[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  “We didn’t know who they were. Were they underground or criminals—”

  “You keep saying that. I am asking a different question. After this was over or at any time, did you ask anybody about who these people were, why they were lying in a pit?”

  “The only one who would know was the SS men,” Reimer insisted. “I couldn’t very well go and start an argument with the SS men. I would be the next one shot.”

  “You never asked? You never were curious to find out who these people were and why they were shot?”

  “No. I never found out.”

  Stutman pressed. “You had no curiosity because you knew who the victims were, didn’t you?”

  “The victims?”

  “You used the term ‘exterminate a labor camp’—”

  “This was—”

  “Let me finish,” Stutman said. “Who were in the labor camps, Mr. Reimer?”

  It was a rhetorical question and Stutman went on. “Now, in your testimony in this court, you stated that you missed the first volley because when leaving the shack behind your men, you stumbled and fell on your head and was knocked out.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Now, of course, we have just established that in 1992, you gave a different version or different reason for missing the first volley, am I right?”

  “I said I overslept.…That’s, of course, totally ridiculous.”

  Stutman motioned to Chubin, who turned on the recorder again to play another excerpt from Rosenbaum’s interview with Reimer.

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

  “Yes.”

  “You finished him off.”

  “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.”

  The courtroom was still. “You and your other Trawniki men fired the last volley, is that correct?” Stutman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s when the man who was pointing to his head was actually finished off?”

  “Not by me.”

  “I didn’t say by you. I said, ‘And that’s when the man who was pointing to his head was actually finished off?’”

  “Yes, right. That’s my impression. I think that’s the way it was.”

  Later, on the witness stand, Reimer started coughing.

  “Are you okay?” Stutman asked. “Would you like to call it a day, Mr. Reimer?”

  “Well, no,” Reimer replied. “I wish you would finish the subject already.”

  DURING A BREAK, Suzanne Stutman pulled her husband into an empty corner in the back of the courtroom and touched his hand. After twenty-five years of marriage, she knew exactly what he was feeling and wasn’t the least bit surprised when he whispered, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I okay?”

  “Rakhmones,” he said, using the Yiddish word for compassion.

  Reimer was a Nazi collaborator and quite possibly a murderer, but he was also a husband, father, and grandfather. His life, in many ways, had also been tragic.

  “You know he’s an old man,” Suzanne said gently. “But the work that you’re doing is so important.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Ramsey Clark had one final chance to make his case. “Were you ever a Nazi?” he asked Reimer.

  “Absolutely not. I just can’t stand that when they call me that because as soon as I had a chance, I got out of there.”

  “Have you ever opposed the United States at any time in any way?”

  “No way.”

  “In your heart or by your deeds, by your acts?”

  “No. I have always been proud and honored to be a citizen of this country.”

  “Have you been chased and harassed by the press and media?”

  “Constantly.”

  “In the several weeks you have been in the courthouse here, have people said mean and terrible things to you?”

  “Yes, but they don’t really know that I was not involved. I don’t hold it against them. I understand their anger, but—”

  “Has the press literally chased you down the street with cameras?”

  “Yes. Yes, Mr. Clark.”

  “Now, Mr. Reimer, my question to you is how do you answer those people and what do you want to say to them?”

  “I have been saying this to Mr. Stutman. I got out of it before it even started. So actually, I did something about it. I should be praised to get out of it before it even started.”

  “What would you say to them about how you feel about them?”

  Reimer paused and then wrapped up the end of the twelve-day hearing. “I pray for everybody that prosecutes me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Second Chances

  Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, Ohio

  2001

  Three years had passed without a ruling in the Jakob Reimer case, a preposterously quiet stretch of weeks and months that would have brought on moments of deep despair if there were no other cases to consume Eli Rosenbaum and the staff of the Office of Special Investigations. From the rosters in Prague and Moscow, the historians had discovered more Trawniki men living in Connecticut, Utah, Philadelphia, the suburbs of New York.

  Growing old in America, Rosenbaum often brooded, alongside Holocaust survivors and war veterans.

  Though OSI had opened more than fourteen hundred investigations of Nazi perpetrators by 2001, time had always been the enemy of the unit, the slow churn of the judicial system as great an obstacle as the savviest defense attorney. But the delay in the Reimer case was unprecedented, and every day without a ruling fed a mounting fear at OSI that the judge was simply biding his time to allow Reimer a graceful exit, an untroubled death in his home in New York.

  It was a terrible thought, Rosenbaum decided, a backhanded slap to all those who had survived the war. What if the O. J. Simpson jury had been out for a year? Surely the American public would have demanded answers. Rosenbaum couldn’t shake the thought, but of course he had been the one to look Reimer in the eyes when Reimer confessed to the shooting at the ravine. After reading the eyewitness statements—“fear-crazed” people forced into the pit with rifle butts—Rosenbaum had imagined Reimer’s pleasant face filled with rage in the shadows of Poland’s Krepiec Forest.

  Rosenbaum would never become a rich man on a government salary, but justice was a righteous payout. He needed that in the Reimer case, if only for the dying man in the pit who had pointed to his head during the massacre, inviting one last shot to end the misery.

