A Death in Vienna (11 page)

G
ABRIEL HAD NO
idea who Erich Radek was. Rivlin told him.

Erich Wilhelm Radek had been born in 1917 in the village of Alberndorf, thirty miles north of Vienna. The son of a police officer, Radek had attended a local gymnasium and showed a marked aptitude for mathematics and physics. He won a scholarship to attend the University of Vienna, where he studied engineering and architecture. According to university records, Radek was a gifted student who received high marks. He was also active in right-wing Catholic politics.

In 1937, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party. He was accepted and assigned the party number 57984567. Radek also became affiliated with the Austrian Legion, an illegal Nazi paramilitary organization. In March 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, he applied to join the SS. Blond and blue-eyed, with a lean athletic build, Radek was declared “pure Nordic” by the SS Racial Commission and, after a painstaking check of his ancestry, was deemed to be free of Jewish and other non-Aryan blood and accepted into the elite brotherhood.

“This is a copy of Radek’s party file and the questionnaires he filled out at the time of his application. It comes from the Berlin Documentation Center, the largest repository of Nazi and SS files in the world.” Rivlin held up two photographs, one a straight-on shot, the other a profile. “These are his official SS photographs. Looks like our man, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel nodded. Rivlin returned the photographs to the file and continued his history lesson:

By November of 1938, Radek had forsaken his studies and was working at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the Nazi institution that waged a campaign of terror and economic deprivation against Austria’s Jews designed to compel them to leave the country “voluntarily.” Radek made a favorable impression on the head of the Central Office, who was none other than Adolf Eichmann. When Radek expressed a desire to go to Berlin, Eichmann agreed to help. Besides, Eichmann was ably assisted in Vienna by a young Austrian Nazi named Aloïs Brunner, who would eventually be implicated in the deportations and murders of 128,000 Jews from Greece, France, Romania, and Hungary. In May 1939, on Eichmann’s recommendation, Radek was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, where he was assigned to the
Sicherheitsdienst,
the Nazi security service known as the SD. He soon found himself working directly for the SD’s notorious chief, Reinhard Heydrich.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Erich Radek was given command of SD operations in what became known as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, a large swatch of the Ukraine that included the regions of Volhynia, Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolayev, Tauria, and Dnepropetrovsk. Radek’s responsibilities included field security and antipartisan operations. He also created the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and controlled their activities.

During preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler had secretly ordered Heinrich Himmler to exterminate the Jews of the Soviet Union. As the Wehrmacht rolled across Soviet territory, four Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units followed closely behind. Jews were rounded up and transported to isolated sites—usually located near antitank ditches, abandoned quarries, or deep ravines—where they were murdered by machine-gun fire and hastily buried in mass graves.

“Erich Radek was well aware of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen units in the Reichskommissariat,” Rivlin said. “It was, after all, his turf. And he was no bureaucratic desk murderer. By all accounts, Radek actually enjoyed watching Jews being murdered by the thousands. But his most significant contribution to the Shoah still lay ahead.”

“What was that?”

“You have the answer to that question in your pocket. It’s engraved on the inside of that ring you took from the house in Upper Austria.”

Gabriel dug the ring from his pocket and read the inscription:
1005, well done, Heinrich.

“I suspect that
Heinrich
is none other than Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo. But for our purposes, the most important information contained in the inscription are those four numbers at the beginning: one, zero, zero, five.”

“What do they mean?”

Rivlin opened the second file. It was labeled: A
KTION

1005.

I
T BEGAN
, oddly enough, with a complaint from the neighbors.

Early in 1942, spring runoff exposed a series of mass graves in the Warthegau district of western Poland along the Ner River. Thousands of corpses floated to the surface, and a horrible stench spread for miles around the site. A German living nearby sent an anonymous letter to the Foreign Office in Berlin complaining about the situation. Alarm bells sounded. The graves contained the remains of thousands of Jews murdered by the mobile gas vans then being used at the Chelmno extermination camp. The Final Solution, Nazi Germany’s most closely guarded secret, was in danger of being exposed by snowmelt.

The first reports of the mass killings of Jews had already begun reaching the outside world, thanks to a Soviet diplomatic cable that alerted the Allies to the horrors being carried out by German forces on Polish and Soviet soil. Martin Luther, who handled “Jewish affairs” on behalf of the German Foreign Office, knew that the exposed graves near Chelmno represented a serious threat to the secrecy of the Final Solution. He forwarded a copy of the anonymous letter to Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and requested immediate action.

Rivlin had a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. He laid it on the table, turned it so Gabriel could see, and pointed at the relevant passage:

Rivlin pointed to the citations in the upper left-hand corner of the memo:
IV B4 43/42 gRs [1005].

“Adolf Eichmann almost certainly received a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. You see, Eichmann’s department of the Reich Security Main Office appears in the address line. The numbers ‘43/42’ represent the date: the forty-third day of 1942, or February twenty-eighth. The initials
g-R-s
signify that the matter is
Geheime Reichssache,
a top-secret Reich matter. And here, in brackets at the end of the line, are the four numbers that would eventually be used as the code name for the top-secret
Aktion,
one, zero, zero, five.”

Rivlin returned the memo to the file.

“Shortly after Müller sent that letter to Martin Luther, Erich Radek was relieved of his command in the Ukraine and transferred back to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. He was assigned to Eichmann’s department and embarked on a period of intense study and planning. You see, concealing the greatest case of mass murder in history was no small undertaking. In June, he returned to the east, operating under Müller’s direct authority, and went to work.”

