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 was also very astute.
That Wednesday afternoon be closed the Cover of the diary of Salomon Tauber after reading the beginning, leaned back, and looked at the young reporter opposite.
“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.
“Then presumably this man-what do you call him, Roschmann? Presumably he’s already on the wanted list. If the police can’t find him, what makes you think you can?”
“Are the police really looking?” asked Miller.
Hoffmann shrugged. “They’re supposed to. That’s what we pay them for.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to help a little, would it? Just check out whether he’s really alive, whether he was ever picked up; if so, what happened to him?”
“So what do you want from me?” asked Hoffmann.
“A commission to give it a try. If nothing comes of it, I drop it.” Hoffmann swung in his chair, spinning around to face the picture windows looking out over the sprawling docks, mile after mile of cranes and wharfs spread out twenty floors below and a mile away.
“It’s a bit out of your line, Miller. Why the sudden interest?” Miller thought hard. Trying to sell an idea was always the hardest part. A freelance reporter has to sell the story, or the idea of the story, to the publisher or the editor first. The public comes much later.
“It’s a good human-interest story. If Komet could find the man where the police forces of the country had failed, it would be a scoop. Something people want to know about.” Hoffmann gazed out at the December skyline and slowly shook his head.
“You’re wrong. That’s why I’m not giving you a commission for it. I should think it’s the last thing people want to know about.”
“But look, Herr Hoffmann, this is different. These people Roschmann killed-they weren’t Poles and Russians. These were Germans-all right, German Jews, but they were Germans. Why wouldn’t people want to know about it?”
Hoffmann spun back from the window, put his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his knuckles. “Miller, you’re a good reporter. I like the way you cover a story; you’ve got style. And you’re a ferret. I can hire twenty, fifty, a hundred men in this city by picking up the phone, and they’ll all do what they’re told, cover the stories they’re sent to cover. But they can’t dig out a story for themselves. You can. That’s why you get a lot of work from me and will get a lot more in the future. But not this one.”
“But why? It’s a good story.”
“Listen, you’re young. I’ll tell you something about journalism. Half of journalism is about writing good stories. The other half is about selling them.
You can do the first bit, but I can do the second. That’s why I’m here and you’re there. You think this is a story everyone will want to read because the victims of Riga were German Jews. I’m telling you that’s exactly why no one will want to read the story. It’s the last story in the world they’ll want to read. And until there’s a law in this country forcing people to buy magazines and read what’s good for them, they’ll go on buying magazines to read what they want to read. And that’s what I give them. What they want to read.”
“Then why not about Roschmann?”
“You still don’t get it? Then I’ll tell you. Before the war just about everyone in Germany knew at least one Jew. The fact is, before Hitler started, nobody hated the Jews in Germany. We had the best record of treatment of our Jewish minority of any country in Europe. Better than France, better than Spain, infinitely better than Poland and Russia, where the pogroms were fiendish.
“Then Hitler started. Telling people the Jews were to blame for the First War, the unemployment, the poverty, and everything else that was wrong. People didn’t know what to believe. Almost everyone knew one Jew who was a nice guy. Or just harmless. People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws; they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything.”
“So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”
“For years people haven’t asked what happened to the Jews of Germany. They just disappeared-nothing else. It’s bad enough to read at every war-crimes trial what happened to the faceless, anonymous Jews of Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystok-nameless, unknown Jews from Poland and Russia. Now you want to tell them, chapter and verse, what happened to their next-door neighbors. Now can you understand it? These Jews’-he tapped the diary—:“these people they knew, they greeted them in the street, they bought in their shops, and they stood around while they were taken away for your Herr Roschmann to deal with. You think they want to read about that? You couldn’t have picked a story that people in Germany want to read about less.” Having finished, Hans Hoffmann leaned back, selected a fine panatela from a humidor on the desk, and lit it from a rolled-gold Dupont. Miller sat and digested what he had not been able to work out for himself.
“That must have been what my mother meant,” he said at length.
Hoffmann grunted. “Probably.”
“I still want to find that bastard.”