Reiner Hartmann

Quick Facts

• Role: Schutzhaftlagerführer (head of the women’s camp) at Auschwitz; the novel’s principal human antagonist and the true Nazi whose crimes drive the plot
• First appearance: Exists only in past narratives, recounted by Josef Weber and Minka Singer
• Key relationships: Older brother to Franz Hartmann (whose later alias is Josef Weber); terrorizes Minka Singer; serves under Hauptsturmführer Voelkel during Eastern Front operations

Who They Are

Bold, handsome, and pitiless, Reiner Hartmann is the story’s unrepentant perpetrator—the man whose crimes Franz later assumes under the alias of Josef Weber, and whose actions devastate Minka Singer. Existing entirely in memory and testimony, he crystallizes the novel’s meditation on The Nature of Good and Evil: where Franz is haunted, Reiner is hollow; where others wrestle with Guilt, Sin, and Atonement, he never even looks back. His purpose in the narrative is both plot-driving and thematic—he is the real, unreformed Nazi whose ordinary charisma and administrative power translate seamlessly into extraordinary violence.

Personality & Traits

Reiner’s personality is an escalation of cruelty given structure, rank, and rewards. The Nazi machine doesn’t corrupt him so much as give him a home; each promotion grants him more latitude to indulge what is already there—dominance, opportunism, and enjoyment of harm.

• Bullying as identity: As a teenager, he publicly pummels his brother Franz in a Hitler-Jugend boxing match to impress superiors and a girl, equating humiliation with strength. Violence is not a means; it is his self-definition.
• Ambition without conviction: He joins the Hitler-Jugend and later the SS because they offer status he cannot achieve academically. Careerism—not ideology—starts the engine; ideology later justifies what ambition wants.
• Sadism under authority: From Kristallnacht to executions on the Eastern Front to Auschwitz, he treats brutality as performance and prerogative. The uniform doesn’t restrain him; it licenses him.
• Remorseless calculation: He shoots Darija not in passion but to erase a witness to his theft—violence as administrative problem-solving.
• Challenge masquerading as “principle”: He confronts Hauptsturmführer Voelkel over the assault of Voelkel’s mistress, Annika. The scene reads less as chivalry than as a power play—Reiner asserting dominance by policing another man’s excess.
• Physical presence as ideology made flesh:
  • Youth: Blond, athletic, with pale, glassy eyes—the poster child of Aryan vigor, rewarded by the Hitler Youth.
  • SS officer: Tall, blond, with icy, near-silver eyes “that glitter.” A tremor in his right hand—especially noticeable when he holds a pistol—becomes his indelible signature and, later, a means of identification.

Character Journey

Reiner’s arc is a straight line downward. A schoolyard bully finds institutional affirmation in the Hitler-Jugend; an ambitious recruit becomes a Totenkopf man and then an Einsatzgruppen functionary; finally, he is installed as Schutzhaftlagerführer at Auschwitz, where bureaucratic efficiency fuses with intimate cruelty. He steals from prisoners, silences witnesses, and oversees daily terror. After the war, fleeing with Franz, he chokes on a sour cherry pit; Franz watches and does not help. That nonintervention is less a twist of fate than a moral fulcrum: Reiner’s evil ends, but its weight transfers to Franz, who survives under his brother’s name and spends a lifetime atoning for sins that are not technically his—and morally, cannot be ignored.

Key Relationships

• Franz Hartmann (alias Josef Weber): The brothers’ bond is a knot of rivalry and dependence. Reiner bullies Franz yet intermittently “protects” him, teaching Franz a warped grammar of loyalty. After the war, Franz’s choice to let Reiner die and to assume his identity transforms a sibling dynamic into a lifelong penance—Franz becomes the vessel for the guilt Reiner never felt.
• Minka Singer: As Schutzhaftlagerführer, Reiner is the daily face of terror in Minka’s life—ordering, striking, deciding who suffers. When he murders her best friend, Darija, to cover his theft, he brands himself into Minka’s memory; the twitching pistol hand and glittering eyes become the forensic details of justice.
• Hauptsturmführer Voelkel: Their fraught hierarchy reveals Reiner’s competitive cruelty. His intervention when Voelkel assaults Annika is less moral than strategic—an assertion of who gets to wield power and how. Even his “limits” are about control, not conscience.

