The Dolomite Challenge

This story takes place in the late summer of 1947. Vienna Police Inspector Karl Marach is investigating Die Spinne, an escape route out of Germany and Austria for Nazi war criminals. Pammy is Marbach’s wife. She is an American doctor who was widowed when her first husband was killed in the Pacific in the early days after Peal Harbor. Pammy enlisted in the British Army because female doctors weren’t accepted into the US Army, a situation that didn’t end until near the end of the war. Soon after her arrival in Vienna in 1945, Pammy, who is Jewish, met, fell in love with, and married Police Inspector Marbach. She continued to work in the burn center in the British hospital in Vienna.

One of Pammy’s patients in the burn center, former SS captain Leo Lechner, is sightless; most of his face was burned off in a bomb blast. Filled with nostalgia, Leo talks about times when he when he was young and climbed the Dolomite Alps. He recalls the old saying that high up in the Dolomites, there is no sin. It is a familiar saying to Marbach, who has been climbing the Dolomite Alps all his life.

Marbach learns from Leo that there are papers that identify a Nazi escape route out of Europe, and that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is using this escape route to flee from Europe. Marbach gathers up some colleagues and goes on a chase after Eichmann and the Odessa papers.