[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  “They have the wrong man,” Reimer told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. “I did not do anything to the Jewish people.”

  Reimer had hired a prominent defense lawyer and changed his account of the massacre at the pit, arguing that he couldn’t have killed the man who had pointed to his head because the man was already dead by the time Reimer fired his shot.

  “That’s not what you told the OSI,” Goldberg said to Reimer during the interview. Reimer did not respond.

  To successfully prosecute Reimer, Stutman knew, OSI would have to take on Reimer’s disparate accounts and convince a judge to move against an affable, churchgoing man who had stepped off a US Navy ship in the port of New York in 1951 and eased into a new life in America. He had found a job sweeping floors and then tending bar at Schrafft’s restaurant in Times Square, serving vodka martinis for eighty-five cents and scotch sours for a dollar. He married, had two sons, and opened a Wise potato chip franchise.

  Unlike some other OSI defendants, Reimer had never guarded Jewish prisoners at a Nazi-run killing center. But Reimer’s service to the Reich, Stutman believed, was just as egregious. Reimer had been deployed to three Jewish ghettos to participate in mass deportation operations, and at least once had led a platoon of Trawniki men to the perimeter of a ravine, where Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered.

  The Holocaust, Barry White often said, was the product of a vast criminal conspiracy that involved the work of thousands of collaborators. Jakob Reimer, Trawniki man, had loyally played his role. Prosecuting him would not only bring a trusted Nazi perpetrator to justice but finally expose the extent of the horrific training operation at Trawniki, stitched together by Black and the OSI historians.

  Stutman scanned the eyewitness statements again. Doomed people. Large pit. Submachine gun. He looked around his office, crowded with maps of Eastern Europe and photographs from concentration camps. A quote from the Torah scrolled across his computer screen.

  It was one of the central tenets of the Old Testament: Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue.

  OSI, Stutman decided, would take on Jakob Reimer and his Nazi past, bring the whole damn thing out into the open.

  SOME PROSECUTORS AT the Office of Special Investigations preferred to handle interviews alone, but Ned Stutman believed that historians could use historical facts to detect the tiniest of lies, to tease out the truth through context and detail. The Reimer case was no exception, and Stutman asked Peter Black to join him during Reimer’s deposition before the case headed to court.

  On a crisp February morning in 1997, five and a half years after Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher had first questioned Reimer, Black and Stutman settled into a conference room at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan.

  Reimer was smaller than Black had expected, with a narrow face and a mane of silver hair. He offered a slight smile, a graciousness that instantly struck Black as practiced and intentional. This time, Reimer had not come alone.

  Black turned to Reimer’s lawyer and nodded, studying the man whom Black had seen in newspapers and television news segments. Ramsey Clark, the son of a US Supreme Court justice, had been a driving force in the civil rights movement before serving as attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Clark had gone on to champion progressive views and vigorously denounce US intervention in the Middle East. He was familiar with OSI, Black knew, since Clark had represented concentration camp supervisor Karl Linnas years earlier.

  “There comes a time after the most horrible acts when the possibility of reconciliation outweighs any possible need for retribution,” Clark once told a reporter at the New York Times.

  Black suspected that the sixty-nine-year-old defense attorney would make a formidable adversary in the courtroom.

  “Good morning, Mr. Reimer,” Stutman said politely. “I am going to be asking you some questions today, and if at any time there is a question I ask that you don’t understand, please ask me to rephrase it or restate it and I will be glad to do that. Is there any health matter that you have that I should be aware of, any condition, physical condition?”

  “No, not really,” Reimer replied. “I would say for age, probably normal.”

  “I read a magazine article in which you are quoted as saying you are interested in nutrition and the bible. Is that right?”

  “Absolutely.” Reimer’s voice was earnest. “I live by the bible. I came from a very, very conservative family.”

  Stutman decided to dig in quickly. He turned to Reimer’s shifting story about the mass shooting at the ravine.

  “Do you recall that you were interviewed by a reporter?” Stutman asked.

  Reimer nodded. “Terrible. They called me a Nazi. I was a prisoner of the Nazis. I fought the war against the Nazis. Half of my country was killed by the Nazis.”

  Stutman interrupted. “I understand, Mr. Reimer. I will give you an opportunity to tell that story. I want to talk—”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “It gets to you, you know?”

  Stutman didn’t answer. He pressed on. “In that article, you were quoted as saying you are the most hated man in America. Did you feel that way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell the reporter that you shot into the ravine?”

  “I don’t remember, but it is in the papers, then I must have said it.”

  Clark interrupted. “You don’t have to assume that they reported it accurately, Mr. Reimer.”

  Stutman went on. “Now, the New York Magazine article…reports that the reporter asked you, ‘So, you shot the man?’ And you responded, ‘Yes, but he was already dead.’”

  “Boy, my mind is always different,” Reimer said. “I am sorry. I don’t remember if I said it.”

  “At the time you fired your shot, you thought they were all dead?”

  “Right.”

  “How do you know that they were all dead?”

  “Well, when I got closer to the edge, they were all motionless. Nobody was moving or anything.”

