A Death in Vienna

recommendation, Radek was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, where he was assigned to theSicherheitsdienst, 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 thatHeinrich 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: AKTION1005.
    IT 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:
    The anonymous letter sent to the Foreign Office concerning the apparent solution of the Jewish question in the Warthegau district, which was submitted by you to me on 6 February 1942, I immediately transmitted for proper treatment. The results will be forthcoming in due course. In a place where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and there is no avoiding this.
    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 initialsg-R-s signify that the matter isGeheime 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-secretAktion, one,