[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  The officer offered another option, deportation back to West Berlin. As Black jumped up to agree, the officer interrupted. “But you have a plane to catch.”

  Black, who had been contemplating life inside a Communist prison, suddenly found himself with a temporary transit visa and permission to board the flight with his friends.

  Sitting stiffly in a US military car as it inched toward a checkpoint that crossed into East Germany in October 1989, nineteen years after his first visit, Black eyed the grim-faced border guards pacing before a thick gate. They moved with deliberate precision, and Black felt a flash of unease, as if something unexpected might happen at any moment, a diplomatic snafu that would send him back to West Germany.

  This time, however, Black was with OSI attorney Bruce Einhorn on official business, representing the government of the United States. The car passed into East Berlin without incident.

  On the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, Black and Einhorn could see the stirrings of revolution everywhere, in a generation of denim-clad young people who favored Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie, in the thousands of demonstrators who had lined the city’s grandest boulevard to greet Mikhail Gorbachev, the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party. “Gorbi, help us!” they shouted again and again.

  Soon, the Berlin Wall would fall at the feet of jubilant crowds, and the head of the East German Communist Party would announce that citizens could cross freely into the West. The movement apparently had not been lost on the East German Ministry of Culture, which, for the first time since the end of the war, had extended an invitation to discuss broad access to its archives.

  Already, historians from Canada and Australia, in newly opened Nazi-hunting units largely modeled after OSI, had made a first pass through some of the collections. “You guys have to get over here,” one Canadian historian told Black.

  OSI historians had for years dug through the archives in the West and in Poland. Cases were growing cold, suspects and witnesses dying. Now, finally, East Germany seemed willing to cooperate, offering access to one of the world’s largest collections of documents on the Nazi regime.

  For the better part of a week, Black and Einhorn traveled from archive to archive, taking careful note of collections and files that OSI historians would soon return to study, stashed away for decades by the Communist government.

  THE BRIEF TRIP to East Germany had produced hundreds of research opportunities, and as Black scrambled to coordinate the unit’s next steps, he received word that the Soviets were also relenting. One month after his visit to East Berlin, on the last day of November 1989, Black joined Eli Rosenbaum in Moscow.

  It was nineteen degrees below zero when Black checked into the Intourist Hotel at the center of the city, a towering, box-shaped building designed in classic Stalinist style, stark, drab, and likely bugged. The hotel was stifling, heated by an overzealous furnace, and though the journey had been exhausting, Black and Rosenbaum ducked outside to cool off and explore nearby Red Square.

  The frigid air reminded Black of the coldest Wisconsin winters. Droplets of icy water froze on the lens of his camera, and he couldn’t advance the film. Black imagined what German soldiers, clad in summer uniforms, must have endured as they reached the suburbs of Moscow in the first freezing days of December 1941.

  Peering across the square, he marveled at the remarkable turn of events that would soon place him before top officials at the archives in Moscow, negotiating for access to war records. The revolution that had gripped Poland had spread to the Soviet Union, where an elected Congress of People’s Deputies had been set up. CNN for the first time was transmitting its programs to Moscow, and in the Soviet legislature reformers openly criticized the Communist government.

  How quickly things changed. Black had searched the archives of Poland, the most amenable Communist state, on three research trips. David Marwell had gone to Poland twice before he left OSI in 1988 to become the head of the Berlin Document Center, which housed troves of Nazi records.

  Both historians had found tidbits of information spread across various records and rosters indicating the involvement of thousands of German and non-German participants in the Nazi killing machine. But, too often, the evidence needed to win a case had been just out of reach, kept in the Soviet archives.

  Now, Rosenbaum and Black had a meeting set up with the Soviet Federal Archival Administration. For the first time since the war’s end, the Soviets seemed willing to open their archives for a wholesale, general inspection. Access to the archives in Moscow, Black knew, would likely also lead to access to the archives in the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, where more than two million Jews had perished during the war.

  Black could scarcely imagine what he might find, how lost Nazi records might deepen and reshape his understanding of the Holocaust. Though émigré groups continued to call for OSI’s closing, the collapse of Communism had given OSI—one of the few agencies in the world still actively investigating Nazi offenders—more options and resources to do its work.

  A lease on life, Black would say later.

  SHORTLY AFTER BLACK returned from Moscow, Jakob Reimer’s personnel file arrived from an archive in southern Ukraine, with a round seal and a Soviet stamp. A photo of a young Reimer, with cropped black hair, an oval face, and a smile that could have passed for a scowl, was attached to the three-page file. Black scanned the heading: Personalbogen Nr. 865.

  He paused. From Reimer’s immigration paperwork, Black knew that Reimer had been born in 1918 in a Mennonite settlement in the Ukrainian countryside, north of the Black Sea, where thousands of ethnic Germans known as Volksdeutsche had settled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reimer had been drafted into the Red Army at the start of the war and received a commission as a second lieutenant before his platoon was captured by German soldiers in July 1941 near Minsk, Belarus, not far from the interwar eastern Polish border.

