Black Sea Waltz: An Inverted Thriller

Black Sea Waltz: An Inverted Thriller

By

J. Otto Pohl

Hans Schmidt, not his real name, but if one wanted to blend in and be anonymous in the German speaking world it was hard to beat, sat in an Arab that is Palestinian cafe in Nazareth. Hans Schmidt was a name that gave no clues as to his geographic origins. As far as anybody knew he had always lived in Germany proper and not the Black Sea German colonies in southwestern Ukraine. But, he had only arrived in the newly truncated borders of Germany sometime in 1945 at age 18.

When he was 10 the NKVD had taken his father away to be shot. Like so many other ethnic German families in Ukraine his had seen a series of personal disasters during the 1930s. His grandparents had died of malnutrition during the Holodomor in 1933. Earlier more distant relatives had been deported to special settlement villages as kulaks in 1930. But, he was still a small child when these earlier atrocities occurred and he had only a dim memory of them. The year 1937 was different. He was ten years old and he vividly remembered the NKVD men taking his father away in the middle of the night. His mother screamed and wailed in protest to no avail.

It was that night and the permanent disappearance of his father that brought him to the Holy Land. He had come here to dispense justice or enact revenge. He did not care how other people viewed it. He was finally, after all these decades going to balance the scales.

At 65 Hans Schmidt was relatively much younger and healthier than his prey. They were now in their 80s and in failing health. They had gone on to participate in the mass deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1941 and later the deportation of the Chechens and Crimean Tatars in 1944. They had lived out their lives in the USSR without notice. They retired with generous KGB pensions in the 1970s. Then in 1991 the USSR collapsed and rather than risk facing justice they fled to Israel. Here they were given protection by the Israeli government under the Law of Return. It was a criminal state giving sanctuary to criminals based solely on being Jewish by blood.

Schmidt took a deep drag from his narghile, tasting the sweet apple flavored smoke. He washed it down with a sip of even sweeter hot tea. He looked to his left to see two very obvious Shin Bet operatives. They were no more nuanced or subtle than their NKVD predecessors had been. Schmidt was not worried about them.

The men he was after had participated in the arrest of his father in 1937. His father had been arrested during the German Operation and falsely accused of being a spy for Hitler. He was shortly thereafter shot. It was 55 years ago. But, finally there would be a reckoning.

Schmidt had only attracted the notice of the Shin Bet due to his association with local Arabs like the ones that owned and worked in the cafe where he sat. In many ways it was a good diversion. The old NKVD men he sought were not high on Shin Bet’s list of people endangered by Palestinian desires for justice and revenge. The idea that an ethnic German from Ukraine could become a communist hunter in Israel itself was beyond the narrow imagination of Israel’s secret police.

Schmidt took another draw from his pipe and exhaled smoke rings. The total lack of self awareness of the Israelis was a huge advantage in his favor. The tables had never been turned this way before. The entire scenario was deemed to one that could not possibly exist. For in the Jewish mind no Jew could ever do any wrong and no German could ever be an innocent victim. Schmidt was a going to reenact a modern version of the killing Talaat Pasha.

Nobody talked about the Armenian genocide anymore. But, during World War One, the Ottoman government had killed some 800,000 Armenians. One of the architects of that genocide was Mehmet Talaat. On 15 March 1921, a young Armenian by the name of Songhomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat as part of Operation Nemesis organized by the Dashnaks. It was a rendering of both personal revenge and national justice. The German jury trying Tehlirian acquitted him after two days. Hans Schmidt did not think any tribunal would acquit him. Then again he had no intention of getting caught.

It had not been easy to track the men whom had arrested his father in 1937. The German and Ukrainian governments had shown no interest in bringing NKVD agents involved in the German Operation to justice. The individual perpetrators, particularly those of Jewish ethnicity, had been given a free pass on their crimes by the international community.

It was as part of the German Operation during the Great Terror that the NKVD had arrested and shot his father. During the years 1937-38 the NKVD arrested and shot over 29,000 ethnic Germans for the crime of being German. It sent another 9,000 to labor camps for the same reason during these years. Over 6,000 of these executions took place in Ukraine during 1937 under the command of Izrail Leplevsky, the head of the NKVD for the Ukrainian SSR at the time. Many of the men under Leplevsky were also Jewish. This included two thirds of the men directly under him in Kiev and the two men that had arrested Schmidt’s father and were currently enjoying their retirement on beaches of Tel Aviv.