Radek established the headquarters of his
Sonderkommando
1005 in the Polish city of Lodz, about fifty miles southeast of the Chelmno death camp. The exact address was
Geheime Reichssache
and unknown except to a few senior SS figures. All correspondence was routed through Eichmann’s department in Berlin.

Radek settled on cremation as the most effective method of disposing of the bodies. Burning had been attempted before, usually with flamethrowers, but with unsatisfactory results. Radek put his engineering training to good use, devising a method of burning corpses two thousand at a time in towering aerodynamic pyres. Thick wooden beams, twenty-three to twenty-seven feet in length, were soaked in petrol and placed atop cement blocks. The corpses were layered between the beams—bodies, beams, bodies, beams, bodies…. Petrol-soaked kindling was placed at the base of the structure and set ablaze. When the fire died down, the charred bones would be crushed by heavy machinery and dispersed.

The dirty work was done by Jewish slave laborers. Radek organized the Jews into three teams, one team to open the burial pits, a second to carry the corpses from the pits to the pyre, and a third to sift the ashes for bones and valuables. At the conclusion of each operation, the terrain was leveled and replanted to conceal what had taken place there. Then the slaves were murdered and disposed of. In that way the secrecy of
Aktion
1005 was preserved.

When work was completed at Chelmno, Radek and his
Sonderkommando
1005 headed to Auschwitz to clean out the rapidly filling burial pits there. By the end of the summer of 1942, serious contamination and health problems had arisen at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Wells near the camps, which supplied drinking water to guards and nearby Wehrmacht units, had been contaminated by the proximity of the mass graves. In some cases, the thin layer of covering soil had burst open, and noxious odors were spewing into the air. At Treblinka, the SS and Ukrainian murderers hadn’t even bothered to bury all the bodies. On the day camp commandant Franz Stangl arrived to take up his post, it was possible to smell Treblinka from twenty miles away. Bodies littered the road to the camp, and piles of putrefying bodies greeted him on the rail platform. Stangl complained that he couldn’t start work at Treblinka until someone cleaned up the mess. Radek ordered the burial pits to be opened and the bodies burned.

In the spring of 1943, the advance of the Red Army compelled Radek to turn his attention from the extermination camps of Poland to the killing sites farther east, in occupied Soviet territory. Soon he was back on his home turf in the Ukraine. Radek knew where the bodies were buried, quite literally, because two years earlier he had coordinated the operations of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads. In late summer, the
Sonderkommando
1005 moved from the Ukraine to Byelorussia, and by September, it was active in the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, where entire Jewish populations had been wiped out.

Rivlin closed the file and pushed it away in disgust.

“We’ll never know how many bodies Radek and his men disposed of. The crime was far too enormous to conceal completely, but
Aktion
1005 managed to efface much of the evidence and make it virtually impossible after the war to arrive at an accurate estimate of the dead. So thorough was Radek’s work that, in some cases, the Polish and Soviet commissions investigating the Shoah could find
no
traces of the mass graves. At Babi Yar, Radek’s cleanup was so complete that, after the war, the Soviets were able to turn it into a park. And now, unfortunately, the lack of physical remains of the dead has given inspiration to the lunatic fringe who claim the Holocaust never happened. Radek’s actions haunt us to this day.”

Gabriel thought of the Pages of Testimony in the Hall of Names, the only gravestones for millions of victims.

“Max Klein swore that he saw Ludwig Vogel at Auschwitz in summer or early autumn of 1942,” Gabriel said. “Based on what you’ve told me, that’s entirely possible.”

“Indeed, assuming, of course, that Vogel and Radek are in fact the same man. Radek’s
Sonderkommando
1005 was definitely active in Auschwitz in 1942. Whether Radek was there or not on a given day is probably impossible to prove.”

“How much do we know about what happened to Radek after the war?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. He attempted to flee Berlin disguised as a Wehrmacht corporal. He was arrested on suspicion of being an SS man and was interned at the Mannheim POW camp. Sometime in early 1946, he escaped. After that, it’s a mystery. It appears he managed to get out of Europe. There were alleged sightings in all the usual places—Syria, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay—but nothing reliable. The Nazi hunters were after big fish like Eichmann, Bormann, Mengele, and Müller. Radek managed to fly below the radar. Besides, the secret of
Aktion
1005 was so well kept that the subject barely arose at the Nuremberg trials. No one really knew much about it.”

“Who ran Mannheim?”

“It was an American camp.”

“Do we know how he managed to escape Europe?”

“No, but we should assume that he had help.”

“The ODESSA?”

“It might have been the ODESSA, or one of the other secret Nazi aid networks.” Rivlin hesitated, then said, “Or it might have been a highly public and ancient institution based in Rome that operated the most successful Ratline of the postwar period.”

“The Vatican?”

Rivlin nodded. “The ODESSA couldn’t hold a candle to the Vatican when it came to financing and running an escape route from Europe. Because Radek was an Austrian, he would almost certainly have been assisted by Bishop Hudal.”

“Who’s Hudal?”

“Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.”

“What kind of assistance did he provide them?”

“For starters, a Red Cross passport in a new name and an entrance visa to a country far away. He also gave them a bit of pocket money and paid for their passage.”

“Did he keep records?”

“Apparently so, but his papers are kept under lock and key at the Anima.”

“I need everything you have on Bishop Aloïs Hudal.”

“I’ll assemble a file for you.”

Gabriel picked up Radek’s photograph and looked at it carefully. There was something familiar about the face. It had been clawing at him throughout Rivlin’s briefing. Then he thought of the charcoal sketches he’d seen that morning at the Holocaust art museum, the child cowering before an SS monster, and he knew at once where he’d seen Radek’s face before.

He stood suddenly, toppling his chair.

“What’s wrong?” Rivlin asked.