of the rooming-house.

 

 

"Mind if I go up?" asked Miller.

 

 

"Certainly do. It's nothing to do with you." "I'm press," said Miller, proffering his Hamburg city press card.

 

 

"And I'm police," said the sergeant. "Nobody goes up. Those stairs are narrow enough as it is, and none too safe. The ambulance men will be down right away." He was a big man, standing six feet three, and in his rain cape, with his arms spread wide to hold back the, crowd, he looked as immovable as a barn door.

 

 

"What's up, then?" asked Miller.

 

 

"Can't make statements. Check at the station later on.

 

 

A man in civilian clothes came down the stairs and emerged onto the pavement. The turning light on top of the Volkswagen patrol car swung across his face, and Miller recognized him. They had been at school together at Hamburg Central High. ne man was now a junior detective inspector in the Hamburg police, stationed at Altona Central.

 

 

"Hey, Karl." The young inspector turned at the call of his name and scanned the crowd behind the sergeant. In the next swirl of the police-car light he caught sight of Miller and his raised right hand. His face broke into a grin, part of pleasure, part of exasperation. He nodded to the sergeant.

 

 

"It's all right, Sergeant. He's more or less harmless." The sergeant lowered his arm, and Miller darted past. He shook hands with Karl Brandt.

 

 

"What are you doing here?" "Followed the ambulance." "Damned vulture. What are you up to these days?" "Same as usual. Freelancing." "Making quite a bundle out of it by the look of it. I keep seeing your name in the picture magazines." "It's a living. Hear about Kennedy?" "Yes. Hell of a thing. They must be turning Dallas inside out tonight. Glad it wasn't on my turf." Miller nodded toward the dimly lit hallway of the rooming-bouse, where a low-watt naked bulb cast a yellow glare over peeling wallpaper.

 

 

"A suicide. Gas. Neighbors smelled it coming under the door and called us.

 

 

Just as well no one struck a match; the place was reeking with it." "Not a film star by any chance?" asked Miller "Yeah. Sure. They always live in places like &s. No, it was an old man.

 

 

Looked as if he had been dead for years anyway. Someone does it every night." "Well, wherever he's gone now, it can't be worse than this." The inspector gave a fleeting smile and turned as the two ambulance men negotiated the last seven steps of the creaking stairs and came down the hallway with their burden. Brandt turned around. "Make some room. Let them through." The sergeant promptly took up the cry and pushed the crowd back even farther. The two ambulance men walked out onto the pavement and around to the open doors of the Mercedes. Brandt followed them, with Miller at his heels. Not that Miller wanted to look at the dead man, or even intended to.

 

 

He was just following

 

 

Brandt. As the ambulance men reached the door of the vehicle, the first one hitched his end of the stretcher into the runners and the second prepared to shove it inside.

 

 

"Hold it," said Brandt and flicked back the comer of the blanket above the dead man's face. He remarked over his shoulder, "Just a formality. My report has to say I accompanied the body to the ambulance and back to the morgue." The interior lights of the Mercedes ambulance were bright, and Miller caught a single two-second look at the face of the suicide. His first and only impression was that he had never seen anything so old and ugly. Even given the effects of gassing, the dull mottling of the skin, the bluish tinge at the lips, the man in life could have been no beauty. A few strands of lank hair were plastered over the otherwise naked scalp. The eyes were closed. The face was hollowed out to the point of emaciation, and with the man's false teeth missing, each cheek seemed to be sucked inward till they almost touched inside the mouth, giving the effect of a ghoul in a horror film. The lips hardly existed, and both upper and lower were lined with vertical creases, reminding Miller of the shrunken skull from the Amazon basin he had once seen, whose lips had been sewn together by the natives.

 

 

To cap the effect, the man seemed to have two pale and jagged scars running down his face, each from the temple or upper ear to the corner of the mouth.

 

 

After a quick glance, Bra:ndt pulled the blanket back and nodded to the ambulance attendant behind him. He stepped back as the man rammed the stretcher into its berth, locked the doors, and went around to the cab to join his partner. The ambulance surged away. The crowd started to disperse accompanied by the sergeant's muted growls: "Come on, it's all over.

 

 

There's nothing more to see. Haven't you got homes to go to?" Miller looked at Brandt and raised his eyebrows. "Charming." "Yes. Poor old guy. Nothing in it for you, though?" Miller looked pained. "Not a chance. Like you say, there's one a night. People are dying all over the world tonight, and nobody's taking a bit of notice. Not with Kennedy dead." Inspector Brandt laughed mockingly. "You lousy journalists." "Let's face it. Kennedy's what people want to read about. They buy the newspapers." "Yeah. Well, I must get back to the station. See you, Peter." They shook hands again and parted. Miller drove back toward Altona station, picked up the main road back into the city center, and twenty minutes later swung the Jaguar into the underground garage off the Hansa Square, two hundred yards from the house where he had his penthouse apartment.

 

 

Keeping the car in an underground garage all winter was costly, but it was one of the extravagances he permitted himself. He liked his fairly expensive apartment because it was high and be could look down on the bustling boulevard of the Steindamm. Of his clothes and food he thought nothing, and at twenty-nine, just under six feet, with the rumpled brown hair and brown eyes that women go for, he didn't need expensive clothes.

 

 

An envious friend had once told him, "You could pull broads in a monastery," and he had laughed but been pleased at the same time because he knew it was true.

 

 

The real passions of his life were sports cars, reporting, and Sigrid, though he sometimes shamefacedly admitted that if it came to a choice between Sigi and the Jaguar, Sigi would have to find her loving somewhere else.

 

 

He stood and looked at the Jaguar in the lights of the garage after he had parked it. He could seldom get enough of looking at that car. Even approaching it in the street, he would stop and admire it, occasionally joined by a passer-by who, not realizing it was Miller's, would stop also and remark, "Some motor, that." Normally a young freelance reporter does not drive a Jaguar ~~K 150 S.

 

 

Spare parts were almost impossible to come by in Hamburg, the more so as the XK series, of which the S model was the last ever made, had gone out of production in 1960. He maintained it himself, spending hours on Sunday in overalls beneath the chassis or half buried in the engine. The gas it used, with its three SU carburetors, was a major strain on his pocket, the more so because of the price of gas in Germany, but he paid it willingly. The reward was to hear the berserk snarl of the blown exhausts when he hit the accelerator on the open autobalm, to feet the thrust as it rocketed out of a turn on a mountain road. He had even hardened up the independent suspension on the two front wheels, and as the car had stiff suspension at the back, it took comers steady as a rock, leaving other drivers rolling wildly on their cushion springs if they tried to keep up with him. Just after buying it, he had had it resprayed black with a long wasp-yellow streak down each side. As it had been made in Coventry, England, and not as an export car, the driver's wheel was on the right, which caused an occasional problem in passing but allowed him to change gear with the left hand and hold the shuddering steering wheel in the right hand, which he had come to prefer.

 

 

Even now he wondered at the lucky stroke that had enabled him to buy it.

 

 

Earlier that summer he had idly opened a pop magazine while waiting in a barber shop to have his hair cut. Normally he never read the gossip about pop stars, but there was nothing else to read. The center-page spread bad been about the meteoric rise to fame and international stardom of four tousel-headed English youths. The face on the extreme right of the picture, the one with the big nose, meant nothing to him, but the other three faces rang a bell in his filing cabinet of a memory.

 

 

The names of the two disks that had brought the quartet to stardom, "Please, Please Me" and "Love Me, Do," meant nothing either, but three of the faces puzzled him for two days. Then he remembered them, more than a year earlier, in 1962, singing way down on the program at a small cabaret off the Reeperbalm. It took him another day to recall the name, for he had only once popped in for a drink to talk to an underworld figure from whom he needed information about the Sankt Pauli gang. The Star Club. He went down there and checked through the billings for 1962 and found them. They had been five then, the three he recognized and two others, Pete Best and Stuart Sutliffe.

 

 

From there he went to the photographer who had done the publicity photographs for the impresario Bert Kiimpfert, and had bought right and title to every one he had. His story "How Hamburg Discovered the Beatles" had made almost every pop-music and picture magazine in Germany and a lot abroad. On the proceeds he bad bought the Jaguar, which he bad been eyeing in a car showroom, where it had been sold by a British Army officer whose wife had grown too pregnant to fit into it. He even bought some Beatles records out of gratitude, but Sigi was the only one who ever played them.

 

 

He left the car and walked up the ramp to the street and back to his flat. It was nearly midnight, and although his mother had fed him at six that evening with the usual enormous meal, he was hungry again. He made a plate of scrambled eggs and listened to the late-night news. It was all about Kennedy and heavily accented on the German angles, since there was little more news coming through from Dallas. The police were still searching for the killer. The announcer went to great lengths about Kennedy's love of Germany, his visit to Berlin the previous summer, and his statement in German, "Ich bin ein Berliner." There was then a recorded tribute from the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, his voice choked with emotion, and other tributes were read from Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had retired the previous October 15.

 

 

Peter Miller switched off and went to bed. He wished Sigi was home because he always wanted to snuggle up to her when he felt depressed, and then he got hard and then they made love, after which he fell into a dream- less steep, much to her annoyance because it was after lovemaking that she always wanted to talk about marriage and children. But the cabaret at which she danced did not close till nearly four in the morning, often later on Friday nights, when the provincials and tourists were thick down the Reeperbalm, prepared to buy champagne at ten times its restaurant price for a girl with big tits and a low-cut dress, and Sigi had the biggest and the lowest.

 

 

So he smoked another cigarette and fell asleep alone at quarter to two to dream of the hideous face of the old gassed man in the slums of Altona.

 

 

While Peter Miller was eating his scrambled eggs at midnight in Hamburg, five men were sitting drinking in the comfortable lounge of a house attached to a riding school near the pyramids outside Cairo. The time there was one in the morning. The five men had dined well and were in a jovial mood, the cause being the news from Dallas they had heard almost four hours earlier.

 

 

Three of the men were Germans, the other two Egyptians. The wife of the host and proprietor of the riding school, a favorite meeting place of the cream of Cairo society and the several-thousand-strong German colony, had gone to bed, leaving the five men to talk into the small hours.

 

 

Sitting in the leather-backed easy chair by the shuttered window was Hans Appler, formerly a Jewish expert in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Dr.

 

 

Josef Goebbels. Having lived in Egypt since shortly after the end of the war, where he had been spirited by the Odessa, Appler had taken the Egyptian name of Salah Chaff ar and worked as an expert on Jews in the Egyptian Ministry of Orientation. He held a glass of whisky. On his left was another former expert from Goebbels' staff, Ludwig Heiden, also working in the Orientation Ministry. He had in the meantime adopted the Moslem faith, made a trip to Mecca, and was called El Hadj. In defcrence to his new religion he held a glass of orange juice. Both men were still fanatical Nazis.

 

 

Ile two Egyptians were Colonel Shamseddin Badran, personal aide to Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later to become Vice-President of Egypt before being accused of treason after the Six-Day War of 1967 and later committing suicide. The other was Colonel Ali Samir, head of the Moukhabarat, the Egyptian Secret Intelligence Service.

 

 

There had been a sixth guest at dinner, the guest of honor, who had rushed back to Cairo when the news came through at nine-thirty, Cairo time, that President Kennedy was dead. He was the Speaker of the Egyptian National Asesmbly, Anwar el Sadat, a close collaborator of President Nasser and later to become his successor.

 

 

Hans Appler raised his glass toward the ceiling. "So Kennedy the Jew-lover is dead. Gentlemen, I give you a toast." "But our glasses are empty," protested Colonel Samir.

 

 

Their host hastened to remedy the matter, filling the empty glasses from a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard.

 

 

The reference to Kennedy as a Jew-lover baffled none of the five men in the room. On March 14, 1960, while Dwight Eisenhower was still President of the United States, the Premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had met secretly at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, a meeting that ten years earlier would have been deemed impossible. What was deemed impossible even in 1960 was what happened at that meeting, which was why details of it took years to leak out and why even at the end of 1963 President Nasser refused to take seriously the information that the Odessa and the Moukhabarat of Colonel Samir placed on his desk.

 

 

The two statesmen had signed an agreement whereby West Germany agreed to open a credit account for Israel to the tune of fifty million dollars a year, without any strings attached. Ben-Gurion, however, soon discovered that to have money was one thing, to have a secure and certain source of arms was quite another. Six months later the Waldorf agreement was topped off with another, signed by the Defense Ministers of Germany and Israel, Franz-Josef Strauss and Shimon Peres. Under its terms, Israel would be able to use the money from Germany to buy weapons in Germany.

 

 

Adenauer, aware of the vastly more controversial nature of the second agreement, delayed for months, until in 1961 he was in New York to meet the new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy put the pressure on.

 

 

He did not wish to have arms delivered directly from the United States to Israel, but he wanted them to arrive somehow. Israel needed fighters, transport planes, Howitzer 105-mm. artillery pieces, armored cars, armored personnel carriers, and tanks, but above aH tanks.

 

 

Germany had all of them, mainly of American make, either bought from America to offset the cost of keeping American troops in Germany under the NATO agreement, or niade under license in Germany.

 

 

Under Kennedy's pressure the Strauss-Peres deal was pushed through.

 

 

The first German tanks started to arrive at Haifa in late June 1963. It was difficult to keep the news secret for long; too many people were involved. The Odessa had found out in late 1962 and promptly informed the Egyptians, with whom its agents in Cairo had the closest links.

 

 

In late 1963 things started to change. On October 15, Konrad Adcnauer, the Fox of Bonn, the Granit.- Chancellor, resigned and went into retirement. Adenauer's place was taken by Ludwig Erhard, a good vote-catcher as the father of the German economic miracle, but in matters of foreign policy weak and vacillating.

 

 

Even while Adenauer was in power there had been a vociferous group inside the West German cabinet in favor of shelving the Israeli arms deal and halting the supplies before they had begun. The old Chancellor had silenced them with a few terse sentences, and such was his power that they stayed silenced.

 

 

Erhard was quite a different man and already had earned himself the nickname of the Rubber Lion. As soon as he took the chair the anti-arms-deal group, based in the Foreign Ministry, ever mindful of its excellent and improving relations with the Arab world, opened up again. Erhard dithered. But behind them all was the determination of John Kennedy that Israel should get her arms via Germany.

 

 

And then he was shot. The big question in the small hours of the morning of November 23 was simply: would President Lyndon Johnson take the American pressure off Germany and let the indecisive Chancellor in Bonn renege on the deal? In fact he did not, but there were high hopes in Cairo that he would.