Schmidt drained his tea and summoned the owner’s nephew for a refill. He glanced over at his Shin Bet watchers. As usual Israeli intelligence was clueless. They had coasted on earlier successes and the mistakes of the Arabs for so long they were no longer capable of dealing with threats from Europeans. It is one thing to win against disorganized and pre-modern Arab peasants. It is another to triumph over Europeans, Schmidt thought. It is the difference between 1943 and 1967.

Schmidt finished his tea and took one last drag on his narghile. He dug into his pocket for his wallet and took out a handful of NIS. He left the money on the table and left the cafe to return to his lodgings.

The Shin Bet agents followed him. Schmidt contemplated whether their lack of discretion was because they were used to much easier targets or whether it was just pure chutzpah. At any rate they could not be more obvious in their tailing. It really was crude and heavy handed like everything else they did, thought Schmidt.

He arrived at his hotel and entered the lobby. He briefly exchanged words with the Arab at the desk and retrieved his room key. He headed up the stairs and entered his room. He took off his shoes and shirt and laid down on the bed. In a few minutes he was asleep.

As usual the nightmares returned. He again saw the NKVD officers and their caps adorned with blue ribbon grab his father and drag him out of the house. He awoke with a start. It was dark in his room and Schmidt was covered in sweat. He made his way to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went back to the bedroom and turned on the light. He sat at the writing desk and pulled a notebook from the pocket of his trousers. The notebook detailed the circumstances that had brought him to Israel. The men he was looking for were Lazar Rosenbaum and Izraeil Stern. They were the men that had unceremoniously arrested his father and taken him away to the local jail before he was perfunctorily pronounced guilty of espionage and then shot. They had gone on to participate in the mass deportation of Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1941. In 1944 they similarly participated in the deportation of the Chechens in February and the Crimean Tatars in May. After Stalin’s death they continued to serve in the KGB harassing dissidents until they retired in 1976 and 1977 respectively. Then after the USSR collapsed in 1991 they fled to Israel to avoid any potential scrutiny of their Stalinist past.

Rosenbaum and Stern were nasty pieces of work. They had worked their way up through the GPU-OGPU-NKVD during the 1920s and 1930s. Before the Great Terror in 1937-38 they had been involved in the 1930-31 mass internal deportation of “kulaks” to the Far North and Urals. In 1932 and 1933 they had helped enforce closing the border between Ukraine and Belarus by turning back starving refugees to their deaths. Then there was the Great Terror and the mass arrests of Germans and Poles in Ukraine during 1937-38 including Schmidt’s father. Their career in the OGPU and NKVD read like a criminal rap sheet, only these men were supposed to be the police. Schmidt scanned over his notes briefly for what seemed like the thousandth time then pocketed the notebook. The worst thing was not the crimes themselves. It was the silence around them brutally enforced not only in the USSR, but postwar Germany and the US as well. The parallels with the Armenian genocide and the assassination of Talaat by Tehlirian again struck him.

Schmidt returned to bed and slept until dawn. After awakening, showering, shaving, and dressing he headed back to the cafe for breakfast. Again the Shin Bet sent Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to follow him. Schmidt found the whole claim of Israeli superior intelligence both in terms of the Shin Bet and Mossad on one hand and general IQ on the other to be a sick joke.

Upon arriving at the cafe he ordered fried eggs, toast, and coffee. He had chosen Nazareth as his base of operations because it was still largely an Arab Christian rather than a Jewish city. This gave him more room to maneuver. Finishing his breakfast he again left some shekels on the table and left.

