[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

“I was not in no position. And one more thing. When you say I trained the men, you are telling me I trained the men how to kill Jewish people? That is wrong.”

  “Mr. Reimer, the fact of the matter is the entire purpose of Trawniki, the only reason that facility existed, was to train men to murder Jews. That was the only reason it was built.”

  “Right,” Reimer said.

  “It had no other purpose?”

  “Right.”

  “It was one of the most diabolical facilities in history?”

  “Right,” Reimer said.

  “I will suggest something else to you,” Sher went on. “If you had any explanation as to what you did at that camp, you should have given that explanation after the war when you made application to come to America.”

  “Right.” Reimer said again.

  “This is not the time for it. It is a little late.”

  “Mr. Sher. Are you saying that I am responsible? That I should be put on trial, too, that I committed those same outrageous crimes?”

  Rosenbaum watched the exchange silently. When he was twelve, he had come upon a black-and-white teleplay on NBC, a courtroom drama about the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He had lain on his belly on the living room floor, cupped his chin in his hands, and listened to a female survivor describe gruesome medical experiments conducted by a German doctor. Was this woman a real person or an actor? Rosenbaum had never heard of such atrocities.

  At home and in his synagogue on Long Island in the 1950s, the Holocaust was often a taboo subject, much like cancer—shush now. But just before he would become a Bar Mitzvah, he finally caught on to the intense suffering, and it would see him through to a career at the Office of Special Investigations.

  He looked at Reimer. “You told us about this terrible time that they killed all the Jews at the Trawniki labor camp.…There was another time, wasn’t there, that you saw Jews being killed? That wasn’t the only time, right?”

  Rosenbaum was fishing, crafting questions based on instinct.

  Reimer grew quiet. “There was another time, but I did not participate.”

  Rosenbaum had no idea what Reimer would say next. “Mr. Reimer, just, in your own words, tell me about the incident, whatever you can remember.”

  Reimer’s voice was shaking. “Um. We stayed in a barrack someplace outside of Trawniki. Where, I don’t know. We all woke up and they were all sent to exterminate a labor camp. I did not get up. I slept. I know you are going to say I think you are crazy to believe me, but I did not participate. I was not involved in the shooting.”

  “You saw it?”

  “The German SS man must have realized that I wasn’t there.…He sent a man after me and he came and woke me up.”

  Reimer went on. “They had a board across a ravine or something, and all the people, they were dead in this grave.”

  “It was a mass grave and they had all been shot,” Rosenbaum repeated. It was a statement, not a question. Reimer needed to believe that Rosenbaum already knew the answer.

  “They were all shot,” Reimer repeated.

  “And your colleagues did the shooting?”

  “Right.”

  “They didn’t just cordon off the area. They did the actual shooting.”

  “They did the shooting,” Reimer repeated.

  “Weren’t there some people who were still alive down there who had to be finished off?”

  “There was one—I don’t know—was he half dead or whatever. He was pointing with a finger to his head.”

  “He wanted to be shot?”

  “Yes. And I don’t know who but he was shot. That is all I saw. That is the only one that I saw that was shot in my presence when one of them already in the grave pointed the finger to his head, begged for mercy, so to speak.”

  “There’s something about the man who pointed to his head that you haven’t told me?” Rosenbaum was fishing again.

  “Yes.”

  “You finished him off.”

  Again, Reimer paused. “I’m afraid so. I don’t know if I hit his head. I don’t know that.”

  “But he died?”

  “I just say that I had to make one effort at least while the German was looking at me. I shot at the direction.…I couldn’t very well just stand there. I had to make an effort or something.”

  Sher was looking at Reimer. “It’s clear now that you participated in this execution of Jews. Correct?”

  “It seems that way, that if I shot at that person that pointed at his head.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sher said.

  “Then I did.”

  “And this person that you shot at, he had already been hit but wasn’t dead yet. Is that right?”

  “That’s what I assumed, you know.”