  “It seems that there is always some crime, some image, perhaps from our latest case,” Rosenbaum had told a Jewish congregation in Richmond, Virginia, just before the start of the Reimer hearing, “that won’t let go of us.”

  At least OSI was moving forward, about to take to trial a new case against its most notorious defendant, John Demjanjuk. It would be a high-profile, controversial affair after all that had gone wrong over twenty years of litigation.

  In 1993, after newly discovered Soviet records made clear that Demjanjuk could not have been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, the Israeli Supreme Court had overturned his conviction and death sentence. Though the court found that Demjanjuk had been a guard at the Sobibor killing center, prosecutors declined to take further action. Demjanjuk was freed after five years on death row.

  That same year, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati had lambasted OSI for its handling of the case, pointing out that the original attorneys had had evidence that cast doubt on whether Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible but failed to share documents with the defense team. “Prosecutorial misconduct,” a three-judge panel had bluntly declared.

  The court ordered Attorney General Janet Reno not to block Demjanjuk’s return to the United States. Demjanjuk flew back to Ohio and in 1998 successfully petitioned a federal judge in Cleveland to restore his US citizenship.<
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  Rosenbaum had not been part of the first, tangled denaturalization case against Demjanjuk, which had been launched long before Western historians had proper access to archives behind the Iron Curtain. Armed with hundreds of newly discovered documents, Rosenbaum knew without a doubt that Demjanjuk had trained at Trawniki and gone on to guard the doomed Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor killing center and at the Majdanek and Flossenbürg concentration camps.

  Launching a new case against Demjanjuk would surely bring renewed attention to OSI and require a long legal slog through the federal courts. And it was entirely possible that Demjanjuk would die on US soil before he was ever stripped of his citizenship for a second time. But OSI, Rosenbaum knew, had all the evidence it needed to take the case back to court, and he had gone to the Justice Department’s criminal division for permission to move forward.

  Rosenbaum had been sitting at his desk one fall afternoon in 1998 a few weeks after the Jakob Reimer trial in New York, when a longtime deputy assistant attorney general called with an urgent request.

  “We have to present to Janet Reno,” he told Rosenbaum. “An hour from now.”

  Rosenbaum looked at his watch. It was an unscheduled meeting, called to reassure the attorney general that there would be no unwelcome surprises if OSI pursued Demjanjuk a second time. Rosenbaum mumbled something close to yes and hung up.

  He phoned Patty Stemler, a senior lawyer at the Justice Department and head of the criminal division’s appellate section. She often worked directly with the attorney general, whom Rosenbaum had scarcely met. Rosenbaum explained quickly.

  “Who should make the presentation?” he asked, hoping Stemler would volunteer.

  “I think it should be you.”

  Oh my, Rosenbaum thought, knowing that Reno demanded absolute precision, regularly challenging her staff to be sure that every case was built on solid legal ground. Rosenbaum couldn’t say he blamed Reno for wanting to sign off on the Demjanjuk case. After the media criticism and the thrashing from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Rosenbaum for the first time in his legal career had taken to hedging when strangers asked what he did for a living. “I’m a federal prosecutor,” he’d usually say, and leave it at that.

  Rosenbaum thanked Stemler and hung up. An hour later, he slipped inside the executive suite at the Justice Department. He was seated at a conference table across from the attorney general, who was flanked by senior officials from the criminal division.

  Reno appeared calm behind thick, oversized eyeglasses, but Rosenbaum was keenly aware that the country’s first female attorney general had been threatened with contempt by Republican members of Congress for refusing to turn over two internal Justice Department memos during the impeachment hearings of her boss, President Bill Clinton. Reno, fiercely independent, had made a point to never let politics sway decision making at the Justice Department.

  Reno’s team had already read OSI’s summary of the Demjanjuk case. Is the evidence solid? Rosenbaum said that it was. OSI had Demjanjuk’s Trawniki identification card, his personnel file, and dozens of other records, including rosters that detailed his deployments to Sobibor and Majdanek.

  Rosenbaum recounted the facts and arguments, how Demjanjuk had lied about his Nazi service and then sailed into New York City aboard the USS General W. G. Haan in 1952. Six years later, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He had enjoyed a decent life, with union pay and family.

  Reno listened quietly and finally nodded. “You can file the case.”

  OSI was being given one last chance to set the record straight. Rosenbaum had thanked Reno and her staff and hurried back to the office. He found Ned Stutman and OSI attorney Jonathan Drimmer, who would work with Stutman on the case. Rosenbaum pulled in Barry White, who had become OSI’s chief historian, and Todd Huebner, the historian who would take the lead on the case.

  “Janet Reno says we can file,” Rosenbaum said.

  Just after the 1998 Jakob Reimer hearing, syndicated columnist George F. Will had penned a piece published in the Washington Post. Rosenbaum had read it often, practically memorizing key passages. As OSI scrambled to prepare for the second Demjanjuk trial in the early months of 2001, Rosenbaum thought of Will’s words once again.

  “The unspeakable was done by the unremarkable,” Will had written, “and it speaks well of American justice that it will not close the books on bestiality until the last participant has felt a frisson of fear and is routed from the land of the free.”