As he walked down the Arab streets he thought about how Nazareth had avoided ethnic cleansing in 1948. The commander of the Israeli forces that captured Nazareth was a Canadian Jew. The commander had refused to expel the Arab population of Nazareth without a written order from Ben Gurion. The Israeli leader of course refused to put any such order in writing and the Arab Christian population of Nazareth for the most part avoided expulsion in 1948. Their stroke of good luck resembled his own just a few years earlier. In 1945 and 1946 when Schmidt first arrived in the US occupation zone of Germany the armed forces of the US and UK were busy forcibly repatriating former citizens of the USSR back to the Soviet Union. Everybody that was a Soviet citizen in 1939 was to be sent back to the USSR regardless of their wishes. This included ethnic Germans and other persecuted peoples in the USSR like Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars. Out of the millions of Soviet citizens in Germany in 1945 some 300,000 were ethnic Germans, mostly from Ukraine. The Allies forcibly repatriated over 200,000 of them to the Soviet Union along with millions of other Soviet citizens who were Russian, Ukrainian, and other nationalities. By dint of pure lick Schmidt had been one of the 100,000 or so Germans from the USSR in occupied Germany that managed to avoid repatriation during 1945-46. The other two thirds were not so lucky. They had ended up in Kazakhstan, Siberia, Tajikistan, and other remote areas of the Soviet Union.

In Tajikistan they had been forced to harvest cotton in a manner similar to slaves in the antebellum US South. Some 18,000 Germans mostly from Ukraine had toiled as special settlers in the cotton fields of Tajikistan from 1945-55. Many continued to work in these cotton kolkhozes after the lifting of the special settlement restrictions on 13 December 1955. It remained a little known detail of modern slavery in the USSR.

Schmidt thanked God for his good fortune in 1945 and 1946 in avoiding repatriation to the Soviet Union. He along with 100,000 other ethnic Germans from the USSR had avoided repatriation and managed to stay in West Germany. About 30,000 of these displaced Germans from Ukraine opted to migrate even further west to Canada and South America. But, Schmidt had decided to stay in what became the Federal Republic of Germany. The new Germany arising after World War II would later officially proclaim itself as the homeland of all ethnic Germans in eastern Europe and the USSR.

Schmidt was acutely aware of his Shin Bet tail as he wandered aimlessly through the streets of Nazareth. He was just wasting the time and energy of Shin Bet now. They had no idea why he was really in Israel and probably would not believe him if he had told them. They routinely kept such tabs on foreigners just like their NKVD predecessors did. Schmidt’s association with Arab hotel and cafe owners undoubtedly drew attention to him. But, it drew attention away from his goal and that is what he wanted to do now. Later it would prove extremely valuable.

Schmidt wandered around Nazareth until he came to a book store. He entered the store and browsed the myriad titles. Most of the books were in Arabic. A smaller number were in Hebrew and a smaller number still in English and other languages. He perused the titles before selecting a tome on the history of Nazareth under the Ottomans. After paying for the book he returned to the cafe for lunch.

At the cafe Schmidt ordered a hearty lunch of shawarma and fries. To wash it down he added a bottle of beer. He glanced through his newly acquired book as he ate. Upon finishing his meal he paid and again returned to his lodgings for a nap. This time there were no nightmares.

Schmidt went over to the writing desk and again pulled out his notebook. Regardless of their crimes it was impossible to extradite Rosenbaum and Stern for trial. The Israeli Law of Return granted any ethnic Jew no matter how heinous his crimes automatic and permanent protection from justice if they could physically make it to Israel. This get of jail free card for every criminal in the world with Jewish blood was a Godsend for Soviet state criminals like Rosenbaum and Stern. It made impossible for any of the former socialist states to pursue justice against many Stalin era NKVD criminals.

Thus trials for Jewish criminals were rendered completely impossible if the criminals were ethnically Jewish and could escape to Israel. The only way to render justice was vigilante style like Tehlirian had done with Talaat in Berlin. Schmidt had tracked Rosenbaum and Stern to Israel to kill them. But, he was in a race against God as both Rosenbaum and Stern were old and in ill health. He had to finish the job fast or it would be finished without him.

Schmidt went down to the front desk and arranged for transportation to Tel-Aviv. There he believed he would find Rosenbaum and Stern. When he found them he would kill them. Then he would leave Israel.

As Schmidt waited for his ride to Tel-Aviv he wiled the time away reading his book on Ottoman Nazareth. Unlike the Armenians, the Arab Christians had largely managed to survive intact in Palestine during the entire period of the empire. It was only in 1948 that the Christian Arabs in Palestine had experienced the same catastrophe as their Muslim neighbors. The Arabs in Nazareth being an exception to the mass expulsions of that year.

