“Cheers,” said Cadbury. “Well, now, you’ve got quite a problem. I must say I admire your nerve.”
“Nerve?” said Miller.
“It’s not quite the most popular story to investigate among your countrymen in their present state of mind,” said Cadbury, “as you will doubtless find out in course of time.”
“I already have,” said Miller.
“Mmm. I thought so,” said the Englishman and grinned suddenly. “A spot of lunch? My wife’s away for the day.”
Over lunch Miller asked Cadbury if he had been in Germany at the end of the war.
“Yes, I was a war correspondent. Much younger then, of course. About your age. I came in with Montgomery’s army. Not to Bonn, of course. No one had heard of it then. The headquarters was at Luneburg. Then I just sort of stayed on. Covered the end of the war, signature of the surrender and all that; then the paper asked me to remain.”
“Did you cover the zonal war-crimes trials?” asked Miller.
Cadbury transferred a mouthful of fillet steak and nodded while he chewed.
“Yes. All the ones held in the British Zone. We had a specialist come over for the Nuremberg Trials. That was the American Zone, of course. The star criminals in our zone were Josef Kramer and Irma Grese. Heard of them?”
“No, never.”
“Well, they were called the Beast and Beastess of Belsen. I invented the titles, actually. They caught on. Did you hear about Belsen?”
“Only -vaguely,” said Miller. “My generation wasn’t told much about all that. Nobody wanted to tell us anything.”
Cadbury shot him a shrewd glance under his bushy eyebrows. “But you want to know now?”
“We have to know sooner or later. May I ask you something? Do you hate the Germans?”
Cadbury chewed for a few minutes, considering the question seriously. “Just after the discovery of Belsen, a crowd of journalists attached to the British Army went up for a look. I’ve never been so sickened in my life, and in war you see a few terrible things. But nothing like Belsen. I think at that moment, yes, I hated them all.”
“And now?”
“No. Not any longer. Let’s face it, I married a German girt in nineteen forty-eight. I still live here. I wouldn’t if I still felt the way I did in nineteen forty-five. I’d have gone back to England long ago.”
“What caused the change?”
“Time. The passage of time. And the realization that not all Germans were Josef Kramers. Or-what was his name, Roschmann? Or Roschmanns. Mind you, I still can’t get over a sneaking sense of mistrust for people of my own generation among your nation.”
“And my generation?” Miller twirled his wineglass and gazed at the light refracting through the red liquid.
“They’re better,” said Cadbury. “Let’s face it, you have to be better.”
“Will you help me with the Roschmann inquiry? Nobody else will.”
“If I can,” said Cadbury. “What do you want to know?”
“Do you recall him being put on trial in the British Zone?” Cadbury shook his head. “No. Anyway, you said he was Austrian by birth.
Austria was also under four power occupation at the time. But I’m certain there was no trial against Roschmann in the British Zone of Germany. I’d remember the name if there were.”
“But why would the British authorities request a photocopy of his career from the Americans in Berlin?”
Cadbury thought for a moment. “Roschmann must have come to the attention of the British in some way. At that time nobody knew about Riga. The Russians were at the height of their obstinacy in the late forties. They didn’t give us any information from the east. Yet that was where the overwhelming majority of the worst crimes of mass murder took place. So we were in the odd position of having about eighty per cent of the crimes against humanity committed east of what is now the Iron Curtain, and the ones responsible for them were about ninety per cent in the three western zones. Hundreds of guilty men slipped through our hands because we knew nothing about what they had done a thousand miles to the east.”
“But if an inquiry was made about Roschmann in nineteen forty-seven, he must have come to our attention somehow.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Miller. “Where would one start to look, among the British records?”
“Well, we can start with my own files. They’re back at my house. Come on, it’s a short walk.” Fortunately, Cadbury was a methodical man and had kept every one of his dispatches from the end of the war onward. His study was lined with file boxes along two walls. Besides these, there were two gray filing cabinets in one comer.
“I run the office from my home,” he told Miller as they entered the study.
“This is my own filing system, and I’m about the only one who understands it. Let me show you.” He gestured to the filing cabinets. “One of these is stuffed with files on people, listed under the names in alphabetical order.
The other concerns subjects, listed under subject headings, alphabetically.
We’ll start with the first one. Look under Roschmann.” It was a brief search. There was no folder with Roschmann’s name on it.
“All right,” said Cadbury. “Now let’s try subject headings. There are four that might help. There’s one called Nazis, another labeled SS. Then there’s a very large section headed Justice, which has subsections, one of which contains clippings about trials that have taken place. But they’re mostly criminal trials that have taken place in West Germany since nineteen forty-nine. The last one that might help is about war crimes. Lees start going through them.” Cadbury read faster than Miller, but it took them until nightfall to wade through the hundreds of clippings in all four files. Eventually Cadbury rose with a sigh, closed the War Crimes file, and replaced it in its proper place in the filing cabinet.
“I’m afraid I have to go out to dinner tonight,” he said. “The only things left to look through are these.” He gestured to the box files on shelves along two of the walls.
Miller closed the file he had been searching. “What are those?”
“Those,” said Cadbury, “are nineteen years of dispatches from me to the paper. That’s the top row. Below them are nineteen years of clippings from the paper of news stories and articles about Germany and Austria.
Obviously a lot in the first set are repeated in the second. Those are my pieces that were printed. But there are other pieces in the second set that were not from me. After all, other contributors have had pieces printed in the paper as well. And some of the stuff I sent was not used.
“There are about six boxes of clippings per year. That’s quite a lot to get through. Fortunately its Sunday tomorrow, so we can use the whole day if you like.”
“It’s very kind of you to take so much trouble,” said Miller.
Cadbury shrugged. “I had nothing else to do this weekend. Anyway, weekends in late December in Bonn are hardly full of gaiety. My wife’s not due back till tomorrow evening. Meet me for a drink in the Cercle Francais about eleven-thirty.”
It was in the middle of Sunday afternoon that they found it. Anthony Cadbury was nearing the end of the box file labeled November-December 1947 of the set that contained his own dispatches. He suddenly shouted, “Eureka,” eased back the spring clip, and took out a single sheet of paper, long since faded, typewritten and headed “December 23, 1947.”
“No wonder it wasn’t used in the paper,” he said. “No one would have wanted to know about a captured SS man just before Christmas. Anyway, with the shortage of newsprint in those days, the Christmas Eve edition must have been tiny.” He laid the sheet on the writing desk and shone the Anglepoise lamp onto it. Miller leaned over to read it.
British Military Government, Hanover, 23rd Dec. — A former captain of the notorious SS has been arrested by British military authorities at Graz, Austria, and is being held pending further investigation, a spokesman at BMG headquarters said here today.