Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Q: There was mass murder at the concentration camps, wasn’t there?

A: Well, this is what some say.

Q: You are not convinced though?

A: Well…

Q: You shrugged your shoulders. What does that mean?

A: Well, there were people who were killed, yes.

Q: Was there no mass murder at concentration camps?

A: That is…

Q: Open to question?

A: Yes.

Einhorn put the trial transcripts down. “Is that the colloquy, Mr. Brentar?”

“I wasn’t there [in Treblinka],” Brentar said in his defense. “Were you there?”

“Your Honor, I have to object,” O’Connor finally said. “I just want to know what the relevancy is.”

“I think interest in bias would be a clear, relevant factor in cross-examination,” Einhorn parried. “Don’t you, sir?”

O’Connor didn’t press the objection any further, and Einhorn returned to Brentar.

“With all your world travels on this case,” Einhorn asked, “have you gone to Israel to interview any of the witnesses in the Demjanjuk case who survived Treblinka, and Iwan Grozny?”

“No, sir.”

Next, Einhorn tried to trap Brentar in a deception.

“Is it not a fact, sir,” he asked, “that the rules and regulations under which you operated as an IRO officer excluded from… eligibility individuals who… had participated in Nazi and SS-controlled organizations hostile to Allied forces?”

Einhorn, of course, was referring to Vlasov’s Liberation Army, which was dedicated to fighting the Soviet Union, a U.S. ally during the war.

“Well, I would have to check my manual,” Brentar said. “I have it at home.”

“So you don’t know offhand?”

“I could look it up and I can tell you,” Brentar said.

“As long as you don’t remember, sir, that pretty much answers my question.”

Judge Angelilli took over the cross-examination of Brentar from Einhorn, and he didn’t tap-dance around the issue. “Do you believe there were people gassed in some chambers in Germany somewhere, or Poland, or one of these places? Any one of them ?”

“I don’t know, Your Honor,” Brentar said. “I wish I could believe.”

“Did it happen or not?”

“People did die in the concentration camps.”

“From gassing?”

“Well, I guess it did happen,” Brentar said.

“To a few people or to a lot of people?”

“I would say more people died of starvation and typhus and overexertion in work than maybe of gassing.”

“I heard you say you were in Dachau,” the judge said, recalling earlier testimony.

“Yes, I was.”

“You said you don’t believe anybody was gassed in Dachau?”

“Because it’s proven there were no gasses [sic] at Dachau, Your Honor,” Brentar said. “They had phony caps—shower caps.”

“You don’t believe anybody died in Dachau?”

“Not in Germany. There were no gas chambers in Germany or Austria,” Brentar said.

“Now, you have made an exhaustive study of Treblinka,” Angelilli pressed. “Did they gas people at Treblinka?”

“They had gas chambers in Treblinka, yes.”

“How many did they kill there?”

O’Connor was so upset at the judge’s line of questioning that he interrupted. “Why are you subjecting the witness to these questions?” he demanded.

“I have a duty to find out what this witness believes,” Angelilli said, “because he has been accused of bias by the government.”

“Now, do you believe nobody died there?” Angelilli continued.

“I was told that people were gassed in Treblinka.”

“Did they tell you how many? Did they say boxcars? Boxcars full of people? What did they say?”

“They said boxcars were brought in to Treblinka,” Brentar admitted.

“Did they say anybody ever left there alive? ”

“That was never discussed.”

“Didn’t you ask them if it was true people died there and never got out?” Angelilli pressed harder.

“Well, there were people who died there. Yes.”

“You didn’t have the curiosity to know—to know for sure if they died? I have no further questions,” Judge Angelilli said.

In his re-direct, Mark O’Connor tried to repair the damage inflicted by Einhorn and Angelilli. “You want the whole story?” O’Connor asked.

“Right. And this is the way the Holocaust should be presented to the world,” Brentar said. “And [not] just saying we Jews were the victims. Everybody was a victim.”

“You are not biased against the Jewish people?”

“Absolutely not. I helped when… the Jews came with these phony documents [after the war]. I did not reject one person , because I knew they suffered.”

O’Connor offered into evidence a book about Treblinka written by Jean-François Steiner. The book described how Ivan the Terrible was killed during the August 1943 uprising at the camp. If Ivan the Terrible was already dead, how could Demjanjuk be Iwan Grozny? In anticipation of Brentar’s testimony, OSI attorney Michael Wolf had interviewed Steiner by phone before the hearing. Wolf told the court that Steiner had admitted to him that the story of Iwan Grozny’s death during the insurrection was fiction. Steiner then went on to say that he did not have any information or evidence that the real Ivan the Terrible was dead. He agreed to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.

O’Connor next called for the videotaped testimony of Rudolf Reiss to be presented to the court.

O’Connor offered Reiss, a former Waffen SS sergeant and a Trawniki administrator, as an expert on the structure of the German army, conditions during World War II, and the administrative structure of Trawniki. O’Connor’s co-counsel John Gill had questioned Reiss under oath in Hamburg, where he lived.

The court watched Reiss claim in broken English that he had never volunteered to serve in the Waffen SS. He was conscripted, entered the corps as a private, worked his way up to Unterscharführer (sergeant), then went to officers’ training school. After he was badly wounded on the Russian front, the SS sent him to Trawniki, where he joined Ernst Teufel, who had also been seriously injured in battle. Like Teufel, Reiss served at Trawniki while Demjanjuk allegedly trained there.

Trawniki had three supply administrations—one for cash, one for clothes and weapons, and one for food. Teufel worked for the clothes and weapons administration. Reiss was a cashier in the paymaster’s office along with Heinrich Schaefer, who had testified for the prosecution at Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial.

In his direct examination of Reiss, Gill focused on the Trawniki card in an attempt to prove it was a forgery. Like Heinrich Schaefer before Judge Battisti, Reiss testified that he did not recall a Ukrainian named Iwan Demjanjuk at Trawniki and that he never saw an ID card identical to the one allegedly issued to Demjanjuk.

Gill handed Reiss photographs of the front and back of the card. Reiss studied them under a handheld magnifying glass for a few moments, then testified that one of the seals on the card had a light-to-dark shading. That flaw indicated that something was either blocked out or erased. Furthermore, Reiss said, the inscription on the seal was historically incorrect. And there was a grammatical error in the German word Fest-nehmen (arrest or seize). The word should not be hyphenated. And there appeared to be two different capital A’s and T’s in the printed text on the card, suggesting that two different documents were merged. And there were irregularities with the borders and…

Einhorn lost his patience. He objected to Reiss’s video testimony because neither O’Connor nor Gill had presented Reiss as a document expert and, therefore, the court had never approved of him as an expert graphologist.