Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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I live in Oak Park, and have been doing a bit of archival research about this (it's been politically relevant lately, for complicated reasons). Soffer's book ("Our Nazi") is very well written, better than you'd expect for what I assumed (wrongly) would be just a local interest story.

This all happened back in 1982-1984. I don't think you're going to find a lot of living camp guards in the US work force today.

The craziest detail about this story is that, in the early 1980s, there was an organized effort to pressure the White House and pass legislation to make it impossible to deport Nazis. The effort was led by a group of Baltic and Eastern European ethnic affinity groups, largely out of Chicago. They were called "Americans For Due Process", and their ambition was to pass legislation requiring something like an international Nuremberg Tribunal process in order to anyone deported.

Reinhold Kulle, the specific Nazi in Soffer's story, was not a sympathetic case. He volunteered for the SS Totenkopf, guarded Gross-Rosen, assisted its evacuation to Mauthausen, lied about it when immigrating to the US, lied about the camp (claiming its victims were never beaten, shot, or killed) to investigators and in court, and ultimately confessed to those lies before being deported to West Germany, where he lived out his days (still collecting an OPRF pension!) as a free man.

Other cases were more complicated. One person was almost deported before evidence was discovered conclusively showing he had been confined to a work camp for the duration of the war. Two others were deported to Soviet controlled countries where they had been sentenced to death in absentia.

> The craziest detail about this story is that, in the early 1980s, there was an organized effort to pressure the White House and pass legislation to make it impossible to deport Nazis. The effort was led by a group of Baltic and Eastern European ethnic affinity groups, largely out of Chicago. They were called "Americans For Due Process", and their ambition was to pass legislation requiring something like an international Nuremberg Tribunal process in order to anyone deported.

Some Baltic emigres to the west were clearly guilty to crimes against humanity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktors_Ar%C4%81js comes to mind.

I do not share your surprise about the pressure on the White House though. This gets easier to understand through a personal histories lens. Imagine you were a young male adult Latvian in 1940:

- 1940: native country annexed by the USSR. Most upper class deported to Siberia.

- 1941: native country occupied by Nazi Germany.

- 1942: forcibly conscripted into the Latvian Legion of the Waffen SS

- 1944-1945: native country occupied by the USSR again. escape to western Europe.

- 1946-1950: native country still occupied, move to the Chicago area like so many Baltic refugees

- 198x: native country still USSR occupied, USSR still actively targeting US exiles.

I can perfectly imagine such a person to: - condemn nazi crimes, particulary anti-semitic ones - always have been respectful towards ever human - be scared of deportation to an occupied native country without an independent judiciary - be very supportive of rigorous due process for Baltic emigres

This is all very reasonable, but when you look at contemporaneous accounts of what those Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians were writing in their Chicago newspapers, it gets a lot less reasonable --- there was a strong undercurrent of Holocaust denial.

if you get genocide yourself and the west denies that,why stop there. especially of you assisted one to escape the other .

One thing that's not clear from the article (perhaps it's explained in the book) is why the school had his marriage certificate on file. Since it listed his SS rank and the fact that he worked at a concentration camp, I'm assuming the US immigration authorities did not see it. But then the question is ... clearly he realized that being a Nazi was frowned upon in the US, so why would he provide that document to the school?

The book looks at that document as a sort of smoking gun, too. I think the simplest explanation is that Kulle didn't think the SS thing was a big deal, just a technicality he had to work around to get into the US, and that OPRF (our high school where he worked) didn't really know much about it either. It wasn't unusual for someone to have contemporaneous German documentation --- especially in Chicago, which was a hub for post-war immigration. Gross-Rosen in particular was not well known, even into the 1980s --- the centerpiece of the book is a sort of courtroom drama wherein Kulle's lawyer attempts to convince a judge that there wasn't much of anything untoward about the camp at all.

So the short answer is probably that nobody looked too carefully at Kulle's documentation when he signed on to a low-level janitor's job at a high school.

It's slightly more sinister than that. If you had to be a member of a Nazi organization to get ahead or get the government off your back because you might be viewed as politically unreliable the SS was a common choice. Members would do some paramilitary exercises now and then and be otherwise left alone. For things like Einsatzgruppe or Totenkopf you had to volunteer. The guy knew that well enough.

Yes. Also: that's common knowledge now, but probably wasn't in 1959 (certainly the distinction wasn't apparent in newspaper articles of the time). I don't think it was crazy for OPRF to assume, regardless of any documentation Kulle provided when he was hired, that he'd been vetted at immigration, and wasn't a war criminal. Of course, it was crazy for administrators to come to his defense in 1983 when the details were flushed out! But the village as a whole appears to have wanted him gone.

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