  Three million Soviet soldiers died in German POW camps. But the Germans considered Volksdeutsche valuable racial stock and Baltic nationals and Ukrainians, perceived to hold strong anti-Soviet sentiments, reliable recruits for managing land that the Germans planned to conquer. In the late summer of 1941, the SS selected Reimer from among the camp’s captured Soviet soldiers and sent him to Trawniki.

  The personnel sheet sent by the Soviets was dated September 3, 1941. Black noted that Reimer had been stationed at Trawniki for at least three years and had been promoted to the level of a noncommissioned officer, part of the Trawniki elite, likely because of his German-language skills. Only one other Trawniki man found on US soil had attained such an exalted position.

  Black had seen the details before. Near the end of the war, Reimer had applied for citizenship in Nazi Germany and had mentioned his service at Trawniki on the application. OSI had received a copy from the Berlin Document Center.

  Black moved on, reviewing the back of the personnel sheet sent by the Soviets. It contained a service oath that Reimer had pledged 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 for the Establishment of SS and Police Bases in the Newly Occupied Eastern Territory.

  The oath did not surprise Black either. Trawniki man Liudas Kairys, already investigated by OSI, had signed the same pledge.

  Black scanned the dates and deployments listed in the file. Two entries immediately caught his eye.

  Reimer, the self-styled “paymaster” at Trawniki, had been deployed on at least two critical missions. In September 1942, according to the file, Reimer was assigned to Detachment Czestochowa. Black paused, remembering. That month, SS and police units in the Polish city deported forty thousand Jews to their deaths in the Treblinka gas chambers.

  Reimer had returned to Trawniki, but on April 19, 1943, he left again, this time deployed to Warsaw. On that day, desperate Jewish residents rose in armed resistance
against German forces brought in to liquidate the ghetto.

  If Reimer had played an innocuous role during his service at Trawniki, Black saw no sign of it.

  He pulled out Reimer’s immigration file, compiled by US authorities before Reimer settled in New York City in 1952. Black scanned the visa application, searching for a mention of Trawniki.

  But Reimer had said nothing about the camp. Instead, he had told US officials that he had been drafted into the Soviet armed forces, captured by the Germans, and made to work as an interpreter at a sawmill and then in work camps along Poland’s Vistula River.

  It had been a plausible story until investigators from the US Army Counterintelligence Corps found that Reimer had been granted citizenship in Nazi Germany in 1944. US investigators called him for an interview and, for the first time, asked about Trawniki since Reimer had listed the camp on his citizenship application. He had easily brushed aside the reference.

  SUBJECT stated that he had been assigned to a guard company near TRAWNIKI and that his supervisor officer was a member of the SS. He claimed that he was never integrated into an SS unit, but was assigned as a paymaster in the guard company.

  Reimer had added his own statement about his work at the camp. “We were told that we were civilians,” he wrote. “I never was taken over by SS.”

  He was approved for entry in the United States, in part, Black knew, because an American Red Cross supervisor in Germany had described Reimer as an “honest and dependable” person who would “make a good American citizen,” and in part because US immigration authorities in 1951 had little information about the Nazi-run camp in the village of Trawniki.

  Now OSI could refute Reimer’s claim that he had served only in the Trawniki administration. Reimer, it appeared, had been deployed to at least two ghettos at the exact same time that tens of thousands of Jews were being rounded up for deportation to the Treblinka killing center or shot on the spot.

  “Oh my,” Black told Einhorn as he recounted Reimer’s lies. “We have a case.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sunrise in Prague

  Washington, D.C., and Prague

  1990

  Elizabeth “Barry” White ran her fingertips over a fat stack of paper piled high on the desk in front of her. The only female historian in the Office of Special Investigations was chasing down hundreds of leads against a clock that delivered never-ending grief, another day coming to an end, a new one creeping closer.

  There were fugitive lists from foreign countries and tips called in by strangers, wartime documents of SS units that had routinely carried out mass murder and immigration files on men, long settled in America, whose names had turned up on Nazi personnel records half a world away.

  Suspects were growing older—there was so little time—and on some days it seemed to White that the work of OSI drew only questions and contempt. Once, on a park bench in northern Virginia, another mother had asked White about her job.

  “Oh,” the woman declared when White explained the leads, the clock, the mission. “I don’t want my government doing that.”

  Fifty years from now, White thought, if we were to catch the people who blew up Pan Am flight 103 and they were living in the United States, would we choose to ignore them?

  Even from inside the Justice Department, OSI faced unusual scrutiny. The majority of criminal cases were settled before trial, often after defendants pleaded guilty to lesser charges. But OSI had no room to compromise. The only course of action in the American court system was denaturalization and deportation, and 40 percent of OSI’s cases went to court.

  OSI almost always won, but denaturalization rulings could take months and were regularly appealed, then appealed again. After that, the deportation process began—another trial, another wait for a decision, another appeal, a second appeal.

  “Aren’t you done yet?” other prosecutors would often ask.

