Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

He knew as he sat at the wheel and inserted the ignition key that all was not right. He suspected he had made a mistake. The man the Werwolf had briefed him to kill was tall and lean. The mind’s-eye impression of the figure at the window was of a fat man. From what he had seen the previous evening, he was sure it was Bayer he had hit.

Not that it was too serious a problem. Seeing Bayer dead on his carpet, Miller would be bound to flee as fast as his legs would carry him.

Therefore he would return to his Jaguar, parked three miles away. Mackensen headed the Mercedes back to where he had last seen the Jaguar. He only began to worry badly when he saw the space between the Opel and the Benz truck where the Jaguar had stood the previous evening in the quiet residential street.

Mackensen would not have been the chief executioner for the Odessa if he had been the sort who panics easily. He had been in too many tight spots before. He sat at the wheel of his car for several minutes before he reacted to the prospect of Miller’s now being hundreds of miles away.

If Miller had left Bayer alive, he reasoned, it could only be because he bad got nothing from him or he bad got something. In the first case, there was no harm done; he could take Miller later. There was no hurry. If Miller had got something from Bayer, it could only be information. The Werwolf alone would know what kind of information Miller had been seeking, that Bayer had to give. Therefore, despite his fear of the Werwolf’s rage, he would telephone him.

It took him ten minutes to find a public telephone. He always kept a pocketful of one-mark pieces for long-distance calls.

When he took the call in Nuremberg and heard the news, the Werwolf went into a transport of rage, mouthing abuse down the line at his hired killer. It took several seconds before he could calm down.

“You’d better find him, you oaf, and quickly. God knows where he’s gone now.” Mackensen explained to his chief he needed to know what kind of information Bayer could have supplied to Miller before he died.

At the other end of the line the Werwolf thought for a while. “Dear God,” he breathed, “the forger. He’s got the name of the forger.”

“What forger, Chief?” asked Mackensen.

The Werwolf pulled himself together. “I’ll get on to the man and warn him,” he said crisply. “This is where Miller has gone.” He dictated an address to Mackensen and added, “You get the hell up to 0snabruck like you’ve never moved before. You’ll find Miller at that address, or somewhere in the town. If he’s not at the house, keep searching the town for the Jaguar. And this time, don’t leave the Jaguar. It’s the one place he always returns.” He slammed down the phone, then picked it up again and asked for Information. When he had the number he sought, he dialed a number in 0snabruck.

In Stuttgart, Mackensen was left holding a buzzing receiver. With a shrug he replaced it and went back to his car, facing the prospect of a long, wearying drive followed by another “job.” He was almost as tired as Miller, by then twenty miles short of Osnabriuck. Neither man bad slept for twenty-four hours, and Mackensen had not even eaten since the previous lunch.

Chilled to the marrow from his nights vigil, longing for piping-hot coffee and a Steinhuger to chase it, he got back into the Mercedes and headed it north on the road to Westphalia.

TO LOOK at him, there was nothing about Klaus Winzer to suggest he had ever been in the SS. For one thing, he was weft below the required height of six feet; for another, he was nearsighted. At the age of forty, he was plump and pale, with fuzzy blond hair and a diffident manner.

In fact he had had one of the strangest careers of any man to have worn the uniform of the SS. Born in 1924, he was the son of a certain Johann Winzer, a pork butcher of Wiesbaden, a large, boisterous man who from the early twenties onward was a trusting follower of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. From his earliest days Klaus could remember his father coming home from street battles with the Communists and Socialists.

Klaus took after his mother, and to his father’s disgust grew up small, weak, shortsighted, and peaceful.

He hated violence, sports, and belonging to the Hitler Youth. At only one thing did he excel: from his early teens he fell completely in love with the art of handwriting and the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, an activity his disgusted father regarded as an occupation for sissies.

With the coming of the Nazis, the pork butcher flourished, obtaining as a reward for his earlier services to the Party the exclusive contract to supply meat to the local SS barracks. He mightily admired the strutting SS youths and devoutly hoped he might one day see his own son wearing the black and silver of the Schutzstaffel.

Klaus showed no such inclination, preferring to spend his time poring over his manuscripts, experimenting with colored inks and beautiful lettering.

The war came, and in the spring of 1942 Klaus turned eighteen, the draft age. In contrast to his hamfisted, brawling, Jew-hating father, he was small, pallid, and shy. Failing even to pass the medical then required for a desk job with the Army, Klaus was sent home from the draft board. For his father it was the last straw.

Johann Winzer took the train to Berlin to see an old friend from his street-fighting days who had since risen high in the ranks of the SS, in the hopes the man might intercede for his son and obtain an entry into some branch of service to the Reich. The man was as helpful as he could be, which was not much, and asked if there was anything the young Klaus could do well. Shamefacedly his father admitted he could write illuminated manuscripts.

The man promised he would do what he could, but meanwhile he asked if Klaus would prepare an illuminated address on parchment in honor of a certain SS Major Fritz Suhren.

Back in Wiesbaden, the young Klaus did as he was asked, and at a ceremony in Berlin a week later this manuscript was presented to Suhren by his colleagues. Suhren, then the commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was being sent to take over command of the even more notorious Ravensbruck.

Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.

At the handing-over ceremony in the RSHA headquarters in Berlin, everyone admired the beautifully prepared manuscript, and not least a certain SS Lieutenant Alfred Naujocks. This was the man who had carried out the mock attack on Gleiwitz radio station on the German-Polish border in August 1939, leaving the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in German Army uniforms as “proof” of the Polish attack on Germany, Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland the following week.

Naujocks asked who had done the manuscript, and, on being told, he requested the young Klaus Winzer be brought to Berlin.

Before he knew what was happening, Klaus Winzer was inducted into the SS, without any formal training period, made to swear the oath of loyalty and another oath of secrecy, and told he would be transferred to a top-secret Reich project. The butcher of Wiesbaden bewildered, was in seventh heaven.

The project involved was then being carried out under the auspices of the RSHA, Amt Six, Section F, in a workshop in Delbruckstrasse, Berlin.

Basically it was quite simple. The SS was trying to forge hundreds of thousands of British P-5 notes and American $100 bills. The paper was being made in the Reich banknote paper factory at Spechthausen, outside Berlin, and the job of the workshop in Delbruckstrasse was to try and get the right watermarks for British and American currency. It was for his knowledge of papers and inks that they wanted Klaus Winzer.

The idea was to flood Britain and America with phony money, thus ruining the economies of both countries. In early 1943, when the watermark for the British fivers had been achieved, the project of making the printing plates was transferred to Block 19, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Jewish and nonJewish graphologists and graphic artists worked under the direction of the SS. The job of Winzer was quality control, for the SS did not trust its prisoners not to make a deliberate error in their work.