  “How close were you to him when you shot him?”

  “Fifteen feet, maybe.”

  “After you shot, he was no longer pointing to his head, was he?”

  “No.”

  Clearly, Rosenbaum thought as he listened to the exchange, Reimer had always excelled, as a Red Army lieutenant, as a commander at Trawniki, as an immigrant, as an American. And somewhere deep in the woods outside Trawniki, Reimer had excelled as a participant in a mass-killing operation. It was a devastating thought.

  Reimer went on. “My whole life you think about these things. You try to forget them. I come here before you, and voluntarily, and I finally told you.”

  A thousand barbed responses coursed through Rosenbaum’s head when Reimer brought up his own absolution.

  “Do you feel better that you told the truth now?” Sher said. “Were you carrying this? Were you ashamed of this?”

  “I was,” Reimer said softly.

  “I am trying to understand people like you.”

  “I only have one fear, that you would send me back for no reason.”

  “No reason?” Sher spit the words. “You just admitted you participated in a bloody execution.”

  “Did you [hear] me?” Reimer said, his voice rising. “They were finished when I got there.”

  “Not everyone,” Sher said slowly. “There was one man that we know of who you finished off, one man. He had a family, Mr. Reimer, in all likelihood. He had people who loved him. He was a human being.”

  BACK IN WASHINGTON, Rosenbaum found Peter Black and Barry White and recounted the confession, the first of its kind in the history of the Office of Special Investigations. Rosenbaum described the scene at the ravine, a sea of people, dying or dead, and a single, desperate man, inviting a bullet to his head because that was all he could think to do, beg for death to come quickly.

  “We are going to file this case,” Rosenbaum told the historians. “And we are going to win.”

  Part Three

  Poland and the United States

  1941–1951

  Chapter Thirteen

  Health and Welfare

  Lublin and Trawniki, Poland

  1941–1942

  The Germans had commandeered a middle-school gym in Lublin, and from inside the yellow building SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik was preparing to travel to Berlin to meet with one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidantes.

  Years later, one historian would call Globocnik “the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known,” but in the heady days of October 1941, when the German army had conquered much of eastern Europe and was advancing toward Moscow, he was an intrepid thirty-seven-year-old from Vienna with slicked hair, a long face, and a fanatical devotion to the Nazi Party.

  His hatred of the Jews wasn’t grounded in religion. To men like Globocnik, Jews were an impure race, a threat to German health and welfare, and to talk about them was more of an epidemiological discussion than one about God or history or faith.

  It wasn’t in Globocnik’s nature to wait for instructions, so he had crafted a plan to present to SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Berlin. So much was at stake, the gateway to the occupied east, beginning with the territory between the Vistula and Bug Rivers. Gener
ations of Poles had traded salt, timber, grain, and stone along the rivers, which flowed over the plains of Poland. The region was a strategic stronghold for the Reich, the center of Europe, with lush farmland that Nazi leaders planned to turn over to ethnic German settlers living in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union.

  Already, Globocnik, working with the German security police, had ordered the killings of Jewish and Polish intelligentsia, lest they try to organize and resist. He had supervised the roundup of able-bodied Jews and Poles for construction projects along the roads and rivers, looted Jewish homes for jewelry and money, and started to build an extensive network of labor camps, prison camps, and ghettos.

  The largest ghetto in Lublin proper was confined to the oldest part of the city. Lined with narrow, brick apartment houses, the ghetto was surrounded by police and bounded on the southernmost corner by an arched stone gate that for centuries had separated the Jewish quarter from Lublin’s more affluent Christian neighborhoods. Inside the ghetto, typhus had claimed its first victims.

  They were welcome deaths to Globocnik, who kept himself sufficiently removed from the suffering, living across town in a mansion with a nine-pin bowling alley and working in a leafy, hushed neighborhood of large homes and government offices that had once been occupied by the Lublin elite.

