[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  “Good morning, Your Honor,” Stutman said, rising. “We have come here with one purpose, to revoke the defendant’s citizenship. Our burden in doing so is heavy, as it should be. Your Honor, this is a case of maximum contradiction regarding history. Either the government’s history is right or the defendant’s is. We believe that the seven naming documents and wartime documents like them are the very foundation of history itself, and they clearly and unequivocally show that [the] defendant was a Nazi guard during World War II and that his version of events is simply not true.”

  Tigar quickly shot back. “The government once again has got it wrong.”

  IT WAS AN exhausting first day in Cleveland, and when Stutman asked Drimmer to come to his hotel room after court, Drimmer braced for another long night of strategizing. Drimmer smiled when he spotted a photograph of Stutman’s wife, Suzanne, propped on the nightstand by the bed.

  Drimmer half expected the older lawyer to offer some uncanny quip about the day in court, a joke to lighten the mood. For years, Stutman had performed a stand-up comedy act in the nightclubs of Washington, spinning tales about family and fatherhood. “I take humor very seriously,” he often said.

  But now Stutman’s face was ashen.

  “I need to fly home.”

  Drimmer shook his head, unsure if he was hearing clearly.

  “The test results came in,” Stutman went on, “and it’s bad.”

  Drimmer struggled to manage his thoughts. As the OSI legal team prepared for the hearing, Stutman had complained that he couldn’t run as far on his daily workouts, that his legs felt like cement. His focus was off, foggy somehow. “I’m really having to dig in,” he had told Drimmer.

  “It happens to everybody who works in this office,” Drimmer had answered, grinning at his exhausted colleague, who, at fifty-five, had started working nights and weekends to make final preparations for trial.

  In meetings, Stutman had begun eating jelly doughnuts. “I’m having problems keeping weight on,” he explained, and again Drimmer brushed aside the comment, figuring that stress had caused the weight loss.

  Looking at Stutman in the hotel room, Drimmer could finally see it, the way Stutman’s suit sagged on his hips, the gauntness around his eyes and cheekbones. Later, Drimmer would learn that a doctor had called only moments before the start of the Demjanjuk hearing with news that Stutman had a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There was no known cure.

  Stutman had hung up the phone and gone on to deliver his opening statement in court. He had talked for hours without letting on that he had just been told he likely had six months to live.

  “I conducted that inquiry seated. I apologize,” Stutman said to the judge at one point after posing a long series of questions to an expert in forensic document examination. “Would Your Honor prefer me to stand at the podium?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” the judge had replied. “We are going to be here for quite a while.”

  Looking at Stutman, Drimmer felt helpless. “I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

  Stutman paused, as if he was about to say something more. Instead, he just nodded. “You should keep going. You’ve got this case. You should keep going.”

  Stutman was the team’s lead attorney, but Drimmer knew the material, the witnesses, the history.

  “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  The following morning, Stutman flew home to prepare for an experimental course of cancer treatment at a medical center in Houston. Drimmer asked for a meeting with the judge and Tigar, whose face softened when Drimmer explained.

  Tigar asked whether Drimmer wanted to postpone the hearing. Drimmer thought of his friend and colleague, who had always said that life doesn’t move in a straight line.

  “No,” Drimmer said. “We’re ready to go.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Credible Evidence

  Washington, D.C.

  2002

  Five months after Osama bin Laden’s terror network struck New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, Eli Rosenbaum sat alone in his corner office three blocks from the White House. The space was packed tight with history books, legal folders, and notepads that Rosenbaum kept around to scribble random thoughts about upcoming speeches and cases.

  Taxis sped down 13th Street, which connected Washington’s business district to the sprawling federal office buildings along Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues. Commuters hurried to work, bundled up from the February wind. Official Washington and much of the Justice Department was focused on bin Laden, the extraordinary destruction on American soil, and what had come to be called the “War on Terror.”

  It had occurred to Rosenbaum when the Twin Towers fell in a plume of smoke and flames that he had spent his entire adult life immersed in the worst behaviors of mankind, violence that had caused so much misery, so much loss. Michael Bernstein, gone in a flash of fire over the skies of Scotland.

  Rosenbaum kept a framed photo on his desk, a picture of a billboard that John Lennon and Yoko Ono put up in cities around the world in December 1969 as the Vietnam War raged. “War is Over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”

  For all the scrambling around him, Rosenbaum’s office was quiet. He sat perfectly still in the silence, eyes fixed on his computer screen.

  Eight months after the hearing in Cleveland, Trawniki man John Demjanjuk had been stripped of his US citizenship for the second time. Federal judge Paul Matia had called the government’s evidence “devastating.”

  Although the defendant claims he was not at the camps indicated by the documentary evidence, he has not given the court any credible evidence of where he was during most of World War II. The government had the burden of proving its contention to the court by clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence. It did so.

  Rosenbaum thought about the killing center Sobibor, a place that he knew had been something close to hell, encased by barbed wire and rigged with land minds. Only about 50 of more than 165,000 prisoners had survived to describe it, and their stories—trainloads of men, women, and children driven into gas chambers within moments of their arrival and suffocated with carbon monoxide—had defied imagination.