Schmidt’s ride finally arrived. The Arab driver took his one suitcase and put it in the trunk of the car. The drive to Tel-Aviv was long and quiet. The moment Schmidt had envisioned for decades was almost at hand.

As the car travelled the distance between Nazareth and Tel Aviv, Schmidt thought about his childhood in Ukraine. He did not remember much about the collectivization or the subsequent famine. Although he did remember being hungry all the time when he was six. There seemed to be no food anywhere that year. Then miracolously food appeared again when he was seven. Then of course there was the very vivid and traumatic memory of his father’ arrest when he was ten. Things were never the same after that.

The four years between his father’s arrest and the arrival of the Wehrmacht were difficult for Schmidt’s family. It was only with the temporary end of Soviet rule in Ukraine that things improved significantly. The German occupation brought a respite to the waves of NKVD repression. It also brought about a greater material prosperity for the ethnic Germans in the territory that had avoided deportation to Kazakhstan as a result of the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941. VOMI under the SS provided furniture, clothing, and other assistance to the remaining German colonies in Ukraine. Unlike under Stalin the Volksdeutsche were now a favored rather than a persecuted minority. This situation, however, only lasted for two years. Then in 1943 with the turning of the war they began a long and chaotic trek westward. This journey would only end two years later with the arrival of the Schmidt family I the US occupation zone of Germany. The German colonists present in the Russian Empire and USSR since 1764 became permanently scattered across four continents.

The evacuation to the West took place in stages. First, the German authorities evacuated them to the General Gouvernment. Then it sent them to the Warthegau. Then it transferred them to Silesia. Finally, they fled into the US occupation zone in Bavaria. The two year process finally delivered them to what would become the Federal Republic of Germany.

Schmidt was 18 when he arrived in Bavaria. The trauma of his early life in Ukraine was now over. From this point on he could live a normalized life.

The car finally reached its destination in Tel-Aviv. The entire trip they had obviously been tailed by a very indiscrete pair of Shin Bet agents. Again Schmidt found himself amused at their ham fisted manner of operating. They did no even try and hid their actions.

Tel Aviv is where Schmidt believed Rosenbaum and Stern were currently. He would find them, kill them, then leave Israel. It was a simple plan. But, first he had to lose the Shin Bet tail. He could not accomplish his mission with those clowns following him.

Outside of Nazareth most of the rest of Israel had been ethnically cleansed of its Arab majority in 1948. Jewish colonists from Europe had replaced the Palestinians. This was the case in Tel Aviv. Drawing upon the model of the NKVD’s deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941, the Zionists had expelled over 700,000 of the 850,000 Palestinians in what would be considered Israel from 1948-67. The remaining 150,000 were placed under military regulations similar to the Soviet special settlement regime. These restrictions would last until 1966. The Soviet influence upon the State of Israel was deep and profound.

The Schmidt family like the Christian Arabs of Nazareth were lucky in avoiding expulsion. In 1941 starting with Crimea the NKVD systematically deported the ethnic German population of the USSR west of the Urals into Kazakhstan and Siberia. After the Crimean Germans came the Volga Germans, the largest and oldest concentration of ethnic Germans in the USSR. The NKVD rounded up and loaded onto trains some half a million Volga Germans not only from the Volga German ASSR, but also from the adjacent oblasts of Saratov and Stalingrad. From 3 to 20 September 1941, the Stalin regime erased 177 years of German colonization of the Volga region. This was followed in quick succession through the rest of the year in other regions. The NKVD purged both the North and South Caucasus of their German colonies. They removed the ethnic German minority from Moscow and other cities. Finally, they evicted almost 80,000 Germans from eastern Ukraine. The Germans in western and central areas of the Ukrainian SSR like the Schmidts were spared deportation to Kazakhstan in 1941 due to the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. In total the German military rescued over 300,000 ethnic Germans in Ukraine from deportation. Of these 300,000 some 200,000 would be forcibly repatriated to the USSR in 1945-46. Only 100,000 out of 1.5 million ethnic Germans in the USSR would permanently escape Soviet rule during the 1940s. The rest would either die or be confined to the Asian areas of the USSR up until the late 1980s.

