[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  But the plan raised concerns inside the Justice Department, and the US State Department balked at the idea of agitating the Germans, a bulwark in NATO and an ally against Communism.

  “Serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” European-affairs chief Richard Burt wrote in a 1984 memo to the State Department’s deputy secretary.

  It had been clear to Sher and Rosenbaum then that no help was coming. From its obscure outpost at the Department of Justice, under the critical eye of pundits and émigré groups, and with resistance from the diplomats who represented the United States in foreign affairs, OSI would have to find a way to remove Nazi defendants on its own.

  Later, Rosenbaum would imagine himself standing on the rooftop of the Justice Department, shouting into a megaphone, “My fellow Americans, you will not believe this, but Germany WILL NOT TAKE THEIR NAZIS BACK.”

  The lack of cooperation from Germany and Austria was a significant threat, the most critical in the short history of OSI, and when the Austrian government appeared to be reconsidering its position in the final months of 1988, Rosenbaum and the staff of OSI could scarcely believe the turn of events. After years of pushback, the Austrians were willing to come to the table to talk about readmitting Nazi criminals. It was an olive branch, Rosenbaum thought, a potential step toward real cooperation.

  Michael Bernstein and an official from the US State Department had attended a first round of talks in Washington, but the meeting ended without an agreement. The Austrians insisted on a meeting in Vienna.

  Sher was traveling in Budapest. Rosenbaum, who had decided to return to OSI to become Sher’s deputy director, was busy overseeing the office. Both men had disqualified themselves from the Vienna assignment since they had worked on the high-profile Nazi war-crimes investigation that, one year earlier, barred Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States. The former United Nations secretary was now the president of Austria.

  Bernstein would go. He was one of the best negotiators in the office. It promised to be a plum assignment, the chance to bring home a badly needed diplomatic win for the beleaguered unit.

  Finally, OSI might catch a break.

  EVEN IN THE bustling offices of the Justice Department, the sound of a breaking-news bulletin, rushed and urgent, was unmistakable. Pan Am flight 103, just thirty-eight minutes into its route from London to New York, had lost contact with air traffic controllers in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, and gone down in a ball of flames. There were 259 people on board. All were believed to be dead.

  Eli Rosenbaum sucked in his breath. After four days in Vienna, Michael Bernstein was on his way home, a copy of the freshly signed deportation agreement tucked inside his briefcase. The Austrian government had agreed to take back its Nazi criminals, an extraordinary victory for OSI.

  Rosenbaum didn’t have Bernstein’s flight information, so he went to look for attorney Bruce Einhorn.

  “Don’t panic,” Einhorn said. The details of Bernstein’s travel plans were unclear.

  Rosenbaum drove home, kissed his infant daughter, and settled into the family’s two-story townhouse near Dupont Circle, in a historic district in Northwest Washington. His phone rang later that night.

  Bernstein’s original flight had been canceled, and no one was entirely sure which plane he had rebooked on since multiple flights a day flew between London and New York or Washington. Stephanie Bernstein was calling the airlines, but she couldn’t get a firm answer.

  Frantic, Rosenbaum started making calls. In the early-morning hours, the phone rang again. It was official: Bernstein had been on the doomed flight.

  Rosenbaum couldn’t reach Neal Sher, who was still abroad. Instead, he called the Justice Department Command Center and asked to be patched through to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard. Richard asked a question that Rosenbaum would remember years later.

  “Tell me that Mike had a signed travel authorization.”

  “He did,” Rosenbaum answered, knowing that with the authorization, the family would receive employee death benefits.

  Rosenbaum steadied himself for the day ahead.

  THERE BUT FOR the grace of God go I.

  The words looped round and round in Rosenbaum’s head as he parked his car near Michael Bernstein’s house later that morning and made his way inside. He thought about his own family, the daughter who had been born only two months earlier, and wondered what he might say to Bernstein’s children, Sara and Joe.

  Rosenbaum went to look for Stephanie Bernstein. She had been using her exercise bike in the basement the night before when news of the crash flashed on television. She raced to make calls and knew that her husband was dead when she was finally transferred to a phone line for relatives of passengers on the Pan Am flight.

  She peeked in on her children and decided to let them sleep through the night, a few more hours without knowing, steady breaths under warm blankets, in tiny bedrooms with views of the wildflowers that bloomed every spring in the family’s backyard. She wandered to her own bedroom, past the haphazard pile of issues of the New York Review of Books that her husband stacked on the floor by the side of the bed for some time later when there would surely be time for reading. She started making phone calls.

  Looking at Stephanie, a widow at thirty-seven, Rosenbaum felt sick. The Pan Am Boeing 747 jetliner, once dubbed the Clipper Morning Light, had left a wreckage that spread across one nautical mile.

  He imagined Bernstein in seat 47D, heading home to his family, the signed agreement with the Austrian government in the overhead bin. Later, the world would learn that a terrorist bomb had punched a twenty-inch hole on the left side of the plane’s fuselage.

  Rosenbaum hugged Stephanie and wandered upstairs, where four-year-old Joe was playing in his bedroom, oblivious to the somber gathering.