 

 

The host at the convivial meeting outside Cairo that night, having filled his guests' glasses, turned back to the sideboard to top up his own. His name was Wolfgang Lutz, born at Mannheim in 1921, a former major in the German Army, a fanatical Jew-hater, who had emigrated to Cairo in 1961 and started his riding academy. Blond, blue-eyed, bawk-faced, he was a top favorite among both the influential political figures of Cairo and the expatriate German and mainly Nazi community along the banks of the Nile.

 

 

He turned to face the room and gave a broad snide. If there was anything false about that smile, no one noticed it. But it was false. He had been born a Jew in Mannheim but had emigrated to Palestine in 1933 at the age of twelve. His name was Ze'ev, and he held the rank of rav-seren (major) in the Israeli Army. He was also the top agent of Israeli Intelligence in Egypt at that time. On February 28, 1965, after a raid on his home in which a radio transmitter was discovered in the bathroom scales, he was arrested. Tried on June 26, 1965, he was sentenced to hard labor in perpetuity. Released after the end of the 1967 war as part of an exchange against thousands of Egyptian prisoners of war, he and his wife stepped back onto the soil of home at Lod Airport on February 4, 1968.

 

 

But the night Kennedy died this was all in the future: the arrest, the tortures, the multiple rape of his wife. He raised his glass to the four smiling faces in front of him.

 

 

In fact, he could hardly wait for his guests to depart, for something one of them had said over dinner was of vital importance to his country, and be desperately wished to be alone, to go up to his bathroom, get the transmitter out of the bathroom scales, and send a mes sage to Tel Aviv. But he forced himself to keep smiling.

 

 

"Death to the Jew-lovers," he toasted. "Sieg Heil."

 

 

Peter Miller woke the next morning just before nine and shifted luxuriously under the enormous feather cushion that covered the double bed. Even half awake, he could feet the warmth of the sleeping figure of Sigi seeping across the bed to him, and by reflex he snuggled closer so that her buttocks pushed into the base of his stomach. Automatically he began to erect.

 

 

Sigi, still fast asleep after only four hours in bed, grunted in annoyance and shifted away toward the edge of the bed. "Go away," she muttered without waking up.

 

 

Miller sighed, turned onto his back, and held up his watch, squinting at the face of it in the half-light. Then he slipped out of bed on the other side, pulled a toweling bathrobe around him, and padded through into the living room to pull back the curtains. The steely November light washed across the room, making him blink. He focused his eyes and looked down into the Steindamm. It was a Saturday morning, and traffic was light down the wet black tarmac. He yawned and went into the kitchen to brew the first of innumerable cups of coffee. Both his mother and Sigi reproached him with living almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes.

 

 

Drinking his coffee and smoking the first cigarette of the day in the kitchen, he -considered whether there was anything particular he ought to do that day and decided there was not. For one thing, all the newspapers and the next issues of the magazines would be about President Kennedy, probably for days or weeks to come. And for another, there was no particular story he was chasing at the time. Besides which, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to get hold of people in their offices, and they seldom like being disturbed at home. He had re- cently finished a well-received series on the steady infiltration of Austrian, Parisian, and Italian gangsters into the gold mine of the Reeperbahn, Hamburg's half-mile of nightclubs, brothels, and vice, and had not yet been paid for it. Ile thought be might contact the magazine to which he had sold the series, then decided against it. It would pay in time, and he was not short of money for the moment. Indeed his bank statement, which had arrived three days earlier, showed he had more than 5000 marks to his credit, which he thought would keep him going for a while.

 

 

"The trouble with you, pal," he told his reflection in one of Sigi's brilliantly polished saucepans as he rinsed out the cup with his forefinger, "is that you are lazy." He had been asked by a civilian-careers officer, at the end of his military service ten years earlier, what he wanted to be in life. He had replied, "An idle rich man," and at twenty-nine, although he had not achieved it and probably never would, he still thought it a perfectly reasonable ambition.

 

 

He carried the portable transistor radio into the bathroom, closed the door so Sigi would not hear it, and listened to the news while he showered and shaved. The main item was that a man bad been arrested for the murder of President Kennedy. As he had supposed, there were no other items of news on the entire program but those connected with the Kennedy assassination.

 

 

After drying off he went back to the kitchen and made more coffee, this time two cups. He took them into the bedroom, placed them on the bedside table, slipped off his robe, and clambered back under the cushion beside Sigi, whose fluffy blond head was protruding onto the pillow.

 

 

She was twenty-two and at school had been a champion gymnast who, so she said, could have gone on to Olympic standing if her bust had not developed to the point where it got in the way and no leotard could safely contain it. On leaving school she became a teacher of physical training at a girls' school. The change to striptease dancer in Haniburg came a year later and for the very best and most simple of economic reasons. It earned her five times more than a teacher's salary.

 

 

Despite her willingness to take her clothes off to the buff in a nightclub, she was remarkably embarrassed by any lewd remarks made about her body by anyone whom she could see when the remarks were made.

 

 

"The point is," she once told an amused Peter Miller with great seriousness, "when I'm on the stage I can't see anything behind the lights, so I don't get embarrassed. If I could see them, I think I'd run offstage." This did not stop her from later taking her place at one of the tables in the club when she was dressed again, and waiting to be invited for a drink by one of the customers. The only drink allowed was champagne, in halfbottles or preferably whole bottles. On these she collected a fifteen-per-cent commission. Although almost without exception the customers who invited her to drink champagne with them hoped to get much more than an hour of gazing in stunned admiration at the canyon between her breasts, they never did. She was a kindly and understanding girl, and her attitude to the pawing attentions of the customers was one of gentle regret rather than the contemptuous loathing that the other girls hid behind their neon smiles.

 

 

"Poor little men," she once said to Miller, "they ought to have a nice woman to go home to." "What do you mean, poor little men?" protested Miller. "They're dirty old creeps with a pocketful of cash to spend." "Well, they wouldn't be if they had someone to take care of them," retorted Sigi, and on this her feminine logic was unshakable.

 

 

Miller had seen her by chance on a visit to Madame Kokett's bar just below the Caf6 Keese on the Reeperbahn, when he had gone to have a chat and a drink with the owner, an old friend and contact. She was a big girl, five feet, nine inches tall and with a figure to match, which, on a shorter girl, would have been out of proportion. She stripped to the music with the habitual supposedly sensual gestures, her face set in the usual bedroom pout of strippers. Miller had seen it all before and sipped his drink without batting an eyelid.

 

 

But when her brassi6re came off even he had to stop and stare, glass half-raised to his mouth. His host eyed him sardonically. "She's stacked, eh?" he said.

 

 

Miller bad to admit she made Playboy's Playmates of the Month look like severe cases of undernourishment. But she was so firmly muscled that her bosom stood outward and upward without a vestige of support.

 

 

At the end of her turn, when the applause started, the girl had dropped the bored poise of the professional dancer, bobbed a shy, half-embarrassed little bow to the audience, and given a big sloppy grin like a halftrained bird dog which against all the betting has just brought back a downed partridge. It was the grin that got Miller, not the dance routine or the figure. He asked if she would like a drink, and she was sent for.

 

 

As Miller was in the company of the boss, she avoided a bottle of champagne and asked for a gin fizz. To his surprise, Miller found she was a very nice person to be around and asked if he might take her home after the show.

 

 

With obvious reservations, she agreed. Playing his cards coolly, Miller made no pass at her that night. It was early spring, and she emerged from the cabaret, when it closed, clad in a most unglamorous duffel coat, which he presumed was intentional.

 

 

They just had coffee together and talked, during which she unwound from her previous tension and chatted gaily. He learned she liked pop music, art, walking along the banks of the Alster, keeping house, and children. After that they started going out on her one free night a week, taking in a dinner or a show, but not sleeping together.

 

 

After three months Miller took her to his bed and later suggested she might like to move in. With her single-minded attitude toward the important things of life, Sigi had already decided she wanted to marry Peter Miller, and the only problem was whether she should try to get him by not sleeping in his bed or the other way around. Sensing his ability to fill the other half of his mattress with other girls if the need arose, she decided to move in and make his life so comfortable that he would want to marry her. They bad been together for six months by the end of November.

 

 

Even Miller, who was hardly house-trained, had to admit she kept a beautiful home, and she made love with a healthy and bouncing enjoyment.

 

 

She never mentioned marriage directly but tried to get the message across in other ways. Miller feigned not to notice. Strolling in the sun by the Alster lake, she would sometimes make friends with a toddler under the benevolent eyes of its parent.

 

 

"Oh, Peter, isn't he an angel?" Miller would grunt. "Yeah. Marvelous." After that she would freeze him for an hour for having failed to take the hint. But they were happy together, especially Peter Miller, who was suited down to the ground by this arrangement of all the comforts of mar- riage, the delights of regular loving, without the ties of marriage.

 

 

After drinking half his coffee, Miller slithered down into the bed and put his anus around her from behind, gently caressing her crotch, which he knew would wake her up. After a few minutes she muttered with pleasure and rolled over onto her back. Still massaging, he leaned over and started to kiss her breasts. Still half asleep, she gave vent to a series of long mmmms, and her hands started to move drowsily over his back and buttocks. Ten minutes later they made love, squealing and shuddering with pleasure.

 

 

"That's a bell of a way to wake me up," she grumbled afterward.

 

 

"There are worse ways," said Miller.

 

 

"What's the time?" "Nearly twelve," Miller lied, knowing she would throw something at him if she learned it was half past ten and she had had only five hours' sleep. "Never mind, you go back to sleep if you feel like it."

 

 

"Mmmm. Thank you, darling, you are good to me," said Sigi and fell asleep again.

 

 

Miller was halfway to the bathroom after drinking the rest of his coffee and Sigi's as well, when the phone rang. He diverted into the sitting room and answered it.

 

 

"Peter?" "Yes, who's that?" "Karl.

 

 

His mind was still fuzzed, and he did not recognize the voice. "Karl?" The voice was impatient. "Karl Brandt. What's the matter? Are you still asleep?" Miller recovered. "Oh, yes. Sure, Karl. Sorry, I just got up. What's the matter?" "Look, it's about this dead Jew. I want to talk to you.

 

 

Miller was baffled. "What dead Jew?" "The one who gassed himself last night in Altona. Can't you even remember that far back?" "Yes, of course I remember last night," said Miller. "I didn't know he was Jewish. What about him?" "I want to talk to you," said the police inspector. "But not on the phone.

 

 

Can we meet?" Miller's reporter's mind clicked into gear immediately. Anyone who has got something to say but does not wish to say it over the phone must think it important. In the case of Brandt, Miller could hardly suspect a police detective would be so cagy about something ridiculous.

 

 

"Sure," he said. "Are you free for lunch?" "I can be," said Brandt.

 

 

"Good. I'll buy it if you think it's something worth while." He named a small restaurant on the Goose Market for one o'clock and replaced the receiver. He was still puzzled, for he couldn't see a story in the suicide of an old man, Jewish or not, in a slum tenement m Altona.

 

 

Throughout the lunch the young detective seemed to wish to avoid the subject about which he had asked for the meeting, but when the coffee came he said simply, "The man last night."

 

 

"Yes," said Miller. "What about him?" "You must have heard, as we all have, about what the Nazis did to the Jews during the war and even before it?" "Of course. They rammed it down our throats at school, didn't they?" Miller was puzzled and embarrassed. Like most young Germans, he had been told at school when he was twelve or so that he and the rest of his countrymen had been guilty of massive war crimes. At the time he had accepted it without even knowing what was being talked about.

 

 

Later it had been difficult to find out what the teachers had meant in the immediate postwar period. There was nobody to ask, nobody who wanted to talk-not the teachers, not the parents. Only with coming manhood had he been able to read a little about it, and although what he read disgusted him, he could not feel it concerned him. It was another time, another place, a long way away. He had not been there when it happened, his father had not been there, his mother had not been there. Something inside him had persuaded him it was nothing to do with Peter Miller, so he had asked for no names, dates, details. He wondered why Brandt should be bringing the subject up.

 

 

Brandt stirred his coffee, himself embarrassed, not knowing how to go on.

 

 

"That old man last night," he said at length. "He was a German Jew, He was in a concentration camp." Miller thought back to the death's head on the stretcher the previous evening. Was that what they ended up like? It was ridiculous. The man must have been liberated by the Allies eighteen years earlier and had lived on to die of old age. But the face kept coming back. He had never seen anyone who had been in a camp before-at least, not knowingly. For that matter he had never met one of the SS mass-killers, he was sure of that. One would notice, after all.

 

 

His mind strayed back to the publicity surrounding the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem two years earlier. The papers had been full of it for weeks on end. He thought of the face in the glass booth and remembered that his impression at the time had been how ordinary that face was, so depressingly ordinary. It was in reading the press coverage of the trial that for the first time he had gained an inkling of how the SS had done it, how they had got away with it.

 

 

But these had all been about things in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, far away and a long time back. He could not make them personal.

 

 

He brought his thoughts back to the present and the sense of unease Brandt's line of talk aroused in him.

 

 

"What about it?" be asked the detective.

 

 

For answer Brandt took a brown-paper-wrapped parcel out of his attach6 case and pushed it across the table. "The old man left a diary. Actually, be wasn't so old. Fifty-six. It seems he wrote notes at the time and stored them in his foot-wrappings. After the war he transcribed them all. They make up the diary." Miller looked at the parcel with scant interest. "Where did you find it?" "It was lying next to the body. I picked it up and took it home. I read it last night." Miller looked at his former friend quizzically. "It was bad?" "Horrible. I had no idea it was that bad-the things they did to them." "Why bring it to me?" Now Brandt was embarrassed. He shrugged. "I thought it might make a story for you." "Who does it belong to now?" "Technically, Tauber's heirs. But we'll never find them. So I suppose it belongs to the Police Department. But they'd just file it. You can have it, if you want it. Just don't let on that I gave it to you. I don't need any trouble in the department." Miller paid the bill, and the pair walked outside.

 

 

"All right, I'll read it. But I don't promise to get steamed up about it.

 

 

It might make an article for a magazine." Brandt turned to him with a half-smile. "You're a cynical bastard," he said.

 

 

"No," said Miller, "it's just that, like most people, I'm concerned with the here and now. What about you? After ten years in the police I'd have thought you'd be a tough cop. This thing really upset you, didn't it?" Brandt was serious again. He looked at the parcel under Miller's arm and nodded slowly. "Yes. Yes, it did. I just never thought it was that bad.

 

 

And by the way, it's not all past history. 'nat story ended here in Hamburg last night. Good-by, Peter." The detective turned and walked away, not knowing how wrong he was.

 

 

PETER MILLER took the brown 2paper parcel home and arrived there just after three. He threw the package onto the living-room table and went to make a large pot of coffee before sitting down to read it.

