(Times of Israel) Renee Ghert-Zand - Jack (Jakob) Reimer, a retired potato chip salesman and restaurant manager living in New York, was also a war criminal who had been trained by the SS at the Trawniki camp near Lublin, Poland, to help the Nazis eradicate Jews. The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) worked for decades to prosecute Reimer and revoke his naturalized U.S. citizenship, only to see him die on American soil in 2005. Among the obstacles, most critically, was a lack of cooperation from Germany, which refused to accept him back. The OSI's efforts to identify, prosecute and deport Reimer and other Nazi guards trained at Trawniki (including the infamous John Demjanjuk) are chronicled in investigative journalist Debbie Cenziper's excellent new book, Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler's Hidden Soldiers in America. Reimer is "Citizen 865," referring to his identification code on Nazi rosters from Trawniki. At Trawniki camp the SS trained over 5,000 Soviet POWs and Ukrainian civilians (some of ethnic German heritage) between 1941 and 1944. Cenziper told the Times of Israel: "The idea that these Nazi perpetrators could be living on U.S. soil in peace, raising families, collecting pensions and social security, and easing into quiet retirement after everything I knew about the war - what American soldiers sacrificed, and what happened to Jews - was incomprehensible."
2019-12-13 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive