Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

I bear no hatred or bitterness toward the German people, for they are a good people. Peoples are not evil; only individuals are evil. The English philosopher Burke was right when he said, “I do not know the means for drawing up the indictment of an entire nation.” There is no collective guilt, for the Bible relates how the Lord wished to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the evil of the men who lived in them, with their women and children, but how there was living among them one righteous man, and because he was righteous he was spared. Therefore guilt is individual, like salvation.

When I came out of the concentration camps of Riga and Stutthof, when I survived the Death March to Magdeburg, when the British soldiers liberated my body there in April 1945, leaving only my soul in chains, I hated the world. I hated the people, and the trees and the rocks, for they had conspired against me and made me suffer. And above all I hated the Germans. I asked then, as I had asked many times over the previous four years, why the Lord did not strike them down, every last man, woman, and child, destroying their cities and their houses forever from the face of the earth. And when He did not ‘ I hated Him too, crying that He had deserted me and my people, whom He had led to believe they were His chosen people, and even saying that He did not exist.

But with the passing of the years I have learned again to love; to love the rocks and the trees, the sky above and the river flowing past the city, the stray dogs and the cats, the weeds growing between the cobblestones, and the children who run away from me in the street because I am so ugly. They are not to blame. There is a French adage, “To understand everything is to forgive everything. When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.

There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us, walking through the cities, working in the offices, lunching in the canteens, smiling and shaking hands and calling decent men Kamerad. That they should live on, not as outcasts but as cherished citizens, to smear a whole nation in perpetuity with their individual evil, this is the true failure. And in this we have failed, you and I, we have all failed, and failed miserably. Lastly, as time passed, I came again to love the Lord, and to ask His forgiveness for the things I have done against His Laws, and they are many. Shema Yisroel, Adonai elohenu Adonai ehad.

[The diary began with twenty pages during which Tauber described his birth and boyhood in Hamburg, his working-class war-hero father, and the death of his parents shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. By the late thirties he was married to a girl called Esther and was working as an architect. He was spared being rounded up before 1941 owing to the intervention of his employer. Finally he was taken, in Berlin, on a journey to see a client. After a period in a transit camp he was packed with other Jews into a boxcar on a cattle train bound for the east.]

I cannot really remember the date the train finally rumbled to a halt in a railway station. I think it was six days and seven nights after we were shut up in the car in Berlin. Suddenly the train was stationary, the slits of white light told me it was daytime outside, and my head reeled and swam from exhaustion and the stench.

There were shouts outside, the sound of bolts being drawn back, and the doors were flung open. It was just as well I could not see myself, who had once been dressed in a white shirt and well pressed trousers.

(The tie and jacket had long since been dropped to the floor.) The sight of the others was bad enough.

As brilliant daylight rushed into the car, men threw arms over their eyes and screamed with the pain.

Seeing the doors opening, I had squeezed my eyes shut to protect them. Under the pressure of bodies half the car emptied itself onto the platform in a tumbling mass of stinking humanity. As I had been standing at the rear of the car, to one side of the centrally placed doors, I avoided this and, risking a half-open eye despite the glare, I stepped down upright to the platform.

The SS guards who had opened the gates, mean-faced, brutal men who jabbered and roared in a language I could not understand, stood back with expressions of disgust. Inside the boxcar thirty-one men lay huddled and trampled on the floor. They would never get up again. The remainder, starved, half-blind, steaming and reeking from head to foot in their rags, struggled upright on the platform. From thirst, our tongues were gummed to the roofs of our mouths, blackened and swollen, and our lips were split and parched.

Down the platform forty other cars from Berlin and eighteen from Vienna were disgorging their occupants, about half of them women and children. Many of the women and most of the children were naked, smeared with excrement, and in much as bad shape as we were. Some women carried the lifeless bodies of their children in their arms as they stumbled out into the light.

The guards ran up and down the platform, clubbing the deportees into a sort of column, prior to marching us into the town. But what town? And what was the language these men were speaking? Later I was to discover that this town was Riga and the SS guards were locally recruited Latvians, as fiercely anti-Semitic as the SS from Germany, but of a much lower intelligence, virtually animals in human form.

Standing behind the guards was a cowed group in soiled shirts and slacks, each bearing a black square patch with a big J on the chest and back. This was a special command from the ghetto, brought down to empty the cattle cars of the dead and bury them outside the town. They too were guarded by half a dozen men who also had the J on their chests and backs, but who wore armbands and carried pickax handles.

These were Jewish Kapos, who got better food than the other internees for doing the job they did. There were a few German SS officers standing in the shade of the station awning, distinguishable only when my eyes were accustomed to the light. One stood aloof on a packing crate, surveying the several thousand human skeletons who emptied themselves from the train with a thin but satisfied smile. He tapped a black riding quirt of plaited leather against one jackboot. He wore the green uniform with black and silver flashes of the SS as if it were designed for him and carried the twin-lightning strikes of the Waffen SS on the right collar. On the left his rank was indicated as captain. He was tall and lanky, with pale blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. Later I was to learn he was a dedicated sadist, already known by the name that the Allies would also later use for him the Butcher of Riga. It was my first sight of SS Captain Eduard Roschmann.

At 5 a.m. on the morning of June 22, 1941, Hitler’s 130 divisions, divided into three army groups, had rolled across the border to invade Russia. Behind each army group came the swarms of SS extermination squads, charged by Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich with wiping out the Communist commissars and the rural-dwelling Jewish communities of the vast tracts of land the Army overran, and penning the large urban Jewish communities into the ghettos of each major town for later “special treatment.” The Army took Riga, capital of Latvia, on July 1, 1941, and in the middle of that month the first SS commandos moved in. The first onsite unit of the SD and SP sections of the SS established themselves in Ricya on August 1, 1941, and began the extermination program that would make Ostland (as the three occupied Baltic states were renamed) Jew-free.