Dov Bar: This Rode, who appears in the Black Book list as well as in Timofievich's testimony, had a hobby of appearing in the Brest Ghetto with white gloves on his hands, telling lies right and left, promising that the Jews have nothing to worry about, that the future holds hope for them and hinting that he can be bribed. He was not reluctant to have sexual relations with his Jewish women clerks in the ghetto. Rode set the date of annihilation of Volchin's Jews – 22nd of September 1942. He scheduled the death trains from Brest to Brona Gora on the 15th-16th of October 1942. Rode “cleansed” the region of Brest of its Jews. By the end of 1942 there were no more Jews in his region. He served in this office another 15 months and then was replaced by Biner, who served from beginning of 1944 until the liberation of Brest.
I tried to trace this murderer, Rode. I wasn't very successful. Even Moshe Smoler, a survivor of the Brest ghetto who wrote a book about the ghetto, could not supply me with any information. Smoler told me that people saw Rode after the war walking in the streets of Vienna. Smoler did not even know Rode's first name --nor did anybody else. He did not know how to pronounce the name: Ruda, Rode or Roda…
While I was reviewing the records of the trials in the German district under British occupation, I ran across a proceeding known as the “Natzweiler Trial”. This was a short trial that took place between and May 25th and June 1st, 1946, in which the were 10 defendents. Only one of them was sentenced to death - Werner Rode - and he was executed on the gallows the beginning of 1947. I suspect that he is the “cruel king” of Brest. When he finished executing the Jews of his district, he was left jobless and was sent to a proportionally small hard-labor concentration camp on the border of Germany and France called Struthof-Natzweiler. I suppose that in order to hide his identity, the Nazis changed his first name.
Andrea Simon also tried to trace this murderer. She sent a letter to the archive of the Central Bureau of the Judicial Administration of the States in Ludvigsburg for Investigation of Nazi Crimes. That archive offered her ridiculous answers about a Major Friedrich Wilhelm Rode head of SS and commander of the Brest Police. The Germans who were working at the time in the archive of the Bureau did not think that this man and others --named by the bureau but unfamiliar to us-- were necessarily guilty of crimes. To prove their point -- none of these people were charged or called to stand trial.
They stated that there was no obligation to bring them to trial, and if there was any guilt, it should be cancelled because of its negligible importance. In other words: the guilt of murdering 50,000 Jews in Brona-Gora should be cancelled because of its “negligible importance”.
