Samuel
Kunz, a guard at the Belzec death camp, is accused of involvement
in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews - 10 by his
own hand. Why are German authorities bringing this elderly
man to trial now?
OBERBACHEM, Germany - Hermann Heck was certain his search
for the perfect house had finally ended five weeks ago.
After he ruled out a number of possibilities for various
reasons, the real estate agent called to say he must see
a gorgeous place in Oberbachem, a village belonging to
the municipal council of Wachtberg, 15 kilometers south
of Bonn.
Heck, a private investigator, has in recent years been looking into suspicions
of alleged corruption in the German telecommunications
giant Telekom. When the agent called, he lost no time:
For the past year he had been looking for a new home for
his partner and his 16-year-old stepdaughter, a place from
which they could restart their lives, a place of repose
for him.
He got into his car, negotiated the dozens of stoplights, drove through the tunnel
and on to the B9 expressway, which leads out of Bonn, via
the neighborhoods into which Germany spits its refugees,
and into endless green spaces.
The slow drive along the winding road allowed Heck to notice the ripe apples,
pears and cherries that dangled from the trees by the roadside.
Following a descent into a valley, after one last bend
to the right, he saw the agent's car parked next to the
first house he encountered in the village, at 21 Liessemer
Kirschweg. He saw the farm across the way where horses
cantered and noticed the cows that lolled lazily on the
hill above the house. His search, he knew, had come to
an end.
That same day he met with the
owners, an elderly retired couple who lived with their
son in the adjacent house, at No. 19. A rental agreement
was drawn up within a few days. On the wooden door of her
room, Heck's stepdaughter put up a poster of Kurt Cobain
shrouded in cigarette smoke. His partner arranged the house
as she wanted, though with one condition imposed by Heck,
which he has always insisted on: no carpets.
The family began to adjust to
life in the village. On the way to and from work, Heck
waved to his neighbor-landlord, amazed by the fact that
the stooped man of 89 was still able to work such long
hours in his garden and store logs for the winter.
But three weeks ago, the new routine
of Heck's life was abruptly disturbed. Journalists and
television cameramen swirled around the house and the police
were summoned to maintain the public order. Heck was certain
that the long arm of had found him and was accusing him
of some nefarious deed. But he soon discovered that the
truth was far more grave: According to German prosecutors,
his neighbor-landlord was a monster named Samuel Kunz,
who had participated in the murder of 434,000 people, 10
of whom, the authorities allege, were killed personally
by Kunz in the Belzec death camp, where he was a guard
from January 1942 until July 1943.
Opting for collaboration
Samuel Kunz was born in 1921 in
Russia, in a village on the Volga River. In World War II
he was a soldier in the Red Army and was captured by the
Wehrmacht. The Nazis gave him two options: incarceration
in the POW camp at Chelm, or collaboration. After a few
days in Chelm, where he saw the bodies of dozens of fellow
prisoners being dragged out of the camp, Kunz volunteered
to collaborate. He was sent to the SS training camp at
Trawniki, along with some 5,000 other POWs (among them
John Demjanjuk ). The trainees were subsequently assigned
three missions: emptying the ghettos of their Jewish inmates,
overseeing forced laborers or serving in death camps. Kunz
became a guard in the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland.
He rose rapidly through the ranks
and was involved in rousting Jews from the trains, pushing
them into the gas chambers and evacuating the bodies to
mass graves. His zealousness gained him an appointment
as commander of other guards, a position that carried a
higher salary and a significant improvement in food rations.
But according to the indictment, Kunz, who did not deny
that he was in Belzec, was no ordinary collaborator: In
May 1943 he allegedly shot dead two Jews who tried to escape
from the train. A month later, while seeing a guard shoot
and wound eight Jews, he apparently grabbed the guard's
pistol and shot and killed the eight as they lay on the
ground.
At the end of 1943 - after nearly
all the 1.8 million Jews who had lived in the region had
been murdered - the camp at Belzec was shut down. Kunz
was transferred to Flossenburg, a concentration camp in
Bavaria, where he first met the guard John Demjanjuk. He
was captured by the Americans and, beginning in the 1960s,
testified in the trials of Nazi war criminals.
