The Nazis Next Door (34 page)

Buchanan was a natural ally for the Alabama scientists, with his public attacks on the Nazi office filling the opinion pages of newspapers nationwide. The Nazi hunters and Soviet intelligence officials had reached “a devil’s bargain” to go after wrongly accused men, he charged, and the Americans they accused were left “undefended” and presumed guilty. Testimony from witnesses who survived the Nazis was deeply suspect, with “a Holocaust survivor syndrome” leading to “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics,” he said. Carbon monoxide from diesel engines at the concentration camps could not have actually killed prisoners in the way that historians said. And Hitler himself, for all his faults, was “an individual of great courage,”
Buchanan wrote.

To Buchanan’s opponents, his attacks on the Justice Department smacked of Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitism. “Why is Pat Buchanan so in love with Nazi war criminals?” Allan Ryan asked. The
New York Post
, one of the biggest outlets for Buchanan’s opinion pieces, questioned its star columnist’s “attitude toward Jews as a group,” and said his writing “betrays an all-too-familiar hostility”
toward Jews. But for Buchanan, the attacks only seemed to energize him.   

At the height of the tensions, Sher, an occasional target of Buchanan’s barbs, was attending an engagement party
thrown by talk show host Larry King at a famous Washington eatery when he saw that Buchanan was also among the guests. Sher’s boss, Mark Richard, sensed trouble brewing. “Stay away from Buchanan,” he advised. His mother would have said the same thing, Sher decided. Then he thought about what his late father would have told him:
Go tell the sonofabitch off
. So he did.

Sher walked across the room and introduced himself to the man who had so often denounced the “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. “We’ve never met,” he said, “but you’ve written about me.” The things that Buchanan had been saying about the government’s Nazi investigations were unfair, misguided, and damaging, Sher charged. “I don’t understand you people,” Buchanan retorted. “Why don’t you want to debate these things?” Back and forth they went, discussing long-ago Nazis and current-day Americans. Sher tried to hold his temper. But when Buchanan began arguing that Treblinka was not in fact a death camp, but a “transit camp” used as a pass-through point for prisoners, Sher had heard enough. Some nine hundred thousand Jews had died at Treblinka, but to Pat Buchanan, Holocaust revisionist, it was only a deportation point, Sher thought to himself. “You’re kidding me!” he yelled. Then he walked away. He knew he would never persuade Buchanan, but at least he’d had his say. His father would have approved.

As divisive as many of the Justice Department’s Nazi investigations had become, none would raise quite so many vexing moral questions as the case of Jacob Tannenbaum, a Brooklyn man who was both a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and, in Sher’s view, one of its perpetrators.

In many ways, the horror of Jacob Tannenbaum’s life story read no differently than those of hundreds of thousands of other survivors. Born in Poland, Tannenbaum lost virtually his entire family to the Nazis. His wife, their six-month-old daughter, and five of his siblings were all killed. Tannenbaum himself was imprisoned in a string of concentration camps and wound up at the Görlitz camp in eastern Germany.

At Görlitz, however, Tannenbaum’s path veered away from that of the typical survivor. He was made the chief
kapo
, or overseer, taking charge of other Jewish prisoners as they were forced to build military parts and machinery for the Nazis. He got the job, he said, because he was “tall and presentable,” and he spoke a little German; the SS looked for men like him—and even some women—to help run the camps. As chief kapo, Tannenbaum had his own room, he got to wear a civilian jacket instead of the prisoner uniform, and he was allowed to go into town on his own for supplies.

The SS entrusted hundreds of functionaries like Tannenbaum with keeping order over the other camp prisoners. But Tannenbaum was not like other kapos, his fellow survivors said. He was brutal—more brutal, in fact, than even the SS officers who ran the camp at Görlitz, they said. He was not a man of mercy, but of rage. Tannenbaum was notorious
for beating prisoners even when the SS officers weren’t watching, and he seemed to thrive on the power the Nazis had given him. Stories about his collaboration with the Nazis were legion. Once, he reported two hungry prisoners to the SS after he caught them rifling through a pigsty in search of food. They were quickly executed.

