And I learned of that amazing day in the spring of 1945 when a single US Army jeep, driving north through Bavaria with just four soldiers on board, had seen plumes of smoke rising from the courtyard of a medieval castle.
Driving unchallenged over the drawbridge, they had discovered a dozen SS men in overalls tending a bonfire. They arrested the lot and hosed out the fire. Experts came up from General Patton’s headquarters to discover that what was being burned was the entire SS personnel archive. Only 2 or 3 percent had been consumed by the flames. The rest was now lodged under American care in West Berlin. That included the entire file on Captain (Hauptsturmführer) Eduard Roschmann of Riga, an Austrian-born fanatic now high on the wanted list. Slowly, my story was coming together, but there was less and less to invent; it was beyond fiction, but it was all true.
The real irony was that I could say anything I wanted about this monster. Wherever he was, he was hardly likely to come out of hiding to sue.
Finally, Simon Wiesenthal pointed me back north to Germany with a huge volume of information and even more warnings. I thought his conviction that West German officialdom was comprehensively penetrated by a generation steeped in either participation in, or sympathy for, what had happened between 1933 and 1945 might be just paranoia, but it was nothing of the sort. It all came down to the issue of “which generation.”
A fanatical Nazi aged twenty-five at the end of the war would have been born around 1920. He would have been steeped in Nazi education from age thirteen onward and almost certainly a member of the Hitler Youth from that age. He could well have been a mass murderer by twenty-five.
By the time of my research, he would have been fifty-one or -two; that is, at the prime of life and a high-ranker in any of a hundred official positions. Nor would I receive obstruction only from wanted criminals. Behind them was the even larger army of guilty desk-doers, the bureaucrats without whose organizational flair the Holocaust could never have happened.
This was the generation that now ran Germany, blossoming in its economic miracle. After 1949, the founding under Allied aegis of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany, the chancellor was the undeniably anti-Nazi Konrad Adenauer. But he had a terrible quandary to resolve.
Nazi Party members were so pandemic that had he banned them all, the country would have been ungovernable. So he cut his Faustian pact. Delving into the past when considering appointment or promotions was neither practical nor desirable. According to Simon Wiesenthal, every branch of the public function was impregnated with bureaucrats who had never pulled a trigger but had helped those who did. Research, he said, was not a question of open hostility but of closed doors. Police officers who volunteered to join the Nazi-hunting commissions quite simply terminated their own careers. They became outcasts. And he turned out to be right.
He also pointed me toward clandestine groups who still really believed in the coming of the Fourth Reich one day and whose meetings I could attend with my fluent German. So I did. The more I delved into the murk of pre-1945 Nazism and its post-1945 admirers, the more I came to the view that in all the history of the human race there has never been a creed so foul. It had not a single redeeming feature, appealing only to the nastiest corners of the human soul.
But it was all hidden, back then. The participant generation never spoke of it and the young generation was profoundly ignorant and indeed deeply puzzled by foreign hostility when they met it.
Despite their professed loathing of fascism and Nazism, the Communists of the East, behind the Iron Curtain, offered no help or cooperation whatsoever.
Thus, all investigation of all the crimes committed east of the Iron Curtain during the Nazi time was allocated to different state attorney offices spread across West Germany. Riga came under the state attorneyship of Hamburg. I started there and met a blank wall of closed doors. I was puzzled. Surely they were lawyers? I rang Simon Wiesenthal. He roared with laughter.
“Yes, of course they are lawyers. But whose lawyers?”
I realized many must have been or still were in the Comradeship. But slowly I made contact with either younger men, untainted because they were too young, or anti-Nazis who had lived through it and survived unsullied. They talked, but quietly, furtively, in darkened beer bars, once convinced I was just a British investigative reporter. And slowly the story came together that in 1972 appeared under the title The Odessa File.
Starting in Hamburg, I drifted back south again until I returned to Austria, from which my villain Roschmann had come. In an antique shop, I found an old Jew who had been in Riga under Roschmann and had survived, even the death march west as the Russians advanced. His wife assured me her husband had never spoken of it and never would. But she was wrong.
The old man was courtesy itself and offered me tea. We sat as I explained the plotline of the story I had in mind. I do not know why, but he began to correct me. It was not like that, he said, it was like this. Darkness fell. As his wide-eyed wife brought relay after relay of tea, he talked for twenty hours. In the book, the testimony of Salomon Tauber is recounted to me, detail by detail, by candlelight in a Viennese antique shop. I just moved Herr Tauber to Hamburg.
For a hero, I needed a young investigator of the new generation to inherit the diary of the dead Tauber and do something about it. So I invented Peter Miller, and his investigative trail almost exactly matches my own during that summer of 1971.
I returned to the UK in June for the launch of The Day of the Jackal. It was a very quiet affair. No one had heard of the title or the author. It had not been reviewed. Hutchinson had begun with an audacious five thousand copies, raised to eight thousand as the book buyers of the major stores slowly increased their orders. The PR lady for
the launch was Cindy Winkleman, now the mother of the British TV star Claudia.
Then I went back to Germany to tie up the last details. I wrote The Odessa File that autumn and presented it to Harold Harris, as promised, before Christmas. Slowly, Jackal was climbing the charts, and the second novel had a better media reception. Hollywood succumbed to the wiles of my new agent, Diana Baring, and bought the film rights.
The movie, when it came out in 1974, starring Jon Voight as Peter Miller and Maximilian Schell as the villainous Roschmann, led eventually to the quixotic twist in this tale.
In 1975, in a fleapit cinema on the coast south of Buenos Aires, an Argentinian was watching the Spanish-language version when it occurred to him that Eduard Roschmann, who had reverted to his real name, so convinced was he of his safety, was living down the street. So he denounced him.
Argentina was in one of its brief windows of democratic government under President Isabel Perón, widow of the old tyrant Juan Perón, and, seeking to do the right thing, had Roschmann arrested. West Germany slapped in a request for extradition.
Before the legal formalities had been completed between the West German embassy and the Ministry of Justice, Roschmann—on bail, thanks to a local magistrate—lost his nerve. He ran north for the sanctuary of the pro-Nazi dictator Alfred Stroessner of Paraguay. He reached the border and waited for the ferry across the Paraguay River to safety.
Right in the middle of the river, he had a massive heart attack. Witnesses said he was dead before he hit the floor, or in this case the deck. What followed must have come from a very flaky comedy show.
On the Paraguayan bank, the terminal master refused to accept the body on the grounds it belonged to Argentina. The captain insisted the dead man had paid full fare for his crossing and the cadaver belonged to Paraguay. The ferry schedule insisted the boat depart, so the body went back to Argentina, still lying on the foredeck.
It went back and forth four times, becoming ever more smelly under the tropical sun. Then two detectives arrived from Vienna to identify it. Thanks to the American jeep in Bavaria in 1945, they had fingerprints and dental records from the Roschmann file in the SS personnel archives. They asked for the body to be unloaded at last and the Paraguayans conceded.
Proof positive was established and the clincher was the two missing toes, amputated when Roschmann fled the British through the border snows in 1947. With the ferry refusing to have the corpse back, the Paraguayans buried it in a gravel bank just back from the water’s edge.
So today the bones of the Butcher of Riga lie in an unmarked grave in a gravel bank beside the Paraguay River. It took a bit of time but eventually, thanks to the movie, job done.
DOGS OF WAR