  GIVEN THE SIGNIFICANCE of the case against John Demjanjuk, the first day of the hearing in Cleveland in May 2001 was bound to be tense. The prosecution had once again made international news, OSI’s reputation was on the line, and the fate of a man accused of helping the SS slaughter thousands of Jews would be put before a federal judge in the United States for a second time.

  Still, OSI attorney Jonathan Drimmer chuckled under his breath as he walked into the courtroom and saw several thick World War II books prominently propped up on the defense table for good showing. He glanced at Demjanjuk’s lawyer, Michael Tigar, whose silver and turquoise belt buckle glinted in the morning sun. The veteran criminal defense attorney, once compared by his peers to Clarence Darrow and Thurgood Marshall, had earned a reputation for enjoying a flair for the dramatic in the courtroom.

  Later, to needle the defense team, Drimmer would make a good show of laying down The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World War II on his own table in the courtroom. It wasn’t exactly a legal strategy that he had picked up at law school at UCLA or during a stint at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, but it was too delicious a move for second thoughts.

  Drimmer had been twenty-nine when he joined OSI, just before the Jakob Reimer case went to court. He had spent hours with Ned Stutman, Peter Black, and historian Todd Huebner, learning about the operation at Trawniki. Stutman, Drimmer realized early on, had learned to press defendants for details about their whereabouts during the war, knowing that the historians could rebut lies with facts and context.

  “These guys know their stories,” Stutman often said about OSI suspects, “but they don’t know history.”

  Drimmer was moved by his new colleagues. He had found Black profoundly patient, an educator as much as a historian. For all his time at OSI, digging into some of the darkest moments in history, Black still managed to laugh every time Stutman, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, mispronounced a Polish name.

  “Kozowka?” Black would say, chuckling, his glasses bouncing off the tip of his nose. “Ko-zow-ski.”

  At home, Drimmer knew, Black and his wife, Mary, were caring for Aaron, who on one afternoon had slipped away from his school, walked into an unlocked house a few blocks away, pulled food from the refrigerator, and started to eat. The homeowner called the police, and one of the officers had pepper sprayed Aaron and tackled him to the ground. Black and Mary rushed to retrieve their son, whose eyes were red and wrists were bruised from handcuffs.

  Drimmer had come to know Stutman too, particularly on a trip to Ukraine, where they toured an ancient synagogue that the Nazis had used as a stable for horses during the war. Later, the building was turned into a public theater.

  “All these amazing restored churches,” Stutman had remarked, gazing at the Star of David that still hung above the building’s stained-glass windows, “and with these old synagogues, they don’t give a shit.”

  The moment had helped Drimmer understand Trawniki, how the Germans had leveraged generations of antisemitism in eastern Europe to turn men like Reimer and Demjanjuk into loyal collaborators.

  To prosecute Demjanjuk, OSI would present seven German documents showing that he had been sent from the Trawniki training camp to Sobibor, Majdanek, and the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The records included a photo, a signature, a date and place of birth, and a physical description of Demjanjuk, who bore scars on his left arm and his back and had a tattoo listing his blood type, a product of SS service.

  OSI also had Demjanjuk’s ori
ginal Trawniki identification card, which had been returned by the Israelis. Eli Rosenbaum had picked it up in Tel Aviv and placed it in a waterproof container inside his briefcase. On the long flight home, he opted not to use the restroom because he didn’t want to leave his briefcase unattended above the seat. So much had already gone awry in the case over so many years. Rosenbaum decided to leave no room for another mishap.

  Though no survivors would be put on the witness stand in court, Stutman and Drimmer wanted to share small, humane details about suffering and loss, not for dramatic effect but because the awful story of John Demjanjuk could not be told by dates, documents, and deployments alone. Only six Sobibor survivors were still living in the United States, and Drimmer had gone to see each one, traveling to Ohio, Connecticut, California, New York, and New Jersey.

  On the first day of the Demjanjuk hearing, the air inside the Cleveland courtroom felt chilly. Drimmer sat next to Stutman, behind stacks of records gathered by the historians.

  When Rosenbaum reopened the case against Demjanjuk, the editorial board at the Washington Post had called the move “correct, even courageous.” But Drimmer couldn’t know for sure how the judge might ultimately rule.

  Drimmer looked for eighty-one-year-old Demjanjuk, a large man with a spit of white hair who had been rumored to need extra-large handcuffs while on trial in Israel. But only his son and son-in-law sat at the defense table alongside Tigar. Drimmer assumed that Demjanjuk was waiting at home in the suburbs of Cleveland.

  Drimmer was eager to hear from Demjanjuk’s lawyer, who had defended Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols after he was charged with helping to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing more than 160 people and injuring 680 others. In court, Michael Tigar would argue that OSI had it wrong again, a second case of mistaken identity, and that Demjanjuk had never been at Trawniki.

  Just before eleven a.m., federal judge Paul Matia surveyed the packed courtroom. He was familiar with the case, Drimmer knew, since Matia had been the one to restore Demjanjuk’s citizenship three years earlier after he had returned from Israel.