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Carl Reissman is the protagonist of "Master Race", the first story of issue #1 of the EC Comics line Impact.
Biography[]
Carl is introduced at the beginning of the story getting onto a subway train in America in 1955. The narrator explains that Carl has a dark secret: he was in a German concentration camp during the Second World War, and has lived in fear ever since, unable to forget the horror and suffering he witnessed.
As Carl tries to read his newspaper to distract himself from the memories, he sees someone he recognises getting on the train. With horror, Carl realizes that he recognises the other man from the camps. For ten years he has been living in fear that this man would find him and finish what he started in the 1940s. The sight of the man brings back Carl's memories of Germany, when he saw Adolf Hitler speak at a Nazi rally before screaming multitudes, speaking of a German master race and calling for an end to international Jewry. He recalls how he went home feeling sickened after the rally and contemplates how many others were sickened like him, but were powerless to stop the rise of the Nazis and stood by as they rounded up their neighbours and forced them into camps.
Carl's thoughts turn to when he first came to Belsen concentration camp, and saw throngs of starving and emaciated prisoners against the barbed wire fence. He remembers seeing hundreds of his countrymen killed in gas chambers and burnt in ovens, including people he knew before the war and considered friends. Carl further remembers seeing brutal tortures practiced by the sadistic guards, including medical experiments on human guinea pigs and officers making lampshades from the skin of their victims, as well as women and children being burnt alive in the ovens and hundreds of helpless people buried alive in mass graves. He remembers the moment when he heard the Allies were closing in and knew the killing was over, and how the man now sitting in front of him looked at him and told him that it wasn't over and he'd get him one day. Carl knew the man was telling the truth and ran away, hiding amongst the crowds of refugees fleeing the war, and has been running ever since.
Back in the present, Carl continues to watch the man with fear. The man looks up and sees Carl watching him; looking closer, he recognizes him as Carl Reissman and rises to his feet. Just then the train comes to a stop and Carl runs out the doors and down the deserted platform, pursued by his old nemesis. As Carl runs, the narrator berates him for running away from his past all these years when he was too afraid to run from the bloody tide of Nazism that swept his countrymen in its wake, and explains that Carl wasn't a prisoner in Belsen: he was the commander, and the man chasing him is one of his former victims.
Another subway train pulls into the station. As it does so, Carl is cornered against the edge of the platform and loses his footing, falling in front of the oncoming train. His pursuer is questioned and denies knowing Carl, claiming that he jumped under the train on purpose.
Trivia[]
- Carl's service at Belsen concentration camp is somewhat anachronistic for several reasons. Firstly, Carl remembers seeing inmates at Belsen killed in gas chambers, which Belsen did not have as it was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. He also remembers seeing lampshades made from human skin, but these are only believed to have been made at Buchenwald concentration camp, not Belsen. Furthermore, Carl remembers Belsen being liberated by the Russians, when in reality it was liberated by the British.