Schmidt planned to find Rosenbaum and Stern in Tel Aviv then kill them and then leave Israel. But, first he had to do somehting about his very annoying tail. The Shin Bet men were still following him now in Tel Aviv. Schmidt gathered up luggage and headed into the lobby of his hotel. Soon it would all be finished.

Schmidt found his Israeli passport under the name Yaacov Arad. It had been acquired from a rather corrupt and greedy Israeli official at their embassy in Moscow. He took it with him and headed to the central municipal police station in Tel Aviv.

At the police station he explained that he was being followed by two men he was pretty sure were criminals. The police captain made some calls and before Schmidt had even left the station a couple of uniformed cops had pulled in the two Shin Bet men following him. They would be cut loose soon. But, the disruption of their surveillance gave Schmidt enough time to accomplish his mission. He left the station and headed towards the beach.

Schmidt walked until found the building he was looking for. He took a key pass card out of his pocket and used it to open the lobby door. He hen climbed the steps to the 14^th floor. There he hoped to find Rosenbaum.

He walked to apartment number 203 and took a key out of his pocket. He opened the door. Sitting in a chair with pillows propping up his head was Rosenbaum. A plastic tube ran from a green metal oxygen cylinder to his nose. He appeared to be asleep.

Schmidt entered the room. He strode over to Rosenbaum. He turned off the oxygen tank and stood in front of the dying former NKVD officer. Rosenbaum started to gasp and cough. Schmidt grabbed one of the pillows behind Rosenbaum’s head and pressed it against his fact to silence him. Schmidt’s gloved hands pressed the pillow hard against Rosenbaum’s mouth and nose. The former NKVD officer flailed his arms and legs frantically like some sort of epileptic jellyfish. Soon it would all be over. Eventually, Rosenbaum stopped jerking around. He was dead now and Schmidt had half of his revenge.

Schmidt had a preprepared card written in Hebrew hat read, “Justie has been done.” He placed this in the mouth of Rosenbaum. He then walked out of the room and downstairs and out of the building.

Stern’s death came even easier than Rosenbaum’s. Unbeknownst to Schmidt the other NNKVD officer was already dead. Schmidt went back to his hotel. On the way back he disposed of his gloves and keys to Rosenbaum’s flat. The next day he would venture out to kill Stern. But, God had already beaten Schmidt.

Stern was in the hospital. Schmidt using his Arad identity asked what room he was in at the front desk. After finally convincing the woman at the desk that he was indeed Stern’s cousin from Germany he was informed that he had died last night. At least Schmidt had ended Rosenbaum. Although he too probably would not have lived much longer even without Schmidt’s intervention. It was now time for Schmidt to leave the Holy Land.

He walked back to his hotel. He then packed his one suitcase and went down stairs to get a taxi to Ben Gurion International Airport. He managed to leave Israel and enter Istanbul easily. He spent a couple weeks in Turkey before returning to Germany. Eventually he made his way back to Stuttgart. There he had one last mission. But, this one did not involve killing anyone.

He knocked on the door to brother’s apartment. A man about a decade younger than Schmidt opened the door. He let Schmidt into the flat and sat down on the couch. Schmidt stood standing a while before sitting down on a chair opposite the sofa. He softly spoke in German, “Fritz, it is done.” His brother hesitated a brief moment before answering, “You killed both Rosenbaum and Stern?” Hans replied, “I killed Rosenbaum. Stern died before I could get to him.” Fritz nodded. He had only been an infant when the NKVD had arrested their father and he had no memory of the arrest unlike Hans.

Hans left his brother’s flat to go to his own domicile. He lived in a small house outside the city. He drove a small black car. Upon arrival he undressed, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

Schmidt awoke in the morning. The journey to the Holyland to kill Rosenbaum and Stern had exhausted him. He showered and dressed. Then he drove into town for breakfast and coffee at a small cafe. There he again contemplated the last month.

He went out to the newspaper kiosk and scanned the front pages to see if there was anything on Rosenbaum’s death. He did not see anything. His act of revenge had not registered with any journalists yet.

It never would other than a small obituary notice in the Jerusalem Post. Rosenbaum’s death like his life passed away unnoticed by anybody, but his victims. But, for Schmidt the past had finally passed.

The End

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