Leo Sammer

Leo Sammer enters the narrative as Zeller, a prisoner whose composed public manner and troubled nighttime disclosures conceal a former government official’s role in wartime persecution. Speaking to Hans Reiter, he revises his identity and history as he goes: he admits that some of his earlier statements were false, recounts his work supplying labor to the Reich, and describes abandoning a group of Jews in an old tannery. His account makes the distance between administrative self-description and responsibility for violence impossible to ignore.

Identity and Background

At first, Sammer is known in the camp as Zeller. By day he appears dignified and decorous, keeps mostly to his old Volkssturm comrades, and is regarded by many prisoners as decent. Reiter, who hears his nighttime talk, observes a deterioration beneath that respectable manner. Sammer’s words come more rapidly as the American interrogators move through the prisoners; he whispers, moans, and imagines scenes that Reiter cannot make coherent. The contrast between the orderly daytime figure and the agitated speaker at night makes his identity seem less a settled fact than something being defended and revised.

One night Sammer says that he is not Zeller but Leo Sammer, and that some of what he has told Reiter is true and some is not. He insists that he was never a member of the Volkssturm. Instead, he says, he fought on an economic and political battlefield: before the war’s end he had been assistant director of an organization responsible for supplying workers to the Reich, with its main offices in a Polish town near the General Government. After his son was killed at Kursk, Sammer says, he stopped believing in the war, but continued working and was eventually appointed head of the organization. He describes the resulting increase in his duties as the work of a methodical administrator, while the substance of that work places him inside the machinery of the regime.

His Account of Wartime Responsibility

Sammer presents his administrative career through a personal story of loss and endurance. His son, he says, was an intelligent boy who liked reading and sports and died at Kursk. His wife survived but suffered constant migraines. Sammer claims that he worked to forget his misfortunes and kept going through tenacity. The explanation asks Reiter to see a bereaved husband and father, yet it accompanies an account of directing a labor-supply organization and administering its operations in occupied Poland. Personal suffering does not erase the institutional responsibilities he describes; instead, his self-portrait brings those claims into uneasy proximity.

His most consequential admission concerns a group of Jews in his power. Sammer says he sought instructions by telephone but received no answer. He then ordered an evacuation, sent people west before dawn, and stayed behind. He says he visited the Jews and told them to leave, but ultimately removed the two policemen guarding them and abandoned them in the old tannery. He calls this freedom, a word that turns his account into an attempted justification: the people were left without protection, and Sammer frames their abandonment as though it were a release.

After leaving the town, Sammer says, he had already burned what needed to be burned. He recalls empty streets, women watching from windows, and his departure by car. He describes himself as a fair administrator who did good things by instinct and bad things because of the vicissitudes of war. He then rejects responsibility for the harm done to Polish boys, blaming alcohol, football, and their mothers rather than himself. The repeated movement from admission to excuse defines his account: Sammer supplies incriminating circumstances, then tries to contain their meaning within a story of duty, misfortune, and limited personal culpability.

Reiter and the Prisoner-of-War Camp

Sammer’s relationship with Reiter is shaped by disclosure, dependence, and suspicion. During the day, Sammer largely keeps to his former Volkssturm companions; at night, he turns to Reiter with increasingly disordered recollections. Reiter does not know what forces are at work in him, but senses that Sammer’s worsening condition comes from a single source: madness. Sammer’s confession therefore reaches Reiter not as a stable testimony delivered in formal questioning, but as the speech of a man whose public composure is failing while the prospect of interrogation draws nearer.

Sammer fears that the American police will return, arrest him, and expose him to public disgrace. The fear does not make him a prominent target: Reiter later explains that the Americans were looking for people of greater standing, including officials from death camps, SS officers, and major party figures. Sammer, in their view, was an insignificant civil servant. Reiter was questioned about him, including whether Sammer had enemies among the prisoners, and answered that he knew nothing beyond Sammer’s stories about his dead son and his wife’s migraines. Sammer’s own account, however, had already given Reiter knowledge of the tannery and the people left there.

One morning Sammer’s body is found between the tent and the latrines. Someone has strangled him. The Americans question about ten prisoners, including Reiter, who says he heard nothing unusual that night. They take Sammer’s body away and bury him in the common grave at the Ansbach cemetery. The narrative does not identify the killer or establish why Sammer was killed. His death ends the possibility of further interrogation without resolving the gap between his confession and his self-justifications.

Identity, Confession, and Narrative Significance

The names Zeller and Sammer mark the changing terms of his self-presentation. Initially, the false name gives him distance from the past; his eventual disclosure appears to restore an identity, but it does not produce a complete or transparent account. Sammer expressly admits that some of his statements are true and others are not, and the narrative offers no independent confirmation for every part of his wartime history. His testimony must therefore be read alongside the particulars he supplies and the evasions with which he surrounds them, rather than as a final, unambiguous verdict on himself.

Sammer’s account is consequential because it shows how responsibility can be narrated in the language of administration and personal hardship. He describes directing a state organization, making decisions during the retreat, and abandoning Jews under his control, yet repeatedly recasts himself as a conscientious official overtaken by war. The contradiction does not make the actions he recounts disappear; it exposes the limits of his preferred story. In the sequence of the novel, Reiter’s knowledge of Sammer’s past also becomes a source of danger and concealment: when Reiter later tells a woman that he killed Sammer, he identifies him as a killer of Jews and explains that Sammer had confided in him in the prisoner-of-war camp. Sammer’s brief presence thus binds wartime bureaucracy and persecution to Reiter’s later life, while leaving the circumstances of Sammer’s own death unresolved.