Hoffmann suggested the same at Komet. Why should there be? I’m only twenty-nine years old. All this was before my time.”
“Of course.” Wiesenthal glanced at his watch and rose. “It is five o’clock, and I like to get home to my wife these winter evenings. Would you let me read the diary over the weekend?”
“Yes, of course,” said Miller.
“Good. Then please come back on Monday morning, and I will fill in what I know of the Roschmann story.”
Miller arrived on Monday at ten and found Simon Wiesenthal attacking a pile of letters. He looked up as the German reporter came in and gestured him to a seat. There was silence for a while as the Nazi-hunter carefully snipped the edges off the sides of his envelopes before sliding the contents out.
“I collect the stamps,” he said, “so I don’t like to damage the envelopes.” He worked away for a few more minutes. “I read the diary last night at home. Remarkable document.”
“Were you surprised?” asked Miller.
“Surprised? No, not by the contents. We all went through much the same sort of thing. With variations, of course. But so precise. Tauber would have made a perfect witness. He noticed everything, even the small details. And noted them-at the time. That is very important to get a conviction before German or Austrian courts. And now he’s dead.”
Miller considered for a while. He looked up. “Herr Wiesenthal, so far as I know, you’re the first Jew I have ever really had a long talk with, who went through all that. One thing Tauber said in his diary surprised me: he said there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?”
“No,” said the Nazi-hunter flatly. “Tauber was right.”
“How can you say that, if we killed fourteen million people?”
“Because you, personally, were not there. You did not kill anyone. As Tauber said, the tragedy is that the specific murderers have not been brought to justice.”
“Then who,” asked Miller, “really did kill those people?”
Simon Wiesenthal regarded him intently. “Do you know about the various branches of the SS? About the sections within the SS that really were responsible for killing those millions?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then I’d better tell you. You’ve heard about the Reich Economic Administration Main Office, charged with exploiting the victims before they died?”
“Yes, I read something about it.”
“Its job was in a sense the middle section of the operation,” said Herr Wiesenthal. “That left the business of identifying the victims among the rest of the population, rounding them up, transporting them, and, when the economic exploitation was over, finishing them off. This was the task of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, which actually killed the fourteen million already mentioned. The rather odd use of the word ‘Security’ in the title of this office stems from the quaint Nazi idea that the victims posed a threat to the Reich, which had to be made secure against them. Also in the functions of the RSHA were the tasks of rounding up, interrogating, and incarcerating in concentration camps other enemies of the Reich like Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, editors, reporters, and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, resistance fighters in the occupied countries, and later Army officers like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, both murdered for suspicion of harboring anti-Hitler sentiments.
“The RSHA was divided into six departments, each called an Amt. Amt One was for administration and personnel; Amt Two was equipment and finance. Amt Three was the dreaded Security Service and Security Police, headed by Reinhardt Heydrich, assassinated in Prague in 1942, and later by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, executed by the Allies. Theirs were the teams who devised the tortures used to make suspects talk, both inside Germany and in the occupied countries.
“Amt Four was the Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Milller (still missing), whose Jewish Section, department B4, was headed by Adolf Eichmann, executed by the Israelis in Jerusalem after being kidnapped from Argentina. Amt Five was the Criminal Police, and Amt Six the Foreign Intelligence Service.
“The two successive heads of Amt Three, Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner, were also the overall chiefs of the whole RSHA, and throughout the reigns of both men the head of Amt One was their deputy. He is Lieutenant General of the SS Bruno Streckenbach, who today has a well-paid job with a department store in Hamburg and lives in Vogelweide.
“If one is going to specify guilt, therefore, most of it rests on these two departments of the SS, and the numbers involved are thousands, not the millions who make up contemporary Germany. The theory of the collective guilt of sixty million Germans, including millions of small children, women, old-age pensioners, soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who had nothing to do with the holocaust, was originally conceived by the Allies, but has since suited the former members of the SS extremely well. The theory is the best ally they have, for they realize, as few Germans seem to do, that so long as the collective-guilt theory remains unquestioned nobody will start to look for specific murderers-at least, look hard enough. The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective-guilt theory.”
Miller digested what he had been told. Somehow the very size of the figures involved baffled him. It was not possible to consider fourteen million people as each and every one an individual. It was easier to think of one man, dead on a stretcher under the rain in a Hamburg street.
“The reason Tauber apparently had for killing himself,” Miller asked, “do you believe it?”
Herr Wiesenthal studied a beautiful pair of African stamps on one of the envelopes. “I believe he was right in thinking no one would believe that he saw Roschmann on the steps of the Opera. If that’s what he believed, then he was right.”
“But he didn’t even go to the police,” said Miller.
Simon Wiesenthal snipped the edge off another envelope and scanned the letter inside. After a pause he replied, “No. Technically he should have. I don’t think it would have done any good. Not in Hamburg, at any rate.”
“What’s wrong with Hamburg?”
“You went to the State Attorney General’s office there?” asked Wiesentbal mildly.
“Yes, I did. They weren’t terribly helpful.”
Wiesenthal looked up. “I’m afraid the Attorney General’s department in Hamburg has a certain reputation in this office,” he said. “Take for example the man mentioned by me just now, SS General Bruno Streckenbach. Remember the name?”
“Of course,” said Miller. What about him?”
For answer Simon Wiesenthal riffled through a pile of papers on his desk, abstracted one, and gazed at it. “Here he is,” he said. “Known to West German justice as Document 141 JS 747/61. Want to hear about him?”
“I have time,” said Miller.
“Right. Here goes. Before the war Gestapo chief in Hamburg. Climbed rapidly from then on to a top position in the SD and SP, the Security Service and Security Police sections of the RSHA. In 1939 he led an extermination squad in Nazi-occupied Poland. At the end of 1940 he was head of the SD and SP sections of the SS for the whole of Poland, the so-called General Government, sitting in Cracow. Thousands were exterminated by SD and SP units in Poland during that period, mainly through Operation AB.
“At the start of 1941 he came back to Berlin, promoted to Chief of Personnel for the SD. That was Amt Three of the RSHA. His chief was Reinhardt Heydrich, and he became his deputy. Just before the invasion of Russia he helped to organize the extermination squads that went in behind the Army. As head of staffing he picked the personnel himself, for they were all from the SD branch.
“Then he was promoted again, this time to head of personnel for the entire six branches of the RSHA, and remained deputy chief of the RSHA under first Heydrich, who was killed by Czech partisans in Prague in 1942-that was the killing that led to the reprisal at Lidice-and then under Ernst Kaltenbrunner. As such he had all-embracing responsibility for the choice of personnel of the roving extermination squads and the fixed SD units throughout the Nazi-occupied eastern territories until the end of the war.”