 

 

Settled in his favorite armchair with a cup of coffee at his elbow and a cigarette going, be opened it. The diary was in the form of a looseleaf folder with stiff covers of cardboard bound in a dull black vinyl, and a series of clips down the spine so that the leaves of the book could be extracted, or further leaves inserted, if necessary.

 

 

The contents consisted of a hundred and fifty pages of typewritten script, apparently banged out on an old machine, for some of the letters were above the line, others below it, and some either distorted or faint.

 

 

The bulk of the pages seemed to have been written years before, or over a period of years, for most of them, although neat and clean, bore the unmistakable tint of white paper several years old. But at the front and back were a number of fresh sheets, evidently written barely a few days previously. There was a preface of some new pages at the front of the typescript, and there was a sort of epilogue at the back. A check of the dates on the preface and the epilogue showed both to have been written on November 21, two days previously. Miller supposed the dead man had written them after he had made the decision to end his life.

 

 

A quick glance at some of the paragraphs on the first page surprised him, for the language was clear and precise German, the writing of a well-educated and cultured man. On the outside of the front cover a square of white paper had been pasted, and over it a larger square of cellophane to keep it clean. On the square of paper had been written in large block capitals in black ink: THE DIARY OF SALOMON TAUBER.

 

 

Miller settled himself deeper in his chair, turned to the first page, and began to read.

 

 

TAUBER'S DIARY: PREFACE

 

 

My name is Salomon Tauber, I am a Jew and about to die. I have decided to end my own life because it has no more value, nor is there anything left for me to do. Those things that I have tried to do with my life have come to nothing, and my efforts have been unavailing. For the evil that I have seen has survived and flourished, and only the good has departed in dust and mockery. The friends that I have known, the sufferers and the victims, are all dead, and only the persecutors are all around me. I see their faces on the streets in the daytime, and in the night I see the face of my wife, Esther, who died long ago. I have stayed alive this long only because there was one more thing I wished to do, one thing I wanted to see, and now I know I never shall.

 

 

I bear no hatred or bitterness toward the German people, for they are a good people. Peoples are not evil; only individuals are evil. The English philosopher Burke was right when he said, "I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation." There is no collective guilt, for the Bible relates how the Lord wished to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the evil of the men who lived in them, with their women and children, but how there was living among them one righteous man, and because he was righteous he was spared. Therefore guilt is individual, like salvation.

 

 

When I came out of the concentration camps of Riga and Stutthof, when I survived the Death March to Magdeburg, when the British soldiers liberated my body there in April 1945, leaving only my soul in chains, I hated the world. I hated the people, and the trees and the rocks, for they had conspired against me and made me suffer. And above all I hated the Germans. I asked then, as I had asked many times over the previous four years, why the Lord did not strike them down, every last man, woman, and child, destroying their cities and their houses forever from the face of the earth. And when He did not ' I hated Him too, crying that He had deserted me and my people, whom He had led to believe they were His chosen people, and even saying that He did not exist.

 

 

But with the passing of the years I have learned again to love; to love the rocks and the trees, the sky above and the river flowing past the city, the stray dogs and the cats, the weeds growing between the cobblestones, and the children who run away from me in the street because I am so ugly. They are not to blame. There is a French adage, "To understand everything is to forgive everything.ff When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

 

 

There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I, we have all failed, and failed miserably. Lastly, as time passed, I came again to love the Lord, and to ask His forgiveness for the things I have done against His Laws, and they are many. Shema Yisroel, Adonai elohenu Adonai ehad.

 

 

[The diary began with twenty pages during which Tauber described his birth and boyhood in Hamburg, his working-class war-hero father, and the death of his parents shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. By the late thirties he was married to a girl called Esther and was working as an architect. He was spared being rounded up before 1941 owing to the intervention of his employer. Finally he was taken, in Berlin, on a journey to see a client. After a period in a transit camp he was packed with other Jews into a boxcar on a cattle train bound for the east.]

 

 

I cannot really remember the date the train finally rumbled to a halt in a railway station. I think it was six dayS and seven nights after we were shut up in the car in Berlin. Suddenly the train was stationary, the slits of white light told me it was daytime outside, and my head reeled and swam from exhaustion and the stench.

 

 

There were shouts outside, the sound of bolts being drawn back, and the doorS were flung open. It was just as well I could not see myself, who had once been dressed in a white shirt and wellpressed trousers.

 

 

(The tie and jacket had long since been dropped to the floor.) The sight of the others was bad enough.

 

 

As brilliant daylight rushed into the car, men threw arms over their eyes and screamed with the pain. Seeing the doors opening, I had squeezed my eyes shut to protect them. Under the pressure of bodies half the car emptied itself onto the platform in a tumbling mass of stinking humanity. As I had been standing at the rear of the car, to one side of the centrally placed doors, I avoided this and,risking a half-open eye despite the glare, I stepped down upright to the platform.

 

 

The SS guards who had opened the gates, mean-faced, brutal men who jabbered and roared in a language I could not understand, stood back with expressions of disgust. Inside the boxcar thirty-one men lay huddled and trampled on the floor. They would never get up again. The remainder, starved, half-blind, steaming and reeking from head to foot in their rags, struggled upright on the platform. From thirst, our tongues were gummed to the roofs of our mouths, blackened and swollen, and our lips were split and parched.

 

 

Down the platform forty other cars from Berlin and eighteen from Vienna were disgorging their occupants, about half of them women and children. Many of the women and most of the children were naked, smeared with excrement, and in much as bad shape as we were. Some women carried the lifeless bodies of their children in their arms as they stumbled out into the light.

 

 

The guards ran up and down the platform, clubbing the deportees into a sort of column, prior to marching us into the town. But what town? And what was the language these men were speaking? Later I was to discover that this town was Riga and the SS guards were locally recruited Latvians, as fiercely antiSemitic as the SS from Germany, but of a much lower intelligence, virtually animals in human form.

 

 

Standing behind the guards was a cowed group in soiled shirts and slacks, each bearing a black square patch with a big J on the chest and back. This was a special command from the ghetto, brought down to empty the cattle cars of the dead and bury them outside the town. They too were guarded by half a dozen men who also had the J on their chests and backs, but who wore armbands and carried pickax handles.

 

 

These were Jewish Kapos, who got better food than the other internees for doing the job they did. There were a few German SS officers standing in the shade of the station awning, distinguishable only when my eyes were accustomed to the light. One stood aloof on a packing crate, surveying the several thousand human skeletons who emptied themselves from the train with a thin but satisfied smile. He tapped a black riding quirt of plaited leather against one jackboot. He wore the green uniform with black and silver flashes of the SS as if it were designed for him and carried the twin-lightning strikes of the Waffen SS on the right collar. On the left his rank was indicated as captain. He was tall and lanky, with pale blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. Later I was to learn he was a dedicated sadist, already known by the name that the Allies would also later use for himthe Butcher of Riga. It was my first sight of SS Captain Eduard Roschmann.

 

 

[At 5 a.m. on the morning of June 22, 1941, Hitler's 130 divisions, divided into three army groups, had rolled across the border to invade Russia. Behind each army group came the swarms of SS extermination squads, charged by Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich with wiping out the Communist commissars and the rural-dwelling Jewish communities of the vast tracts of land the Army overran, and penning the large urban Jewish communities into the ghettos of each major town for later "special treatment." The Army took Riga, capital of Latvia, on July 1, 1941, and in the middle of that month the first

 

 

SS commandos moved in. The first onsite unit of the SD and SP sections of the SS established themselves in Ricya on August 1, 1941, and began the extermination program that would make Ostland (as the three occupied Baltic states were renamed) Jew-free.

 

 

Then it was decided in Berlin to use Riga as the transit camp to death for the Jews of Germany and Austria. In 1938 there were 320,000 German Jews and 180,000 Austrian Jews, a round half-million. By July 1941 tens of thousands had been dealt with, mainly in the concentration camps within Germany and Austria, notably Sachsenbausen, Mauthausen, Ravensbriick, Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Theresienstadt in Bohemia.

 

 

But they were getting overcrowded, and the obscure lands of the east seemed an excellent place to finish off the rest. Work was begun to expand or begin the six extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzee, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Maidanek. Until they were ready, however, a place had to be found to exterminate as many as possible and "store" the rest. Riga was chosen.

 

 

Between August 1, 1941, and October 14, 1944, almost 200,000 exclusively German and Austrian Jews were shipped to Riga. Eighty thousand stayed there, dead; 120,000 were shipped onward to the six extermination camps of southern Poland already mentioned; and 400 came out alive, half of them to die at Stutthof or on the Death March back to Magdeburg.

 

 

Tauber's transport was the first into Riga from the German Reich, and reached there at 3:45 in the afternoon of August 18, 1941.

 

 

The Riga ghetto was an integral part of the city and had formerly been the home of the Jews of Riga, of whom only a few hundred existed by the time I got there. In less than three weeks Roschmann and his deputy, Krause, had overseen the extermination of most of them, as per orders.

 

 

The ghetto lay at the northern edge of the city, with open countryside to the north. There was a wall along the south face; the other three were sealed off with rows of barbed wire. There was one gate, on the northern face, through which all exits and entries had to be made. It was guarded by two watchtowers manned by Latvian SS. From this gate, running clear down the center of the ghetto to the south wall, was Mase Kalnu Iela, or Little Hill Street. To the right-hand side of this (looking from south to north toward the main gate) was the Blech Platz, or Tin Square, where selections for execution took place, along with roll call, selection of slave-labor parties, floggings, and hangings. The gallows with its eight steel hooks and permanent nooses swinging in the wind stood in the center of this. It was occupied every night by at least six unfortunates, and frequently several shifts had to be processed by the eight hanging hooks before Roschmann was satisfied with his day's work.

 

 

The whole ghetto must have been just under two square miles, a township that had once housed 12,000 to 15,000 people. Before our arrival the Riga Jews, at least the 2000 of them left, had done the bricking-off work, so the area left to our transport of just over 5000 men, women, and children was spacious. But after we arrived transports continued to come day after day until the population of our part of the ghetto soared to 30,000 to 40,000, and with the arrival of each new transport a number of the existing inhabitants equal to the number of the surviving new arrivals had to be executed to make room for the newcomers. Otherwise the overcrowding would have become a menace to the health of the workers among us, and that Roschmann would not have.

 

 

So on that first evening we settled ourselves in, taking the best-con- structed houses, one room per person, using curtains and coats for blankets and sleeping on real beds. After drinking his fill from a water butt, my room neighbor remarked that perhaps it would not be too bad after all. We had not yet met Roschmann.

 

 

As summer merged into autumn and autumn into winter, the conditions in the ghetto grew worse. Each morning the entire population-mainly men, for the women and children were exterminated on arrival in far greater percentages than the work-fit males-was assembled on Tin Square, pushed and shoved by the rifle butts of the Latvians, and roll call took place. No names were called; we were counted and divided into work groups. Almost the whole population, men, women, and children, left the ghetto each day in columns to work twelve hours at forced labor in the growing host of workshops nearby.

 

 

I had said earlier that I was a carpenter, which was not true, but as an architect I had seen carpenters at work and knew enough to get by. I guessed, correctly, that there would always be a need for carpenters, and I was sent to work in a nearby lumber mill where the local pines were sawed up and made into pre-fabricated hutments for the troops.

 

 

The work was backbreaking, enough to ruin the constitution of a healthy man, for we worked, sum er and winter, mainly outside in the cold and damp of the low-lying regions near the coast of Latvia.

 

 

Our food rations were a half-liter apiece of so-called soup, mainly tinted water, sometimes with a knob of potato in it, before marching to work in the mornings, and another half-liter, with a slice of black bread and a moldy potato, on return to the ghetto at night.

 

 

Bringing food into the ghetto was punishable by immediate hanging before the assembled population at evening roll call on Tin Square.

 

 

Nevertheless, to take that risk was the only way to stay alive.

 

 

As the columns trudged back through the main gate each evening, Roschmann and a few of his cronies used to stand by the entrance, doing spot checks on those passing through. They would call to a man or a woman or a child at random, ordering the person out of the column to strip by the side of the gate. If a potato or a piece of bread was found, the person would wait behind while the others marched through toward

 

 

Tin Square for evening roll call.

 

 

When they were all assembled, Roschmann would stalk down the road, followed by the other SS guards and the dozen or so condemned people.

 

 

The males among them would mount the gallows platform and wait with the ropes around their necks while roll call was completed. Then Roschmann would walk along the line, grinning up at the faces above him and kicking the chairs out from under, one by one. He liked to do this from the front, so the person about to die would see him.

 

 

Sometimes he would pretend to kick the chair away, only to pull his foot back in time. He would laugh uproariously to see the man on the chair tremble, thinking he was already swinging at the rope's end, only to realize the chair was still beneath him.

 

 

Sometimes the condemned men would pray to the Lord; sometimes they would cry for mercy. Roschmann liked to hear this. He would pretend he was slightly deaf, cocking an ear and asking, "Can you speak up a little? What was that you said?" When he had kicked the chair awayit was more like a wooden box, reallyhe would turn to his cronies and say, 'Dear me, I really must get a hearing aid."

 

 

Within a few months Eduard Roschmann had become the Devil incarnate to us prisoners. There was little that he did not succeed in devising.

 

 

When a woman was caught bringing food into the camp, she was made to watch the hangings of the men first, especially if one was her husband or brother. Then Roschmann made her kneel in front of the rest of us, drawn up around three sides of the square, while the camp barber shaved her bald.

 

 

After roll call she would be taken to the cemetery outside the wire and made to dig a shallow grave, then kneel beside it while Roschmann or one of the others fired a bullet from his Luger point-blank into the base of the skull. No one was allowed to watch these executions, but word seeped through from the Latvian guards that he would often fire past the ear of the woman to make her fall into the grave with shock, then climb out again and kneel in the same position. Other times he would fire from an empty chamber, so there was just a click when the woman thought she was about to die. The Latvians were brutes, but Roschmann managed to amaze them for all that.

 

 

There was one certain girl at Riga who helped the prisoners at her own risk. She was Olli Adler-from Munich, I believe. Her sister Gerda had already been shot in the cemetery for bringing in food. Olli was a girl of surpassing beauty and took Roschmann's fancy. He made her his concubine-the official term was housemaid, because relations between an SS man and a Jewish girl were banned. She used to smuggle medicines into the ghetto when she was allowed to visit it, having stolen them from the SS stores. This, of course, was punishable by death. The last I saw of her was when we boarded the ship at Riga docks.

 

 

By the end of that first winter I was certain I could not survive much longer. The hunger, the cold, the damp, the overwork, and the constant brutalities had whittled my formerly strong frame down to a mass of skin and bones. Looking in the mirror, I saw staring back at me a haggard, stubbled old man with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. I had just turned thirty-five, and I looked double that. But so did everyone else.

