"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

"Doesn't he have a good accent, kid?" exclaimed Lazarus. He pulled out another Colt and at the same time must have
noticed the second so-called Dutchman start to move, behind him, for he said, good-naturedly, without even turning around:
"One more step, De Groot, and I'll shoot your ass." He smiled at Reb.
"You are going to have to kill him. And now, please; we are not going to spend all day on this. It's not worth it. Take it, kid, take this .45. Take it!"
The gun changed hands.
"And don't shoot him right in the head. Right in the mouth, rather. He should see your finger on the trigger, you understand? Look, you do like this
He guided Reb's hand, and the barrel of the gun went deep into Langen's mouth.
Suddenly, he screamed in Yiddish: "Do it, Rebi He killed your mother and your sisters! What did he do to them, Reb? He burned them alive, right? KILL HIM! Fucking shit, KILL HIM!"
Silence.
"O.K., kid, move away," Lazarus said softly, in English this time. "Just move away, and leave that thing where it is."
Then, a few seconds later: "Suck it, Langen ... Suck the gun as if it were a nice fat Jewish schiong . . . There, that's right . . . Very good, Langen . .
The shot went off after the last word. He wheeled around and, with his other weapon, held in his left hand, killed De Groot with one shot in the head, right in the temple.

Dov Lazarus and Reb Klimrod reappeared in Austria, in Linz, at Landstrasse 36, Simon Wiesenthal's home. Henri
Х Haardt, who was worried about them, was told by a certain Sol Mancusa, who was now in command of Wild Cat, that, having quarrelled with the Dutchmen, they had lingered on a while in Italy.
Wiesenthal asked Klimrod whether he belonged to any organization, and he answered no, he was acting alone.
"And the other man?" asked Wiesenthal. "The one who is waiting in the street?"
"A friend," Reb said simply.
The names of the men he was interested in were Erich Joachim Steyr and Wilhelm Hochreiner.
Neither of these names was familiar to Wiesenthal, who didn't have them on his lists. But in the beginning of 1947 very little was known about the men who ran the extermination camps or what had happened to them since May of 1945. In February 1947, Wiesenthal was just drawing up a list of Adolf Eichmann's close collaborators, and he had no way of knowing if he was still alive. As for the ODESSA network, an intricate channel set up in 1947 to facilitate Nazi escapes, it was totally unknown to him. "I have some Steyrs. But no Erich Joachim, born in Graz on what date . . . ?"
"April 14, 1905," said Reb. "Son of Joachim Steyr, also born in Graz, on November 6, 1879, and Martha Silvernagel, born October 23, 1883, in Klagenfurt. Which makes him forty-two years old. He's five feet ten. Blond, blue eyes, very good-looking, with a star-shaped scar on his right palm. Before the war, he was a lawyer in Vienna. He speaks English and a little French. He is very interested.in art, especially in painting. His favorite painters . .
He recited the facts in a slow, detached voice. It happened often, and it was to happen even more often, that people who were total strangers to Simon Wiesenthal, as was this tall boy with the dreamy expression, would come and tell him stories. Often these stories would shed new light on his research. Names and facts would suddenly fall together. So he made a note of the names of Steyr and Hochreiner.
"War criminals?"
"Yes," said Reb.
"I would need facts. If you agree to testify and to . .
"And what would happen if I testified?"
"These men would be sought. And, if the proof is sufficient, provided they are found, they would be arrested, tried, and sentenced."
The boy smiled.
"I see," he said. "I will think it over, and perhaps I'll come back to see you."
He got up.
Wiesenthal asked: "There is between you and these men a personal matter, is there not?"
"In a way," answered Reb, giving his curious slow smile.
"Do you want to tell me about it? I myself have lost eighty-five members of my family."
The boy shook his head politely. "Another time, perhaps. And thank you for your kind welcome."
Wiesenthal saw him go out, pass by number 40, where the offices of the OSS were located, and join the other man, who was much smaller, older, broader, with very wide shoulders and rimless glasses.
He never saw Reb Klimrod again.
