“I don’t see why not,” said Schiller. “The Americans are pretty helpful to us in Bureau One. Because we’re charged by Willy Brandt with investigating Nazi crimes, we’re in there almost every day.” They took Miller’s Jaguar and drove out to the suburbs of the city, to the forests and the lakes, and at the bank of one of the lakes arrived at Number 1, Wasserkuferstieg, in the suburb of Zehlendorf, Berlin 37. The building was a long, low, single-story affair set amid the trees ; “Is that it? said Miller incredulously.
“That’s it,” said Schiller. “Not much, is it? The point is, there are eight floors below ground level. That’s where the archives are stored, in fireproof vaults.” They went through the front door to find a small waiting room with the inevitable porter’s lodge on the right. The detective approached it and proffered his police card. He was handed a form, and the two of them repaired to a table and filled it out.
The detective filled in his name and rank, then asked, “What was the chap’s name again?”
“Roschmann,” said Miller. “Eduard Roschmann.”
The detective filled it in and handed the form back to the clerk in the front office.
“It takes about ten minutes,” said the detective. They went into the larger room set out with rows of tables and chairs. After a quarter of an hour another clerk quietly brought them a file and laid it on the desk. It was about an inch thick, stamped with the single title: ROSCHMANN, EDUARD.
Volkmar Schiller rose. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way,” he said.
“I’ll find my own way back. Mustn’t stay away too long after a week’s leave. If you want anything photostated, ask the clerk.” He gestured to a clerk sitting on a dais at the other end of the reading room, no doubt to ensure that no visitors tried to remove pages from the files.
Miller rose and shook hands. “Many thanks.”
“Not at all.”
Ignoring the other three or four readers hunched over their desks, Miller put his head between his hands and started to peruse the SS’s own dossier on Eduard Roschmann.
It was all there. Nazi Party number, SS number, application form for each, filled out and signed by the man himself, result of his medical check, evaluation of him after his training period, self-written curriculum vitae, transfer papers, officer’s commission, promotion certificates, right up to April 1945. There were also two photographs, taken for the SS records, one full-face, one profile. They showed a man of six feet, one inch, hair shorn close to the head with a parting on the left, staring at the camera with a grim expression, a pointed nose, and a lipless slit of a mouth. Miller began to read….
Eduard Roschmann was born on August 25, 1908, in the Austrian town of Graz, a citizen of Austria, son of a highly respectable brewery worker. He attended kindergarten, school, and high school in Graz. He attended college to try to become a lawyer, but failed. In 1931, at the age of twenty-three, he began work in the brewery where his father had a job and in 1937 was transferred to the administrative department from the brewery floor. The same year he joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS, both at that time banned organizations in neutral Austria. A year later Hitler annexed Austria and rewarded the Austrian Nazis with swift promotions all around.
In 1939, at the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the Waffen SS, was sent to Germany, trained during the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1940, and served in a Waffen SS unit in the overrunning of France.
In December 1940 he was transferred back from France to Berlin -here somebody had handwritten in the margin the word “Cowardice?”-and in January 1941 was assigned to the SD, Amt Three of the RSHA.
In July 1941 he set up the first SD post in Riga, and the following month became commandant of Riga ghetto. He returned to Germany by ship in October 1944 and, after handing over the-remainder of the Jews of Riga to the SD of Danzig, returned to Berlin to report. He returned to his desk in Berlin headquarters of the SS and remained there awaiting reassignment.
The last SS document in the file was evidently never completed, presumably because the meticulous little clerk in Berlin SS headquarters reassigned himself rather quickly in May 1945.
Attached to the back of the bunch of documents was one last one apparently affixed by an American hand since the end of the war. It was a single sheet bearing the typewritten words: “Inquiry made about this file by the British Occupation authorities in December 1947.” Beneath this was the scrawled signature of some GI clerk long since forgotten, and the date December 21, 1947.
Miller gathered the file and eased out of it the self-written life story, the two photographs, and the last sheet. With these he approached the clerk at the end of the room.
“Could I have these photocopied please?”
“Certainly.” The man took the file back and placed it on his desk to await the return of the three missing sheets after copying. Another man also tendered a file and two sheets of its contents for copying. The clerk took these also and placed them all in a tray behind him, whence the sheets were whisked away through an aperture by an unseen hand.
“Please wait. It will take about ten minutes,” the clerk told Miller and the other man. The pair retook their seats and waited, Miller wishing he could smoke a cigarette, which was forbidden; the other man, neat and gray in a charcoal winter coat, sitting with hands folded in his lap.
Ten minutes later there was a rustle behind the clerk, and two envelopes slid through the aperture. He held them up. Both Miller and the middle-aged man rose and went forward to collect.
The clerk glanced quickly inside one of the envelopes. “The file on Eduard Roschmann?” he queried.
“For me,” said Miller and extended his hand.
“These must be for you,” the clerk said to the other man, who was glancing sideways at Miller.
The gray-coated man took his own envelope, and side by side they walked to the door. Outside, Miller ran down the steps and climbed into the Jaguar, slipped away from the curb, and headed back toward the center of the city.
An hour later he rang Sigi. “I’m coming home for Christmas,” he told her.
Two hours later he was on his way out of West Berlin. As his car headed toward the first checkpoint at Drei Linden, the man with the gray coat was sitting in his neat and tidy flat off Savigny Platz, dialing a number in West Germany. He introduced himself briefly to the man who answered.
“I was in the Document Center today. Just normal research, you know the sort I do. There was another man in there. He was reading through the Me of Eduard Roschmann. Then he had three sheets photocopied. After the message that went around recently, I thought I’d better tell you.” There was a burst of questions from the other end.
“No, I couldn’t get his name. He drove away afterward in a long black sports car. Yes, yes, I did. It was a Hamburg number plate.” He recited it slowly while the man at the other end took it down.
“Well, I thought I’d better. I mean, one never knows with these snoopers.”
“Yes, thank you, very kind of you…. Very well, I’ll leave it with you…. Merry Christmas, Kamerad.”
7
CHRISTMAS DAY was on the Wednesday of that week, and it was not until after the Christmas period that the man in West Ger many who had received the news from Berlin about Miller passed it on. When he did so, it was to his ultimate superior.
The man who took the call thanked his informant, put the office phone down, leaned back in his comfortable leather-padded executive chair, and gazed out of the window at the snow-covered rooftops of the Old Town.
“Verdammt and once again verdammt,” he whispered. “Why now, of all times?