Resettlement of the Jews. It was Nazi code for murder.
Black wanted to know more. He had less than a week in Hamburg, but he would take his time, carefully constructing a chronology of decisions, details, and events. He had learned long ago that even the most innocuous fact could fit with another and eventually deliver a watershed moment of understanding after months or years spent navigating wrong turns and dead ends.
In the prosecutor’s office in Hamburg, Black readied himself for a long day ahead. The US Justice Department and the Federal Republic of Germany regularly shared information about ongoing investigations, and Black smiled at the prosecutor who had worked on the case against Streibel. But something was off. He could feel it as soon as he introduced himself. The prosecutor was shaking her head, insisting that Black could not review the records without higher authorization.
Stunned, Black pressed her to reconsider. She was adamant. Black wondered whether the reunification of Germany had somehow changed the parameters of the agreement between the two nations. There was no way to know. He had traveled four thousand miles to Hamburg but would have to settle for a limited review of the records, at least until the matter could be sorted out by his supervisors in Washington.
The prosecutor offered Black the criminal indictment, outlining the allegations against Streibel. Black quickly scanned the document. West German prosecutors had argued that Streibel was responsible for the actions of Trawniki men in the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers.
Streibel’s men, according to the indictment, also traveled to the Polish city of Lublin during the 1942 ghetto-clearing operation, when thousands of Jews were deported to the Belzec killing center or shot on the spot.
Responsible as a perpetrator in the deaths of between 35,000–40,000 people.
The indictment went on. Trawniki men participated in at least twenty-one large-scale shooting and deportation operations throughout the Lublin region.
Responsible for the deaths of at least 50,000 people.
Trawniki men went to Warsaw in 1942 during mass deportations of Jews to the Treblinka killing center.
Responsible for the deaths of 300,000–400,000 people.
Trawniki men returned to help the Germans fight Jewish resisters during the bloody Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Responsible for the deaths of at least 7,000 people through the deportations…
The words were graphic and chilling, and when Black left Hamburg a few days later, disappointed by the turn of events at the prosecutor’s office, he was all but certain that he was leaving behind a critical piece of history.
THERE WAS HARDLY a quiet time in the bustling Office of Special Investigations, where in 1991 eleven trial attorneys and eight historians juggled forty-two court cases and more than four hundred open investigations.
Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher were scrambling to oversee investigations and hearings. Barry White was working to run the names of the seven hundred men listed on the rosters from Prague through INS records to see who might be living on US soil. It was a tedious affair because a single name could take on many different transliterated versions—Nikolaus on a roster might have been born Mykolaj, spelled Nikolai in Cyrillic on Russian papers and Mykola on a US visa. Scores of names lacked biographical details such as birth dates and hometowns.
But the rosters in Prague were among the most significant finds in OSI’s expanding Trawniki investigation, and the effort to match names was a critical next step.
While White and Peter Black worked in Washington, other OSI historians were sending back records from archives spread across the former Soviet Union, new details about the operation at Trawniki from Nazi rosters and the statements of former guards. Ukraine had declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and OSI had begun to exploit the archives there. Collectively, the former USSR housed the world’s largest body of captured Nazi documents relating to occupied eastern Europe.
As the records poured in, the historians began calling Black’s office “Trawniki Central.”
Black was particularly intrigued by the work of historian Mike MacQueen, who was preparing to leave for the archives of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Black knew that men of Baltic nationality had trained at Trawniki.
“If you find any reference to Trawniki material, please review and copy it,” Black told him.
A few days later, MacQueen called from Vilnius. “Is Demjanjuk 1393?”
“Yes,” Black said quickly. He knew OSI defendant John Demjanjuk’s Trawniki identification number by heart. “What do you have?”
MacQueen had found a disciplinary report from the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin. It was dated January 1943, during what had been a particularly lethal winter for the prisoners confined behind the camp’s barbed-wire fences. A typhus epidemic had swept the barracks, and the SS placed the entire facility under quarantine. Prisoners who didn’t die from disease were gassed with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide that had been used to delouse ships and clothing until the SS applied it to the murder of human beings.
The documents discovered by MacQueen described two companies of Trawniki guards stationed in Majdanek that January. Over the phone, he quickly translated:
Subject: Report of the Canine Officer Detachment
The above-named guards left their barracks and the camp without permission, despite the repeatedly announced camp quarantine order. According to their statements, the above named went into the village to buy salt and onions.
The report contained the names of four Trawniki men, including John Demjanjuk. For breaching curfew and leaving the camp during a typhus outbreak and quarantine, Demjanjuk and each of the three other men had received twenty-five lashes from a whip.
Black thought quickly. OSI already knew that Demjanjuk had trained as a guard at Trawniki, worked at an SS estate in the Lublin District in September 1942, and served at the Sobibor killing center from March 1943 until some unknown date. Gaps in his service record before and after Sobibor had left open the possibility that he could have also been the so-called Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka killing center.