  WHITE HAD BEEN a girl of six in 1961 when someone stuck a burning cross on the front lawn of her family’s colonial-style home in Norfolk, Virginia, near a trim patch of dogwood trees that bloomed pink and white in the springtime. Her father raced for a garden hose and doused the flames, but a black scar in the grass nearly reached the house. It was the year that she realized her family was different.

  On the surface, the Whites were like many other Southerners in the stately neighborhood along the shores of the James River: white, Protestant, and relatively affluent. White’s father was a pediatrician who tended to Norfolk’s children, her mother a Vassar graduate who had broken Japanese naval codes during the war and then moved to the South to be with her husband.

  The river was just across the street, and on steamy afternoons with her best friend and her standard poodle, Pooh, White would wade into the water in tennis shoes, careful to avoid the oyster shells and stinging nettles underfoot. There were crabs to catch and sticks and weeds that could be twined together for rafts to float on. She would walk home slowly, bare feet sticky with mud, cropped blond hair still wet from the water.

  On Sundays, there was church, creaking pews filled with girls in frilly dresses and shiny Mary Janes. When White took her first communion, she was inspired by the minister’s lyrical words about love and service. She would close her eyes and imagine a life of purpose, contours more than details, but beautiful nonetheless.

  The truth came slowly, as political and social upheaval swept the South. Over a roast and hot rolls at the family dinner table, Forrest White excoriated the poll taxes that kept poor blacks from voting and, later, the governor of Virginia for shutting down the public schools in Norfolk to avoid putting black children in the same classrooms as whites. The move, part of Virginia’s policy of “massive resistance,” was in direct defiance of the US Supreme Court ruling that had declared school segregation unconstitutional.

  Forrest White drove to Richmond to see about the matter as head of an organization of white citizens in Norfolk who wanted the schools reopened. He was turned away by the governor, and on the ride home Forrest White decided his organization should figure out a way to sue on behalf of white students since they couldn’t go to school either.

  “We’re all God’s children,” Forrest White had told his daughter more than once.

  Edith White wore proper white gloves and hats to church, but her four children came to recognize that their Yankee mother was far more outspoken than their father. Her activism in liberal and civil rights organizations got her blackballed from the Junior League and shunned by the ladies at the country club, who called her “Comrade Edie.”

  It wasn’t unusual for the Whites to receive death threats.

  When the family’s minister was abruptly dismissed, fired after insisting that nonwhites would be welcomed at church services, White struggled to make sense of it. Most everyone she knew went to the Methodist church, but something hateful had happened in a place that spread God’s love, and the hypocrisy and injustice gnawed at her.

  In the seventh grade, when White was asked to give a speech before her classmates, it seemed only fitting to talk about the foul history of the Ku Klux Klan. “Nigger lover,” someone called out afterward, and White finally understood that there were those in her city, with its peach trees and Southern pleasantries and summers that drifted long into September, who harbored an awful secret.

  White went to Vassar to study languages but found herself drawn to German history. She wanted to understand why Christians who valued their civilized culture could support a regime that enforced bigotry and murder.

  She graduated in 1975, pursued a doctorate degree in history at the University of Virginia, and moved to Washington to research her dissertation at the National Archives, getting by as a part-time government clerk-typist.

  The odds of striking up a romance in the basement of a federal office building seemed altogether slim to White, but at a holiday party for the Department of Energy, she met Bill Blackmore, a left-leaning Southerner who spent much of the evening huddled with White in a quiet corne
r of the room, quoting from Steinbeck, Hemingway, Heller. His mustache was on the longer side, curling over his top lip, but his eyelashes were short, and that made White happy since her mother had always warned her to stay away from boys with long eyelashes.

  They became friends over lunches and the occasional drink. One afternoon, he gave White a parting hug and sighed, “Juicy Fruit.” Later, they would laugh about whether his decision to recite a line from the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been creative brilliance or social suicide. But that night, twenty-five-year-old White was intrigued. A few months later, she was in love.

  After a year of research in Germany and another year teaching and writing in Charlottesville, White moved back to Washington. On a visit home to Norfolk for Thanksgiving in 1982, her father pulled her aside.

  “I think Bill has MS.”

  White paused. Bill had a tremor in his hand and had endured a bout of optic neuritis, but doctors had talked of a temporary condition. Startled, White looked at her father, knowing that he had made it a practice over the years to never offer a diagnosis to anyone who wasn’t a patient. Something must be terribly wrong. Her father’s face was kind but certain.

  White decided to keep the information to herself. You don’t stop loving somebody just because he’s sick.

  White had been looking for work in Washington for months when historian David Marwell called in 1983 on the recommendation of one of White’s former history professors. She became the sixth historian in the Office of Special Investigations, surrounded by a formidable team of men who had lived and worked in European countries and spoke some combination of Russian, German, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, and Latvian.

  White fit in quickly. She was one of the few historians in the country who could translate Sütterlin, a German script often used by the older generation in Germany, and much to the surprise of the men of OSI she ordered beer over lunch at the local Thai place.