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| “ | Heinrich, an SS officer, came into our house with cake. We barely had bread. He said if I could talk the neighbors into cooperating, we would be spared. I was 19. If I didn't do it, someone else would. People lived a few months, weeks, days, longer. That's what it was about. Anybody who was not there could never understand. | „ |
| ~ Steinmetz rationalizing collaborating with the Nazis. |
Jakob Skulman, aka David Steinmetz, is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Night and Fog". He is a former Nazi collaborator who murders his wife after she discovers his secret.
He was portrayed by the late Nehemiah Persoff, who also portrayed Carl Lanser in The Twilight Zone, Little Bonaparte in Some like It Hot, Iben Kostas in the 1966 Mission: Impossible series, and Graile in The Comancheros.
Early life[]
Steinmetz was born Jakob Skulman in Łódź, Poland, in 1922. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and put its Jews in ghettos, he joined the Jewish Ghetto Police, a Jewish law enforcement group created by the Nazis to take the burden of policing the ghettos off of Nazis and onto Jewish ghetto residents. He was known for his brutality, beating Jews who were not "productive" enough in the Nazis' sweatshops and putting them on the trains to Auschwitz. The Nazis did not reward him for his cruelty, however; when they cleared the ghettos in 1944, they sent him to Auschwitz along with everyone else.
He managed to survive until Allied forces liberated Auschwitz in 1945 and emigrated to the United States. There, he changed his name to David Steinmetz and married a woman named Ursula, a Holocaust survivor, with whom he had a daughter, Mara. They opened a store together and lived happily for decades, with Ursula having no idea what her husband had done.
The truth emerged when they were in their early 70s, however, when Ursula joined a support group for Holocaust survivors and heard another member's description of Skulman, which matched her husband perfectly. She confronted Steinmetz, who denied it, but she remained convinced that he and Skulman were one and the same, meaning that their entire life together had been a lie.
Unable to live with the shame, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, and Steinmetz decided to let her die to keep his secret. He went for a walk around the neighborhood, expecting her to die while he was gone. When he returned, however, he found that she was still alive, so he smothered her to death with a pillow.
In "Night and Fog"[]
The Steinmetzes' downstairs neighbor finds Ursula's body and calls the police. Steinmetz returns home in the middle of the crime scene investigation and says that he killed his wife. During interrogation with NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Mike Logan, Steinmetz says that Ursula had been in unbearable pain from cancer, and he gave her an overdose of her medication to end her suffering. Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone and Assistant District Attorney Paul Robinette are at a loss with what to charge Steinmetz with, eventually setting on assisting a suicide, a minor felony.
Briscoe and Logan keep investigating, however, and after interviewing Ursula's support group find out that she had reason to believe that her husband and war criminal Jakob Skulman are the same person. They arrest Steinmetz for murdering his wife.
During the trial, Steinmetz's lawyer, Gary Lowenthal, makes two arguments: that Ursula mistook her husband for the wrong person; and that, even if she did find the right person, Steinmetz saved more people than he murdered.
Seeking to scare Steinmetz into pleading guilty, Stone threatens to put Mara in prison for lying to the prosecution. In a rare display of decency, Steinmetz pleads guilty to crimes against humanity in order to save his daughter.
Trivia[]
- Steinmetz is loosely based on the real-life Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk.
External links[]
- David Steinmetz on the Law & Order Wiki