  Rosenbaum would help send FBI agents to Scotland to try to persuade authorities to release Bernstein’s remains so that he could be buried quickly, according to Jewish custom. He would call the New York Times to request an obituary and ask famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to write a letter of condolence to the Bernstein family. He would deliver remarks at the memorial service on behalf of the Department of Justice and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish alongside hundreds of people.

  Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.

  He would tell journalists that Bernstein was responsible for deporting seven of the twenty-four Nazi defendants that had been removed from the United States since OSI had been in operation. He would help write the Justice Department announcement, three months later, declaring that a California man who was once an armed SS guard at Auschwitz had been deported to his native Austria, thanks to the agreement that Bernstein helped negotiate.

  He would keep a picture of Bernstein in his office for as long as he stayed at OSI, a daily reminder of the man who had died in the line of duty more than forty years after the war’s end.

  But sitting beside young Joe Bernstein, who would grow up with only a dim memory of being scooped up like a football and settled into his father’s lap, Rosenbaum could do absolutely nothing at all.

  NEAL SHER PUBLICLY blamed the Austrian government for Michael Bernstein’s death, pointing out that the young lawyer would not have flown to Vienna if the Austrians had honored the deportation agreement in the first place. Sher suspected that the meeting had been called to create an artificial crisis, retribution for OSI’s effort to bar Austrian president Waldheim from entering the United States.

  Peter Black considered the loss of his friend and colleague more a matter of extraordinary bad fortune than international politics, a sequence of ill-fated events that had placed a good man on a plane with a bomb wrapped in baby clothes and tucked inside a suitcase.

  Chapter Nine

  Secrets and Lies

  Washington, D.C.

  1988–1989

  In the mid-1980s, two members of the Estonian émigré community secretly arranged to collect the trash from a dumpster used by the Office of Special Investiga
tions in downtown Washington. For two years, they took heaping bags of garbage to a local garage and dumped the contents onto the floor for sorting. Amid the crushed cigarette butts and scraps of yesterday’s lunches, they found documents and notes that OSI had thrown away, which they surreptitiously packaged and mailed to accused Nazi collaborators.

  Two envelopes were sent to the family of defendant John Demjanjuk in Cleveland. After living in the United States for thirty-two years, Demjanjuk had been stripped of his US citizenship and extradited to Israel to stand trial as Ivan the Terrible, the notoriously violent gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka killing center.

  Inside the packages, which were sent anonymously, the Demjanjuk family found material that appeared to undermine OSI’s case, including leads to another Ukrainian man who had been identified by former Treblinka guards as the reviled Ivan.

  At first, Demjanjuk’s family thought that someone inside OSI was leaking information. But Edward Nishnic, Demjanjuk’s son-in-law, told a journalist at the New York Times that he was later invited to Washington, where he found a woman picking through garbage in a stinking garage filled with plastic bags. Nishnic had pulled on rubber gloves and coveralls to help.

  Demjanjuk’s family accused the government of withholding critical evidence in the case, and a federal judge ordered OSI, under the Freedom of Information Act, to provide a listing of documents related to the Demjanjuk case.

  In the wrenching days after Michael Bernstein’s death in December 1988, OSI was still consumed by the judge’s demand, and teetering piles of legal folders, years old and pulled from the depths of a storage room, were rising around the office.

  Peter Black found the whole matter deeply troubling. Though the attorneys who had first prosecuted Demjanjuk in Cleveland in 1981 had long since left OSI, the revelations would surely provide fodder for those who wanted to see the unit closed for good. There was also the disturbing matter of the legal case itself.

  Black had expected the District Court in Jerusalem to sort out the discrepancies in the case, but only seven months earlier, the Israeli court had found Demjanjuk guilty for his service at Treblinka and sentenced him to death by hanging. Black opposed the death penalty on principle and worried about a serious miscarriage of justice, regardless of how guilty Demjanjuk might have been for crimes committed elsewhere in occupied Poland.

  On a late December afternoon, Black sat alone at his desk. It was a dreary month in Washington, with frigid winds and nights that fell long before dinner. A few blocks away, the green and gold lights from the national Christmas tree twinkled along Pennsylvania Avenue as Washington celebrated the winter holidays. But grief had settled over OSI, along with the very real possibility that the unit would struggle with the Demjanjuk case for months or even years.

  Black was lost in thought when OSI attorney Bruce Einhorn knocked on the door, clutching a slip of paper.

  “Take a look at this,” he said to Black. “Something came in.”

  Black studied the single page from top to bottom, once and then twice, a surgeon’s precision. While searching for documents to turn over to the Demjanjuk defense team, Einhorn had found cable traffic between the US Department of State and the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

  Back in 1980, someone at OSI had asked the Soviets for records relating to New York businessman Jakob Reimer, whose name had turned up during the Demjanjuk investigation, placing both men at the Trawniki training camp. Two OSI lawyers went to question Reimer about it, but the matter was quickly closed after Reimer insisted that he had never known Demjanjuk and had only served in Trawniki’s administrative offices.