Defining Moments

Reiner’s story is punctuated by scenes where private appetite meets public power—and where the consequences reverberate long after he is gone.

• Hitler-Jugend boxing match against Franz
  • What happens: Reiner brutalizes his own brother to impress onlookers.
  • Why it matters: It inaugurates a pattern—violence as currency, spectacle, and shortcut to approval.
• Kristallnacht participation
  • What happens: He smashes Jewish property and kicks a pleading woman.
  • Why it matters: His cruelty scales from personal bullying to sanctioned persecution; the state rewards what he already is.
• The theft and murder in Franz’s office at Auschwitz
  • What happens: Caught stealing from the camp safe, Reiner shoots Darija in the face to silence her.
  • Why it matters: Violence becomes administrative housekeeping; Minka’s memory of his trembling pistol hand becomes the key to identifying him.
• The tremor that unmasks him
  • What happens: His right-hand twitch recurs during acts of violence.
  • Why it matters: A small bodily glitch cuts through his cultivated invulnerability—what he cannot control ultimately exposes him.
• Death by cherry pit; Franz does not intervene
  • What happens: Reiner chokes and dies while Franz watches.
  • Why it matters: The baton of moral consequence passes to Franz; Reiner exits unchanged, forcing others to live with what he made.

Essential Quotes

I looked at the guard who was watching me sift through the suitcases and satchels and shouted at me to get to work. So I reached into the pile that never seemed to get any smaller and pulled out a leather valise. I tossed away a nightgown and some brassieres and underwear, a lace hat. There was a silk roll with a string of pearls. I called to the officer, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the wall of the shack, and handed it over to him to record and inventory. I lugged another piece of luggage out of the heap. This one, I recognized.

This vignette shows the bureaucratic rhythm of theft at Auschwitz and the officer’s casual entitlement—“smoking… leaning” while property is inventoried. Reiner’s presence hovers in that posture of ownership; the recognition of the suitcase collapses anonymity into personal violation, foreshadowing how Minka will later recognize him by his habits and his hand.

The Schutzhaftlagerführer walked around me in a half circle. “By taking one of my workers?” “One of my workers,” the Hauptscharführer said. “Without my permission.” “For God’s sake, Reiner. You can find another. This one happens to be fluent in German.” “Wirklich?” he said. Really? He was talking to me, but since I had my back to him, I didn’t know he was waiting for a response. Suddenly, something crashed down on the back of my skull. I fell out of my chair onto my knees, reeling. “You will answer when you are spoken to!” The Schutzhaftlagerführer stood over me with his hand raised.

The half circle is choreography—predator and prey—as Reiner makes Minka’s body the stage for an argument about authority. His violence is not impulse but punctuation: a blow as grammar for hierarchy, insisting that language, labor, and pain all belong to him.

I started to back out of the room, panicked. I had to get out of there, and I had to get Darija out of there. But even if we were able to break through the fence and escape to Russia it would not have been far enough. As long as I knew that the Schutzhaftlagerführer was stealing, and as long as I worked for his brother, I could turn him in. Which meant he’d have to get rid of me. “Run,” I yelled to Darija as the Schutzhaftlagerführer’s hand closed over my wrist. Darija paused, and that was just enough time for the officer to grab her by the hair with his other hand and drag her into the office. He closed the door behind us. “What do you think you saw?” he demanded. I shook my head, looking at the ground. “Speak!” “I . . . I saw nothing, Herr Schutzhaftlagerführer.” Beside me, Darija slipped her hand into mine. The Schutzhaftlagerführer saw the slight movement... I don’t know what he thought at that moment... Or simply that if he let us go, I would tell my friend what he had done, and then there would be two people who knew his secret. He pulled his pistol out of its holster and shot Darija in the face.

Here, Reiner reduces murder to logistics: a witness exists; the witness must be erased. The intimacy of Darija’s hand in Minka’s—human connection—triggers his reflex to sever, literally, any tie that might expose him. The moment fuses theft, terror, and the identifying tic of his gun hand into the single act that will later condemn him.