  “You said that you observed a man who was pointing with a finger to his head. Did you see a man who was pointing with a finger to his head?”

  “Mr. Stutman, I probably said that and it’s probably true but…I wasn’t the only one who fired at this point.…I fired in the direction of the ravine. I did not fire at anybody. To me, that was a no-no.”

  Reimer went on, insisting that an SS officer had forced him to fire his gun during the shooting operation to prove loyalty to the German cause. “To me, Mr. Stutman, they were all dead. They were all motionless. Suppose I had not fired a shot? They would have called an ambulance or something? No. I only fired over the ravine. I didn’t even aim at the man.”

  If Stutman had his doubts about Reimer’s story, Black decided, the lawyer didn’t let on. Stutman asked his question again. “Isn’t it true that you fired at the man who was pointing to his head?”

  “Like I say,” Reimer said, “you think of that one incident and it builds on you and builds on you, but was it true? I don’t know. Please. God hates liars. Ninth commandment. Believe me, I could not kill anybody or lie.”

  “Which is the truth? Was he alive or was he dead? Was he moving?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There was no one moving in the pit?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t go down and take everybody’s pulse in the pit, did you?” Stutman asked.

  “This is too serious to joke,” Reimer shot back.

  “I am not joking,” Stutman quickly replied, his voice level.

  Watching the exchange, Black suddenly understood how Reimer had so easily covered up his past. He was one of the more congenial defendants that Black had ever seen, appearing likable and cooperative even in the face of a murder inquiry. And Reimer was smart, carefully sidestepping questions about his role in the pit shooting. He shot but he did not kill. He had been forced by the SS. A crafty way to pivot.

  Reimer wa
s describing the men at Trawniki. “They were getting into things that I hadn’t dreamed about, that I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “What did you learn that they were getting into?” Stutman asked.

  “They were shooting civilians, okay? And, it is one thing to be in the war to defend yourself, you go against an enemy in the war, but shooting unarmed civilians, absolutely wrong. And I didn’t stand for that.”

  “You saw this at the ravine incident?”

  “Yes. I had to do something and I did,” Reimer said. More than once over the years, Reimer had insisted that he spent much of his time at Trawniki as a paymaster, far from the violence. “I should be thanked for getting out of it, but now I am being prosecuted.”

  Black glanced at Stutman, who did not appear angry or frustrated. Stutman was perfectly poised, a finder of fact rather than an arbiter of justice.

  “We were prisoners of the Nazis.” Reimer was indignant. “Russia was totally cut off from the world. We didn’t get any information. We had no knowledge what the Nazis were all about. It just as well we could have been in China.”

  Stutman switched subjects to the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto in March 1942. In the interview with Rosenbaum and Sher, Reimer had acknowledged spending a single night in Lublin. A training exercise, he had called it, not an operational mission. His men had simply guarded empty houses in an empty ghetto.

  “Did you have occasion to go into any building?” Stutman asked.

  “I did,” Reimer answered.

  “Can you describe the circumstances?”

  “Well, the sun went down and it was getting dark and there were no lights going on in these buildings, so I was curious. I just probably walked in one and I saw there were no people. The apartments were completely furnished and everything and the kitchen utensils, everything was here, but no people. It was completely empty.”

  “What did you see?”

  “There was the beds, there was everything there. There were linens. There was everything. Towels in the kitchen. It was…set up for somebody to live in.”

  Black took in the details. For the second time, Reimer had confirmed that he had been in Lublin during the massive ghetto-clearing operation in March and April 1942. It had been no single-day training event, as Reimer had tried to claim, but a mission that spanned weeks during one of the darkest, bloodiest periods in Lublin.

  “You say that you had no expectation about guarding people when you went to Lublin,” Stutman said. “You acquired weapons in Lublin?”

  “Yes,” Reimer replied.

  Stutman paused briefly. “So what did you expect the weapons would be used for?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Winter in Penza

  Penza, Russia

  1998

  The most critical eyewitness in the case against Jakob Reimer lived four hundred miles southeast of Moscow in a factory town along the southern route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The fastest way to get there was by train, and on a January evening in Moscow in 1998, OSI historian David Rich settled into a second-class cabin with Ned Stutman and padlocked the door.

  The Russian train was a behemoth of steel and glass, one of the last carriages manufactured by the East Germans before the collapse of Communism eight years earlier. Over twelve hours, the train would travel through the frozen steppe to the Russian city of Penza, a frontier-fortress outpost built in the 1600s to protect Russia from the Crimean Tatars.

  The train cabin smelled of stale sweat and smoke, but Rich was thankful for the narrow foldout beds and the cheese and wine that Stutman had thought to pick up in Moscow before the overnight journey. The night air was frigid. Rich glanced at his traveling companion, bundled up in a fur hat. Rich was warm enough in his long underwear, but he made a mental note of the babushka who was selling hot tea in the back of the train car.

  Soon, they would meet Nikolai Leont’ev, one of the two former Trawniki guards who had described Reimer’s participation in a shooting at a pit in a forest near Lublin during the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto. Stutman suspected that Reimer’s lawyer would argue in court that the 1964 eyewitness accounts had been strong-armed by the Soviets. Stutman wanted to interview Leont’ev himself.

