Moise Rosenthal and Avram Steinman bothered me. I found them so troubling, in fact, that at first I had difficulty staying tuned in to the conversation.
"Part of the problem in prosecuting the Germans who participated in Sobibor," Avram was saying, "was that there were so few survivors, not only among the prisoners, but also among the German personnel who were in charge.
"From the very beginning, the German High Command ran the place with a skeleton crew. Large numbers of guards weren't necessary because the people who were sent to Sobibor weren't prisoners in the ordinary sense of the word. They arrived dazed and ill, weak and exhausted from a hellish boxcar trip. In the summer, some prisoners perished in transit from heat and thirst. In the winter, many died of numbing cold. After exiting the trains, they were herded from the railroad siding into Sobibor's gas chambers within hours of their arrival."
"In other words, not that many guards were necessary," Sue Danielson interjected.
Avram nodded. "Right. The ranks of guard survivors were further reduced, not only by the number of those killed during the October uprising, but also by the ones who simply disappeared afterward. At the time, most of those were reported as either dead or missing in action. After all, the Germans didn't want it known in the ranks that they were having a desertion problem. Things were bad enough for them right then that it could have encouraged others to follow suit."
"I understand that Hans Gebhardt was among those who either went underground after the war or who were thought long dead," Sue said. "I'm wondering about the others, the guards and officers who were tried, convicted, and given their obligatory slaps on the hand during the trials at Nuremburg. Was your organization instrumental in bringing any of them to trial?"
"Yes," Avram said. "We were involved in some of those cases. But what we're talking about here is another kind of trial altogether, other trials besides the ones at Nuremburg."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
Avram ignored my interruption and continued. "While the German High Command was totally focused on waging and losing a war, a few minor details slipped through the cracks. Sobibor was one of them. Those in charge knew approximately the number of prisoners who had been sent to the camp while it was in existence. According to the law of large numbers, they also knew about how much of what they called das neben-produkt — side-product-should have resulted from that many bodies. In the final accounting, gold from Sobibor turned up short."
"I thought Germans always kept meticulous records," I said.
"Supposedly, and up to a point, they did. From the time the gold was melted into bars and turned over for shipment, there's a complete paper trail, even now. The missing gold was stolen long before it entered that officially documented path."
"Stolen by whom?" I asked.
"Hans Gebhardt, no doubt," Avram answered.
"Certainly he wasn't acting alone," I supplied. "Who else would have helped him? Other guards perhaps? Some of the prisoners?"
"Maybe both," Avram said. "A young lieutenant named Lars Weber was in charge of Sobibor's accounting…"
"He was in on it?" Michael Morris interrupted. "I remember his name from Kari's and my research. Lars Weber was tried in Nuremburg and imprisoned for a while-only for six months or so. According to one of his surviving relatives, he died shortly after being released."
"He died as a result of one of those other trials I was telling you about," Avram answered quietly. "The unofficial ones. They were conducted by some of the earliest and most vicious gangs of what we now call neo-Nazis. They wanted to regroup and reorganize. They were broke and looking for money. By then someone must have realized that a large amount of gold from Sobibor was missing."
"After he was released from prison, Lars Weber got a job doing reconstruction in Berlin. He disappeared one afternoon on his way home from work. A passing car slowed down, a door opened, and he was pulled inside. He returned home three weeks later. His five-year-old daughter found him outside the front door early one morning. He had been dumped off during the night. He had been severely burned over two thirds of his body. All his fingers and toes were missing. Gangrene set in. He died two weeks later."
A burned body. Missing fingers and toes. This was clearly an identifiable M.O.-an inarguable connection.
Sue's eyes met mine across the table, but neither of us gave anything away. Unfortunately, Michael Morris wasn't a cop. He didn't know better.
"Fingers and toes!" he exclaimed. "That's the same thing that happened…" Too late, I silenced him with a reproving glare. He subsided meekly back into his chair.
"You're saying Lars Weber was in on it then?" Sue asked.
Avram shrugged, "Maybe. Maybe not. The daughter-Erika-did very well in school. She grew up, became a member of the Communist party, and went to work for a branch of Stasi-the feared East German secret police. She dropped out of sight shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We've been looking for her for the past several months."
"Why?"
"One of our affiliated organizations maintains a data base on the status of known Nazi war criminals-those who have already served their prison terms as well as those who have never been apprehended. When two of the missing Ukrainian guards from Sobibor turned up dead-murdered, or rather executed-under similar circumstances hundreds of miles apart, we started looking into it."
"Those guards were murdered?" Michael asked. "We checked on them. Kari and I were told they all died of natural causes."
"As far as we can tell," Avram answered, "six of the guards are dead. Some of them did die of natural causes. Two of them did not. Neither did the sons of two of the others. You must understand that the term ‘natural causes' becomes very flexible in some jurisdictions when inquiries are being made by someone from outside that jurisdiction."
"You said ‘similar circumstances,'" I prompted. "Can you be more specific?"
"Burned," he answered. "Almost beyond recognition, but not quite. In each case, the fingers and toes were removed but left with the body. As a warning, perhaps."
"To whom?"
"To whoever had the gold. We believe Erika Weber Schmidt was serving notice to all concerned that she was coming looking for the gold her father had once been accused of stealing."
"Whether or not he did it," Sue said. Avram nodded. "Do you think she was acting alone or in concert with someone else?"
"That we haven't been able to determine. Our assessment is that Erika Weber Schmidt is more than capable of doing it. She's a trained killer. More to the point, she's an unemployed trained killer, or at least she was."
"What does that mean?"
"We now have reason to believe she has gone to work for one of the newer and more radical neo-Nazi splinter groups."
"What you're giving us is a lot of ancient history," I interjected. "I'd like to know what brought you here to Washington last week when you showed up at Kari and Michael's apartment up in Bellingham."
Avram looked questioningly at Moise, who nodded. "A few days ago, while checking Erika Schmidt's back trail, we stumbled over the names of Michael Morris and Kari Gebhardt. One of the survivors mentioned having been interviewed by someone named Gebhardt. Since Hans Gebhardt was one of the missing German soldiers from Sobibor, it struck us as more than just a coincidence. We came here as soon as it was possible to make suitable arrangements. I should imagine Erika located Gunter in much the same way."
"Mr. Gebhardt's murder is our fault then, isn't it?" Michael murmured, his face ashen. "Kari's father died because our research called her attention to him."