"We knew that Jews
were being killed and we knew they were being burned," he stated at one trial. "We could smell it every day."
Finally, he moved to Bonn, received
German citizenship and worked for the government as a carpenter
in the Ministry of Construction until his retirement. Like
many civil servants in the German government after the
war - which was based in Bonn until the move to Berlin
in the mid-1990s - Kunz saved his money until he could
move to a leafy suburb, invest in real estate and disappear
into the banality of assimilation. Time was on his side
and work in his garden as a pensioner in Oberbachem was
far removed from Belzec.
Belzec 'laboratory'
Toward the end of October 1941,
the Germans had launched Operation Reinhard, which effectively
began the implementation of the "Final Solution." In contrast to the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which functioned also as labor
camps, the new facilities - Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec
- were intended for the mass murder of Jews and Roma. Belzec,
the first to be opened, was a "laboratory," the model upon which the other camps were built and operated. The choice of
its site embodied a logistical rationale: The Lublin district,
in which the camp lay, was close to the Jewish population
concentrations in Poland and Galicia, and the infrastructure
for transporting them from Lvov, Krakow and Lublin was
already in place.
The camp commandant was Christian
Wirth, a colonel in the SS who had gained valuable experience
in mass murder as one of those in charge of Aktion (Operation
) T-4, in which 70,000 Germans who suffered from mental
or physical disabilities were murdered by lethal injection.
The first killing method at Belzec was to load Jews onto
trucks whose exhaust fumes led into the sealed cabin into
which the inmates were crammed.
But Wirth wanted something more
efficient: He built gas chambers, placed flower pots in
them and had a huge Star of David painted on the roof of
the building. He received the thousands of people transported
to the camp every day in packed train cars with a fiery
speech, on the ramp. Invariably, some of the Jews who thought
Belzec would be an improvement on life in the ghetto cheered
him. Wirth sent the inmates to be disinfected, and men
and women were separated. They disrobed and handed their
belongings to the guards; the women's hair was shaved and
everyone was sent to the "showers."
Unlike other camps, hardly any
witnesses emerged alive from Belzec; even those who survived
until the camp's closure were afterward put to death in
Sobibor. One of the few testimonies about what went on
in the camp came from Kurt Gerstein, a German chemical
engineer who joined the Waffen SS as head of the technical
department involved in disinfection. Already during the
war Gerstein secretly made available information about
the camp, hoping to arouse the international community
to take action, but no one lifted a finger.
Excerpts from Gerstein's testimony: "The
guards pushed the Jews into the showers and reminded them
before they entered to breathe deeply to ensure that the
disinfection would be effective ... Eight-hundred people
were crammed into a room of 93 square meters. Then Sergeant
Hackenholt would start his Opel truck and the exhaust fumes
were carried in pipes into the gas chambers ... Generally
all the inmates were dead within half an hour ... You could
know who the families were because they held hands and
there was nowhere for them to fall ... Infants still lay
on their mother's breast ... Then the guards would enter
and kill anyone who had survived, and Jewish inmates evacuated
the dead to a mass grave - not before looking for gold
in the mouths of the dead."
Wirth even dubbed the structure
the "Hackenholt Foundation." In the 15 months of its operation, 434,500 people were murdered there.
Third on the list
Samuel Kunz could have died peacefully
at a ripe old age in a fine house, surrounded by a blossoming
garden in a village nestled in a valley by the Rhine. Indeed,
had he already died, he would have pulled off the biggest
success of his life: selecting three years from his twenties
and pressing the "delete" button. But in his case things took a different course. Among the thousands
of documents transferred by the American authorities to
Germany in connection with the extradition of John Demjanjuk
were papers about one of the potential witnesses in the
trial, a German citizen by the name of Samuel Kunz.
The German prosecutors who read
the documents decided that Kunz deserved an indictment
of his own. John Demjanjuk, Jr. also fanned the flames
when he complained that the Germans were dragging a Ukrainian
citizen - his father - across the Atlantic but were not
bringing their own citizens to trial, even when clear evidence
against them existed. Germany, he declared, was trying
to purge itself of cases of mass murder.
