[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  ARE WE DOING TRAWNIKIS TODAY?

  Chapter Twelve

  Seven Floors Above

  Manhattan

  New York City

  1992

  Would there be something in Jakob Reimer’s eyes, some hint in the way he carried himself that betrayed what he once was, a commander and a collaborator, so loyal to the SS that he had earned the promise of a future in postwar Nazi Germany?

  Eli Rosenbaum settled into the conference room at the US Attorney’s office and waited. It was a bright spring morning in Manhattan and the city was on edge, gripped by whispers about unrest and violence. A California jury had acquitted four white police officers in the videotaped beating of young black motorist Rodney King, setting off days of rioting in South Central Los Angeles.

  But seven floors up, in the teeming offices of the Southern District of New York, Rosenbaum was thinking only of the man whom Peter Black would come to call “Mr. Trawniki.”

  Reimer had come from nothing, a tiny farm village in the Ukrainian countryside, but he had turned himself into an experienced and skilled leader, once as a lieutenant in the Red Army and again when he collaborated with the Germans, the very enemy he had fought against.

  Rosenbaum sighed. How easily Reimer had disappeared after the war. With an angular face and thick, dark hair, he had blended into the immigrant community of New York City in the 1950s. How easily he had lived for the better part of a half century, a salesman and a family man, complicit in the mass murder of Poland’s Jews but allowed to prosper in the country that had fought to free them.

  Now Reimer had agreed to come in for questioning. And he had decided not to bring an attorney. Would he appear anxious? Distressed? Rosenbaum had his doubts.

  Twice before, once under questioning by US Army investigators and a second time before OSI attorneys, Reimer had insisted that he never played a role in the persecution of Poland’s Jews. He would tell a good story, how he only handled money at the Trawniki training camp, better to cooperate than to starve in a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Soviet soldiers. Schrecklich, schrecklich, dreadful, awful.

  Except Rosenbaum knew better. History had finally caught up to Reimer, chronicled in a detailed biographical report that Black had provided before Rosenbaum, Neal Sher, and OSI attorney Michael Bergman left for New York.

  Black’s account of Reimer’s potential role at Trawniki had been nothing less than chilling. About five thousand Trawniki guards, instruments of death in occupied Poland, had served in the killing centers, Jewish ghettos, and forced-labor camps. Reimer had been there from the very beginning, and for his service he had received promotions, vacations, service medals, and German citizenship.

  The door to the conference room opened. At seventy-three, Reimer was still lithe and slender, with silver hair and skin that had darkened from the sun. He walked in slowly and offered a friendly nod. Someone was talking loudly in a nearby office, but Rosenbaum barely heard the chatter. He stood up and offered Reimer his hand, an excruciating pleasantry.

  “Mr. Reimer. Thank you for coming here this morning. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Yes.” Reimer’s voice was soft, his accent still heavy.

  “You understand that this is a voluntary interview on your part.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “We would like to ask you about your activities during the war and then your immigration to the United States and the process through which you became an American citizen.”

  Rosenbaum had asked Reimer to bring records and photos relating to his immigration, naturalization, and wartime activities. Reimer pushed a document across the table. Rosenbaum recognized the certificate of US naturalization that Reimer had been given in 1959, seven years after emigrating from Germany on the recommendation of a Red Cross supervisor.

  “My name was changed,” Reimer said lightly. “It used to be Jakob.”

  Rosenbaum pointed. “You are holding a small photograph?”

  “I would say it was taken when I was a prisoner of war,” Reimer replied.

  Rosenbaum pretended to study it, but he had seen the photo before. It had been attached to the upper-left corner of the Trawniki personnel file that the Soviets had sent to Peter Black.

  “You would say this was taken in 1941?”

  Reimer began to tell his story, starting with his capture by the Germans and confinement to a POW camp for Soviet soldiers.

  “Let me give you a picture of the prison camp,” he said, in a grand show of cooperation. “It was an open field, no buildings, no trees, no shrubbery, nothing, just barbed wires and machine gun towers, and there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It was cold, especially the nights. And we had every day a truckload of dead bodies, and they were naked because the ones that were still alive, they were ripping off the clothes.”

  “When I walked into there, one of my soldiers…recognized me. He yelled, ‘Hey lieutenant!’ And I put a finger on my lips. I said, ‘Please, be quiet’ because I, quite frankly, was afraid they would shoot me because being a German, being in the war against Germany, I did not know what was going to happen.”

  Reimer appeared lost in thought. In some ways, Rosenbaum understood the silence, how memories lurked in shadows.

  Reimer went on. “My soldiers kept on saying to me, ‘You speak German. Why don’t you tell them? You maybe can help us, food and whatnot.’ So finally, I did. I saw there were some other German soldiers and they did work as translators. So I identified myself and they took me out…all those who spoke German were taken out. And we were brought to a new camp, which was called Trawniki.”

  “Let’s spell that,” Rosenbaum said carefully. “T R A W N I K I?”

