Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Overruled.”

“They certainly turned on the engines and gassed the people,” Horn said.

“How long would the process of gassing last?”

“Perhaps an hour.”

“And what if anything happened after that hour was over?”

“The chambers were opened,” Horn said.

“And what happened then?”

“The corpses were carried away into the pit… for burning.”

Anticipating that the defense would attempt to characterize Horn as an unsavory war criminal, Moscowitz asked: “Mr. Horn, were you tried in court for your activities at Treblinka?”

“At Düsseldorf… 1964–1965,” Horn admitted.

“And what was the verdict?”

“I was acquitted.”

“Completely?”

“Entirely,” Horn said.

Horn was the only German found not guilty in the Treblinka war crimes trial in Düsseldorf. The court did not believe that supervising the burying of the corpses of Jews murdered in gas chambers, while he stood by and watched, was a crime against humanity.

Moscowitz scored two big points. Horn had identified Iwan as the Ukrainian guard who herded victims into the gas chambers and who was inside the motor room when the gassing took place. He had not actually seen Iwan start the motor, however, or direct the gas to the chambers. Second, he had positively identified John Demjanjuk as Iwan from two photos in two correctly presented spreads.

However valuable Horn was to the prosecution, he was far from a sympathetic witness. He had described the killing process at Treblinka in cold, unemotional terms as if he were describing cattle rather than people. And he tried to portray himself as innocent of all wrongdoing as a euthanasia project worker and as a Treblinka guard who supervised the gruesome burying and burning of hundreds of thousands of corpses of men, women, and children.

Martin’s job was to destroy Horn’s credibility by characterizing him as a war criminal and, therefore, not trustworthy. As a nurse, Horn had worked in T-4, Himmler’s secret euthanasia program, designed to rid Germany of the elderly, chronically sick, and mentally handicapped. Himmler didn’t consider them good Aryan specimens and their care cost too much. Its name was an abbreviation for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the project headquarters in Berlin. T-4 murdered more than two hundred thousand people before religious and public pressure forced the Nazis to discontinue the program.

“Were you part of the T-4 organization?” Martin asked.

“No.”

“Yet you worked in their offices in Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“And you worked at their euthanasia locations doing clearance work?”

“Yes.”

“You had to take charge of urns?”

“Yes.”

“Were these the remains of the children that were gassed and burned?”

“There were no children gassed there,” Horn said. “These were adults, mentally ill adults…. The urns were empty.”

Horn went on to claim that the SS was no longer euthanizing people when it drafted him. The claim sounded self-serving and Martin ended his T-4 cross-examination on that note. He asked Horn what he did at Treblinka.

Horn said he supervised Jewish workers.

“What were your duties in supervising the Jews?” Martin asked.

“They were burning corpses and shoveling earth into pits,” Horn said.

“Did you ever see this person you describe as Iwan commit any atrocities, do anything other than hang around the gas chamber?” Martin asked.

“No, I didn’t.”

Once again, the answer did not appear honest. Every witness to follow Horn would describe the atrocities Iwan committed right under Horn’s nose.

“How old was this man that you remember as being Iwan?”

“About twenty-four, twenty-five.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Dark to black.”

“How tall was he?”

“Approximately 180 centimeters [about six feet].”

“How much did this person weigh?”

“Seventy-five to eighty kilograms [about 165–75 pounds].”

“What kind of uniform did he have?”

“I think a black one.”

Martin scored three solid points. First, Horn was more than a simple bystander to Nazi atrocities and, therefore, his testimony was tainted. Second, if Horn could be believed, Iwan was not a monster as the Treblinka survivors would later describe him, casting some doubt on their credibility. And third, the Iwan whom Horn knew at Treblinka had dark hair, not blond, as the Trawniki card described Demjanjuk’s hair.

Next, the government called five Treblinka survivors in a row to testify that John Demjanjuk was the Ivan the Terrible they saw and feared. For spectators, it was the high point of the trial and they flocked to the courthouse door.

The crowd in the courthouse lobby on the morning the first Treblinka survivor was scheduled to testify was unruly. There was pushing and shoving as spectators jostled to get closer to the metal detector, the gateway to a seat in the courtroom or gallery. Under these conditions, it was impossible for the marshals to create anything that resembled an orderly line. A news release issued by a Ukrainian group suggesting that Holocaust survivors had become “psychotic with revenge and hate” did not help to defuse a potentially explosive situation.

The prosecution called Chiel Rajchman to the stand. Then living in Montevideo, Uruguay, Rajchman was born in Poland, captured by the Nazis in 1942, and sent to Treblinka along with his sister. The SS selected him to sort clothes. They sent her to the gas chamber. On his second day in the camp, Rajchman found her dress in the pile of clothes he was sorting. He cut a piece of it when no one was looking and treasured it like a photograph until the day he escaped.

The SS took Rajchman off the sorting line after a few days and made him a “barber.” His new job was to cut off the hair of naked women and girls, their last stop before being driven down the camouflaged path that the SS called the “Road to Heaven.” It was a wrenching, stressful job. He had to remove a woman’s hair in five quick cuts and drop the locks into a valise. Six cuts and he would join her in the gas chamber.

Next, Rajchman worked for Otto Horn in camp two. He pulled bodies from the gas chambers, loaded them onto large wheelbarrows without sides, and raced them to the pits. If he didn’t move fast enough, the Germans or Trawniki men who worked around the gas chambers would beat him, like the guards beat the slave miners in Camp Dora.

When Rajchman arrived at the long, deep pit, he would slide the corpse(s) off the wheelbarrow into the hole, where groups of Jews waited to stack them head to toe. When the pit was filled, they covered the bodies with sand and chlorine. In February 1943, as the Red Army pushed west, Himmler ordered the bodies to be dug up and burned to destroy the evidence.

Toting corpses was so traumatic that many prisoners assigned to the gruesome task hung themselves by their belts. Rajchman told the court that he wanted to hang himself, too, but he couldn’t do it. Instead, he asked the chief dentist, who pulled gold teeth from the dead, for some poison. The dentist got him a job as his assistant.

Pulling teeth was a lot easier than carting victims, some of whom were still breathing. When there were no transports, Rajchman cleaned blood, flesh, and bone from the teeth. Then he separated the gold teeth from those with other metals and polished them until they gleamed.

Long before the trial began, Rajchman had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible from the two legally correct OSI photo spreads. Since he worked next to the gas chambers, Rajchman had had a chance to observe Ivan at work. He recalled him as armed with a both a rifle and a pistol. For a Trawniki man who was not a Volksdeutsche to be given a pistol was a sign of prestige and trust.