Tannenbaum came to America in 1950 and settled in Brooklyn, starting a second family and working in the dairy industry inspecting eggs. He mentioned nothing to U.S. immigration officials about serving as a kapo in the war. But decades later, a Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn recognized him as the brutal henchman of Görlitz and reported him to the INS.

The case, like so many others, sat dormant for years. Prosecutors were reluctant to touch it. Walter Rockler, the former Nuremberg prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s new Nazi-hunting unit at its inception in 1979, inherited the investigation and thought the idea of prosecuting a Jewish kapo was pure insanity; the kapos might not have been the most likable people, but they were prisoners and victims themselves, he believed, and they did what they had to do to stay alive. They were the last group
that Rockler wanted his Justice Department lawyers to be targeting.

But when Sher became chief of the Nazi office four years later, he took a very different view of Tannenbaum. He was particularly swayed by the testimony of more than three dozen survivors who knew of Tannenbaum’s particularly cruel brand of camp administration. Virtually every survivor contacted by the Justice Department about Tannenbaum wanted to see him prosecuted and deported. Their emotions were still raw four decades later. Some said they still had nightmares about him. “He’s still alive?” one survivor asked. “Give me his address,
and you won’t have to worry about him.” He was no better than the Nazis themselves, several said. What set Tannenbaum apart from the other kapos, Sher believed, was the testimony that he routinely beat Jewish prisoners even when the SS officers were
not
watching. He was not simply saving his own skin or following orders, and the whippings were not just for show to satisfy those in charge. He was a sadist,
Sher believed.

Sher knew that the prosecution of a Jewish kapo would be controversial, so he decided to handle the case himself. The investigation was a secret even within the office, in fact. If there was fallout, Sher wanted it to land on him. He interviewed Tannenbaum personally. Sher was an intense interrogator. Once, he was so confrontational in questioning an immigrant in New York accused of helping to wipe out the Warsaw ghetto—“You must really think we’re stupid,” Sher told him angrily when the man denied involvement—that the judge threw out much of the testimony. Sher was not going to go easy on Tannenbaum. Over three days of interviews, the two sparred over what Tannenbaum was forced to do at the concentration camp, and what he
chose
to do. He had served as kapo only to save his own life, Tannenbaum insisted, and he had spared the lives of prisoners who were destined to be killed otherwise. Sher wasn’t buying it, and he let Tannenbaum know it. The interrogation was so contentious that, at the start of the third day, Tannenbaum slumped down in his chair and had to be taken to the hospital, where he remained for nearly three weeks being treated for heart problems.

When word surfaced in May 1987 that the Justice Department was bringing a denaturalization case against Tannenbaum, a Holocaust survivor and Jewish kapo, it proved polarizing from the start. Tannenbaum cut a sympathetic figure in many ways. At seventy-two, he was a man who had worked hard in America and never caused any trouble, his friends and neighbors all said. He had lost his family to the Nazis and survived the Holocaust. He was a deeply religious man, an Orthodox Jew who regularly helped make up the minyan of ten men needed to begin prayer at his Brighton Beach synagogue. He had lit a candle at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony, and he gave money to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Was this really the kind of man the Justice Department was going to throw out of the country?

Rockler, the former director of the Nazi office, was so incensed that he offered to defend Tannenbaum pro bono.
He wrote in protest to Sher, a lawyer he’d always liked when he was his boss at the Justice Department. “I regard such a suit as more than a little dubious as a matter of law,” Rockler wrote to Sher, “and improper, if not outrageous,
as a matter of policy.”

Sher pressed on anyway. Ultimately, he and Tannenbaum’s lawyers reached a deal: the ex-kapo agreed to give up his American citizenship and admitted to “brutalizing and physically abusing prisoners outside the presence of German SS personnel.” The admission of brutality and abuse was pivotal to Sher; he wanted it made clear
that Tannenbaum was no “ordinary” kapo. In exchange for his admissions, the Justice Department allowed Tannenbaum to stay
in the United States indefinitely because of his poor health. It was a compromise that left people on both sides of the case wrestling with their own notions of right and wrong. Even the judge, a war veteran who had been at Dachau after its liberation, was torn by the ethical complexities. “I dreaded the day
when this case was to come to trial,” he said. “I have often wondered how much moral and physical courage we have a right to demand or expect of somebody in the position of Mr. Tannenbaum . . . I sometimes wonder whether I might have passed that test.”