  “Yes. And the first thing they did when we got there, they lined us up and they told us, ‘Drop your pants.’ I didn’t have the slightest idea what that was all about. Later on, we found out what that meant. They were looking if there were Jewish people among us. Now…a German was training us in the German command, the formation, you know, and the turns and whatnot, without weapons, just marching and so forth.”

  “At Trawniki?”

  “Yes. Then they start bringing in soldiers from that same camp that I came from, Russian soldiers. Because they knew I used to be an officer in the Russian army, I then trained those Russians.”

  “Was it military training?”

  “Yes. Just marching, and they called us Wachmannschaften.”

  Just marching, Rosenbaum thought wryly. “I want to explain really why it is that we are here.”

  “Yes,” Reimer said. “Why I am here?”

  “You spoke with an attorney from our office…some years ago. Do you recall that?”

  “About fifteen, I would say, twelve, fifteen years ago.”

  “You told him that you had been at Trawniki continuously from 1941 to 1944 and that you had worked exclusively in the orderly room.”

  “Well—,” Reimer started.

  “Hear what I have to say,” Rosenbaum said more firmly. “Since that time, my office, which only works on these kinds of World War II cases, has done an enormous amount of research. We have been able to gain access to your personnel records…also records about what was going on at Trawniki, what you and other members of the Trawniki unit were doing.”

  Reimer was quiet.

  “I want to explain at the very outset that you are under oath now and under affirmation in your case, and Mr. Sher and Mr. Bergman and I are federal officials. If you testify falsely to us, that is a federal offense, for which, frankly, one can be imprisoned. Nobody here wants to see that happen. What we want is the truth. And you will see from my questioning that we know a lot of it already.”

  “You’re finished with your introduction?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “In all candor, this was so many years ago that there could be false statements that I make.”

  “That’s fine,” Rosenbaum said. “I am not really concerned about what was said in 1980.…What I am con
cerned about is what is going to be said here this morning. All right? If you don’t remember something, tell me…but obviously, there are going to be things that no human being could have forgotten and that I will expect you to be able to tell me about. There are events and assignments and duties and actions that you certainly will remember.”

  Early in his legal career, Rosenbaum had learned to recite facts that had been uncovered in investigations. It was a strategic bluff, a way of showing reluctant suspects that he knew where they had served and what they had done, even if the details were still fuzzy. Don’t bother lying. I already know the truth.

  Rosenbaum asked about Reimer’s background. “You consider yourself an ethnic German?”

  “Well, the village I lived in, they were Germans from the Hamburg area of Germany,” Reimer replied. “What can I say? I am German descent. What can I say?”

  “Fine. German descent.”

  Reimer interrupted. “I consider myself American, quite frankly. I have been living here more than in any other country.”

  Rosenbaum went on. “You were sent to this Trawniki camp in 1941. But you were not stationed in Trawniki all the time during your assignment to this Trawniki unit. You received assignments in other cities. Isn’t that right?”

  “No,” Reimer said. “I was just—I was in Trawniki.”

  “But there were also assignments to Czestochowa and to Warsaw. Isn’t that right?”

  Rosenbaum pulled out Reimer’s personnel file from Trawniki, which listed the two deployments. He passed it across the table and waited, wondering whether Reimer was going to try to explain how a so-called paymaster in the office at Trawniki had ended up in two cities at the exact time the SS and police were deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi-run killing centers.

  “Why don’t we try that again?” Rosenbaum said. “From Trawniki, you were, as we say in English, detailed, temporarily assigned to some other places, correct?”

  “Well, it shows that I was sent to Czestochowa.” Reimer sounded anxious.

  “Right,” Rosenbaum said. “And also to Warsaw?”

  “And also to Warsaw.”

  Rosenbaum pictured the devastated Jewish ghetto after the uprising, burnt-out buildings, air choked by ash, bodies on the ground, shot or burned. “Heil Hitler!” SS general Jürgen Stroop, the commander of the Warsaw ghetto operation, had cried when he celebrated the defeat of the Jews by blowing up the city’s Great Synagogue, one of the largest in the world.

  “I recall one thing,” Reimer said, “and this probably will crack you…up. I sold a truck of vodka to a Polish restauranteur.…I was supplying the food and the payroll in each one of these cities and specifically, I remember in Warsaw.”

  He stumbled over the word. War-shaw.

  “How you pronounce it?” Reimer asked.

  “Warsaw,” Rosenbaum corrected.

  “Warsaw,” Reimer repeated diligently. “I sold a whole truck of vodka to them. When I think of it, if the Germans found out, they would have shot me right there. I don’t know how I had the nerve to do it.”

  “This was the vodka that was—?”

  “For the men. They were half loaded all the time. So I felt they had too much to drink as it is. I took a whole truckload and sold it to a Polish restaurant.”

  “One of your jobs was to account for this vodka?”

  “That was the only job.…Same in Czestochowa. I was never in field duty,” Reimer said. “I tried to tell you that at the very beginning. I was never involved in that. I was involved in one assignment. We were brought to a city block—now we know it is a ghetto.”

  “This is in what city?” Rosenbaum asked carefully, intrigued.

  “In Lublin. That’s near Trawniki. And they brought us over there on guard duty.”