  A celebration of the Demjanjuk decision would be wholly inappropriate.

  Instead, Rosenbaum reached for the phone. He called a Sobibor survivor in New Jersey, whose parents had been stripped naked and forced into the gas chambers by Trawniki guards with whips and rifle butts. “We won,” Rosenbaum said gently, thanking the man for being willing to testify.

  Rosenbaum told historians Todd Huebner and Barry White, who had worked on a 176-page report about Demjanjuk and the men of Trawniki that expert witness Charlie Sydnor had provided to the court.

  Trawniki became the training ground, command center, and supply depot for this force, whose members participated directly in the implementation of virtually every aspect of Operation Reinhard. One of these auxiliaries was a young Ukrainian.…Demjanjuk entered German service at Trawniki in mid-1942, beginning a career that would take him to the depths of the Nazi abyss.

  Rosenbaum called Peter Black and Ned Stutman, grateful to have something good to share with a man who was promising to return as a lucky redbird after he died so that his grandson could one day sit by a bird feeder and say, “Hi Poppop.”

  There was silence on the line after Rosenbaum delivered the news of the judge’s decision, and he knew that Stutman was crying.

  It was a significant victory, even after the embarrassment of the first failed case, and at a press conference later that morning, Rosenbaum peered into a bank of television cameras. He thanked Stutman, the historians, and Jonathan Drimmer, who had stepped into the role of lead trial attorney when Stutman fell ill.

  Already, Demjanjuk’s lawyer was vowing to appeal, and Drimmer was preparing arguments for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that had criticized OSI for withholding evidence in the first case.

  With an
y luck, Demjanjuk would be ordered deported and sent to Ukraine or Germany. But there was no telling how long the case might linger before that happened. Demjanjuk, Rosenbaum knew, might live a good long while on US soil.

  And yet, the man was no longer an American citizen, his role in the mass murder of Jews finally, officially, correctly confirmed by a federal court.

  “Our efforts,” Rosenbaum said at the press conference, “were inspired by the courage of the survivors who, in recounting for us their nightmarish experiences of more than a half a century ago, were willing to reopen psychic wounds that of course have never fully healed in order to help us ensure that justice is done on behalf of those who perished.… They should never have been forced to share their adopted homeland with John Demjanjuk.”

  PETER BLACK WOULD never know exactly what happened over four days in September 2002, seven months after Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship. Eli Rosenbaum had complained to a friend about the interminable delay in the Jakob Reimer case, and the friend had placed a discreet phone call to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

  And then, suddenly, four years after the hearing in federal court and fifty years after Reimer had settled in New York, Black received news of a decision.

  Federal judge Lawrence McKenna had ruled for the government, stripping Reimer of his citizenship. It seemed a reluctant decision, a half-hearted parsing of facts and arguments rather than an angry denouncement of Reimer’s role in the destruction of Polish Jews.

  The judge had placed “little weight” on Reimer’s initial confession about the ravine shooting, but Reimer had been armed during a mass shooting and had repeated in court his admission that he fired his gun while at least one victim was still alive. As a member of Trawniki, he had “logistically supported” SS personnel during the busiest, most violent months of the Holocaust.

  Reimer had thirty days to turn in his passport.

  At OSI, Rosenbaum got Ned Stutman and historian David Rich on the line, then called Charlie Sydnor. “Judge McKenna has ruled in favor of the government,” Rosenbaum declared.

  In New York, US Attorney James Comey, who would go on to become the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the New York Times, “Reimer’s presence in the United States is an affront to all those killed in the Holocaust.”

  After nearly six decades, Black reasoned, a full accounting of the operation at Trawniki was now part of the official public record, memorialized by a federal court. Above all else, Black was relieved.

  Unlike nearly every other Trawniki man found on American soil, Reimer had never served in a labor camp or killing center. But his participation in at least one mass shooting and in the liquidation of Jewish ghettos had been enough, and the win would surely allow OSI to more easily prosecute others.

  In Sutton, Massachusetts, Trawniki man Vladas Zajanckauskas, who had penned a journal he called “My Bits of Life in this Beautiful World,” was insisting that he had played no part in the murder of Polish Jews.

  In Queens, New York, Trawniki man Jakiw Palij was fighting to stay in the United States even though OSI had found that he guarded Jewish prisoners in the months before they were shot at Trawniki during Operation Harvest Festival.

  Finally, Black decided with a discreet measure of satisfaction, the record of history was complete, with a detailed and somber roadmap of the past that might one day deter others from acting on such inhumane instincts. Jakob Reimer, for all his proclamations, had been brought to justice, and though time was surely the enemy of OSI, it had not won out.

  Not yet anyway.

  Reimer would appeal the ruling. But as Black read the judge’s decision, even rhetoric from Reimer’s defense lawyer wasn’t particularly troublesome.