Kunz denies the charge of having
murdered 10 Jews, but the German prosecution maintains
it has clear proof of his actions, backed up by testimonies
from postwar trials held in the Soviet Union.
Thus, instead of dying peacefully
in old age, Kunz, who is half deaf and has a heart pacer,
opened the door to the police officers who scoured his
home in search of evidence about his past. He and his wife
complained in an interview to a local radio station that
someone had sprayed the word "Murderer" on the wall of their home .
Kunz appears in third place on
the annual list of the most-wanted Nazis drawn up by the
Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. No. 1
is Dr. Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian officer accused of murdering
1,200 civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia, who lives in Budapest
opposite a synagogue; No. 2 Milivoj Asner, the chief of
the Slovenska Pozega police in Croatia, who played a key
role in the persecution, deportation and subsequent deaths
of thousands of Jews, Roma and Serbs, but whom the Austrian
authorities refuse to extradite to Croatia for an assortment
of reasons.
One wonders what induced the German
authorities - in contrast to their counterparts in Austria
and Hungary, who are doing nothing to bring senior Nazis
to trial - to take action against a minor figure like Kunz
after so many years. The official reasons include the advent
of a new generation of prosecutors, who have decided that
time is against them and are now trying to put every surviving
suspect on trial, from senior officers to junior guards,
as well as a new approach that murder is murder and that
even a foreign national who worked in the service of the
Germans is indictable. But to find the real reason we must
turn to the annual report of the Jerusalem branch of the
Wiesenthal Center and its author, Dr. Efraim Zuroff.
'Failing grade'
Born in New York in 1948, Zuroff
immigrated to Israel in 1970. In 1978 he went to Los Angeles
for two years to collect material for his doctoral thesis
- on the response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States
to the Holocaust - and was appointed academic director
of the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center. Shortly before
his scheduled return to Israel, he received a job offer
from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations
(which tracks and investigates people who violated international
law or participated in crimes against humanity ). The original
two-month position stretched into six years, during most
of which Zuroff was based in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
memorial in Jerusalem, where he collected material and
interviewed witnesses about Nazi criminals, most of them
from Eastern Europe, who were then indicted by the U.S.
authorities. In 1986, Zuroff realized he was sitting on
an archival gold mine.
The database of the International
Red Cross that is used for identifying and locating people
who disappeared during World War II is housed in Yad Vashem.
Its collection of 16 million entries allowed Zuroff to
see where almost every East European refugee had gone.
He cross-checked names with names of Nazis he read about
in the archives. (They had not bothered to change their
names, as they didn't think the authorities would hunt
them down. )
Zuroff decided his work needed
to go beyond the boundaries of American prosecution. He
contacted the Wiesenthal Center and suggested that a database
with information about all the Nazis in the world be established,
which would inform authorities from other English-speaking
countries (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom ) about the
presence of such criminals on their soil. The Wiesenthal
Center agreed and on September 1, 1986 Zuroff set to work.
On October 1, he submitted to the government of Australia
a list of 40 Nazi war criminals living in that country.
In the 1990s, following the collapse
of the Soviet Union, Zuroff focused his attention on the
countries of the former communist bloc. But a change of
approach in the Wiesenthal Center led him to reorder his
priorities.
"Although we are named
for Simon Wiesenthal, we do not have a formal tie with
the center," Zuroff says today. "It's an organization that started out as an educational and commemorative center,
and then became a political organization that fights anti-Semitism
and efforts to delegitimize Israel. Nazi hunting was lowered
to a secondary priority."
Thus it seems that Zuroff remains
one of the last Nazi hunters today - and is certainly foremost
among them. His annual report, which is published on Holocaust
Memorial Day, contains a list of the 10 most wanted Nazis
and also grades countries in terms of their efforts in
persecuting Nazis and holding full-scale trials of them.
(The reports, first published in 2002, are entitled "Operation Last Chance." ) In 2007, Germany received a "failing grade" for the first time since the reports were drawn up.
There is no way to prove this,
but it seems the Germans took offense at their low score.