  Now Black was intrigued. The cable traffic indicated that the Soviets had complied and sent documents on Reimer in 1981, a year after his interview with OSI. Since the case had been closed by then, Black wondered, had anyone bothered to read the records?

  “What did the file say?” Einhorn asked.

  Black held up his hands. “What the hell did we do with the file?”

  There was no easy way to look for it since OSI had no computers. Black and Einhorn started with the investigative file that OSI had put together on Reimer years earlier. They dug through boxes and cabinets. Nothing.

  Black decided to ask the Soviets to resend the file, which meant following standard, tedious channels: a request from the State Department to the US Embassy in Moscow and then on to Soviet agencies and archives.

  Black had no idea how long it might take, if the file was even sent at all. But Trawniki had come up too many times, a pattern too suspicious to ignore. Fedorenko, Kairys, Demjanjuk, Zajanckauskas, Reimer—five men on US soil.

  In the village near Lublin, whose Jewish population had been nearly wiped out during the war, the SS had set up a training camp for police auxiliaries. Scholarly references had made clear that the men were Ukrainian and Polish civilian recruits and captured Red Army soldiers pulled from German prisoner-of-war camps.

  But so much about Trawniki was not yet understood: the mission, the strategy, the training process, the scope of its role in Operation Reinhard, the secret plan to exploit and murder the Jews of occupied Poland.

  Did some men staff the killing centers while others stayed behind? Were some men exclusively cooks, paymasters, or waiters, and others guards or killers? Black wasn’t certain. What was clear was that five men who had spent months or years at Trawniki had spent decades trying to hide it from US authorities.

  Black had read an infamous 1944 report about the murder of Poland’s Jews that Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police leader in Lublin District, had submitted to Heinrich Himmler. The content was horrifying, but the words were as a sterile as a bank ledger’s.

  “The evacuation of Jews,” Globocnik reported, “has been carried out and completed. The requirement here was to seize the people by means of a methodically correct procedure, with the weak forces available, reducing to a minimum economic damage to war production. In general, the operation was successful.”

  The report included an accounting of the assets collected from the dead, worth 180 billion reichsmark. Grand larceny on a massive scale, Black thought as he studied the numbers:

  236 gold bars

  Nearly 400,000 gold coins

  2,134 silver bars

  More than 60,000 watches

  1,900 freight-car loads of textiles

  Nearly 16,000 gold and diamond rings

  1,716 pairs of gold earrings studded with diamonds

  3,240 coin purses

  627 pairs of sunglasses

  350 electric razors

  41 silver cigarette cases

  Paper foreign currency from the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, Turkey, Switzerland, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay, Sweden, Palestine, Cuba, and Albania

  The mass murder of 1.7 million Jews and an untold number of Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and Polish civilians, along with the sorting and cataloguing of their assets, would have required a highly organized operation and the participation of thousands of personnel.

  In early January 1989, Black wrote up a buck slip, a yellow five-by-eight-inch slip of paper with notes, and attached the Soviet cable that Bruce Einhorn had found. Black sent it to Eli Rosenbaum, requesting to reopen the investigation against the mysterious Jakob Reimer.

  IT HAD BEEN 500 deutschmark cheaper to fly out of the airport in East Berlin in 1971 when twenty-year-old Peter Black and two friends studying at the university in Bonn decided to travel to the Middle East on a winter break. As night fell, they caught a train to West Berlin and then a transit bus to the Berlin Schönefeld Airport. The bus rumbled to a stop at the border, and a guard who looked no older than Black climbed inside.

  “Ihr Pass ist nicht gültig,” the guard said, studying Black. Your passport is not valid.

  Black’s three-year-old passport had expired the previous summer, but a State Department official in Wisconsin had assured him that a new US law extended the life of his passport by two years and that all foreign governments were
aware of the change. Black pulled out a printed copy of the law.

  “We are aware of this regulation,” the guard said politely, “but as your government didn’t bother to officially inform us of the change, we see no obligation to recognize it.”

  “What can I do?” Black asked in German.

  “You should probably get off the bus and go back to West Berlin.”

  “But I have a plane to catch.”

  “Well, I can let you in, but I can’t guarantee what will happen.”

  If Black had been an older man, he probably would have turned back. But fear at twenty was fleeting, outweighed by grand travel plans that included a visit to Turkey, Israel, and Ethiopia. He decided to take his chances.

  At the airport, Black dutifully reported to the border police. He watched as an officer studied the passport and grew red in the face.

  “You have entered the German Democratic Republic illegally,” the officer declared. “The penalty for that is five years in prison.”

  Taking Black by the scruff of his collar, the officer frog-marched him to another office and shouted at a police officer wearing the greenish-gray uniform of the People’s Police. The second officer reminded Black of a cross between Reinhard Heydrich and a blond-haired bully that Black remembered from middle school.

  The officer took his time studying Black and then the passport, in no hurry to deal with the young, fretting American.

  “Why did you enter the German Democratic Republic?” he finally asked.

  Black tried to explain. Five hundred deutschmark. A trip to the Middle East.

  “The fact remains that you entered the German Democratic Republic illegally. We can arrest you now and turn you over to the prosecutor for indictment.” The officer paused. “But I don’t think you would want this.”