  Eli Rosenbaum had quickly approved the request. He had become director of OSI four years earlier, after Neal Sher left the unit for a job with the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Authorities in Moscow could have taken months to coordinate the visit, but approval came swiftly, and Stutman and Rich had flown to Russia four days into the new year.

  Rich studied the chain he had used to secure the cabin door, a precaution that seemed only logical during the tumultuous, post-Communist presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Drug traffickers and mob bosses had commandeered much of Russia, violent criminals known as Vory v Zakone who had murdered bankers and businessmen and pushed the country’s homicide rate to one of the highest in the world.

  Tourists had also been targeted, particularly on the Trans-Siberian Railway and other remote routes. Rich had read news stories of train gangs that had pistol-whipped, raped, robbed, and murdered travelers. Though Western passengers had been generally left unharmed, Rich decided to leave nothing to chance.

  He had once chased Soviet submarines through the depths of the Mediterranean, but the thought of street thugs slipping onto the train in the middle of the night with axes and iron rods was downright terrifying. He would sleep with one eye open. He doubted Stutman would sleep at all.

  The lawyer was bent over his legal pad reviewing the questions he would ask Leont’ev, the cheese and wine untouched. Night fell around them, dark and lonely. The train lurched, and Rich could feel the seat twitching beneath him. Don’t mess this up, he told himself. It was his first major trip and his first major case with OSI.

  A navy man, Rich had been a helicopter pilot in the Pacific during the Cold War. He spoke Russian and Ukrainian and had spent time in the post-Soviet archives doing sensitive work for the federal government. When Peter Black had offered him the job at OSI only months earlier, Rich had never heard of Jakob Reimer or the obscure Nazi-run camp where he had once trained.

  How did the SS convince a mass of largely uneducated Soviet prisoners of war who came from different places and didn’t speak German to function as a cohesive SS unit, day after day, month after month? They had labored through two Polish summers and two brutally cold winters, until every ghetto in German-occupied Poland was emptied, money and valuables sorted and sent back to the Reich, 1.7 million Jews dead.

  Over long conversations with Black, Rich finally understood. The answer was both stunning and simple. The Trawniki complex had functioned as a militarized police organization, with squads, platoons, companies, promotions, service medals, training, and clearly defined images of the enemy.

  Trawniki men who were injured in the line of duty had been hospitalized in SS facilities, Black explained. Those who died were buried in military cemeteries. It had been purposeful work with a mission that few men had questioned, their war years spent away from combat. They had received spending money and vodka, enjoyed full bellies, and engaged in dalliances with Polish women. And Reimer had been at the center of it all, an educated ethnic German, perfectly positioned to earn the trust of his SS superiors.

  As the train to Penza rumbled through the Russian countryside, Rich turned to Stutman. “Do you want to chat?”

  “No, no,” Stutman said, without looking up. He was reading the eyewitness statement again, a blood-curdling account that Rich knew had been delivered with absolute dispassion. “I’m just going to work.”

  Rich stared at the thin line of fluorescent light that stretched beneath the cabin door. Was there anyone else in the car with them? Perhaps the whole train was empty. He looked out the window at the passing countryside and for a split second thought he saw a den of wolves, yellow eyes glowing in the darkness.

  Don’t mess this up, he told himself a second time. He thought about Black, who had left OSI after nea
rly twenty years to become the senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a few blocks away from the OSI offices in downtown Washington. Black would continue to help the unit with its Trawniki cases, and for that Rich was grateful.

  Black had gathered more information on the camp and its recruits than any other scholar in the world and had spent two and a half years helping to craft an expert report about Reimer and Trawniki that expert witness Charlie Sydnor would present in federal court. Rich had taken part too, and now he was officially the OSI historian on the case.

  Just before he drifted off to sleep, he decided he could have been a character from Doctor Zhivago. How absurd this all was, the way life jerks and turns, padlocks on trains, wolves in the shadows, the mysterious man waiting at the end of the line.

  THE TRAIN ROLLED into Penza at dawn. David Rich squinted into the bright early-morning sunshine at the lone figure who stood on the platform.

  “Come with me,” the city’s chief prosecutor said in Russian and led the two Americans to a Volga limousine dusted by a fresh layer of snow.

  Stutman offered a quick nod. He was in no mood for small talk. He had barely uttered a word on the train, and Rich noticed that the light over Stutman’s top bunk had stayed on all night. Stutman slipped quietly into the back of the limousine alongside their Russian interpreter, who would help with the Leont’ev interview. Rich sat in front with the prosecutor.

  Penza was an industrial city, and one of Russia’s poorest, with factories that produced steel and lumber along the banks of the Sura River. In the fifteenth century, a Russian architect on orders from the tsar had built a fortress in Penza, with a wooden kremlin and a compact village with housing for nobility, tradesmen, and merchants, mostly of Ukrainian descent. By 1801, about thirteen thousand people lived in clusters of stone houses, and over time the western Russian city grew into an industrial hub, with a railway junction that linked Moscow to Chelyabinsk.