At Demjanjuk’s criminal trial in Jerusalem in 1987, Israeli prosecutors had argued that Trawniki men could have moved between one killing center and another. Black found the argument contrived, an unsupported theory to justify the claim that Demjanjuk had served at Treblinka.
After Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to die in 1988, Israeli prosecutors and private investigators had gained access to archives behind the collapsing Iron Curtain and found that the Soviets in the 1960s had brought criminal charges against a series of men who had trained at Trawniki and then worked in Treblinka. As many as forty former guards were interviewed, and in tens of thousands of pages of court records, Demjanjuk’s name did not appear a single time.
Demjanjuk may have been at Treblinka, Black thought when he learned of the discovery in Israel, but he certainly could not have been there long enough to earn a reputation as Ivan the Terrible.
Soviet authorities eventually provided more documents, rosters from 1943 showing that Demjanjuk and dozens of other Trawniki guards had been transferred from the Sobibor killing center to a concentration camp in Flossenbürg, Germany.
At OSI, Neal Sher made a similar discovery in a stack of Flossenbürg records. But the earlier gap in Demjanjuk’s service record had remained, a span of six months between 1942 and 1943, the last possible link to Treblinka.
MacQueen’s discovery in the archives in Vilnius, Black quickly realized, shredded what was left of the Treblinka theory. As a trusted Trawniki man, Demjanjuk had served at Majdanek in the months before his deployment to the Sobibor killing center, then gone on to Flossenbürg afterward. Despite the findings of US and Israeli courts, he could not have been the notorious Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.
Black was reminded of the titles of two chapters in an Isaac Asimov science fiction trilogy that he had read as a boy: “The Answer That Satisfied.” “The A
nswer That Was True.”
Clearly, erroneous information had been used to build a death-penalty case, and the historical and legal record needed to be set straight. There was also the matter of the conviction itself. Demjanjuk, in solitary confinement in Israel, was waiting on a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court. If the court confirmed Demjanjuk’s conviction and sentence, he would hang for crimes that he had not committed.
Yet Demjanjuk, Black knew, was far from innocent. Demjanjuk had begun his SS career at Trawniki, his base unit and training ground, and gone on to serve in a Nazi-run killing center and two lethal concentration camps. Black wanted to see Demjanjuk properly called to account, made to answer for his participation in the persecution and mass murder of Poland’s Jews, beginning with his service at Trawniki.
IN 1992, THE prosecutor’s office in Hamburg relented, and Black received thick batches of records from the Karl Streibel criminal case. One was the protocol of an interview with Streibel himself, taken in preparation for his trial in West Germany. Streibel had described working in his father’s carpentry business and joining the far-right Nazi Party, convinced that it could cure the country’s economic problems.
“The Jewish question was not an issue in my family and for myself at first,” Streibel told the investigators. “As far as I know, my parents did business with Jewish suppliers. My tavern also had Jewish customers.”
“Were you aware of [the party’s] attitude towards Jews when you applied for membership in the party?” an investigator asked.
“Yes, but the Jewish problem was unimportant for me and my circle at the time. Important citizens in our town were members of the SS.”
Streibel went on to describe his work as the commandant of the Trawniki training camp. “When I reached Trawniki, it held around 300 Ukrainian prisoners. In reality, there were also people of other nationalities, but they were all called Ukrainian.…On orders of the SS head of police in Lublin, the Ukrainians were to be trained as guards. They received weapons as well as uniforms. Ukrainians with knowledge of German were used as noncommissioned officers.”
Jakob Reimer among them, Black thought grimly.
Streibel had also described one of the most dreadful events of the Holocaust, a massacre planned by Heinrich Himmler to eliminate the remaining Jewish workers in the Lublin District of occupied Poland. The Nazis had given the plan a cynical name: Aktion Erntefest. Operation Harvest Festival.
On November 3, 1943, SS and police units shot as many as six thousand Jewish prisoners working in a forced-labor camp adjacent to the training camp at Trawniki. Men, women, and children had been made to stand on the edge of a trench before a firing squad, and soon, Black knew, the earth had been filled with bodies.
During Operation Harvest Festival, at least forty-three thousand Jews were murdered at the Trawniki labor camp, the nearby Majdanek concentration camp, and the Poniatowa forced-labor camp, the largest single-day killing spree carried out by the SS during the war.
“I gave the order to cover the moat with the dead bodies with dirt,” Streibel told German investigators about the mass shooting at Trawniki. “I ordered the burning of the bodies. A transport of Jews came to Trawniki to do the work. The burning of the bodies lasted approximately two weeks. After finishing the burning, the Jewish people who burned the bodies were shot.”
Black read carefully, absorbing the clinical description of murder. He moved on, digging deeper into the Streibel files, and came upon a statement from one of Trawniki’s German officers.
The entire battalion, the officer reported, had been deployed to the Jewish ghetto in Lublin in March 1942. Odilo Globocnik had just opened the Belzec killing center, located about 130 kilometers southeast of the city.