 

 

I had witnessed the departure of tens of thousands to the forest of the mass graves, the deaths of hundreds from cold, exposure, and overwork, and of scores from hanging, shooting, flogging, and clubbing. Even after surviving five months, I had outlived my time.

 

 

The will to live that I had begun to show in the train had dissipated, leaving nothing but a mechanical routine of going on living that sooner or later had to break. And then something happened in March that gave me another year of will power.

 

 

I remember the date even now. It was March 3, 1942, the day of the second DiinamiAnde convoy. About a month earlier we had seen for the first time the arrival of a strange van. It was about the size of a long single-decker bus, painted steel-gray, and without windows. It parked just outside the ghetto gates, and at morning roll call Roschmann said he had an announcement to make.

 

 

He said there was a new fish-pickling factory just started at the town of Di1namUnde, situated on the Ddna River, about eighty miles from Riga. It offered light work, he said, good food,and good living conditions. Because the work was so light the opportunity was open only to old men and women, the frail, the sick, and the small children.

 

 

Naturally, many were eager to go to such a comfortable kind of labor.

 

 

Roschmann walked down the lines, selecting those to go, and this time, instead of the old and sick hiding themselves at the back to be dragged screaming and protesting forward to join the forced marches to Execution Hill, they seemed eager to show themselves. Finally more than a hundred were selected, and all climbed into the van. Then the doors were slammed shut, and the watchers noticed how tight they fitted together. The van rolled away, emitting no exhaust fumes.

 

 

Later, word filtered back what the van was. There was no fish-pickling factory at WinamUnde; the van was a gassing van. In the parlance of the ghetto the expression "Di1namUnde convoy" henceforward came to mean death by gassing.

 

 

On March 3 the whisper went around the ghetto that there was to be another DiinamUnde convoy, and sure enough, at morning roll call Roschmann announced it. But there was no pressing forward to volunteer, so with a wide grin Roschmann began to stroll along the ranks, tapping on the chest with his quirt hose who were to go.

 

 

Astutely, he started at the fourth and rear rank, where he expected to find the weak, the old, and the unfit-for-work.

 

 

There was one old woman who had foreseen this and stood in the front rank. She must have been close to sixty-five, but in an effort to stay alive she had put on high-heeled shoes, a pair of black silk stockings, a short skirt even above her knees, and a saucy hat. She had rouged her cheeks, powdered her face, and painted her lips carmine. In fact she would have stood out among any group of ghetto prisoners, but she thought she might be able to pass for a young girl.

 

 

Reaching her as he walked by, Roschmann stopped, stared,and looked again. Then a grin of joy spread over his face.

 

 

"Well, what have we here?" he cried, pointing to her with his quirt to draw the attention of his comrades in the center of the square guarding the hundred already chosen. "Don't you want a nice little ride to DiinamUnde, young lady?" Trembling with fear, the old woman whispered, "No, sir." "And how old are you, then?' boomed Roschmann as his SS friends began to giggle. "Seventeen? Twenty?" The old woman's knobbly knees began to tremble. "Yes, sir," she whispered.

 

 

"How marvelous," cried Roschmann..Well, I always like a pretty girl.

 

 

Come out into the center so we can all admire your youth and beauty."

 

 

So saying, he grabbed her by the arm and hustled her toward the center of Tin Square.Once there, he stood her out in the open and said, "Well now, little lady, since you're so young and pretty, perhaps you'd like to dance for us, eh?. She stood there, shivering in the bitter wind, shaking with fear as well.

 

 

She whispered something we could not hear.

 

 

'What's that?" shouted Roschmann. "You can't dance? Oh, I'm sure a nice young thing like you can dance, can't you?" His cronies of the German SS were laughing to bust. The Latvians could not understand but started to grin. The old woman shook her head.

 

 

Roschmann's smile vanished. "Dance," he snarled.

 

 

She made a few little shuffling movements, then stopped. Roschmann drew his Luger, eased back the hammer, and fired it into the sand an inch from her feet. She jumped a foot in the air from fright.

 

 

.Dance... dance... dance for us you hideous Jewish bitch," he shouted, firing a bullet into the sand benath her feet each time he said, "Dance." Smacking in one spare magazine after another until he had used up the three in his pouch, he made her dance for half an hour, leaping even higher and higher, her skirts flying round her hips with each jump, until at last she fell to the sand unable to rise whether she lived or died.

 

 

Roschmann fired his last three slugs into the sand in front of her face, blasting the sand up into her eyes. Between the crash of each shot came the old woman's rattling wheeze that could be heard across the parade square.

 

 

When he had no more ammunition left he shouted, "Dance," again and slammed his jackboot into her belly. All this had happened in complete silence from us, until the man next to me started to pray. He was a Hasid, small and bearded, still wearing the rags of his long black coat; despite the cold which forced most of us to wear ear-muffs on our caps, he had the broad-brimmed hat of his seat. He began to recite the Shema, over and over again, in a quavering voice that grew steadily louder.

 

 

Knowing that Roschmann was in his most vicious mood, I too began to pray silently that the Hasid would be quiet. But he would not.

 

 

"Shema Yisroel (Hear, O Israel... ) "Shut up," I hissed out of the corner of my mouth.

 

 

"Adonai elohenu (the Lord is our God... ) "Will you be quiet! You'll get us all killed." "Adonai eha-a-a-ad. " (The Lord is One.) Like a cantor, he drew out the last syllable in the traditional way, as Rabbi Akiba had done as he died in the amphitheater at Caesarea on the orders of Tinius Rufus. It was just at that moment that Rosahmann stopped screaming at the old woman. He lifted his head like an animal scenting the wind and turned toward us. As I stood a head taller than the Hasid, he looked at me.

 

 

"Who was that talking?" he screamed, striding toward me across the sand.

 

 

"You-step out of line." There was no doubt he was pointing at me. I thought: This is the end, then. So what? It doesn't matter; it had to happen, now or some other time. I stepped forward as he arrived in front of me.

 

 

He did not say anything, but his face was twitching like a maniacls. Then it relaxed and he gave his quiet, wolfish smile that struck terror into everyone in the ghetto, even the Latvian SS men.

 

 

His hand moved so quickly no one could see it. I felt only a sort of thump down the left side of my face, simultaneous with a tremendous bang as if a bomb had gone off next to my eardrum. Then the quite distinct but detached feeling of my own skin splitting like rotten calico from temple to mouth. Even before it had started to bleed, Roschmann's hand moved again, the other way this time, and his quirt ripped open the other side of my face with the same loud bang in the ear and the feeling of something tearing. It was a twofoot quirt, sprung with whippy ste,el core at the handle end, the remaining foot-length being of plaited leather thongs without the core, and when drawn across and down human skin at the same time, the plaiting could split the hide like tissue paper. I had seen it done.

 

 

Within a matter of seconds I felt the trickle of warm blood beginning to flow down the front of my jacket, dripping off my chin in two little red fountains. Roschmann swung away from me, then back, pointing to the old woman still sobbing in the center of the square.

 

 

"Pick up that old hag and take her to the van," he barked.

 

 

And so, a few minutes ahead of the arrival of the other hundred victims, I picked up the old woman and carried her down Little Hill Street to the gate and the waiting van, pouring blood onto her from my chin. I set her down in the back of the van and made to leave her there. As I did so, she gripped my wrist in withered fingers with a strength I would not have thought she still possessed. She pulled me down toward her, squatting on the floor of the death van, and with a small cambric handkerchief that must have come from better days stanched some of the still flowing blood.

 

 

She looked up at me from a face streaked with mascara, rouge, tears, and sand, but with dark eyes bright as stars.

 

 

"Jew, my son," she whispered, "you must live. Swear to me that you will live. Swear to me you will get out of this place alive. You must live, so that you can tell them, them outside in the other world, what happened to our people here. Promise me, swear it by the Torah." And so I swore that I would live, somehow, no matter what the cost.

 

 

Then she let me go. I stumbled back down the road Into the ghetto, and halfway down I fainted.

 

 

Shortly after returning to work I made two decisions. One was to keep a secret diary, nightly tattooing words and dates with a pin and black ink into the skin of my feet and legs, so that one day I would be able to transcribe all that had happened in Riga and give precise evidence against those responsible.

 

 

The second decision was to become a Kapo, a member of the Jewish police.

 

 

The decision was hard, for these were men who herded their fellow Jews to work and back, and often to the place of execution. Moreover, they carried pickax handles and occasionally, when under the eye of a German SS officer, used them liberally to beat their fellow Jews so they would work harder. Nevertheless, on April 1, 1942, 1 went to the chief of the Kapos and volunteered, thus becoming an outcast from the company of my fellow Jews. There was always room for an extra Kapo, for despite the better rations, living conditions, and release from slave labor, very few agreed to become Kapos.

 

 

I should here describe the method of execution of those unfit for labor, for in this manner between 70,000 and 80,000 Jews were exterminated under the orders of Eduard Roschmann at Riga. When the cattle train arrived at the station with a new consignment of prisoners, usually about 5000 strong, there were always close to a thousand already dead from the journey. Only occasionally was the number as low as a few hundred, scattered among fifty cars.

 

 

When the new arrivals were lined up in Tin Square, the selections for extermination took place, not merely among the new arrivals but among us all. That was the point of the head-count each morning and evening.

 

 

Among the new arrivals, those weak or frail, old or diseased, most of the women, and almost all the children, were singled out as being unfit for work. These were set to one side. The remainder were then counted. If they totaled 2000, then 2000 of the existing inmates were also picked out, so that 5000 had arrived and 5000 went to Execution Hill. That way there was no overcrowding. A man might survive six months of slave labor, seldom more; then, when his health was reduced to ruins, Roschmann's quirt would tap him on the chest one day, and he would go to join the ranks of the dead.

 

 

At first these victims were marched in column to a forest outside the town. The Latvians called it Bickernicker Forest, and the Germans renamed it the Hochwald or High Forest. Here, in clearings between the pines, enormous open ditches had been dug by the Riga Jews before they died. And here the Latvian SS guards, under the eye and orders of Eduard Roschmann, mowed them down so that they fell into the ditches.

 

 

The remaining Riga Jews then filled in enough earth to cover the bodies, adding one more layer of corpses to those underneath until the ditch was full.

 

 

Then a new one was started.

 

 

From the ghetto we could hear the chattering of the machine guns when each new consignment was liquidated, and watch Roschmann riding back down the hill and through the ghetto gates in his open car when it was over.

 

 

After I became a Rapo all social contact between me and the other internees ceased. There was no point in explaining why I had done it, that one Kapo more or less would make no difference, not increasing the death toll by a single digit, but that one single surviving witness might make all the difference, not to save the Jews of Germany, but to avenge them. This at least was the argument I repeated to myself, but was it the real reason? Or was I just afraid to die? Whatever it was, fear soon ceased to be a factor, for in August that year something happened that caused my soul to die inside my body, leaving only the husk struggling to survive.

 

 

In July 1942 a big new transport of Austrian Jews came through from Vienna. Apparently they were marked without exception for "special treatment," for the entire shipment never came to the ghetto. We did not see them, for they were all marched from the station to High Forest and machine-gunned. Later that evening, down the hill rolled four trucks full of clothes, which were brought to the Tin Square for sorting.

 

 

They made a mound as big as a house until they were sorted out into piles of shoes, socks, underpants, trousers, dresses, Jackets, shaving brushes, spectacles, dentures, wedding rings, signet rings, caps, and so forth.

 

 

Of course this was standard procedure for executed deportees. All those killed on Execution Hill were stripped at the graveside and their effects brought down later. These were then sorted and sent back to the Reich. The gold, silver, and jewelry were taken in charge by Roschmann personally.

 

 

In August 1942 there was another transport, from Theresienstadt, a camp in Bohemia where tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews were held before being sent eastward to extermination. I was standing at one side of the Tin Square, watching Roschmann as he went around making his selections. The new arrivals were already shaved bald, which had been done at their previous camp, and it was not easy to tell the men from the women, except for the shift dresses the woman mainly wore. There was one woman across on the other side of the square who caught my attention. There was something about her cast of features that rang a bell in my mind, although she was emaciated, thin as a rake, and coughing continuously.

 

 

Arriving opposite her, Roschmann tapped her on the chest and passed on. The Latvians following him at once seized her arms and pushed her out of line to join the others in the center of the square. There were many from that transport who were not work-fit, and the list of selections was long.

 

 

That meant fewer of us would be selected to make up the numbers, though for me the question was academic. As a Kapo I wore an armband and carried a club, and the extra food rations had increased my strength a little.

 

 

Although Roschmann had seen my face, he did not seem to remember it. He had slashed so many across the face that one more or less would not attract his attention.

 

 

Most of those selected that slimmer evening were formed into a column and marched to the ghetto gates by the Rapos. The column was then taken over by the Latvians for the last four miles to High Forest and death.

 

 

But as there was a gassing van standing by also at the gates, a group of about a hundred of the frailest of the selected ones was detached from the crowd. I was about to escort the other condemned men and women to the gates when SS Lieutenant Krause pointed to five of us Kapos. "You," he shouted, "take these to the WinamUnde convoy." After the others had left, we five escorted the last hundred, most of them limping, crawling, or coughing, to the gates where the van waited.

 

 

The thin woman was among them, her chest racked by tuberculosis. She knew where she was going-they all did-but like the rest she stumbled with resigned obedience to the rear of the van. She was too weak to get up, for the tailboard was high off the ground, so she turned to me for help. We stood and looked at each other In stunned amazement.

 

 

I heard somebody approach behind me, and the other Kapos at the tailboard straightened to attention, scraping their caps off.

 

 

Realizing it must be an SS officer, I did the same. The woman just stared at me, unblinking. The man behind me came forward. It was Captain Roschmann. He nodded to the other Kapos to carry on, and stared at me with those pale blue eyes. I thought he could only mean I would be flogged that evening for being slow to take my cap off.

 

 

"What's your name?" he asked softly.

 

 

"Tauber, Herr KapitAn,0 I said, still ramrod at attention.

 

 

"Well, Tauber, you seem to be a little slow. Do you think we ought to liven you up a little this evening?

 

 

There was no point in saying anything. The sentence was passed.

 

 

Roschmann's eyes flickered to the woman and narrowed as if he were suspecting something; then his slow, wolfish smile spread across his face.

 

 

.Do you know this woman?. he asked.

 

 

'Yes, Herr Kapitlin, I I answered.

 

 

.Who is she?" he asked. I could not reply. My mouth was gummed together as if by glue "Is she ~our wife?. he went on.

 

 

I nodded dumbly.

 

 

He grinned even more widely. "Well, now, my dear Tauber, where are your manners? Help the lady up into the van.

