“There’s one set here, in the basement,” said the lawyer. “And ours is all composed of photostats. The originals of the entire card index of the SS were captured in nineteen forty-five by an American unit. At the last minute a small group of the SS stayed behind at the castle where they were stored in Bavaria and tried to bum the records. They got through about ten per cent before the American soldiers rushed in and stopped them. The rest were all mixed up. It took the Americans, with some German help, two years to sort out the rest. “During those two years a number of the worst SS men escaped after being temporarily in Allied custody. Their dossiers could not be found in the mess. Since the final classification the entire SS index has remained in Berlin, still under American ownership and direction. Even we have to apply to them if we want something more. Mind you, they’re very good about it; no complaints at all about cooperation from that quarter.”
“And that’s it?” asked Miller. “Just two sets in the whole country?”
“That’s it,” said the lawyer. “I repeat, I wish I could help you.
Incidentally, if you should get anything on Roschmann, we’d be delighted to have it.” Miller thought. “If I find anything, there are only two authorities that can do anything with it. The Attorney General’s office in Hamburg, and you. Right?”
“Yes, that’s all,” said the lawyer.
“And you’re more likely to do something positive with it than Hamburg.” Miller made it a flat statement.
The lawyer gazed fixedly at the ceiling. “Nothing that comes here that is of real value gathers dust on a shelf,” he observed.
“Okay. Point taken,” said Miller and rose. “One thing, between ourselves, are you still looking for Eduard Roschmann?”
“Between ourselves, yes, very much.”
“And if he were caught, there’d be no problems about getting a conviction?”
“None at all,” said the lawyer. “The case against him is tied up solid. He’d get hard labor for life without the option.”
“Give me your phone number,” said Miller.
The lawyer wrote it down and banded Miller the piece of paper. “There’s my name and two phone numbers. Home and office. You can get me any time, day or night. If you get anything new, just call me from any phone box on direct-dial. In every state police force there are men I can call and know I’ll get action if necessary. There are others to avoid. So call me first, right?”
Miller pocketed the paper. “I’ll remember that,” he said as he left.
“Good luck,” said the lawyer.
It’s a long drive from Stuttgart to Berlin, and it took Miller most of the following day. Fortunately it was dry and crisp and the tuned Jaguar ate the miles northward past the sprawling carpet of Frankfurt, past Kassel and Gottingen to Hanover. Here he followed the branch off to the right from autobahn E4 to E8 and the border with East Germany.
There was an hour’s delay at the Marienborn Checkpoint while he filled out the inevitable currency-declaration forms and transit visas to travel though 110 miles of East Germany to West Berlin; and while the blue-uniformed customs man and the green-coated People’s Police, fur-hatted against the cold, poked around in and under the Jaguar. The customs man seemed torn between the frosty courtesy required of a servant of the German Democratic Republic towards a national of revanchist West Germany, and one young man’s desire to examine another’s sports car.
Twenty miles beyond the border, the great motorway bridge reared up to cross the Elbe, where in 1945 the British, honorably obeying the rules laid down at Yalta, had halted their advance on Berlin. To his right, Miller looked down at the sprawl of Magdeburg and wondered if the old prison still stood. There was a further delay at the entry into West Berlin, where again the car was searched, his overnight case emptied onto the customs bench, and his wallet opened to see he had not given all his Westmarks away to the people of the worker’s paradise on his progress down the road. Eventually he was through and the Jaguar roared past the Avus circuit toward the glittering ribbon of the Kurfurstendamm, brilliant with Christmas decorations. It was the evening of December 17.
He decided not to go blundering into the American Document Center the same way he had into the Attorney General’s office in Hamburg or the Z Commission in Ludwigsburg. Without official backing, he had come to realize, no one got anywhere with Nazi files in Germany.
The following morning he called Karl Brandt from the main post office.
Brandt was aghast at his request. “I can’t,” he said into the phone. “I don’t know anyone in Berlin.”
“Well, think. You must have come across someone from the West Berlin force at one of the colleges you attended. I need him to vouch for me when I get there,” shouted Miller back.
“I told you I didn’t want to get involved.”
“Well, you are involved.” Miller waited a few seconds before putting in the body blow. “Either I get a look at that archive officially, or I breeze in and say you sent me.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” said Brandt.
“I damn well would. I’m fed up with being pushed from pillar to post around this lousy country. So find somebody who’ll get me in there officially.
Let’s face it, the request will be forgotten within the hour, once I’ve seen those files.”
“I’ll have to think,” said Brandt, stalling for time.
“I’ll give you an hour,” said Miller. “Then I’m calling back.”
He slammed down the receiver. An hour later Brandt was as angry as ever and more than a little frightened. He heartily wished he had kept the diary to himself and thrown it away.
“There’s a man I was at detective college with,” he said into the phone. “I didn’t know him well, but he’s now with Bureau One of the West Berlin force. That deals with the same subject.”
“What’s his name?”
“Schiller. Volkmar Schiller, detective inspector.”
“I’ll get in touch with him,” said Miller.
“No, leave him to me. I’ll call him today and introduce you to him. Then you can go and see him. If he doesn’t agree to get you in, don’t blame me.
He’s the only one I know in Berlin.”
Two hours later Miller called Brandt back. Brandt sounded relieved. “He’s away on leave,” he said.
“They tell me he’s doing Christmas duty, so he’s away until Monday.”
“But it’s only Wednesday,” said Miller. “That gives me four days to kill.”
“I can’t help it. He’ll be back on Monday morning. I’ll ring him then.”
Miller spent four boring days hanging around West Berlin, waiting for Schiller to come back from leave. Berlin was completely involved, as the Christmas of 1963 approached, with the issue by the East Berlin authorities, for the first time since the Wall had been built in August 1961, of passes enabling West Berliners to go through the Wall and visit relatives living in the eastern sector. The progress of the negotiations between the two sides of the city had held the headlines for days. Miller spent one of his days that weekend by going through the Heinestrasse Checkpoint into the eastern half of the city (as a West German citizen was able to do on the strength of his passport alone) and dropped in on a slight acquaintance, the Reuters correspondent in East Berlin. But the man was up to his neck in work on the Wall-passes story, so after a cup of coffee he left and returned to the west.
On Monday morning he went to see Detective Inspector Volkmar Schiller. To his great relief the man was about his own age and seemed, unusually for an official of any kind in Germany, to have his own cavalier attitude to red tape. Doubtless he would not get far, thought Miller, but that was his problem. He explained briefly what he wanted.