For the survivors of Görlitz, the claims of moral dilemmas rang false. To them, there was nothing complicated about Tannenbaum’s situation: he was a brutal Nazi collaborator, no matter what God he claimed, and he was lucky to get off with the deal that he did, they said. They wanted vengeance for Tannenbaum, not compassion or understanding. “Is this all he is getting, for what he did?” one former prisoner at Görlitz asked. Declared another survivor: “I would have hanged him with my own hands.”

13

Ivan the Terrible

November 17, 1993

SIXTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS, CINCINNATI, OHIO

For all the attacks that Pat Buchanan waged against them, the most damaging blow the Nazi hunters at the Justice Department would ever suffer was self-inflicted. The deep wounds it left would remain raw for years, after an ex-Nazi camp guard living outside Cleveland was nearly executed in 1993 for another man’s barbaric war crimes.

It all began with a seeming stroke of luck sixteen years earlier, in 1977, with a photo lineup at a warehouse outside Tel Aviv. An Israeli war crimes investigator
was showing a Holocaust survivor named Eliyahu Rosenberg a photo album filled with snapshots of middle-aged men in suits and ties. Rosenberg, a warehouse manager, had escaped from the death camp at Treblinka thirty-four years earlier; the ghastly images of the place still haunted him. American prosecutors were hoping Rosenberg might be able to pick out the photo of a Connecticut factory worker, Feodor Fedorenko, who they knew had worked as a low-level Nazi guard at Treblinka. They knew that a solid eyewitness identification from a Treblinka survivor could make their case.

The warehouse manager leafed through the pages of the album. There were seventeen photos in all. Did he recognize anyone, the investigator asked? On the third page, Rosenberg stopped at the very last photo. Yes, that man looks very familiar, Rosenberg said. He didn’t remember his name, but he was a guard at Treblinka, he said. Just as prosecutors had hoped, the photo he picked was Feodor Fedorenko’s.

Then Rosenberg’s gaze turned back to the photo just before Fedorenko’s—photo 16. It was an intimidating-looking man with short hair, large ears, and a steely gaze. Rosenberg seemed paralyzed by the image staring back at him from the page. This man had been at Treblinka, too, Rosenberg told the interviewer, his tone disbelieving. His name was Ivan, and he was not just any guard. He worked the gas chamber. He was a monster, Rosenberg said; a man so feared and reviled he had acquired his own grim sobriquet. This was the man, Rosenberg said.
This was Ivan the Terrible
.

There must be a mistake, the interviewer told him. Investigators thought the man in photo 16 might have been at another camp in Poland—at Sobibor—but not Treblinka. This man had never worked there, the interviewer said.

No, it was him, Rosenberg repeated. The man in the photo was Ivan the Terrible. Rosenberg was made to work every day just a few yards from him at the gas chamber, he said. He could never forget that face.

So began a torturous, thirty-five-year legal odyssey that would set off bitter battles in the United States, Israel, and Germany, call into question the ethics and competence of the Justice Department’s Nazi hunters, and threaten their very mission.

The man in the photograph that Rosenberg picked out was a fifty-six-year-old car mechanic at a Ford auto plant outside Cleveland. He was a Ukrainian immigrant who came to America seven years after the war. He lived with his wife and three children in a tidy suburban rambler, with a well-tended lawn and colorful flowerbeds. He was a regular at the local Ukrainian church. His name was John Demjanjuk.

Two other Treblinka survivors in Israel picked Demjanjuk’s photo out of the same album. Like Rosenberg, they identified him, with obvious agitation, as the man known in the camp as Ivan the Terrible. A muscular Ukrainian in his early twenties, Ivan was a man of almost mythic monstrosity, the survivors recounted: He would wield a sword and a lead pipe as he herded the prisoners to the gas chamber, cutting off men’s ears and slashing women’s breasts along the way. Sometimes he would force the prisoners, adults and children alike, to perform sex acts on each other before he and his partner, Nikolai, shoved them inside the gas chamber. Then he would walk down a flight of stairs to an engine room known as Ivan’s Area, where he would crank the diesel engine and pump the gas into the chamber until the prisoners’ screams turned deadly silent.