Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

The Russian spring offensive of 1944 carried the tide of war so far westward that the Soviet troops pushed south of the Baltic States and through to the Baltic Sea to the west of them. This cut off the whole of Ostand from the Reich and led to a blazing quarrel between Hitler and his generals. They had seen it coming and had pleaded with Hitler to pull back the forty-five divisions inside the enclave. He had refused, reiterating his parrot-cry, “Death or Victory.” All he offered those 500,000 soldiers inside the enclave was death. Cut off from resupply, they fought with dwindling ammunition to delay a certain fate, and eventually surrendered. Of the majority, made prisoners and transported in the winter of 1944-1945 to Russia, few returned ten years later to Germany. The advance swept on. So long as they could still claim they had a task to perform, important to the Reich, they could continue to outrank the Wehrmacht and avoid the terrible prospect of being required to face Stalin’s divisions in combat. This “task,” which they allotted to themselves, was the escorting back into the still safe heart of Germany of the few remaining wretches from the camps they had run. Sometimes the charade became ridiculous, as when the SS guards outnumbered their tottering charges by as many as ten to one.]

It was in the afternoon of October 11 that we arrived, by now barely 4000 strong, at the town of Riga, and the column went straight down to the docks. In the distance we could hear a strange crump, as if of thunder, along the horizon. For a while it puzzled us, for we had never heard the sound of shells or bombs. Then it filtered through to our minds, dazed by hunger and cold. There were Russian mortar shells landing In the suburbs of Riga. When we arrived at the dock area it was crawling with officers and men of the SS. I had never seen so many in one place at the same time. There must have been more of them than there were of us. We were lined up in rows against one of the warehouses, and again most of us thought that this was where we would die under the machine guns. But this was not to be. Apparently the SS troops were going to use us, the last remainder of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had passed through Riga, as their alibi to escape from the Russian advance, their passage back to the Reich. The means or travel was berthed alongside Quay Sixa freighter, the last one out of the encircled enclave. As we watched, the loading began of some or the hundreds of German Army wounded who were lying on stretchers in two of the warehouses farther along the quay.

It was almost dark when Captain Roschmann arrived, and he stopped short when he saw how the ship was being loaded. When he had taken in the sight of the German Army wounded being put onto the ship he turned around and shouted to the medical orderlies bearing the stretchers, “Stop that.” He strode toward them across the quay and slapped one of the orderlies in the face. He whirled around on the ranks of us prisoners and roared, “You scum. Get up on that ship and get these men off. Bring them back down here. That ship is ours.”

Under the prodding of the gun barrels of the SS men who had come down with us, we started to move toward the gangplank. Hundreds of other SS men, privates and NCOs, who till then had been standing back watching the loading, surged forward and followed the prisoners up onto the ship. When the first got on the deck, they began picking up the stretchers and carrying them back to the quay. Rather, they were about to, when another shout stopped us.

I had reached the foot or the gangway and was about to start up, when I heard the shout and turned to see what was happening.

An Army captain was running down the quay, and he came to a stop quite close to me by the gangway.

Staring up at the men above, bearing stretchers they were about to unload, the captain shouted. “Who ordered these men to be offloaded?”

Roschmann walked up behind him and said, “I did. This boat is ours.”

The captain spun around. He delved in his pocket and produced a piece of paper. “This ship was sent to pick up Army wounded,” he said. “And Army wounded is what it will take.” With that he turned to the Army orderlies and shouted to them to resume the loading. I looked across at Roschmann. He was standing trembling, I thought with anger. Then I saw he was soared. He was frightened of being left to face the Russians. Unlike us, they were armed.

He began to scream at the orderlies, “Leave them alone! I have commandeered this ship in the name of the Reich.”

The orderlies ignored him and obeyed the Wehrmacht captain. I noticed his face, as he was only two meters away from me. It was gray with exhaustion, with dark smudges under the eyes. There were lines down each side of the nose and several weeks of stubble on his chin. Seeing the loading work begin again, he made to march past Roschmann to supervise his orderlies. From among the crowded stretchers in the snow of the quay I heard a voice shout in the Hamburg dialect, “Good for you, Captain. You tell the swine.”

As the Webrmacbt captain was abreast of Roschmann, the SS officer grabbed his arm, swung him around, and slapped him across the face with his gloved hand. I had seen him slap men a thousand times, but never with the same result. The captain took the blow, shook his head, bunched his fist, and landed a haymaker of a right-fisted punch on Roschmann’s jaw.

Roschmann flew back several feet and went flat on his back in the snow, a small trickle of blood coming from his mouth. The captain moved toward his orderlies.

As I watched, Roschmann drew his SS officer’s Luger from its holster, took careful aim, and fired between the captain’s shoulders.

Everything stopped at the crash from the pistol. The Army captain staggered and turned. Roschmann fired again, and the bullet caught the captain in the throat. He spun over backward and was dead before he hit the quay. Something he had been wearing around his neck flew off as the bullet struck, and when I passed It, after being ordered to carry the body and throw it into the water, I saw that the object was a medal on a ribbon. I never knew the captain’s name, but the medal was the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster.

[Miller read this page of the diary with growing astonishment gradually turning to disbelief, doubt, belief again, and finally a deep anger. He read the page a dozen times to make sure there was no doubt, then resumed reading the diary.]

After this we were ordered to start unloading the Wehrmacht wounded and told to lay them back in the gathering snow on the quayside. I found myself helping one young soldier back down the gangplank onto the quay.

He had been blinded, and around his eyes was wrapped a dirty bandage torn from a shirttail. He was half delirious and kept asking for his mother. I suppose he must have been about eighteen. Finally they were all taken off, and we prisoners were ordered on board. We were all taken down into the two holds, one forward and one aft, until we were so cramped we could hardly move. Then the hatches were battened down and the SS began to come aboard. We sailed just before midnight, the captain evidently wishing to be well out into the Gulf of Latvia before dawn came, to avoid the chance of being spotted and bombed by the patrolling Russian Stormoviks.

It took three days to reach Danzig, well behind German lines. Three days in a pitching, tossing hell below decks, without food or water, during which a quarter of the four thousand prisoners died. There was no food to vomit, and yet everyone was retching dry from seasickness. Many died from the exhaustion of vomiting, others from hunger or cold, others from suffocation, others because they simply lost the will to live, lay back, and surrendered to death. And then the ship was berthed again, the hatches were opened, and gusts of ice-cold winter air came rushing into the fetid, stinking holds. When we were unloaded onto the quay at Danzig, the dead bodies were laid out in rows alongside the living, so that the numbers should tally with those that had been taken on board at Riga.