Jakob Reimer

Born to Russian Mennonite parents in Friedensdorf in southeastern Ukraine, Reimer studied to be a librarian.

In 1940, Reimer was drafted into the Soviet Army. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Reimer entered combat and was captured by German forces on July 6. Two months later, due to his ethnic German heritage and language skills, he was recruited to the Trawniki concentration camp for training as a camp guard.

While serving as a camp guard, Reimer participated in the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Poland, in addition to administrative and office duties. On one occasion, Reimer fired a shot while at a pit containing corpses and at least one live civilian, which would later prove pivotal in his US denaturalization trial. In 1944, he received a War Merit Cross for his service, and was promoted to SS Senior Platoon Guard (SS-Oberzugwachmann) in 1945.

In 1944, Reimer gained German citizenship after Adolf Hitler made all ethnic German military and police personnel eligible for German citizenship.

In 1952, Reimer applied for a visa to the United States and was naturalized as a United States citizen on April 28, 1959. During his time in the United States, he worked as a Wise potato chip salesman and a restaurant manager, and lived in Brooklyn, New York. After he retired, he moved to Carmel, New York, and was living in Fort Lee, New Jersey at the time of his death.

Reimer was first investigated by American authorities in 1980 in connection with the John Demjanjuk case, but little progress was made during this initial investigation. Not until the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of Communism in the Eastern Bloc did investigators make substantial progress, as formerly restricted archives were opened up to Western historians. In 1992 the Office of Special Investigations filed a denaturalization suit against Reimer, and following a bench trial in 1998, Reimer was denaturalized on September 5, 2002. He appealed his denaturalization, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld it on January 27, 2004. In 2005, the government sought to deport Reimer, and he agreed to leave for Germany, but he died before his deportation could be completed.