| Schutzstaffel SS identification photo of SS-Oberzugwachmann Jakob “Jack” Reimer (November 6, 1918 – August 3, 2005), who, as SS battalion commander it is now believed, directed executions during the liquidations of the Jewish ghettos in Warsaw, Lublin, and Czestochowa, Poland. There were 12,000 Jews imprisoned at Trawniki as of 1943 sorting through trainsets of clothing delivered from Holocaust locations. They were all massacred during Operation Harvest Festival on November 3, 1943, by the auxiliary units of Trawniki men like Reimer, stationed at the same location, helped by the traveling Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Orpo. Eli M. Rosenbaum (born May 8, 1955) interviewed Reimer in 1998. Reimer, who admitted to being SS when he came to the States, had already been interviewed twice by authorities and let go. He arrived at the interview with Rosenbaum without a lawyer, prepared to walk off again. But Rosenbaum suspected Reimer had a story to tell. And after 2 hours of questioning, Rosenbaum had Reimer describing a mass execution in which about 50 men were shot to death in a pit in the forest. But Reimer claimed he went out of his way not to kill anyone. “It was a battle of wits. He was trying to discern what I already knew, and I was trying to conceal it,” Rosenbaum said. The interview transcript runs to 174 pages. By page 150, Rosenbaum had Reimer on the verge of admitting that he’d pulled his trigger. The back and forth arrives at this climax: Rosenbaum: “Weren’t there some people who were still alive down there who had to be finished off?” Reimer: “There was one — I don’t know — was he half dead or whatever. He was pointing with a finger to his head.” Rosenbaum: “He wanted to be shot?” Reimer: “Yes. And I don’t know who but he was shot. That is all I saw. That is the only one that I saw that was shot in my presence when one of them already in the grave pointed the finger to his head, begged for mercy, so to speak.” Rosenbaum: “There’s something about the man who pointed to his head that you haven’t told me?” Reimer: “Yes.” Rosenbaum: “You finished him off.” Reimer: “I’m afraid so. I don’t know if I hit his head. I don’t know that.” Rosenbaum: “But he died?” Reimer: “I just say that I had to make one effort at least while the German was looking at me where I was.” Rosenbaum later said, “We ended up in court having to make the grotesque analysis that even if Reimer’s bullet didn’t hit the man, that between the time he saw Reimer pointing a gun at him and the time he died, even if it’s just a second, that’s serious persecution. It was a very awful situation to be in,” Reimer’s lawyer, former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark (December 18, 1927 – April 9, 2021), told me he believes to this day what Reimer told him — that he intentionally shot over the heads of victims. “Reimer was an absolutely tragic case,” Clark said. “He was a totally nonviolent person. What’s he supposed to do, stand there and let the [German] sergeant shoot him?” Clark suggested that Rosenbaum may have committed entrapment by suggesting to Reimer he knew something he did not, an argument Clark did well not to raise in court: law enforcement personnel suggest foreknowledge to interview subjects all the time. It’s part of the job. Clark also recounted that as he and Reimer sat eating in the courtroom cafeteria 1 day during the trial, a woman came over and spat in Reimer’s face. “There’s fanaticism behind Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI). It fuels hatred,” he said. But Reimer’s fate was sealed when OSI tracked down, in a village north of the Ural Mountains, a man who’d served under him in the SS Battalion Streibel. In his testimony, the man recalled seeing Reimer and 2 co-commanders directing executions, using “their rifle butts to prod the victims, forcing these fear-crazed people to stand up from the ground in groups of five to seven people, including men, women, children, and old people, and marching them into the pit. Then, together with the German officers, they shot the Jews.” “Probably a million people died that way over the course of the war,” Rosenbaum said. He added: “I remember thinking that if [Reimer] was a guy who I didn’t know what he’d done, I’d feel perfectly fine letting him babysit my children.” | |
| Image Filename | wwii0615.jpg |
| Image Size | 101.50 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1000 x 1403 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 1, 1943 |
| Location | |
| City | Trawniki |
| State or Province | Lublin |
| Country | Poland |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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