Steven P. Remy on Michael Soffer’s *Our Nazi: an American suburb’s encounter with evil*

In 1981, the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) revealed that Reinhold Kulle, then a custodian at the high school in Oak Park, Illinois, had been a member of the SS and a guard at the Gross Rosen concentration camp. Having lied about these things on his immigration application in 1957, Kulle – one of an estimated 10,000 former Nazis, European fascists, and collaborators who managed to enter the US – settled in Oak Park and worked at the school for the next 27 years. Our Nazi explores the intertwined stories of the local responses to the revelation and the OSI’s legal proceedings against him.

Michael Soffer, a former history teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School, delves into the Kulle case in considerable, and occasionally distracting, detail. Kulle lived the ideal postwar working class life in Oak Park. He was respected and popular at the school. Everyone considered him indispensable to its day-to-day operations and yearly events. The revelations about Kulle’s past hit the town like a bombshell.

Soffer shows how multiple developments produced the divisions that characterized the Kulle affair. On the one hand, public awareness that a large number of war criminals had settled in the US had been growing for a decade. Revelations in the press provoked a backlash. Ethnic religious and civic groups dismissed the accusations as KGB fabrications or brushed them off as the inevitable outcome of war. Neighbors could not believe that the friendly, hardworking people who cultivated lovely gardens and kept tidy homes could have been war criminals. But others – notably American Jewish organizations, Holocaust survivors, principled members of Congress and OSI officials – took the position that justice delayed was justice denied and refused to allow men like Kulle to live out their lives in the peace and security they had denied to millions.

The distance between the two sides was widened by limited knowledge of the Holocaust in 1970s America, the popularity of Anne Frank’s diary notwithstanding. The subject was not taught widely in American schools and universities. Indeed, attempts to introduce Holocaust education in public schools in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago were met with ferocious resistance from German- and Arab-American groups, with the former denying the genocide outright and the latter accusing “Zionists” of using schools for “their evil propaganda purposes” (77).

But the legal landscape changed dramatically in 1978, when Elizabeth Holtzmann, a Congresswoman from New York, sponsored an amendment to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that facilitated the denaturalization and deportation of ex-Nazis living in the US. Then came the creation within the Justice Department of the OSI, which needed only to prove that someone had served in a Nazi unit or camp to proceed with a prosecution. In 1981, OSI investigators flagged Kulle from lists of concentration camp guards and compiled a damning file of his wartime service, though found no evidence that he had committed any particular crime. For his part, Kulle initially admitted to lying about his past and insisted that he was a simple guard at Gross Rosen and had been following orders. He would later claim to have been confused by his initial questioning. Throughout, he seemed to be totally remorseless. But his admission that he had lied to immigration officials in 1957 combined with the evidence documenting his SS service ensured the success of the OSI’s case against him. In 1987 Kulle was deported to West Germany, where he was never prosecuted.

Similar to other cases, Kulle’s defenders could not comprehend how a pillar of their community could have been a Nazi. Soffer recounts the anguished debates that coursed through Oak Park – a community that regarded itself, perhaps too generously, as a bastion of tolerance – as to what should be done. Ultimately, the school dismissed Kulle, though Soffer reveals that he was quietly granted early retirement, which included benefits and a lifelong pension for him and his wife.

The fate of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators has become of intense recent interest to historians. While we have important studies of high-visibility cases (Adolf Eichmann, Wernher von Braun, John Demjanjuk) and the institutions and escape routes that allowed so many war criminals to evade justice, less work has been done on cases like Kulle’s. A notable exception is Monique Laney’s superb study of the ex-Nazi scientists who settled in Huntsville, Alabama and built America’s space flight program. It’s unfortunate that Soffer did not engage with Laney’s analysis. A comparison of how the residents of two very different places responded to the presence of ex-Nazis in their respective communities would have been fascinating and instructive. OSI investigations ultimately led to the denaturalization and/or deportation of over 100 former Nazis, and Soffer’s account should inspire similar research on the places where they had found safe haven.