Jakob Reimer, Trawniki recruit 865, was born in 1918 in a Mennonite settlement in the Ukrainian countryside north of the Black Sea. In 1941, when his Red Army platoon was cap-tured by German soldiers in Minsk, Belarus, he was taken to a POW camp. Soon he was recruited by the very men who had captured him and sent to the Trawniki training camp to serve the Third Reich. His personnel sheet, maintained by his supervisors at Trawniki, listed his deployments in the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and Czestochowa. He also helped liquidate the Lublin ghetto. Credit: US Department of Justice
When Reimer arrived at Trawniki, he posed for an official photo and signed a service oath to the SS and police: “I herewith declare that I am obligating myself for service in the guard detachments of the Commissioner of the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police. . . .” He went on to receive four promotions, vacations, service medals, and the promise of a future in Nazi utopia. Credit: US Department of Justice
About seven thousand Jews were killed by the Germans and their auxiliaries during the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. Another seven thousand ghetto inhabitants were sent to the Treblinka killing center and gassed on arrival. The remaining forty-two thousand were deported to the Majdanek concentration camp or to forced-labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. The Jewish resistance inspired other uprisings in occupied Poland. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
Three hundred and fifty Trawniki men, including Jakob Reimer, joined the SS and German police in Warsaw to suppress the ghetto uprising. At night, the men, armed with rifles, bayonets, and ammunition pouches, retreated to a bunker in a schoolhouse a half mile west of the ghetto. In this photo, Trawniki guards look through a doorway over the bodies of ghetto inhabitants killed in the fighting. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
Relatively few Germans staffed the SS-run killing centers and forced-labor camps in occupied Poland. Most of the work was left to Trawniki men, who had been taught Nazi ideology and the inhumane treatment of Jewish prisoners. At the forced-labor camp in Belzec, in southeastern Poland, Jews were made to build fortifications and anti-tank ditches along the Bug River. A group of Trawniki guards, including one who played the mandolin, pose for a picture. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej
Feliks Wojcik and his wife, Lucyna, managed to survive the war together by hiding in Lublin and then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, but their families were lost. They spent four years in Vienna, where Feliks finished medical school, before emigrating to New York. Courtesy of the Wojcik family
The fledgling Office of Special Investigations brought one of its most infamous cases to court in 1982 after it was discovered that Valerian Trifa, the sixty-eight-year-old leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States, had helped provoke days of deadly riots against the Jews of Bucharest during the war. “Trifa’s speeches, articles, and newspaper editorials,” OSI historian Peter Black concluded, “had pounded home the themes of hatred towards Jews and foreigners.” Credit: Bett mann, Getty Images
The case against Trawniki man and death-camp guard John Demjanjuk of Cleveland vexed the Office of Special Investigations for years until records behind the Iron Curtain were made available to Western investigators. Demjanjuk was sent back to Germany in 2009 and convicted as an accessory to the murder of more than twenty-eight thousand people at the Sobibor killing center. He died while his appeal was pending. Credit: Johannes Simon, Getty Images
Demjanjuk’s Trawniki identification card. Credit: US Department of Justice, Getty Images
In 1987, émigré groups, joined by conservative journalist Pat Buchanan, publicly denounced the Office of Special Investigations for the pending deportation of a Long Island man who had been the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp in Soviet Estonia. Just before Karl Linnas was set to be deported to the Soviet Union, the groups convinced then US Attorney General Edwin Meese to strike an eleventh-hour agreement to send Linnas to Panama instead. Eli Rosenbaum, a former OSI lawyer who would go on to lead the unit, helped block the deal. Rosenbaum (left), shown here at the Panamanian embassy, was joined by Elizabeth Holtzman, who, as a US congresswoman, helped pass the legislation that created OSI. Credit: Bettmann, Getty Images
Buchanan (left) made one final pitch to keep Linnas out of the Soviet Union, squaring off on CNN’s live nightly news show, Crossfire, with Eli Rosenbaum. Buchanan’s push frustrated Rosenbaum. “In Panama,” Rosenbaum said, “[Linnas] will spend the rest of his days living very comfortably under palm trees.” Linnas was deported to his native Soviet Estonia; he died a few months later of heart, liver, and kidney failure. OSI faced pushback and criticism for years from émigré groups that wanted to see the unit shut down for good. Credit: CNN