 

 

I still stood there, unable to move. He put his face closer to mine and whispered, "You have ten seconds to pack her in, or you will go yourself." Slowly I held out my arm and Esther leaned upon it. With this assistance she climbed into the van. The other Kapos waited to slam the doors shut.

 

 

When she was up, she looked down at me, and two tears came, one from each eye, and rolled down her cheeks. She did not say anything to me; we never spoke throughout. Then the doors were slammed shut and the van rolled away. The last thing I saw was her eyes looking at me.

 

 

I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.

 

 

When the van had gone, Roschmann turned to me, still grinning. "You may go on living until it suits us to finish you off, Tauber," he said. "But you are dead as of now." And he was right. That was the day my soul died inside me. It was August 29, 1942.

 

 

After August that year I became a robot. Nothing mattered any more. There was no feeling of cold or of pain, no sensation of any kind at all. I watched the brutalities of Roschmann and his fellow SS men without batting an eyelid. I was inured to everything that can touch the human spirit and most things that can touch the body. I just noted everything, each tiny detail, filing them away in my mind or pricking the dates into the skin of my legs. The transports came, their occupants marched to Execution Hill or to the vans, died, and were buried.

 

 

Sometimes I looked into their eyes as they went, walking beside them to the gates of the ghetto with my armband and club. It reminded me of a poem I had once read by an English poet, which described how an ancient mariner, condemned to live, had looked into the eyes of his crewmates as they died of thirst, and read the curse in them. But for me there was no curse, for I was immune even to the feeling of guilt. That was to come years later. There was only the emptiness of a dead man still walking upright...

 

 

[Peter Miller read on late into the night. The effect of the narration of the atrocities on him was at once monotonous and mesmerizing. Several times he sat back in his chair and breathed deeply for a few minutes to regain his calm. Then he read on.

 

 

Once, close to midnight, he laid the book down and made more coffee.

 

 

He stood at the window before drawing the curtains, looking down into the street. Farther down the road the brilliant neon light of the Caf6 Ch6rie blazed across the Steindamm, and he saw one of the part-time girls who frequent it to supplement their incomes emerge on the arm of a businessman. They disappeared into a pension a little farther down, where the businessman would be relieved of 100 marks for half an hour of copulation.

 

 

Miller pulled the curtains across, finished his coffee, and returned to Salomon Tauber's diary.] In the autumn of 1943 the order came through from Berlin to dig up the tens of thousands of corpses in the High Forest and destroy them more permanently, with either fire or quicklime. The job was easier said than done, with winter coming on and the ground about to freeze hard. It put Roschmann in a foul temper for days, but the administrative details of carrying out the order kept him busy enough to stay away from us.

 

 

Day after day the newly formed labor squads were seen marching up the hill into the forest with their pickaxes and shovels, and day after day the columns of black smoke rose above the forest. For fuel they used the pines of the forest, but largely decomposed bodies do not burn easily, so the job was slow. Eventually they switched to quicklime, covered each layer of corpses with it, and in the spring of 1944, when the earth softened, filled them in.. The gangs who did the work were not from the ghetto. They were totally isolated from all other human contact. They were Jewish, but were kept imprisoned in one of the worst camps in the neighborhood, Salas Pils, where they were later exterminated by being given no food at all until they died of starvation, despite the cannibalism to which many resorted.

 

 

When the work was more or less completed in the spring of 1944, the ghetto

 

 

.This procedure badly burned the corpses but did not destroy the bones.

 

 

The Russians later uncovered these 80,000 skeletons. was finally liquidated. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants were marched toward the forest to become the last victims that pinewood was destined to receiYe. About 5000 of us were transferred to the camp of Raiservald, while behind us the ghetto was fired and then the ashes were bulldozed. Of what had once been there, nothing was left but an area of flattened ashes covering hundreds of acres..

 

 

[For a further twenty pages of typescript Tauber's diary described the struggle to survive in Kaiserwald concentration camp against the on- slaught of starvation, disease, overwork, and the brutality of the camp's guards. During this time no sign was seen of SS Captain Eduard Roschmann. But apparently he was still in Riga. Tauber described how in early October of 1944 the SS officers, by now panic-stricken at the thought they might be taken alive by the vengeful Russians, prepared for a desperate evacuation of Riga by sea, taking along a handful of the last surviving prisoners as their passage ticket back to the Reich in the west. This became fairly common practice for the SS staff of the concentration camps as the Russian

 

 

. The Russian spring offensive of 1944 carried the tide of war so far westward that the Soviet troops pushed south of the Baltic States and through to the Baltic Sea to the west of them. This cut off the whole of Ostand from the Reich and led to a blazing quarrel between Hitler and his generals. They had seen it coming and had pleaded with Hitler to pull back the fortyfive divisions inside the enclave. He had refused, reiterating his parrot-cry, "Death or Victory." All he offered those 500,000 soldiers inside the enclave was death. Cut off from resupply, they fought with dwindling ammunition to delay a certain fate, and eventually surrendered. Of the majority, made prisoners and transported in the winter of 1944-1945 to Russia, few returned ten years later to Germany. advance swept on. So long as they could still claim they had a task to perform, important to the Reich, they could continue to outrank the Wehrmacbt and avoid the terrible prospect of being required to face Stalin's divisions in combat. This "task," which they allotted to themselves, was the escorting back into the still safe heart of Germany of the few remaining wretches from the camps they had run. Sometimes the charade became ridiculous, as when the SS guards outnumbered their tottering charges by as many as ten to one.]

 

 

It was in the afternoon of October 11 that we arrived, by now barely 4000 strong, at the town of Riga, and the column went straight down to the docks. In the distance we could hear a strange crump, as if of thunder, along the horizon. For a while it puzzled us, for we had never heard the sound of shells or bombs. Then it filtered through to our minds, dazed by hunger and coldthere were Russian mortar shells landing In the suburbs of Riga. When we arrived at the dock area it was crawling with officers and men of the SS. I had never seen so many in one place at the same time. There must have been more of them than there were of us. We were lined up in rows against one of the warehouses, and again most of us thought that this was where we would die under the machine guns. But this was not to be. Apparently the SS troops were going to use us,the last remainder of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had passed through Riga, as their alibi to escape from the Russian advance, their passage back to the Reich. The means or travel was berthed alongside Quay Sixa freighter, the last one out of the encircled enclave. As we watched, the loading began of some or the hundreds of German Army wounded who were lying on stretchers in two of the warehouses farther along the quay.

 

 

It was almost dark when Captain Roschmann arrived, and he stopped short when he saw how the ship was being loaded. When he had taken in the sight of the German Army wounded being put onto the ship he turned around and shouted to the medical orderlies bearing the stretchers, "Stop that." He strode toward them across the quay and slapped one of the orderlies in the face. He whirled around on the ranks of us prisoners and roared, "You scum. Got up on that ship ana get these men off. Bring them back down here. That ship is ours." Under the prodding of the gun barrels of the SS men who had come down with us, we started to move toward the gangplank. Hundreds of other SS men, privates and NCOs, who till then had been standing back watching the loading, surged forward and followed the prisoners up onto the ship. When the first got on the deck, they began picking up the stretchers and carrying them back to the quay. Rather, they were about to, when another shout stopped us.

 

 

I had reached the foot or the gangway and was about to start up, when I heard the shout and turned to see what was happening.

 

 

An Army captain was running down the quay, and he came to a stop quite close to me by the gangway. Staring up at the men above, bearing stretchers they were about to unload, the captain shouted.Who ordered these men to be offloaded?w Roschmann walked up behind him and said, "I did. This boat is ours." The captain spun around. He delved in his pocket and produced a piece of paper..This ship was sent to pick up Army wounded," he said. "And Army wounded is what it will take." With that he turned to the Army orderlies and shouted to them to resume the loading. I looked across at Roschmann. He was standing trembling, I thought with anger. Then I saw he was soared. He was frightened of being left to face the Russians. Unlike us, they were armed.

 

 

He began to scream at the orderlies, 'Leave them alone! I have commandeered this ship in the name of the Reich." The orderlies ignored him and obeyed the Wehrmacht captain. I noticed his face, as he was only two meters away from me. It was gray with exhaustion, with dark smudges under the eyes. There were lines down each side of the nose and several weeks of stubble on his chin. Seeing the loading work begin again, he made to march past Roschmann to supervise his orderlies. From among the crowded stretchers in the snow of the quay I heard a voice shout in the

 

 

Hamburg dialect, "Good for you, Captain. You tell the swine." As the Webrmacbt captain was abreast of Roscbmann, the SS officer grabbed his arm, swung him around, and slapped him across the face with his gloved hand. I had seen him slap men a thousand times, but never with the same result. The captain took the blow, shook his head, bunched his fist, and landed a haymaker of a right-fisted punch on Roschmann's jaw.

 

 

Roschmann flew back several feet and went flat on his back in the snow, a small trickle of blood coming from his mouth. The captain moved toward his orderlies.

 

 

As I watched, Roschmann drew his SS officer's Luger from its holster, took caref ' ul aim, and fired between the captain's shoulders.

 

 

Everything stopped at the crash from the pistol. The Army captain staggered and turned. Roschmann fired again, and the bullet caught the captain in the throat. He spun over backward and was dead before he hit the quay. Something he had been wearing around his neck flew off as the bullet struck, and when I passed It, after being ordered to carry the body and throw it into the water, I saw that the object was a medal on a ribbon. I never knew the captain's name, but the medal was the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster.

 

 

[Miller read this page of the diary with growing astonishment gradually turning to disbelief, doubt, belief again, and finally a deep anger. He read the page a dozen times to make sure there was no doubt, then resumed reading the diary.]

 

 

After this we were ordered to start unloading the Wehrmacht wounded and told to lay them back in the gathering snow on the quayside. I found myself helping one young soldier back down the gangplank onto the quay.

 

 

He had been blinded, and around his eyes was wrapped a dirty bandage torn from a shirttail. He was half delirious and kept asking for his mother. I suppose he must have been about eighteen. Finally they were all taken off, and we prisoners were ordered on board. We were all taken down into the two holds, one forward and one aft, until we were so cramped we could hardly move. Thon the hatches were battened down and the SS began to come aboard. We sailed just before midnight, the captain evidently wishing to be well out into the Gulf of Latvia before dawn came, to avoid the chance of being spotted and bombed by the patrolling Russian Stormoviks.

 

 

It took three days to reach Danzig, well behind German lines. Three days in a pitching, tossing hell below decks, without food or water, during which a quarter of the four thousand prisoners died. There was no food to vomit, and yet everyone was retching dry from seasickness. Many died from the exhaustion of vomiting, others from hunger or cold, others from suffocation, others because they simply lost the will to live, lay back, and surrendered to death. And then the ship was berthed again, the hatches were opened, and gusts of ice-cold winter air came rushing into the fetid, stinking holds. When we were unloaded onto the quay at Danzig, the dead bodies were laid out in rows alongside the living, so that the numbers should tally with those that had been taken on board at Riga.

 

 

The SS was always very precise about numbers.

 

 

We learned later that Riga had fallen to the Russians on October 14, while we were still at sea.

 

 

[Tauber's pain-wracked Odyssey was reaching its end. From Danzig the surviving inmates were taken by barge to the concentration camp of Stutt- hof, outside Danzig, and until the first weeks of 1945 he worked daily in the submarine works of Burggraben by day and lived in the camp by iiight.

 

 

Thousands more at Stutthof died of malnutrition. He watched them all die, but somehow stayed alive.

 

 

In January 1945, as the advancing Russians closed on Danzig, the survivors of Stutthof camp were driven westward on the notorious Death March through the winter snow toward Berlin. All across eastern Germany these columns of wraiths, used as a ticket to safety in Western hands by their SS guards, were being herded westward. Along the route, in snow and frost, they died like flies.

 

 

Tauber survived even this, and finally the remnant of his column reached Magdeburg, west of Berlin, where the SS men finally abandoned them and sought their own safety. Tauber's group was lodged in Magdeburg prison, in the charge of the bewildered and helpless old men of the local Home Guard.

 

 

Unable to feed their prisoners, terrified of what the advancing Allies would say when they found them, the Rome Guard permitted the fittest of them to go scrounging for food in the surround- ing countryside.]

 

 

The last time I had seen Iduard Roschmann was when we were being counted on Danzig quayside. Warmly wrapped against the winter cold, he was climbing into a ear. I thought it would be my last glimpse of him, but I was to see him one last time. It was April 3, 1945.

 

 

I had been out that day toward Gardelegen, a village east of the city, and had gathered a small sackful of potatoes with three others. We were trudging back with our booty when a car came up behind us, heading west. It paused to negotiate a horse and cart on the road, and I glanced around with no particular interest to see the car pass.

 

 

Inside were four S$ officers, evidently making their escape toward the west. Sitting beside the driver, pulling on the uniform jacket of an Army corporal, was Eduard Roschmann.

 

 

He did not see me, for my head was largely covered by a hood cut from an old potato sack, a protection against the cold spring wind. But I saw him. There was no doubt about it.

 

 

All four men in the car were apparently changing their uniforms even as the vehicle headed west. As it disappeared down the road a garment was thrown from one window and fluttered into the dust. We reached the spot where it lay a few minutes later and stooped to examine it. It was the jacket of an SS officer, bearing the.silver twin lightning symbols of the Waffen SS and the rank of captain. Roschmann of the SS had disappeared.

 

 

Twenty-four days after this came the liberation. We had ceased to go out at all, preferring to stay hungry In the prison than venture along the streets, where complete anarchy was loose. Then on the morning of April 27 all was quiet in the town. Toward midmorning I was in the courtyard of the prison, talking to one of the old guards, who seemed terrified and spent nearly an hour explaining that he and his colleagues had nothing to do with Adolf Hitler and certainly nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews.

 

 

I heard a vehicle drive up outside the locked gates, and there was a hammering on them. The old Home Guard man went to open them. The man who stepped through, cautiously, with a revolver in his hand, was a soldier in full battle uniform, one that I had never seen before.

 

 

He was evidently an officer, for he was accompanied by a soldier in a flat round tin hat who carried a rifle. They just stood there in silence, looking around at the courtyard of the prison. In one corner were stacked about fifty corpses, those who had died in the past two weeks and whom no one had the strength to bury. Others, half alive, lay around the walls, trying to soak up a little of the spring sunshine, their sores festering and stinking.

 

 

The two men looked at each other, then at the seveniy-year-old Home Guard. He looked back, embarrassed. Then he said something he must have learned in the First World War. He said, "Hello, Tommy." The officer looked back at him, looked again around the courtyard, and said quite clearly in English, "You fucking Kraut pig.. And suddenly I began to cry.