It had been a chaotic, terrifying month for the condemned Jews of Lublin, thousands of people forced to assemble at the Great Synagogue in the heart of the ghetto and then sent to the newly operational gas chambers at Belzec, with pits that would serve as mass graves. Belzec had been designed for assembly-line mass murder, Black knew, stunning in its efficiency.
Did the Jews of Lublin know they were about to die? According to the officer’s statement, armed Trawniki men had roamed the Lublin ghetto from the very beginning of the liquidation, emptying houses block by block until more than thirty thousand people had disappeared, from dinner tables and backyards and nurseries, generations of families carted off to their deaths.
Black found a statement from a second guard, a professional musician who had volunteered for the SS marching band before he was transferred to Trawniki. Black paused over his words.
“I personally saw dead bodies of people who had been shot, lying in the streets. No one who was present during the operation can deny that.…The general talk during the operation was that Jews who were ill or unable to walk would be shot. Jews were coming out of houses, some were beating the Jews, others were shooting. It was all a disorder.”
In the years since the war’s end, Black had read rudimentary facts about Trawniki. How Globocnik had set up the camp near the abandoned sugar refinery. How the Germans had recruited an auxiliary force of captured Soviet soldiers, men like Liudas Kairys and Jakob Reimer, as well as Ukrainian and Polish civilians from West Ukraine, Lublin, and the Krakow District. How the camp had become a training facility for guards, and how, on a single day in November 1943, thousands of Jewish prisoners had been murdered at the adjacent labor camp, shot by firing squad.
But against the backdrop of the three notorious Nazi-run killing centers, the better-known forced-labor camps, and the horrific conditions inside the Jewish ghettos of occupied Poland, Trawniki—at least outside Poland—remained a footnote in history, an ancillary operation.
Sitting in his office in Washington, grotesque accounts of murder and destruction piled around him, Black was beginning to see that Trawniki men had been everywhere, operating the gas chambers and guarding the perimeters at the killing centers, screaming and beating and firing until Jewish ghettos were cleared and trucks and train cars packed tight, body against body in the darkness.
There was no way the Germans could have killed so many, so fast without a reliable and ruthless workforce comprising hundreds, if not thousands, of loyal collaborators, the muscle behind what was surely the most sustained mass-murder operation in the history of the war.
“What was Trawniki?” a prosecutor had once asked a witness in the Liudas Kairys case.
“A camp for—a training camp.”
“Training for what?”
“I don’t know. To murder Jews.”
The Trawniki men had done their jobs so well that the Germans had been able to kill 1.7 million Jews, along with Roma, Poles, and Soviet POWs, in less than twenty months. The doomed Jews of Poland had called their violent captors “the Ukrainians” or “Blackies,” a reference to the black uniforms and caps that many Trawniki men wore.
To Black, they were the foot soldiers of the Final Solution.
And Trawniki, tucked into the countryside of southeastern Poland, had been nothing less than a school for mass murder.
BLACK HAD TAKEN to working on the weekends, when the hallways of OSI were quiet and he could muse out loud about the operation at Trawniki. His son, Aaron, often came along, content to sit on the floor with a cheeseburger and watch Black type notes and questions on index cards, mumbling the details out loud as he recorded them.
Black was beginning to piece together what life had been like inside the training camp, with five barracks for the recruits, a dining hall, shops for boot making and sewing, a stable for horses, and storage rooms for clothing and equipment. He also saw the emerging outline of standard operating procedures for mustering and training personnel.
Karl Streibel had created a comprehensive system of ranks at Trawniki, based on the noncommissioned ranks of the German police. He had given his men uniforms, military identification numbers, and promotions for loyalty and performance. And as the men spread out across occupied Poland, Streibel had armed them with
carbines, automatic rifles, and pistols.
Black found the statements and interrogations of former Trawniki men particularly helpful.
Statement of Abram Thiessen, August 26, 1964, proceedings against Karl Streibel:
In Lublin, the Ukrainians had orders to seal off the ghetto and remove the Jews from the apartment houses. Though they were told that the Jews would be sent to a labor camp, the circumstances of the evacuation convinced them that the Jews would be killed.
Statement of Kurt Reinberger, May 21, 1962, proceedings against Karl Streibel:
The Ukrainians detailed to Lublin had the task of sealing off the ghetto in Lublin.…Heard shooting and saw corpses during the first day.
Statement of Hermann Reese, March 26, 1962, proceedings against Karl Streibel:
The Jews were beaten with whips and rifle butts to move them along.…It was generally known that those unable to walk were to be shot on the spot.
Interrogation of Erich Lachmann, March 3, 1969, proceedings against Karl Streibel:
We all knew what was going on. I would believe that there was no German and no Ukrainian in Trawniki who did not know what was happening to the Jews.
On index cards, Black wrote out the career data for every Trawniki-trained guard he could identify through the records. He would eventually have more than four thousand index cards, enough to fill a dozen drawers.
Aaron had always kept himself busy at the office, and Black didn’t think much about what his son saw or overheard. But at home early one Saturday morning, Aaron pulled out his letter board.
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