OSI lawyer Michael Bernstein died in 1988 on his way home from Austria, where he had negotiated
a deal with the Austrian government to take back native-born Nazi perpetrators found on US soil. Bernstein, a father of two, was on Pan Am flight 103, which went down in a ball of fire over Lockerbie, Scotland. OSI director Neal Sher publicly blamed the Austrian government for Bernstein’s death, pointing out that the thirty-six-year-old lawyer would never have flown to Vienna if the Austrians had been willing to take back Nazi perpetrators. The lack of cooperation by Germany and Austria, over time, became the single greatest frustration faced by OSI. Courtesy of Eli Rosenbaum, US Department of Justice
In 1990, after four decades of Communist rule, authorities in Prague granted access to its archives to OSI historians Peter Black (far right), Elizabeth “Barry” White, Patrick Treanor, and Mike MacQueen (far left) for the first time since the war’s end. There, Black and White discovered rosters from the Trawniki training camp that would help trigger a years-long investigation into the operation of the camp and the men who served there, including Jakob Reimer, Trawniki recruit 865. Courtesy of Elizabeth B. White
OSI prosecutor Ned Stutman was charged with overseeing the denaturalization cases against Jakob Reimer and John Demjanjuk. Stutman litigated thirteen cases at OSI and won twelve of them, including the cases against Reimer and Demjanjuk, before dying of cancer in 2005. Courtesy of the Stutman family
Jakob Reimer, seventy-nine, testified that he was a victim of the Nazi regime, not a perpetrator, during his denaturalization hearing in federal court in New York in 1998. The Office of Special Investigations argued that he had loyally served the SS, helping to liquidate three Jewish ghettos and participating in at least one mass shooting before returning to the Trawniki training camp. Credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Jakob Reimer’s account of a mass shooting
or shootings in a ravine in occupied Poland changed on the witness stand during his denaturalization hearing in New York. OSI attorney Ned Stutman pressed him for specifics. “You and your other Trawniki men fired the last volley, is that correct?” Credit: Shirley Shepard
Two eyewitnesses placed Jakob Reimer at the site of a mass shooting of Jewish prisoners in the Krepiec Forest near Lublin, Poland, in 1942. Today, a small memorial sits behind a chain-link fence. Courtesy of Jeff Rohrlick
OSI attorney Jonathan Drimmer (right), shown here with historian Peter Black, stepped in as lead prosecutor for the John Demjanjuk denaturalization hearing in Cleveland in 2001 after Ned Stutman fell ill. Drimmer spent hours learning about the operation at Trawniki from Stutman, Black, and OSI historians Todd Huebner and David Rich. Courtesy of Eli Rosenbaum, US Department of Justice
In February 2002, eighty-one-year-old Trawniki man John Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship. A federal judge in Cleveland called the government’s evidence “devastating.” At the Office of Special Investigations, Eli Rosenbaum (right) and Peter Black react to the news. Courtesy of Eli Rosenbaum, US Department of Justice
When the Office of Special Investigations opened in 1979, most everyone believe
d that the Nazi-hunting unit would remain in operation for only a year or two. In 2004, OSI historian Barry White and director Eli Rosenbaum celebrated the unit’s twenty-five-year anniversary. Over more than three decades, OSI investigated and prosecuted hundreds of Nazi perpetrators. Courtesy of Elizabeth B. White
Peter Black spent years investigating the operation at the Trawniki training camp and the men who once served there.
In 2013, he spoke at an international workshop on Trawniki and visited the village for the first time. He has become known as the world’s foremost expert on the camp. Courtesy of Peter Black
“In my life,” Holocaust survivor Lucyna Wojcik once told a rabbi, “God taketh away and then God giveth.” Lucyna’s husband, Feliks, a doctor who cared for generations of families, died at age ninety-two. Lucyna died six months later, at age eighty-seven. They had two children and six grandchildren. Courtesy of the Wojcik family
More Praise for
Citizen 865
“In telling the story of a little-known Holocaust site called Trawniki and the people who dedicated themselves to bringing some of modern history’s worst monsters to justice, Debbie Cenziper has honored the vanishing plea to never forget, first by breaking my heart with the worst of humanity, and then, with the best of us, stitching it back together.”
—David Finkel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and
New York Times bestselling author of The Good Soldiers
Also by Debbie Cenziper
Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers
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[2019] Citizen 865 Page 28