 

 

I do not really know how I made it back to Hamburg, but I did. I think I wanted to see if there was anything left of the old life. There wasn't.

 

 

The streets where I was born and grew up had vanished in the great firestorm of the Allied bombing raids; the office where I had worked was gone, my apartment, everything.

 

 

The English put me in the hospital in Magdeburg for a while, but I left of my own accord and hitchhiked back home. But when I got there and saw there was nothing left, I finally, belatedly col" lapsed completely. I spent a year in the hospital as a patient, along with others, who had come out of a place called Bergen-Belsen, and then another year working in the hospital as an orderly, looking after those who were worse than I had been.

 

 

When I left there, I went to find a room in Hamburg, the place of my birth, to spend the rest of my days.

 

 

[The book ended with two more clean, white sheets of paper, evidently recently typed, which formed the epilogue.]

 

 

1 have lived in this little room in Altona since 1947. Shortly after I came out of the hospital I began to write the story of what happened to me and to the others at Riga.

 

 

But long before I had finished it, it became clear that others had also survived the holocaust. My original intent -believing, as others had done elsewhere in their isolation, that I might be the onlysurvivor-had been to bear witness, to tell the world what had happened. It is clear now that this has already been done. So I did not submit my diary for publication. I kept it and the notes in the hope that one day I might at least bear witness to what happened in the small arena of Riga. I never even let anyone else read it.

 

 

Looking back, it was all a waste of time and energy, the battle to survive and to be able to write down the evidence, when others have already done it so much better. I wish now I had died in Riga with Esther.

 

 

Even the last wish, to see Eduard Roschmann stand before a court, and to give evidence to that court about what he did, will never be fulfilled. I know this now.

 

 

I walk through the streets sometimes and remember the old days here, but it can never be the same. The children laugh at me and run away when I try to be friends. Once I got talking to a little girl who did not run away, but her mother came up screaming and dragged her away.

 

 

So I do not talk to many people.

 

 

Once a woman came to see me. She said she was from the Reparations Office and that I was entitled to money. I said I did not want any money. She was very put out, insisting that it was my right to be recompensed for what was done. I kept on refusing. They sent someone else to see me, and I refused again. He said it was very irregular to refuse to be recompensed. I sensed he meant it would upset their books. But I only take from them what is due to me.

 

 

When I was in the British hospital one of the doctors asked me why I did not emigrate to Israel, which was soon to have its independence. How could I explain to him? I could not tell him that I can never go up to the Land, not after what I did to Esther, my wife. I think about It often and dream about what it must be like, but I am not worthy to go.

 

 

But if ever these lines should be read in the Land of Israel, which I shall never see, will someone there please say Kaddish for me?

 

 

Salomon Tauber, Altona, Hamburg, November 21, 1963

 

 

Peter Miller put the diary down and lay back in his chair for a long time, staring at the ceiling and smoking. Just before five in the morning he heard the flat door open, and Sili came in from work. She was startled to find him still awake.

 

 

"What are you doing up so late?" she asked.

 

 

"Been reading," said Miller.

 

 

Later they lay in bed as the first glint of dawn picked out the spire of Sankt Michaelis, Sigi drowsy and contented, like a young woman who has just been loved, Miller staring up at the ceiling silent and preoccupied.

 

 

"Penny for them," said Sigi after a while.

 

 

"Just thinking." "I know. I can tell that. What about?" "The next story I'm going to cover." She shifted and looked across at him. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

 

 

Miller leaned over and stubbed out his cigarette. "I'm going to track a man down," he said.

 

 

WMLE PETER MILLER and Sigi 3were asleep in each other's arms in Hamburg, a giant Argentine Coronado airliner swung over the darkened hills of Castile and en- tered final approach for a landing at Barajas Airport, Madrid.

 

 

Sitting in a window seat in the third row of the firstclass passenger section was a man in his early sixties with iron-gray hair and a trim mustache.

 

 

Only one photograph had ever existed of the man, in his early forties, showing him with close-cropped hair, no mustache to cover the rattrap mouth, and a razor-straight parting along the left side of his head. Hardly any one of the small group of men who had ever seen that photograph would recognize the man in the airliner, his hair now growing thickly back from the forehead, without a parting. The photograph in his passport matched his new appearance.

 

 

The name in that same passport identified himas Sefior Ricardo Suertes, citizen of Argentina, and the name itself was his own grim joke against the world.

 

 

For suerte in Spanish means "luck," and "luck" in German is GUick. The airline passenger that January night had been bom Richard GlUcks, later to become full general of the SS, head of the Reich Economic Ad ministration Main Office, and Hitler's Inspector General of Concentration Camps. On the wanted lists of West Germany and Israel, he was number three after Martin Bormann and the former chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich MUller. He ranked higher even than Dr. Josef Mengele, the Devil Doctor of Auschwitz. In the Odessa he ranked number two--direct deputy of Martin Bormann, or o, whom the mantle of the Fiffirer had fallen after 1945.

 

 

The role Richard GlUcks; had played in the crimes of the SS was unique and matched only by the manner in which he managed to effect his own complete disappearance in May 1945. Glficks had surpassed even Adolf Eichmann as one of the master minds of the holocaust, and yet he had never pulled a trigger.

 

 

Had an uninformed passenger been told who the man sitting next to him was, he might well have wondered why the former bead of an economic administration office should be so high on the wanted list.

 

 

Had he asked, he would have learned that of the crimes against humanity committed on the German side between 1933 and 1945, probably 95 per cent can accurately be laid at the door of the SS. Of these, probably 80 to 90 per cent can be attributed to two departments within the SS. These were the Reich Security Main Office and the Reich Economic Administration Main Office.

 

 

If the idea of an economic bureau being involved in mass murder strikes a strange note, one must understand how it was intended that the job should be done. Not only was it intended to exterminate every Jew on the face of Europe, and most of the Slavic races also, but it was intended that the victims should pay for the privilege. Before the gas chambers opened, the SS had already carried out the biggest robbery in history.

 

 

In the case of the Jews, the payment was in three stages. First they were robbed of their businesses, houses, factories, bank accounts, furniture, cars, and clothes. They were shipped eastward to the slave-labor camps and the death camps, assured they were destined for resettlement and mainly believing it, with what they could carry, usually two suitcases. On the camp square these were also taken from them, along with the clothes they wore.

 

 

Out of this baggage of six million people millions of dollars' worth of booty was extracted, for the European Jews of the time habitually traveled with their wealth upon them, particularly those from Poland and the eastern lands. From the camps entire trainloads of gold trinkets, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, silver ingots, louis Wor, gold dollars, and banknotes of every kind and description were shipped back to the SS headquarters inside Germany. Throughout its history the SS made a profit on its operations. A part of this profit, in the form of gold bars stamped with the eagle of the Reich and the twin-lightning symbol of the SS, was deposited toward the end of the war in the banks of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Tangier, and Beirut to form the fortune on which the Odessa was later based. Much of this gold still lies beneath the streets of Zurich, guarded by the complacent and self-righteous bankers of that city.

 

 

The second stage of the exploitation lay in the living bodies of the victims. They had calories of energy in them, and these could profitably be used. At this point the Jews came onto the same level as the Russians and the Poles, who had been captured penniless in the first place. Those in all categories unfit for work were exterminated as useless. Those able to work were hired out, either to the SS's own factories or to German industrial concerns such as Krupp, Thyssen, von Opel, and others at three marks a day for unskilled workers, four marks for artisans. The phrase "per day" meant as much work as could be extracted from the living body for as little food as possible during a twenty-four-hour period. Hundreds of thousands died at their places of work in this manner.

 

 

The SS was a state within a state. It had its own factories, workshops, engineering division, construction section, repair and maintenance shops, and clothing department. It made for itself almost everything it could ever need, and used the slave laborers, which by Hitler's decree were the property of the SS, to do the work.

 

 

The third stage of the exploitation lay in the corpses of the dead. These went naked to death, leaving behind wagonloads of shoes, socks, shaving brushes, spectacles, jackets, and trousers. They also left their hair, which was shipped back to the Reich to be turned into felt boots for the winter fighting, and their gold teeth-fillings, which were yanked out of the corpses with pliers and later melted down to be deposited as gold bars in Zurich. Attempts were made to use the bones for fertilizer and render the body fats down for soap, but these were found to be uneconomical.

 

 

In charge of the entire economic or profit-making side of the extermination of fourteen million people was the Reich Economic Administration Main Office of the SS, headed by the man in seat 3-B on the airliner that night.

 

 

Gliicks was one who preferred not to risk his neck, or his life-long liberty, by returning to Germany after his escape. He had no need to.

 

 

Handsomely provided for out of the secret funds, he could live out his days comfortably in South America, and still does. His dedication to the Nazi ideal remained unshaken by the events of 1945, and this, coupled with his former eminence, secured him a high and honored place among the fugitive Nazis of Argentina, from whence the Odessa was ruled.

 

 

The plane landed uneventfully, and the passengers cleared customs with no problems. The fluent Spanish of the first-class passenger from row 3 had long enabled him to pass for a South American.

 

 

Outside the terminal building be took a cab and from long habit gave an address a block away from the Zurburin Hotel. After paying off the cab in the center of Madrid, he took his grip and walked the remaining two hundred yards to the hotel.

 

 

His reservation assured by Telex, he checked in and went up to his room to shower and shave. It was at nine o'clock on the dot that three soft knocks, followed by a pause and two more, sounded at his door. He opened it himself and stood back when he recognized the visitor.

 

 

The new arrival closed the door behind him, snapped to attention, and flashed up his right arm, palm downward, in the old salute.

 

 

"Seig Heil," said the man.

 

 

General Glijcks gave the younger man an approving nod and raised his own right hand. "Sieg Heil," he said more softly. He waved his visitor to a seat.

 

 

The man facing him was another German, a former officer of the SS and at that time the chief of the Odessa network inside West Germany. He felt very keenly the honor of being summoned to Madrid for a personal conference with a senior officer of such eminence, and suspected it had something to do with the death of President Kennedy thirty-six hours earlier. He was not wrong.

 

 

General GlUcks poured himself and his visitor cups of coffee from the breakfast tray on the table beside him and carefully lit a large Corona.

 

 

"You have probably guessed the reason for this sudden and somewhat hazardous visit by me to Europe," he said. "As I dislike remaining on this continent longer than necessary, I will get to the point and be brief." The subordinate from Germany sat forward expectantly.

 

 

"Kennedy is now dead, for us a remarkable stroke of good fortune," the general went on. "There must be no failure to extract the utmost advantage from this event. Do you follow me?" "Certainly, in principle, General," the younger man replied eagerly, "but in what specific form?" "I am referring to the secret arms deal between the rabble of traitors in Bonn and the pigs in Tel Aviv. You know about the arms deal? The tanks, guns, and other weaponry even now flowing from Germany to Israel?" "Yes, of course." "And you know also that our organization is doing everything in its power to assist the Egyptian cause so that it may one day prove completely victorious in the coming struggle?" "Certainly. We have already organized the recruiting of numerous German scientists to that end." General Glilcks nodded. "I'll return to that later. What I was referring to was out policy of keeping our

 

 

Arab friends as closely informed as possible about the details of this treacherous deal, so that they may make the strongest representations to Bonn through diplomatic channels. These Arab protests have led to the formation of a group in Germany strongly opposed to the arms deal on political grounds, because the deal upsets the Arabs. This group, mainly unwittingly, is playing our game for us, bringing pressure on the fool Erhard, even as high as cabinet level, to call off the arms deal." "Yes. I follow you, General." "Good. So far Erhard has not called off the arms shipments, but he has wavered several times. For those who wish to see the German-Israeli arms deal completed, the main argument to date has been that the deal is supported by Kennedy, and what Kennedy wants, Erhard gives him." "Yes. That's true." "But Kennedy is now dead." The younger man from Germany sat back, his eyes alight with enthusiasm, as the new state of affairs opened up its perspectives to his mind. The SS general flicked an inch of ash from the cigar into the coffee cup and jabbed the glowing tip at his subordinate.

 

 

"For the rest of this year, therefore, the main plank of political action within Germany that our friends and supporters must undertake will be to whip up public opinion on as wide a scale as possible against this arms deal and in favor of Germany's true and traditional friends, the Arabs." "Yes, yes, that can be done." The younger man was smiling broadly.

 

 

"Certain contacts we have in the government in Cairo will ensure a constant stream of diplomatic protests through their own and other embassies," the general continued. "Other Arab friends will ensure demonstrations by Arab students and German friends of the Arabs. Your job will be to coordinate press publicity through the various pamphlets and magazines we secretly support, advertisements taken in major newspapers and magazines, lobbying of civil servants close to government and politicians who must be persuaded to join the growing weight of opinion against the arms deal." The younger man's brow furrowed. "It's very difficult to promote feelings against Israel in Germany today," he murmured.

 

 

"There need be no question of that," said the other tartly. "The angle is simple: for practical reasons Germany must not alienate eighty million Arabs with these foolish, supposedly secret arms shipments. Many Germans will listen to that ~wgument, particularly diplomats. Known friends of ours in the Foreign Office can be enlisted. Such a practical viewpoint is wholly permissible. Funds, of course, will be made available. The main thing is, with Kennedy dead and Johnson unlikely to adopt the same internationalist, pro-Jewish outlook, Erhard must be subjected to constant pressure at every level, including his own cabinet, to shelve this arms deal. If we can show the Egyptians that we have caused foreign policy in Bonn to change course, our stock in Cairo must inevitably rise sharply." The man from Germany nodded several times, already seeing his plan of campaign taking shape before him. "It shall be done," he said.

 

 

"Excellent," replied General GlUcks.

 

 

The man in front of him looked up. "General, you mentioned the German scientists now working in Egypt....

 

 

"Ah yes, I said I would return to them later. They represent the second prong in our plan to destroy the Jews once and for all. You know about the rockets of Helwan, of course?" "Yes, sir. At least, the broad details." "But not what they are really for?" "Well, I assumed, of course----~' "That they would be used to throw a few tons of high explosive onto Israel?" General GlOcks smiled broadly. "You could not be more wrong.

 

 

However, I think the time is ripe to tell you why these rockets and the men who build them are in truth so vitally important." General GlUcks leaned back, gazed at the ceiling, and told his subordinate the real story behind the rockets of Helwan.

 

 

In the aftermath of the war, when King Farouk still ruled Egypt, thousands of Nazis and former members of the SS had fled from Europe and found a sure refuge along the sands of the Nile. Among those who came were a number of scientists. Even before the coup d'itat that dislodged Farouk, two German scientists had been charged by Farouk with the first studies for the eventual setting up of a factory to manufacture rockets.

 

 

This was in 1952, and the two professors were Paul Gbrke and Rolf Engel.

