New York City, 1992
Nazi recruit 865 ducked into the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, rode the elevator to the seventh floor and sat down in a hushed conference room, where three federal prosecutors were waiting. He smiled, a practiced smile, the smile of an old friend. Tufts of silver hair were combed neatly over his ears, and a mustache grown long ago straddled a thin upper lip. He was lean from years of careful eating and late nights spent in the dance halls of Munich after the war.
“Ready?” one of the lawyers asked.
He nodded, clear-eyed and steady, and raised his right hand. “I affirm to tell the truth.”
His Eastern European accent had softened over the years, and the words sounded lyrical, a light and mellow promise. He was an obliging helper who had come when he was called, traveling all this way from a modest frame house on the shoreline of Lake Carmel, 60 miles upstate, where retirement waited on a spit of a beach and in the faded blue dinghies that bobbed along the water.
Even his name was benign, shortened to three quick beats decades earlier when he had stood before an American flag and vowed to defend the Constitution. Jakob Reimer, the newest citizen of the United States, had given himself a new name. Jack.
From across the table, Eli Rosenbaum managed a slight smile. At the U.S. Department of Justice, Rosenbaum had investigated and prosecuted dozens of Nazi perpetrators, concentration camp guards and police leaders who had slipped into the United States with bogus stories about war years spent on farms and in factories, far removed from the killing squads and annihilation centers of occupied Europe.
Reimer, too, had lied with ease, hiding in plain sight in middle-class America. And now he had American sons and an American wife, a church, a Social Security card, a two-story house in the hamlet of Lake Carmel, population 8,000. Time had been good to Reimer, every new year, every new decade providing distance from a loaded rifle and a uniform bearing the stripes of a first sergeant.
But Rosenbaum knew better. Seven stories above Manhattan, 4,000 miles from Poland and 47 years after the end of the war, the prosecutor studied the 73-year-old retired potato chip salesman sitting before him — quite certain that he had been part of one of the most diabolical operations in the Holocaust.