  Rosenbaum knew that the men of Trawniki had been deployed to Lublin in 1942 during the mass deportations to the Belzec killing center. Now Reimer had confirmed that he had been there at some point, a third deployment outside Trawniki.

  Rosenbaum didn’t flinch. After a significant admission by someone he was questioning, Rosenbaum had been known to yawn to feign boredom, as if to telegraph to suspects that the information was unremarkable or already known to him.

  Reimer explained. “I was in charge so I had men placed around this block.…I would walk into these buildings. There was everything, china and dishes, bedrooms and clothes, no people. There was not a soul in this whole block. That was the only assignment I had.”

  “What were you doing in Lublin?” Rosenbaum asked. “Why were you sent there?”

  “This was a training.”

  “It was not an operational assignment?”

  “No. There was no people in there.”

  “This was the Jewish ghetto?” Rosenbaum asked again.

  “I assume. It must have been. What happened to the people? It must have been the Jewish ghetto.”

  “There were other training missions outside of camp?”

  “No. That was the only one. From then on, I asked for desk duty.”

  Rosenbaum turned to the single day in November 1943 when the SS and police had shot as many as six thousand Jewish prisoners in the forced-labor camp adjacent to Trawniki.

  Rosenbaum had read about the mass shooting carried out under Operation Harvest Festival, how local villagers and Trawniki men had been ordered to stay inside, how radios were turned on to drown out the sounds of machine guns and the desperate cries of victims who had been forced to undress, put their coins in a pile, and stand before a trench that spanned a grassy field. There had been blood everywhere, glowing in the late-afternoon sun. Afterward, Trawniki men had searched the camp for anyone still in hiding.

  “Did you see people trying to escape from these killings?” Rosenbaum asked Reimer.

  “The only thing I saw is one, a young Jewish man,” Reimer replied. “He looked like an athlete who was jumping up and trying to get away. But he didn’t make it, of course.”

  “Did the mothers try to protect their children?”

  “They held them in their arms.”

  “Did you see them crying?”

  “Screaming and crying.”

  “Here is the problem I have,” Rosenbaum said a short time later. “I appreciate your coming here today, but you are asking us to believe quite a bit, that for all these years that you served at Trawniki, initially helping to train men, train a force that existed solely to take part in German operations against innocent Jewish civilians, that you never picked up a rifle, you never left your office, you were exempted from all of this, even though you were promoted, promoted, promoted to the highest rank that a former POW could have achieved.”

  Neal Sher sat forward in his chair. Over the years at OSI, he had met a long list of Nazi defendants who had come to believe their own stories. Time could do that, bend and twist events, make killers into victims. For most, Sher decided, it had been the only way to go on living, to pray to God, to love a wife, to rock a newborn.

  “I am going to ask you a few questions because I have been sitting very patiently listening to you,” Sher said to Reimer. “You clearly are an articulate man. You are an intelligent man. You have not been truthful with me. You have not been truthful with Mr. Rosenbaum. You have not been truthful with yourself. All these stories about that you have a clean conscience and you have spoken to your lord about this, you are not telling the truth. Now, Trawniki, you got there in 1941, correct? Yes or no?”

  “Must have been ’41,” Reimer replied.

  “These Trawniki men with whom you served—you were a Trawniki man,” Sher said. “In fact, you got two promotions, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “And the SS used these Trawniki men for what? You said for guard duty, correct? Did you ever hear of [Operation] Reinhard? Do you know what that was?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t recall? You seem to be hesitant.”

  Reimer’s voice rose. “I don’t like to disappoint you, for crying out loud.”<
br />
  “You are not disappointing me,” Sher shot back. “I assure you, Mr. Reimer, you do not disappoint me. You are everything I expected.”

  He continued. “The first place you know that Trawniki men went to was Lublin, the ghetto of Lublin, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We also know that Trawniki men, yourself included, went to Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And to the Jewish ghetto of Czestochowa, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Now those are just three places we know of. Name some of the camps where the graduates of Trawniki were sent to serve. You know them.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “How about Treblinka? Did you ever hear about Treblinka?”

  “Sure. I heard of Treblinka.”

  “How about Sobibor? Did you ever hear of Sobibor?”

  “After the war.”

  Sher paused. “You must really think we are stupid. You must really think we are thick. You served at Trawniki for over three years. The men were being sent continuously to Sobibor and you never heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever hear of that extermination camp Belzec?”

  “Maybe. Here I am not sure. Maybe.”

  “You see, we know quite a bit about Trawniki, an awful lot. You were there for as long as anybody was there, by your own admission. The fact of the matter is that Trawniki men went to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.…What happened to the Jews who went to these camps?”

  “They exterminated them.”

  “Trawniki men who went to these camps sometimes came back to Trawniki. Isn’t that correct? They never talked about their service at Treblinka and Belzec and Sobibor?”

  “I never talked to anybody.”

  “You talked to the men who came back from these missions. Everybody knew what was going on.”

  “No.” Reimer said. “Suppose, let’s say, I would know what was going on. What? Was I going to stop it singlehandedly? What are you accusing me of?”

  “Mr. Reimer. I am not accusing you of anything.”