United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice functions in City of God as the institutional embodiment of legal procedure applied to the crimes of the Holocaust, and the novel measures its power precisely by its limits. It is the agency that receives letters from a Holocaust survivor seeking justice, the agency whose lawyers respond with bureaucratic replies, and the agency whose evidentiary standards ultimately determine whether a suspected Nazi commandant will ever stand trial. In the story of the effort to expose S.S. Major Schmitz, the Department of Justice emerges as a force that is simultaneously indispensable and inadequate—the only mechanism capable of reopening a deportation case, yet a mechanism so bound by rules of proof that it can be defeated by a clever lie.

The Preissen Case and the Failure of Testimony

The Department's first appearance in the novel comes through the file that the rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, faxes to the ex-Times man—the accumulated record of her father's long campaign for justice. The file contains the father's letters to the Justice Department and their bureaucratic replies, along with two 1977 articles from The New York Times covering a deportation hearing and its finding. At that hearing, three people testified that the man in question was the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer successfully shot down their testimony, portraying them as elderly and easily befuddled. The defendant testified that he was Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who had only done guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front—the same identity he had presented to immigration authorities after the war. The judge found in his favor. The Department of Justice's lawyer, the file shows, was somewhat defensive about his handling of the case, a detail that suggests institutional awareness of failure without institutional correction.

The Wiesenthal Center Contrast and the Limits of Documentation

The file also contains letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and here the novel draws a telling contrast. The functionary at the Wiesenthal Center agreed with Sarah's father that Preissen was almost certainly Schmitz, but conceded that short of convincing documentation, the identification could not be made to justify reopening the case—although their file was being kept open. The Department of Justice offered less agreement, its lawyer defensive about the handling of the case. This contrast establishes the Department as the more rigid of the two institutions, the one less willing to act on probability and more insistent on documentation that the passage of decades and the chaos of war had made nearly impossible to obtain. The novel thus presents the Department not as malicious but as structurally incapable of the kind of moral certainty that the survivor's quest demands.

The Impounded Chest and the Legal Ritual of Unsealing

The Department re-enters the narrative at a moment of high procedural drama: the recovery of the ghetto archive chest, impounded at JFK Airport. At Pem's request, the chest could not be cracked open until the Department of Justice had one of its attorneys present, as customs had insisted it must be. The reasoning was explicitly legal—if the archive included documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it would have to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing had to be irreproachable. The arrangements took the better part of two weeks, and on the appointed day Pem and Sarah rode out to JFK in a taxi through the rain, not speaking. The scene is saturated with the weight of legal formality: the Department's presence is required not to seek justice but to certify that the evidence will survive a courtroom challenge. The novel here shows the Department as a kind of priestly caste of procedure, whose blessing is necessary for the archive to become legally potent.

The Archive's Contents and the Reopening of the Case

When the chest was finally opened in a bare fluorescent-lit room, its contents vindicated the survivor's campaign. In a separately wrapped packet was a complete dossier on Commandant Schmitz—a c.v. with date and place of birth, names of his parents (with his mother's maiden name Preissen, apparently the source of the name Helmut Preissen claimed as an American citizen), schooling, date of joining the Nazi party, date of entry to the S.S., commission as an officer, and a quite clear black-and-white photo of the man in full Nazi regalia, standing plump and righteous before a scaffold with the dangling body of a hanged Jew miscreant behind him. The attorney from the Department of Justice wanted all of it, asking permission to have the entire archive removed for photocopying before Sarah took possession, and announced she would FedEx certain originals to the war-crimes office of the Department. She was sure the deportation case against this Preissen/Schmitz would be reopened, but noted that there were several hundred open cases on file of suspected Nazi criminals living in the United States, and perhaps some of the other materials on individuals would be relevant as well. The Department's attorney struggled to find her voice, trying very hard to be businesslike—a human tremor within the institutional mask.

The Final Irony: Death Without Trial

The novel's final word on the Department of Justice comes as a bitter anticlimax. When Pem learns that the son of a bitch had died two months ago—Schmid, Schmitz, whatever his name was, the Nazi who ran the ghetto, dead in his sleep at a home in Yonkers—the reaction is pure frustration. "We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" The Department's machinery had finally been set in motion, the evidence assembled, the case reopened, and then the target died before he could stand in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The Department of Justice, which had spent decades refusing to act, had at last been compelled to act—and its action was rendered moot by the ordinary mortality of the guilty. The novel thus ends its treatment of the Department on a note of structural irony: the institution that could have delivered justice was too slow, and when it finally moved, history had already rendered its verdict irrelevant. The Department's procedures, so painstakingly followed, produced no courtroom, no public reckoning, no closure—only the knowledge that the machinery had worked too late.