What’s this individual’s name?” I ask.

“Josef Weber.”

“And you think he was an SS officer because...?”

He told me so,” the woman says.

I lean back in my chair. “He told you that he was a Nazi?” In the decade I’ve been doing this, that’s a new one for me. My job has involved peeling away the disguises from criminals, who think that after nearly seventy years, they should literally get away with murder. I’ve never had a defendant confess until I’ve managed to back him so far into a corner with evidence that he has no choice but to tell the truth.

“We’re... acquaintances,” Sage Singer replies. “He wants me to help him die.”

“Like Jack Kevorkian? Is he terminally ill?”

“No. He’s the opposite—very healthy, for a man his age. He thinks that there’s some sort of justice in asking me to be a part of it—because my family was Jewish.”

“Are you? ”

“Does it matter?”

No, it doesn’t. I’m Jewish, but half the staff in our department isn’t.

“Did he mention which camp he was in?”

“He used a German word... Toten... Otensomething?”

Totenkopfverbände?” I suggest.

“Yes!”

Translated, it means the Death’s Head Unit. It’s not an individual location but rather the division of the SS that ran the concentration camps for the Third Reich.

In 1981 my office won a seminal case, Fedorenko v. United States. The Supreme Court decided—wisely, in my humble opinion—that anyone who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp necessarily took part in perpetration of Nazi crimes of persecution there. The camps operated as chains of functions, and for it to work, everyone in the chain had to perform his function. If one person didn’t, the apparatus of extermination would grind to a halt. So really, no matter what this particular guy did or didn’t do—whether he actually pulled a trigger or loaded the Zyklon B gas into one of the chambers—even confirming his role as a member of the SS-TV in a concentration camp would be enough to build a case against him.

Of course, that’s still an enormous longshot.

What’s his name?” I ask again.

“Josef Weber.”

I ask her to spell it and then I write it down on a pad, underline it twice. “Did he say anything else?”

“He showed me a picture of himself. He was wearing a uniform.”

“What did it look like?”

An SS uniform,” she says.

“And you know this because...?”

“Well,” she admits. “It looks like the ones you always see in movies.”

There are two caveats here. I do not know Sage Singer; she could be a recent escapee from a mental hospital who is making this entire story up. I also do not know Josef Weber, who himself might be a mental hospital escapee seeking attention. Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve never, in a decade, received a cold call like this from an ordinary citizen about a Nazi in the backyard that actually panned out. Most of the tips we go on to investigate come from lawyers representing women in divorce suits, hoping to allege that their husbands—who are a certain age and from Europe—are also Nazi war criminals. Imagine the payout, if you can get a judge to believe how cruel the guy was to your client. And always, even these allegations turn out to be total crap.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21