 

 

The project went into abeyance for a few years after Naguil and then Nasser took power, but after the military defeat of the Egyptian forces in the 1956 Sinai campaign, the new dictator of Egypt swore an oath. He vowed that one day Israel would be totally destroyed.

 

 

In 1961, when he got Moscow's final "No" to his requests for heavy rockets, the Gbrke-Engel project for an Egyptian rocket factory was revitalized with a vengeance, and during this year, working against the clock and without rein on their expenditure of money, the German professors and the Egyptians built and opened Factory 333, at Helwan, north of Cairo.

 

 

To open a factory is one thing; to design and build rockets is another.

 

 

Long since, the senior supporters of Nasser, mostly with pro-Nazi backgrounds stretching back to the Second World War, had been in close contact with the Odessa representatives in Egypt. From these came the answer to the Egyptians' main problem -that of acquiring the scientists necessary to make the rockets.

 

 

Neither Russia, America, Britain, nor France would supply a single man to belp. But the Odessa pointed out that the kind of rockets Nasser needed were remarkably similar in size and range to the V-2 rockets that Wernher von Braun and his team had once built at Peenemiinde to pulverize London. And many of his former team were still available.

 

 

In late 1961 the recruiting of German scientists started. Many of these were employed at the West German Institute for Aerospace Research at Stuttgart. But they were frustrated because the Paris Treaty of 1954 forbade Germany to indulge in research or manufacture in certain realms, notably nuclear physics and rocketry. They were also chronically short of research funds. To many of these scientists the offer of a place in the sun, plenty of research money, and the chance to design real rockets was too tempting.

 

 

The Odessa appointed as chief recruiting officer in Germany a former major of the SS, Dr. Ferdinand Brandner, and he in turn employed as his legman a former SS sergeant, Heinz Krug. Together they scoured Germany, looking for men prepared to go to Egypt and build Nasser's rockets for him.

 

 

With the salaries they could offer, they were not short of choice recruits. Notable among them were Professor Wolfgang Pilz, who had been recruited from postwar Germany by the French and had later become the father of the French Wronique rocket, itself the foundation of De Gaulle's aerospace program. Professor Pilz left for Egypt in early 1962.

 

 

Dr. Eugen SUnger and his wife Irene, both formerly on the Von Braun V-2 team, also went along, as did Dr. Josef Eisig and Dr. Kirmayer, all experts in propulsion fuels and techniques.

 

 

The world saw the first results of their labors at a parade through the streets of Cairo on July 23, 1962, to mark the eighth anniversary of the Egyptian republic. Two rockets, the El Kahira and the El Zafira., re- spectively with ranges of 500 and 300 kilometers, were trundled past the screaming crowds. Although these rockets were only the casings, without warheads or fuel, they were destined to be the first of four hundred such weapons that would one day be launched against Israel.

 

 

General GlUcks paused, drew on his cigar, and returned to the present.

 

 

"The problem is that, although we solved the matter of making the casings, the warheads, and the fuel, the key to a guided missile lies in the teleguidance system." He stabbed his cigar in the direction of the West German. "And that was what we were unable to furnish to the Egyptians," he went on.

 

 

"By ill luck, although there were scientists and experts in guidance systems working at Stuttgart and elsewhere, we could not persuade one of them of any value to emigrate to Egypt. All the experts sent out there were specialists in aerodynamics, propulsion, and the design of warheads.

 

 

"But we bad promised Egypt that she would have her rockets, and have them she will. President Nasser is determined there will one day be another war between Egypt and Israel, and war there will be. He believes his tanks and soldiers alone will win for him. Our information is not so optimistic. They might not, despite their numerical superiority. But just think what our position would be if, when all the Soviet weaponry, bought at a cost of billions of dollars, had failed, it turned out to be the rockets, provided by the scientists recruited through our network, which won the war. Our position would be unassailable. We would have achieved the double coup of ensuring an eternally grateful Middle East, a safe and sure home for our people for all time, and of achieving the final and utter destruction of the Jew-pig state, thus fulfilling the last wish of the dying FUbrer. It is a mighty challenge, and one in which we must not and will not fail." The subordinate watched his senior officer pacing the room, with awe and some puzzlement. "Forgive me, General, but will four hundred medium warheads really finish off the Jews once and for all? A massive amount of damage, yes, but total destruction?" GlUcks spun around and gazed down at the younger man with a triumphant smile.

 

 

"But what warheads!" he exclaimed. "You do not think we are going to waste mere high explosive on these swine? We have proposed to President Nasser, and he has accepted with alacrity, that these warheads on the Kahiras and Zafiras be of a different type. Some will contain concentrated cultures of bubonic plague, and the others will explode high above the ground, shower- ing the entire territory of Israel with irradiated cobaltsixty. Within hours they will all be dying of the pest or of gamma-ray sickness. That is what we have in store for them." The other gazed at him, open-mouthed. "Fantastic," he breathed. "Now I recall reading something about a trial in Switzerland last summer-just rumors, so much of the evidence was in camera. Then it's true. But, General, it's brilliant." "Brilliant, yes, and inevitable, provided we of the Odessa can equip those rockets with the teleguidance systems necessary to direct them not merely in the right direction but to the exact locations where they must explode.

 

 

The man who controls the entire research operation aimed at devising a teleguidance system for those rockets is now working in West Germany. His code name is Vulkan. You may recall that in Greek mythology Vulkan was the smith who made the thunderbolts of the gods." "He is a scientist?" asked the West German in bewilderment.

 

 

"No, certainly not. When he was forced to disappear In 1955 he would normally have returned to Argentina. But your predecessor was required by us to provide him immediately with a false passport to enable him to stay in Germany. He was then funded out of Zurich with one million American dollars with which to start a factory in Germany. The original purpose was to use the factory as a front for another type of research in which we were interested at the time, but which has now been shelved in favor of the guidance systems for the rockets of Helwan.

 

 

"The factory Vulkan now runs manufactures transistor radios. But this is a front. In the research department of the factory a group of scientists is even now in the process of devising the teleguidance systems that will one day be fitted to the rockets of Helwan." "Why don't they simply go to Egypt?" asked the other.

 

 

GlUcks smiled again and continued pacing. "That is the stroke of genius behind the whole operation. I told you that there were men in Germany capable of producing such rocket-guidance systems, but none could be persuaded to emigrate. The group of them who now work in the research department of Vulkan's factory actually believe they are working on a contract, in conditions of top secrecy, of course, for the Defense Min- istry in Bonn." This time the subordinate got out of his chair, his coffee spilling on the carpet. "God in Heaven. How on earth was that arranged?" "Basically quite simple. The Paris Treaty forbids Germany to do research into rockets. The men under Vulkan were sworn to secrecy by a genuine official of the Defense Ministry in Bonn, who also happens to be one of us. He was accompanied by a general whose face the scientists could recognize from the last war. They are all men prepared to work for Germany, even against the terms of the Paris Treaty, but not necessarily prepared to work for Egypt. Now they believe they are working for Germany.

 

 

"Of course, the cost is stupendous. Normally, research of this nature can only be undertaken by a major power. This entire program has made enormous inroads into our secret funds. Now do you understand the im- portance of Vulkan?" "Of course," replied the Odessa chief from Germany.

 

 

"But if anything happened to him, could not the program go on?" "No. The factory and the company are owned and run by him alone. He is chairman and managing director, sole shareholder and paymaster. He alone can continue to pay the salaries of the scientists and the enormous research costs involved. None of the scientists ever has anything to do with anyone else in the firm, and no one else in the firm knows the true nature of the overlarge research section. The other workers believe the men in the closed-off section are working on microwave circuits with a view to making a breakthrough in the transistor market. The secrecy is explained as a precaution against industrial espionage. The only link man between the two sections is Vulkan. If he went, the entire project would collapse." "Can you tell me the name of the factory?" General GlUcks considered for a moment, then mentioned a name.

 

 

The other man stared at him in astonishment. "But I know those radios," he protested.

 

 

"Of course. It's a bona fide firm and makes bona fide radios." "And the managing director-he is... T' "Yes. He is Vulkan. Now you see the importance of this man and what he is doing. For that reason there is one other instruction to you. Here." General Gliicks took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to the man from Germany.

 

 

After a long, perplexed gaze at the face, he turned it over and read the name on the back. "Good God, I thought he was in South America." GlUcks shook his head. "On the contrary. He is Vulkan. At the present time his work has reached a most crucial stage. If by any chance, therefore, you should get a whisper of anyone asking inconvenient questions about this man, that person should be--discouraged. One warning, and then a permanent solution. Do you follow me, Kamerad? No one, repeat, no one is to get anywhere near exposing Vulkan for who he really is." The SS general rose. His visitor did likewise.

 

 

"That will be all," said Gliicks. "You have your instructions." 13UT You don't even know if 4 h,.e's alive." Peter Miller and Karl Brandt were sitting side by side in Miller's car outside the house of the detective inspector, where Miller had found him over Sunday lunch on his day off.

 

 

"No, I don't. So that's the first thing I have to find out. If Roschmann's dead, obviously that's the end of it. Can you help me?" Brandt considered the request, then slowly shook his head. "No, sorry, I can't." "Why not?" "Look, I gave you that diary as a favor. Just between us. Because it shocked me, because I thought it might make a story for you. But I never thought you were going to try and track Roschmann down. Why can't you just make a story out of the finding of the diary?" "Because there's no story in it," said Miller. "What am I supposed to say? 'Surprise, surprise, I've found a looseleaf folder in which an old man who just gassed himself describes what he went through during the war'? You think any editor's going to buy that? I happen to think it's a horrifying document, but that's just my opinion. There have been hundreds of memoirs written since the war. The world's getting tired of them. Just the diary alone won't sell to any editor in Germany." "So what are you going on about?" asked Brandt.

 

 

"Simply this. Get a major police hunt started for Roschmann on the basis of the diary, and I've got a story." Brandt tapped his ash slowly into the dashboard tray. "There won't be a major police hunt," he said. "Look, Peter, you may know journalism, but I know the Ham- burg police. Our job is to keep Hamburg crime-free now, in nineteen sixty-three. Nobody's going to start detaching overworked detectives to hunt a man for what he did in Riga twenty years ago. It's not going to happen." "But you could at least raise the matter?" asked Miller.

 

 

Brandt shook his head. "No. Not me." "Why not? What's the matter?" "Because I don't want to get involved. You're all right. You're single, unattached. You can go off chasing will-o'-the-wisps if you want to. I've got a wife and two kids and a good career, and I don't intend to jeopardize that career." "Why should this jeopardize your career with the police? Roschmann's a criminal, isn't he? Police forces are supposed to hunt criminals. Where's the problem?" Brandt crushed out his stub. "It's difficult to put your finger on. But there's a sort of attitude in the police, nothing concrete, just a feeling. And that feeling is that to start probing too energetically into the war crimes of the SS can do a young policeman's career no good.

 

 

Nothing comes of it anyway. The request would simply be denied. But the fact that it was made goes into a file. Then bang goes your chance of promotion. Nobody mentions it, but everyone knows it. So if you want to make a big issue out of this, you're on your own. Count me out." Miller sat and stared through the windshield. "All right. If that's the way it is," he said at length. "But I've got to start somewhere. Did Tauber leave anything else behind when he died?" "Well, there was a brief note. I bad to take it and include it in my report on the suicide. By now it will have been filed away. And the file's closed." "What did he say in it?" asked Miller.

 

 

"Not much," said Brandt. "He just said he was committing suicide. Oh, there was one thing; he said he left his effects to a friend of his, a Herr Marx."

 

 

"Well, that's a start. Where's this Marx?" "How the hell should I know?" said Brandt.

 

 

"You mean to say that's all the note said? Just Herr Marx? No address?" "Nothing," said Brandt. "Just Marx. No indication where he lives." "Well, he must be around somewhere. Didn't you look for him?" Brandt sighed. "Will you get this through your head? We are very busy in the police force. Have you any idea how many Marxes there are in Hamburg?

 

 

Hundreds in the telephone directory alone. We can't spend weeks looking for this particular Marx. Anyway, what the old man left wasn't worth ten pfennigs." "That's all, then?" asked Miller. "Nothing else?" "Not a thing. If you want to find Marx, you're welcome to try." "Thanks. I will," said Miller. The two men shook hands, and Brandt returned to his family lunch table.

 

 

Miller started the next morning by visiting the house where Tauber had lived. The door was opened by a middle-aged man wearing a pair of stained trousers supported by string, a collarless shirt open at the neck, and three days' stubble around his chin.

 

 

"Morning. Are you the landlord?" The man looked Miller up and down and nodded. He smelled of cabbage.

 

 

"There was a man gassed himself here a few nights back," said Miller.

 

 

"Are you from the police?" "No. The press." Miller showed the man his press card.

 

 

"I ain't got nothing to say." Miller eased a ten-mark note without too much trouble into the man's hand.

 

 

"I only want to look at his room." "I've rented it." "What did you do with his stuff?"

 

 

"It's in the back yard. Nothing else I could do with it.5~ The pile of junk was lying in a heap under the thin rain. It still smelled of gas. There were a battered old typewriter, two scuffed pairs of shoes, an assortment of clothes, a pile of books, and a fringed white silk scarf that Miller assumed must be something to do with the Jewish religion. He went through everything in the pile, but there was no indication of an address book and nothing addressed to Marx.

 

 

"Is that all?" he asked.

 

 

"That's all," said the man, regarding him sourly from the shelter of the back door.

 

 

"Do you have any tenant by the name of Marx?" "Nope.

 

 

"Do you know of any Marx?" "Nope." "Did old Tauber have any friends?" "Not that I knew of. Kept himself to himself. Came and went at all hours, shuffling about up there. Crazy, if you ask me. But he paid his rent regular. Didn't cause no trouble." "Ever see him with anybody? Out in the street, I mean." "No, never. Didn't seem to have any friends. Not surprised, the way he kept mumbling to himself. Crazy." Miller left and started asking up and down the street. Most people remembered seeing the old man shuffling along, head down, wrapped in an ankle-length overcoat, head covered by a woolen cap, bands in woolen gloves, from which the fingertips protruded.

 

 

For three days he quartered the area of streets where Tauber lived, checking through the dairy, the grocer, the butcher, the hardware.store, the bar, the tobacconist, intercepting the milkman and the postman. It was Wednesday afternoon when he found the group of urchins playing football up against the warehouse wall.

 

 

"What, that old Jew? Mad Solly?" said the leader of the group in answer to his question. The rest gathered around.

 

 

"That's the one," said Miller. "Mad Solly." "He was crazy," said one of the crowd. "He used to walk like this." The boy hunched his head into his shoulders, harlds clutching his jacket around him, and shuffled forward a few paces, muttering to himself and casting his eyes about. The others dissolved in laughter, and one gave the impersonator a hefty shove which sent him sprawling.

