The Odessa File Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Frederick Forsyth

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Can you forgive the past?

  It’s 1963 and a young German reporter has been assigned the suicide of a holocaust survivor. The news story seems straighforward, this is a tragic insight into one man’s suffering. But a long hidden secret is discovered in the pages of the dead man’s diary.

  What follows is life-and-death hunt for a notorious former concentration camp-commander, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands, a man as yet unpunished.

  ’Brilliant entertainment and a disquieting book’

  Guardian

  About the Author

  Former RAF pilot and investigative journalist, Frederick Forsyth defined the modern thriller when he wrote The Day of The Jackal, with its lightning-paced storytelling, effortlessly cool reality and unique insider information. Since then he has written eleven further bestselling novels. He lives in England.

  ALSO BY FREDERICK FORSYTH

  * * *

  THE BIAFRA STORY

  GREAT FLYING STORIES

  NO COMEBACKS

  THE VETERAN

  THE SHEPHERD

  THE PHANTOM OF MANHATTAN

  * * *

  THE ODESSA

  FILE

  Frederick Forsyth

  To all Press reporters

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It is customary for authors to thank those who have helped them to compile a book, particularly on a difficult subject, and in doing so to name them. All those who helped me, in however small a way, by assisting me to get the information I needed to write The Odessa File are entitled to my heartfelt thanks, and if I do not name them it is for three reasons.

  Some, being former members of the SS, were not aware at the time either who they were talking to or that what they said would end up in a book. Others have specifically asked that their names never be mentioned as sources of information about the SS. In the case of others still, the decision not to mention their names is mine alone, and taken I hope for their sakes rather than for mine.

  F.F.

  FOREWORD

  THE ODESSA OF the title is neither the city in southern Russia nor the small town in America. It is a word composed of six initial letters, which in German stand for ‘Organisation Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen’. In English this means ‘Organisation 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 Hitler, 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 organised 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, though it is seldom mentioned, close to two hundred thousand non-Jewish Germans and Austrians. These were either mentally or physically handicapped unfortunates or so-called enemies of the Reich, like 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 organisation 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 civilised 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 organisation which they formed to effect their escape was the Odessa. When the first task of ensuring the escape to more hospitable climes of the killers 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 organisation from the safety of a comfortable exile.

  The aim of the Odessa was and remains five-fold: 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 defence 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 Kamerad, to ensure former SS men establish themselves in commerce and industry in time to take advantage of the economic miracle that has rebuilt the country since 1945, and finally to propagandise the German people to the view-point 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 their considerable funds, they have 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 organisation, 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’.

  Chapter One

  EVERYONE SEEMS TO remember with great clarity what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, at the precise moment they heard President Kennedy was dead. He was hit at 12.22 in the afternoon, Dallas time, and the announcement that he was dead came at half past one in the same time zone. It was 2.30 in New York, 7.30 in the evening in London and 8.30 on a chilly, sleet-swept night in Hamburg.

  Peter Miller was driving back into the town centre 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 we
ek. 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 North West 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 into the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona towards the centre 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 kerb 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 towards 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 disc jockey had to 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 city, 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 left-hand window, then realised 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.

  ‘Bloody 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 type-set, the telephone lines jammed with yelling men seeking more and ever more details because a man with his throat torn out lay on a slab in a town in Texas.

  He wished in a way he were back on the staff of a daily newspaper, but since he became a freelance three years earlier he had specialised 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 he 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 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 demeanour.

  ‘Ja, ja, ja,’ he murmured with sagacity, as if he had seen it coming all along. ‘Violent people, these Americans, 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. ‘Grüss Gott.’ He started to walk back to his own car. Miller became aware he was going.

  ‘Ja, 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 had been replaced by a slow march, and the announcer said there would be no more light music that night, just news bulletins interspersed with suitable music.

  Miller leaned back in the comfortable leather upholstery of his Jaguar and lit up a Roth-Händl, a filterless black-tobacco cigarette with a foul smell, another thing that his mother complained about in her disappointing 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, nor 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 litre 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 Stresemann Strasse and they were standing at red when he heard the clamour 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 Daimler Strasse. Miller reacted on reflexes alone. He let in the clutch and the Jaguar surged after the ambulance twenty metres behind it.

  As soon as he had done it he wished he had gone straight on 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 anything. 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 6th, 1958, and the plane carrying the Manchester United football team had crashed a few hundred metres from where he stood. The man was not even a professional photographer, but he had unslung the camera he was taking on a ski-ing holiday and snapped the first exclusive pictures of the burning aircraft. The pictorial magazines had paid over £5000 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 towards 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, Mil
ler 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. The 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 kerb 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 to clear a path from the door to the rear of the ambulance.

  ‘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 directly.’

  He was a big man, as befits top sergeants of the police force in the rougher sections of Hamburg. 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.’