  Soon he would leave for Berlin to discuss the most important mission yet: Judenbereinigung. Clearing out the Jews.

  It was the opportunity Globocnik had been waiting for, a critical moment to show Himmler and the civilian occupation authorities in the Lublin District that he was not only an unflinching ideologue but a loyal and enterprising SS leader with a plan to address the enormous task at hand. Globocnik wanted full authority to manage the removal of the Jews throughout the Government General and beyond, including the yet-to-be-conquered Soviet Union.

  To Globocnik, the upcoming meeting in Berlin was an opportunity to assume a leading position in shaping the future of the Reich.

  He had been born in 1904 in the port city of Trieste, then a part of Austria-Hungary, on a narrow stretch of land along the Adriatic coast. His father was a postal official, his grandfather a professor, his great-grandfather a physician. Globocnik had found work servicing water-power plants in southern Austria, but his passion was for politics, and like other disgruntled young men in the Austrian Republic of the 1920s, he became involved in underground German nationalist organizations and, eventually, a virulent Nazi Party.

  He had ferreted out intelligence information for the Reich and channeled Nazi money into Austria even after the Austrian chancellor vowed to subdue the Nazi agitators who had disrupted and divided the country. Hitler himself had ordered underground Nazi factions to tone down the talk and violence, at least until matters between Germany and Austria could be stabilized to Germany’s advantage.

  But Globocnik had soldiered on, focused and fearless, risking prison time to spread Nazi propaganda. When Austria was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1938, Globocnik had been named Gauleiter, or party leader, in Vienna.

  “I will not recoil,” Globocnik had declared, “from radical interventions for the solution of Jewish questions.”

  But subordinates found his management skills weak—one visiting British journalist had called Globocnik a “great enthusiast without much leadership”—and the Nazi ideologue quickly fell from grace, accused of mishandling public and party finances. Demoted to the rank of corporal, he could have been jailed or executed, but in Globocnik, Himmler saw a fierce and passionate comrade.

  In 1939, Himmler named Globocnik SS and police leader for the Lublin District, responsible for creating an SS power base in one of Germany’s most critical positions in the east. Globocnik settled in Lublin and confiscated an estate home. He found the sight of a nearby, rundown area where some of Lublin’s poorer Jews lived altogether unpleasant and in May 1940 quickly ordered the destruction of the houses.

  By 1941, Himmler had decided to Germanize the region. Poles would be moved into Jewish homes and Ukrainians into Polish homes to make space for German colonists. That was the natural order, Globocnik believed, decreed by Hitler, the leader of the German race.

  But what to do with the Jews? There were as many as 320,000 in the Lublin District, more than forty thousand in Lublin proper. Jews had lived in Lublin since at least the fourteenth century, as much a part of the fabric of the city as the non-Jewish Polish population.

  Globocnik had found synagogues, schools, prayer houses, storefronts, Yiddish newspapers, and a five-story Talmudic building, the largest in the world, with thousands of books and a model of the ancient Temple Mount in the old city of Jerusalem.

  He assembled a group of intellectuals to plan for long-term German rule. There had been half-hearted talk about shipping Jews to the island of Madagascar. Killing them, Globocnik thought, would be a far more effective way to neutralize the threat.

  Globocnik dove into his life in Poland, setting up a casino and social events for his comrades and going out of his way to be kind to young women. But he paid scant attention to his appearance, to his romances, or even to his advancement in the Nazi Party.

  The mission itself moved him, exercising absolute power over the lives of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and planning the future of the Reich’s eastern settlements. It was righteous work, building an Aryan world, and Globocnik saw himself as its most devoted champion and architect.

  In July 1941, Himmler gave Globocnik the go-ahead to build a massive concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin. More importantly, Globocnik had authority to plan for the ethnic makeup of the territories.