 

 

"Anyone ever see him with anyone else?" asked Miller. "Talking with anyone else? Another man?" "Whatcher want to know for?" asked the leader suspiciously. "We didn't do him no harm." Miller flicked a five-mark coin idly up and down in one band. Eight pairs of eyes watched the silver glitter of the spinning coin. Eight heads shook slowly. Miller turned and walked away.

 

 

"Mister." He stopped and turned around. The smallest of the group had caught up with him.

 

 

"I seen him once with a man. Talking, they was. Sittipg and talking." "Where was that?" "Down by the river. On the grass bank along the river. There are some benches there. They was sitting on a bench, talking." "How old was he, the other one?" "Very old. Lot of white hair." Miller tossed him the coin, convinced it had been a wasted gesture. But he walked to the river and stared down the length of the grass bank in both directions. There were a dozen benches along the bank, all of them empty.

 

 

In summer there would be plenty of people sitting along the Elbe Chaussee watching the great liners come in and out, but not at the end of November.

 

 

To his left along the near bank lay the fishing port, with half a dozen North Sea trawlers drawn up at the wharfs, discharging their loads of fresh-caught herring and mackerel or preparing for the sea again.

 

 

As a boy, Peter had returned to the shattered city from a farm in the country where he had been evacuated during the bombing, and had grown up amid the rubble and the ruins. His favorite playing place had been this fishing port along the river at Altona.

 

 

He liked the fishermen, gruff, kindly men who smelled of tar and salt and shag tobacco. He thought of Eduard Roschmann in Riga and wondered how the same country could have produced them both.

 

 

His mind came back to Tauber and went over the problem again. Where could he possibly have met his friend Marx? Miller knew there was something missing but could not put his finger on it. It was not until he was back in his car and had stopped for gas close to Altona railway station that the answer came. As so often, it was a chance remark. The pump attendant pointed out there had been a price increase in topgrade gasoline and added, just to make conversation with his customer, that money went less and less far these days. He went to get the change and left Miller staring at the open wallet in Ws hand.

 

 

Money. Where did Tauber get his money? He didn't work. He refused to accept any compensation from the German state. Yet he paid his rent regularly and must have bad something left over with which to eat. He was fifty-six years old, so he could not have had an old-age pension, but he could well have had a disability pension. Probably did.

 

 

Miller pocketed his change, gunned the Jaguar to life, and drove to the Altona post office. He approached the window marked PENSIONS.

 

 

"Can you tell me when the pensioners collect their money?" he asked the fat lady behind the grille.

 

 

"Last day of the month, of course," she said.

 

 

"That will be Saturday, then?" "Except on weekends. This month it will be Friday, the day after tomorrow."

 

 

"Does that include those with disability pensions?" he asked.

 

 

"Everyone who's entitled to a pension collects it on the last day of the month." "Here, at this window?" "If the person lives in Altona, yes," replied the woman.

 

 

"At what time?" "From opening time onwar&" "Thank you."

 

 

Miller was back on Friday morning, watching the queue of old men and women begin to filter through the doors of the post office when it opened. He positioned himself against the wall opposite, watching the directions they took as they departed. Many had white hair, but most wore bats against the cold. The weather had turned dry again, sunny but chill.

 

 

Just before eleven an old man with a shock of white hair like candy floss came out of the post office, counted his money to make sure it was all there, put it in his inside pocket, and looked around as if searching for someone. After a few minutes he turned and began to walk slowly away. At the comer he looked up and down again, then turned down Museum Street in the direction of the riverbank. Miller eased himself off the wall and followed him.

 

 

It took the old man twenty minutes to get the halfmile to the Elbe Cbaussee; then he turned up the bank, crossed the grass, and settled himself on a bench. Miller approached slowly from behind.

 

 

"Herr Marx?" The old man turned as Miller came around the end of the bench. He showed no surprise, as though he were often recognized by complete strangers.

 

 

"Yes," he said gravely, "I am Marx." "My name is Miller." Marx inclined his head gravely in acceptance of this news.

 

 

"Are you--er-waiting for Herr Tauber?"

 

 

"Yes, I am," said the old man without surprise.

 

 

"May I sit down?" "Please." Miller sat beside him, so they both faced toward the Elbe River. A giant dry-cargo ship, the Kota Maru out of Yokohama, was easing downriver on the tide.

 

 

"I'm afraid Herr Tauber is dead." The old man stared at the passing ship. He showed neither grief nor surprise, as if such news was brought frequently. Perhaps it was.

 

 

"I see," he said.

 

 

Miller told him briefly about the events of the previous Friday night. "You don't seem surprised. That he killed himself." "No," said Marx, "he was a very unhappy man." "He left a diary, you know." "Yes, he told me once about that." "Did you ever read it?" asked Miller.

 

 

"No, he never let anybody read it. But he told me about it." "It described the time he spent in Riga during the war." "Yes, he told me be was in Riga." "Were you in Riga too?" The man turned and looked at him with sad old eyes. "No, I was in Dachau." "Look, Herr Marx, I need your help. In his diary your friend mentioned a man, an SS officer, called Roschmann. Captain Eduard Roschmann. Did he ever mention him to you?" "Oh, yes. He told me about Roschmann. That was really what kept him alive.

 

 

Hoping one day to give evidence against Roschmann." "That's what he said in his diary. I read it after his death. I'm a press reporter. I want to try and lind Roschmann. Bring him to trial. Do you understand?" "Yes." "But there's no point if Roschmarm is already dead.

 

 

Can you remember if Herr Tauber ever learned whether Roscbmann was still alive and free?" Marx stared out at the disappearing stem of the Kola Maru for several minutes.

 

 

"Captain Roschmann is alive," he said simply, "and free." Miller leaned forward earnestly. "How do you know?" "Because Tauber saw him." "Yes I read that. It was in early April nineteen forty-five." Marx shook his head slowly. "No, it was last month." For several more minutes there was silence as Miller stared at the old man and Marx stared out at the water.

 

 

"Last month?" repeated Miller at length. "Did he say how he saw him?" Marx sighed, then turned to Miller. "Yes. He was walking late at night, as be often used to do when he could not sleep. He was walking back home past the State Opera House just as a crowd of people started to come out.

 

 

He stopped as they came to the pavement. He said they were wealthy people, the men in dinner jackets, the women in furs and jewels. There were three taxis lined up at the curb waiting for them. The doorman held the passers-by back so they could climb in. And then he saw Roschmann." "In the crowd of opera-goers?" "Yes. He climbed into a taxi with two others, and they drove off." "Now listen, Herr Marx, this is very important. Was he absolutely sure it was Roschmann?" "Yes, he said he was." "But it was almost nineteen years since he last saw him. He must have changed a lot. How could he be so sure?" "He said he smiled." "He what?" "He smiled. Roschmann sniffed." "That is significant?"

 

 

Marx nodded several times. "He said once you had seen Roscbmann smile that way, you never forgot it. He could not describe the smile but just said he would recognize it among a million others, anywhere in the world." "I see. Do you believe him?" "Yes. Yes, I believe he saw Roschmann." "AR right. Let's accept that I do too. Did he get the number of the taxi?" "No. He said his mind was so stunned he just watched it drive away." "Damn," said Miller. "It probably drove to a hotel. If I had the number I could ask the driver where he took that party. When did Herr Tauber tell you all this?" "Last month, when we picked up our pensions. Here, on this bench." Miller stood up and sighed. "You must realize that nobody would ever believe his story?" Marx shifted his gaze off the river and looked up at the reporter. "Oh yes," he said softly. "He knew that. You,see, that was why he killed himself."

 

 

That evening Peter Miller paid his usual weekend visit to his mother, and as usual she fussed over whether he was eating enough, the number of cigarettes he smoked in a day, and the state of his laundry. She was a short, plump, matronly person in her early fifties who had never quite resigned herself to the idea that all her only son wanted to be was a reporter.

 

 

During the course of the evening she asked him what be was doing at the moment. Briefly he told her, mentioning his intention to try to track down the missing Eduard Roschmann. She was aghast.

 

 

Peter ate away stolidly, letting the tide of reproach and recrimination flow over his head.

 

 

"It's bad enough that you always have to go around covering the doings of those nasty criminals and people," she was saying, "without going and getting mixed up with those Nazi people. I don't know what your dear father would have thought, I really don't." A thought struck him. "Mother." "Yes, dear?" "During the war-those things that the SS did to people... in the camps.

 

 

Did you ever suspect--did you ever think that it was going on?" She busied herself furiously, tidying up the table. After a few seconds she spoke. "Horrible things. Terrible things. The British made us look at the films after the war. I don't want to hear any more about it." She bustled out. Peter rose and followed her into the kitchen. "You remember in nineteen fifty when I was sixteen and I went to Paris with a school party?" She paused, filling the sink for the dishwashing. "Yes, I remember." "And we were taken to see a church called the Sacr6 Coeur. And there was a service just finishing, a memorial service for a man called Jean Moulin.

 

 

Some people came out, and they heard me speaking German to another boy. One of the group turned and spat at me. I remember the spittle running down my jacket. I remember I came home later and told you about it. Do you remember what you said?" Mrs. Miller was furiously scouring a dinner plate.

 

 

"You said the French were like that. Dirty habits, you said." "Well, they have. I never did like them." "Look, Mother, do you know what we did to Jean Moulin before he died? Not you, not Father, not me. But us, the Germans, or rather the Gestapo, which for millions of foreigners seems to be the same thing." "I don't want to hear. Now, that's enough of that." "Well, I can't tell you, because I don't know. Doubtless it's recorded somewhere. But the point is, I was spat on not because I was in the Gestapo, but because I'm a German." "And you should be proud of it." "Oh, I am, believe me, I am. But that doesn't mean

 

 

I've got to be proud of the Nazis and the SS and the Gestapo." "Well, nobody is, but there's no point in keeping talking about it." She was flustered, as always when he argued with her, drying her hands on the dishtowel before bustling back into the living room. He trailed after her.

 

 

"Look, Mother, try to understand. Until I read that diary I never even asked precisely what it was we were all supposed to have done. Now at least I'm beginning to understand. That's why I want to find this man, this monster, if he's still around. It's right that he should be brought to trial." She sat on the settee, close to tears. "Please, Peterkin, leave them alone.

 

 

Just don't keep probing into the past. It won't do any good. It's over now, over and done with. It's best forgotten." Peter Miller was facing the mantelpiece, which was dominated by the clock and the photograph of his dead father, who was wearing his Army captain's uniform, staring out of the frame with the kind, rather sad smile that Miller remembered. It was taken before he returned to the front after his last leave.

 

 

Peter remembered his father with startling clarity, looking at his photograph nineteen years later as his mother asked him to drop the Roschmann inquiry. He could remember before the war, when he was five years old, and his father had taken him to Hagenbeck's zoo and pointed out all the animals to him, one by one, patiently reading the details off the little tin plaques in front of each cage to reply to the endless flow of questions from the boy.

 

 

He could remember bow his father came home after enlisting in 1940, and how his mother had cried and how he had thought bow stupid women are to cry over such a wonderful thing as having a father in uniform. He recalled the day in 1944 when be was ten years old, and an Army officer had come to the door to tell his mother that her war-hero husband had been killed on the Eastern Front.

 

 

"Besides, nobody wants these awful expos6s any more. Nor these terrible trials that we keep having, with everything dragged out into the open again. Nobody's going to thank you for it, even if you do find him. They'll just point to you in the street; I mean, they don't want any more trials.

 

 

Not now, it's too late. Just drop it, Peter, please, for my sake." He remembered the black-edged column of names in the newspaper, the same length as every day, but different that day in late October, for halfway down was the entry: "Fallen for Fiihrer and Fatherland. Miller, Erwin, Captain, on October 11. In Ostland." And that was it. Nothing else. No hint of where, or when, or why. Just one of tens of thousands of names pouring back from the east to fill the ever-lengthening black-edged columns, until the government had ceased to print them because they destroyed morale.

 

 

"I mean," said his mother behind him, "you might at least think of your father's memory. You think he'd want his son digging around into the past, trying to drag up another war-crimes trial? Do you think that's what he'd want?" Miller spun around and walked across the room to his mother, placed both hands on her shoulders, and looked down into her frightened china-blue eyes. He stooped and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

 

 

"Yes, Mutti," he said. "I think that's exactly what he'd want." He let himself out, climbed into his car, and headed back into Hamburg, his anger seething inside him.

 

 

Everyone who knew him and many who did not agreed Hans Hoffmann looked the part. He was in his late forties, boyishly handsome with carefully styled graying hair cut in the latest trendy fashion, and manicured fingers. His medium-gray suit was from Savile Row, his heavy silk tie was from Cardin.

 

 

There was an air of expensive good taste of the kind money can buy about him.

 

 

If looks bad been his only asset be would not have been one of West Germany's wealthiest and most successful magazine-publishers. Starting after the war with a hand-operated press, turning out handbills for the British Occupation authorities, he had founded in 1949 one of the first weekly picture magazines. His formula was simple--tell it in words and make it shocking, then back it up with pictures that make all competitors look like novices with their first box brownies. It worked. His chain of eight magazines ranging from love stories for teenagers to the glossy chronicle of the doings of the rich and sexy had made him a multimillionaire. But Komet, the news and current-affairs magazine, was still his favorite, his baby.

 

 

The money had brought him a luxurious ranch-style house at Othmarschen, a chalet in the mountains, a villa by the sea, a Rolls-Royce, and a Ferrari.

 

 

Along the way he bad picked up a beautiful wife, whom he dressed from Paris, and two handsome children he seldom saw. The only millionaire in Germany whose succession of young mistresses, discreetly maintained and frequently exchanged, were never photographed in his gossip magaZine was Hans Hoffmann. He waF also very astute.

 

 

That Wednesday afternoon be closed the Cover of the diary of Salomon Tauber after reading the beginning, leantd back, and looked at the young repoi:ter opposiie.

 

 

"All right. I can guess the rest. What do you want?" "I think that's a great document," said Miller. "There's a man mentioned throughout the diary called Eduard Roschmann. Captain in the SS. Commandant of Riga ghetto throughout. Killed eighty thousand men, women, and children.

 

 

I believe he's alive and here in West Germany. I want to find him." "How do you know he's alive?" Miller told him briefly.

 

 

Hoffmann pursed his lips. "Pretty thin evidence."

 

 

"True. But worth a second look. I've brought home stories that started on less." Hoffmann grinned, recalling Miller's talent for ferreting out stories that hurt the Establishment. Hoffmann had been happy to print them, once they were checked out as accurate. They sent circulation soaring.