That same year the country's authorities began to implement
a proactive approach of prosecuting everyone who was an
accomplice to murder (thereby eliminating the popular defense
argument, "I was just following orders" ), even foreign nationals. According to Zuroff, until 2007, the chief prosecutor
for Nazi affairs in the Dortmund public prosecutor's office,
Ulrich Maass, was an ongoing failure in regard to bringing
Nazis to justice, but afterward he displayed much zeal
in putting Nazi war criminals on trial. His successor,
Andreas Brendel, launched an investigation that catapulted
Kunz to third place on Zuroff's most-wanted list of 2010.
The report also awarded a grade of A (the highest one )
to two countries: the United States and Germany.
The criteria by which he draws
up the most-wanted list, Zuroff explains, are determined
by the command rank of the individual, the scale of the
murder in general and whether he took part in murder specifically.
He also mentions the issue of the assimilation of Nazi
criminals into the surrounding society and their ability
to begin a new life.
"First of all, there
are the charges brought by the country they are living
in," he says. "There are countries such as Austria which, incredibly, have not brought Nazi
criminals to justice for the past 30 years. But even in
Germany, where the political will exists, and where Nazis
are tried in criminal rather than civil courts, we have
not seen the emergence of a highly motivated official determined
to conduct a crusade against the Nazis and in pursuit of
justice. It's true that Wiesenthal was held in far higher
regard in Germany than in Austria, but I find it amazing
that no German Wiesenthal has arisen.
"From the personal,
individual point of view," Zuroff continues, "it must be remembered that 99.9 percent of those who murdered Jews did not possess
a saliently criminal or psychotic personality. Very few
committed suicide or became drug addicts, and only a handful
ran afoul of the law. These are people who grew up with
an anti-Semitic heritage and came from places which were
not known for upholding human rights. The Germans and the
Austrians created historical and geopolitical circumstances
for them in which they received bonuses for murdering Jews
and were punished for rescuing them. In later years these
people assimilate into the society and the neighbors don't
ask questions, because who wants to draw a link between
that horrific tragedy, the embodiment of absolute evil,
and his nice neighbor?
"The hardest part of
my job is to stand before the members of the family and
inform then that the father is a monster, while they try
to persuade me that he is not a murderer and that no one
ever heard him even make an anti-Semitic remark. That is
probably true. He was apparently a murder in certain extenuating
circumstances, but he is still a murderer.
"I also don't think
they live their past. Like the [Jewish] survivors - with
all due respect, of course, to the huge differences - these
people wanted only to look forward, because that was the
only way to survive, and it's why they moved to places
with a different culture and language. In the past 20 years
the Holocaust has entered popular consciousness and culture,
yet no Nazi criminal has come forward to say, 'I am sorry.
I did what I did when I was young or because I truly thought
the Jews constituted a threat.' I have been dealing with
the Holocaust for 40 years but have never heard a Nazi
criminal express contrition. People without a conscience
live longer."
Zuroff wants Kunz to rot in prison,
in a small cell where he will have enough time to think
about all he did. He does not accept the view that a Nazi
criminal's age should be taken into account in deciding
whether to prosecute ("If an 80-year-old serial killer is caught in Germany, won't they prosecute him?" ). The passage of time, he says, does not reduce guilt, and old age does not
mitigate murder. He feels a commitment to the Jewish, Roma
and homosexual victims and he wants to send a message that
in the pursuit of Nazi murderers the wheels of justice
can grind very slowly indeed.
What will he do in another 15
years, when Nazi criminals will no longer be alive? Zuroff
laughs. A few months ago he published "Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice" - a sort of summary of his efforts. (The book was published in English, French,
Polish and Serbian, but to date no Israeli publisher has
decided that it's worth translating into Hebrew. )
"A great deal of work
remains," Zuroff explains. "All the countries that are not pursuing Nazis - because they do not want to draw
attention to the activity of their nationals in the Nazi
period - are now trying to link Nazi crimes to the crimes
of the communist regime. That endangers the legacy of the
Holocaust and distorts its narrative. A case in point is
Lithuania, where ordinary folk and intellectuals killed
212,000 of the 220,000 Jews who lived there. There is still
much work to be done."