  Globocnik knew that a euthanasia program had killed Germans with disabilities by pumping pure, chemically manufactured carbon monoxide into stationary killing centers. The SS had also used carbon monoxide to murder several thousand people in specially fitted mobile gas vans at a manor house on the outskirts of the Polish village of Chelmno.

  Globocnik was interested. At the end of September 1941, he wrote to Himmler, outlining actions against the Jews “of a security policy nature” and arranged to have several officials from the Reich euthanasia program permanently transferred to the Lublin District.

  But there was a problem. Globocnik had a staff of fewer than two hundred SS men. He needed an operation, preferably in Lublin and under his direct control, that could take the lead in the destruction of the region’s Jews. Quietly, he started to recruit a small army of helpers to flesh out his plan.

  In prisoner-of-war camps for captured Soviet soldiers, Globocnik’s staff had found hundreds of candidates: German speakers, skilled workers, and men who looked reasonably healthy. They had been sent to the grounds of an abandoned sugar refinery southeast of Lublin in the village of Trawniki, set against rail lines that snaked across Poland in every direction. The first recruits had arrived at Trawniki in late summer.

  By the time Globocnik left for his October 13 meeting with Himmler in Berlin, where Globocnik would present a plan to annihilate Poland’s Jews, recruits were pouring into Trawniki.

  “Gentlemen,” Globocnik would say later, “if ever a generation will come after us which is so weak and soft-hearted that it doesn’t understand our task, then indeed the whole of National Socialism has been in vain. To the contrary, in my opinion, one should bury bronze plates on which it is recorded that we have had the courage to carry out this great and so necessary work.”

  IF IT WEREN’T for a sugar plant and a railway station, there may never have been a thriving Polish settlement in Trawniki. Traders and craftsmen migrated to the area at the end of the nineteenth century, turning the sprawling countryside fed by the Wieprz River into a small village, with thatched-roof houses and farms that in the summer months grew bright-yellow canola flowers.

  A hundred Jewish families from a nearby congregation had settled on land near the sugar mill, and even after the mill closed a few decades before the war, the modest village of Poles and Jews on the outskirts of the Lublin District maintained a tiny indust
rial core, linked to the rest of Poland through the rail lines.

  An ideal place to train and deploy a makeshift army.

  In late summer 1941, Jakob Reimer arrived at Trawniki in a convoy of seventy captured Soviet soldiers, altogether surprised that he was still alive. The Germans had overrun his platoon in Minsk, and Reimer had been taken to Stalag 307 in eastern Poland.

  He was an ethnic German, captured as a Red Army officer with the 447th Soviet Infantry Regiment. If the Germans discovered his rank, Reimer knew there would be no mercy. Hitler had instructed the high command of German armed forces to summarily shoot officers and Communist officials at the time of capture, and word of the order had spread among Red Army soldiers.

  Reimer had been sure to destroy his papers, but in Stalag 307 it had seemed only a matter of time before the Germans identified him, an artillery lieutenant who had commanded a platoon of Russian men.

  But he had been recruited, not killed, a startling twist of fate, and now he stood in a barrack in the training camp Trawniki, posing for a service photo as a newly dubbed German police auxiliary. Black hair, gray eyes, the lines of his mouth drawn into something of a grimace.

  Did he ever belong to the Communist Party? Reimer said no. Was he racially pure? Did he have Jewish ancestors? Reimer knew quite well that Germans routinely shot Jewish soldiers of the Red Army. No, he said again. He was given a declaration in German and Russian:

  I declare that I am of Aryan descent, that there were no Jews among my forefathers, that I was neither a member of the Communist Party nor the Communist Youth Organization.

  Reimer was fingerprinted and offered a hand-me-down Polish army uniform that had been dyed black. He was also given an identification number that would follow him throughout his career as a Trawniki man: 865. The number was etched onto a metal disc he would wear around his neck.

  Reimer followed the others to a barn in the shadows of a watchtower, where they would remain in quarantine until it could be determined that no one had lice, typhus, tuberculosis, or influenza. At least he would get to rest.