In 1932, Erich Steyr had joined a firm of lawyers headed by Johann Klimrod. He assumed official control of it in 1941, but had been running it de facto for more than six years, on the basis of a trusteeship document signed by Klimrod, who couldn't maintain his practice because of the hemiplegia that had forced him to move about in a wheelchair. Steyr did not reappear in Vienna, or anywhere else, at the end of the war. And in February 1947, before the Graz tribunal, his wife filed a petition for a Todeserkiarung, a legal declaration of death, for her husband, basing her request on the testimony of a man who swore he witnessed the death of Erich Steyr, killed by a Soviet machine-gun blast in Prague. The court granted this request easily, since this was a classic procedure. The name of Steyr disappeared from, if ever it had appeared on, the list of Nazi criminals.
Steyr's career was rather well documented. His participation in the failed coup of 1934 was established in a police report, which mentions an intervention by Johann Klimrod in his favor. His enrollment in the Nazi party dated from February 1938, card number 6.330.372. As of that date, he became a recognized legal specialist in the "Jewish problem." Appointed
legal counsellor to the Central Bureau for the Emigration of Jews, he participated in the arrest, internment, and expulsion, for a ransom of several million dollars, of Baron Louis de Rothschild. In 1940, he worked on the legal aspects of the Madagascar Project, which foresaw the deportation of all European Jews and used for the first time the term "final solution to the Jewish problem." The following year, as ordered by Reinhard Heydrich, he made several trips to the Low Countries as an administrator of assets and pensions belonging to the one hundred forty thousand Dutch Jews, of whom only five thousand survived. At the same time, he continued to manage, in his own way, the Klimrod office.
In 1943, having joined the Waffen SS, he left for the Eastern front, returning in March 1944 for hospital treatment. As of October 1944, his official activities decreased. Less and less is known about him after that, until his complete disappearance in April of 1945.
That was the official Erich Joachim Steyr. David Settiniaz offers a more complete version of the life and accomplishments of this man.
The discretion with which Steyr's career was conducted within Nazi Germany was deliberate. Steyr used current events for strictly personal ends, with a cynical and impressive effectiveness. His aim: getting possession of all the worldly goods belonging to the Klimrod family, as well as those entrusted to Johann Klimrod, the crippled but honest lawyer, by his clients, in those already dark years from 1938 to 1941. Steyr had also counted Hannah Klimrod among his objectives. As a result of an investigation conducted at his urging in 1982, David Settiniaz has a photograph of Hannah Klimrod, taken on August 7, 1937, on the Lido beach in Venice. She is standing in the middle of a group, with her three children; she is looking at the lens with her extraordinary light eyes, which Reb inherited from her; her beauty is breathtaking, a serious, calm, yet radiant beauty. Steyr is standing about six feet from her not looking at the lens, but looking at her. He did not succeed in obtaining this possession, more precious than all the others. He lucidly sent them to Lvov, she and her three children, with the passports he had obtained for them, with all the guarantees he could give them from his position as a high-ranking Nazi . .
Х . . with, also, the certainty that he was sending them to a death he had probably planned himself.
And Settiniaz believes that Johann Klimrod's arrest, carried out so discreetly, and his consignment to Hartheim castle, to be used as a guinea pig for the future torturers of the extermination camps, was all the handiwork of Steyr, who completed his personal Anschluss by laying off the former servants and killing Anton Hinterseer, the old butler.
As for what Erich Steyr did after April of 1945 . . . He found refuge, at first, in an American prison camp, using a false name, waiting for the moment when he could reappear officially. When Reb Klimrod had shown up once again-now more dangerous than he would have been two years earlier- Steyr realized that his security was seriously endangered .
which explains what happened in the Austrian mountains . . . and Steyr's ifight to South America in March 1947.

For Settiniaz, there is no doubt: of all the possible channels, Steyr used the one known as "the Route of the Monasteries."

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