People in the street
After I told Hermann Heck who
his landlord and neighbor was, I took a stroll through
the pastoral village of Oberbachem. Detached homes, swings
in the yards, Japanese cars. A picture postcard of a bored
middle-class setting with a church and a cemetery in the
center. I asked about Kunz in the drugstore, post office,
bank, gardening shop. Media consumption here is mostly
confined to reading the local news in the paper ("13-year-old Juergen reaches the finals of the kite flying competition" ), and no one knew a thing about him. When I told them what Kunz was accused
of, they reacted with mild shock and turned to the next
customer.
Rita, the pharmacist, told me
that what should really be investigated is the modern history
of the German people and why they had not spat out their
Kunzes 15 or 30 years ago, when the problem of advanced
age did not yet exist. The salesman in the gardening shop
said there were better things to do than chase 90-year-old
people. He added that Kunz had always been a model customer: "I wish everyone were like him," he said.
Kunz cries every night, suggested
the owner of the laundry. That is his punishment - to live
with the secret, to hide for a lifetime, to make sure that
no one knows who you really are. It's part of the new Germany,
merciful offspring of unmerciful fathers.
Returning to Heck's home, I found
him sitting at the kitchen table with his wife, both of
them chain smoking. On his iPhone he read the latest news
about their neighbor; on a laptop, his wife found other
information.
"My daughter is very
active against the Nazis," she told me. "I don't know what I will tell her when she gets back from her vacation."
Both of them punctuated their
remarks with expressions of shock and dismay: "Unbelievable." "It can't be." The problem with Germans, Hermann Heck said, is that we like to sweep everything
under the rug.
I left the house and turned right.
No. 19 seemed perfectly normal. A white fence, two garbage
bins, a box for mail and another for the newspaper, some
steps, a path and then another five steps leading up to
a two-story house with a tiled roof in the shape of a pyramid,
from which the second-floor rooms jut out. The name appears
on the doorbell. The garden was immaculate. Flowers in
a panoply of colors which invite dozens of bees to hover
around them, herbs and bushes, all in exemplary order,
trimmed to the last centimeter. Decorative white curtains
covered large windows, on whose sills flower boxes were
perched. At one point a curtain on the second floor was
opened and Samuel Kunz's son motioned me to leave. I gestured
for him to come down, but he gave me the finger and disappeared.
Suddenly I saw an old couple walking
toward me along the street. She walked erect and slightly
ahead of him, in a long, light wool beige jacket, a blue
skirt and square sunglasses. He walked behind her, stooped,
aided by a cane and wearing black pants and a gray jacket
over a blue-and-red checked shirt buttoned to the top.
Can I talk to you, I asked. There is nothing to talk about,
the woman said assertively and pulled Kunz's arm. They
went on walking. I turned around and said, "Wissen Sie, Ich bin Judisch" ("I am Jewish, you know" ). Kunz stopped, turned around and gave me a long look, until his wife pulled
him again and led him up the stairs toward home.
The Belzec killing machine
The Belzec death camp was run
by 20 to 30 Germans from the S.S., in command and administrative
posts, supplemented by between 90 and 120 Ukrainians, who
had been trained at Trawniki − Soviet POWs who volunteered
to serve the Reich.
Initially there were three gas
chambers at Belzec, situated in a barracks of 12 x 8 meters.
The building had two walls with a layer of sand between
them for insulation and was divided into three rooms, of
4 x 8 meters. The floor and the walls of the gas chambers
were covered up to a height of one meter with tin. The
doors were made of heavy wood in order to withstand the
pressure from within. Pipes led into the gas chambers.
At the end of February 1942 experiments
were undertaken to determine whether the gas chambers were
in proper working order and to test their efficiency.
Groups of Jews were brought from
the town of Lubica Kralovska and pushed inside. The gas,
carbon monoxide, was brought in metal containers and fed
in through the pipes. Jews who had been forced to build
the camp were also murdered in the experimental phase,
when a 250-horsepower diesel engine was installed outside
the chambers to pump the carbon monoxide into the killing
spaces, which made the use of metal containers superfluous.
On March 17, 1942, after the tests
were concluded, the mass murder began. All told, some 600,000
persons were murdered in Belzec, almost all of them Jews,
as well as several hundred or several thousand Roma.
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