  “To me, among those who’ve survived,” Ramsey Clark had declared of his client, “he’s one of the greater victims of World War II.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Trawniki

  Trawniki, Poland

  2013

  The barracks that once housed five thousand men had long been abandoned, the site of the forced-labor camp for Jews replaced by a grassy field. Still, the Polish village of Trawniki seemed familiar, and despite the unusual warmth of the October sun, sixty-two-year-old Peter Black shivered.

  He had set out in the morning, walking among the birch trees that grew in the backyard of his hotel. Both perpetrators and victims had described birch trees at shooting sites, and Black paused, taking in the landscape.

  He walked along the old railroad tracks that had delivered Trawniki men to ghettos and killing centers across occupied Poland. He walked past buildings adjacent to the former training camp, near the spot where the SS and police had shot to death as many as six thousand Jewish prisoners during Operation Harvest Festival in 1943.

  Everywhere Black went, it seemed as if he were standing on the bodies of the dead.

  He had traveled to Trawniki to address an international group of historians and prosecutors who had come together, nearly seventy years after the war’s end, to talk about the operation at the training camp.

  “To manage the murder of two million Jews believed to be residing in the Government General, the Nazis in Lublin needed a reliable, available and ruthlessly led police auxiliary force,” Black told the group. “Trawniki Training Camp provided this resource. The Trawniki men not only served as the foot soldiers of the final solution in the Government General but also represented a workable model for the enforcers of the future in the grim world the Nazis intended to construct.”

  The Office of Special Investigations had identified nearly forty-five hundred of the roughly fifty-one hundred men who had trained at Trawniki. As he walked through the village for the first time since he had started his research years earlier, Black thought of Jakob Reimer.

  As promised, Reimer had appealed the court’s denaturalization ruling, but in January 2004 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld the decision to revoke his citizenship. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who would later accept a seat on the US Supreme Court, had penned the ruling:

  Perhaps most damning to Reimer’s argument…is that on at least one occasion he stood, armed, at the edge of a pit into which people—some alive and others dead—had been thrown. When one of the men who lay in the pit moved slightly, Reimer was ordered to fire. He did.

  Reimer had agreed to leave for Germany, but German officials turned him away. Eli Rosenbaum had been so frustrated by Germany’s refusal to take back Nazi criminals ordered deported by US immigration judges that he later went to Germany and, in a speech to scholars and prosecutors, pleaded for help.

  “The nonacceptance of what to us is a clear moral obligation is a great disappointment,” Rosenbaum declared. “If Germany does not act to admit these men…they will likely get to spend the rest of their lives in my country, which is the adopted homeland of so many thousands of Holocaust survivors and is a country whose families sacrificed 200,000 of their sons in order to bring to an end the nightmare of Nazi inhumanity in Europe.”

  Jakob Reimer would die in Pennsylvania in August 2005 before the Office of Special Investigations and the US State Department could find a country willing to take him.

  To Black, a more profound tragedy would come one month later, when Ned Stutman died just after his sixtieth birthday. Black missed his old friend, who had come back to work for a stretch when the cancer was in remission. Stutman had been thinner, but his graying hair had started to grow back. “Like the cherry blossoms on the Tidal Basin in Washington,” he had said, grinning.

  Jews, Stutman explained to friends and colleagues, didn’t believe in asking God for miracles. But he figured that God could certainly decide on his own accord to permanently rid Stutman’s body of cancer. Wishful thinking or not, Stutman had thrown a party to celebrate his improving health, passing out bagels and baseball caps to thank friends who had sent hats when chemotherapy had cost Stutman his hair.

  But there would be no miracle. He would write that
his immune system had likely been weakened by his work—“a steady diet of Holocaust horror and sorrow and the emotion that came from recreating it.”

  From a bed in Georgetown University Hospital, Stutman had given his son-in-law a proposed headline for an obituary: “Justice Department Lawyer, Humorist.”

  Just before his lungs filled up with water and he started to hallucinate, Stutman kissed his wife and children good-bye. It was a mitah yafah, Suzanne Stutman said afterward. A good death.

  And when a cardinal built a nest right outside their daughter’s house in Philadelphia a few months later, no one was much surprised.

  Stutman had litigated thirteen cases at OSI and won twelve of them. Black wished that Stutman had lived long enough to see John Demjanjuk sent back to Germany in 2009, where he was convicted as an accessory to the murder of more than twenty-eight thousand people while he had been a guard at Sobibor between late March and early August 1943. Demjanjuk died while the case was on appeal.

  Alone in Trawniki, Black stood on the grounds of the sugar factory, with its towering smokestack and old bricks that had turned a dull shade of white. He could see no visible signs of a training camp for murder, only a small memorial down the street with a few trees and a slab of marble.

  Black lingered for a long while, thinking of Reimer, Demjanjuk, so many others. The Trawniki rosters discovered in Prague, and the research that came afterward, helped OSI successfully prosecute thirteen Trawniki men in the United States. Standing in front of the place where they had been armed and trained to kill, Black had a single thought.

  The dead never knew their names.