A past failure of moral judgment sounds an alert today
Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil by Michael Soffer. University of Chicago Press, 2024. 296 pp., $25.00
On a December morning in 1982 school board members at the Oak Park and River Forest High School outside Chicago opened their papers to an article about a local man under investigation by the government. He was discovered to be a former Nazi. And not just any Nazi, but a member of the Waffen SS’s infamous Death’s Head division.
Unlike many ordinary German draftees, Reinhold Kulle had joined the elite group that mandated pure “Aryan” ancestry early in World War II. Not only had he served in the SS, he served at one of the many concentration camps that were scattered across Europe wherever the Third Reich had spread. The Gross-Rosen camp held more than 100,000 Jews, Poles, and Russians between 1940 and 1945. As many as 40,000 people had died there. That a participant in these infamous crimes was now living quietly in a midwestern suburb was shocking. But there was more, and it was this that got the school board members’ attention: Kulle, veteran of the SS, former guard in a Nazi concentration camp, was the head custodian of their high school. He’d worked there since 1959.
Nothing sounds less probable than the idea that the U.S. would create not just an accidental home for the perpetrators of the Holocaust but a welcoming one. After all, the official values of the U.S. stand in such stark contrast to those of the Nazis, and the country proved its commitment to those values in expended blood and treasure during the war. Would Americans really be willing to defend Nazis and ready to vilify their Jewish neighbors? But in the 1980s—just four decades after the fact, when most American war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and ex-Nazis were still middle aged—this is what occurred. Michael Soffer, a history teacher in Oak Park, Illinois, tells how that played out in his own community in this brilliantly researched, marvelously executed, and deeply unsettling book.
Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors settled in the U.S. after the war, bearing on their bodies—sometimes with tattooed identification numbers—and in their memories evidence of the horrors they lived through. About 1600 known former Nazis—technicians, intelligence analysts, and scientists—were brought to America and employed by the U.S. government. And many thousands more Germans immigrated to America and melted into the post-war population. Kulle was one of the latter. He lied about his disqualifying SS membership, though his documents, which were on file at the high school, noted it, had anyone bothered to look. Early in the Cold War no one was motivated to look.
Awareness of Nazis in our midst grew slowly. The capture of SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and his subsequent trial in Israel brought public attention to the matter. But it was activists like Simon Wiesenthal and a host of lesser knowns, along with New York Representative Elizabeth Holzman, who finally spurred the U.S. government to look into the matter. In 1979 the Justice Department set up a new Office of Special Investigations to examine cases of war criminals living in the U.S. Hundreds were subsequently found and prosecuted and dozens were deported. Reinhold Kulle was among them.
Soffer, who teaches at the high school Kulle worked at for more than twenty years, made use of the event in his classes. He recounts the shock his students felt at learning their school had once employed a Nazi, and how they assumed that, once revealed, it was an open-and-shut case to dismiss him. It was not.
In almost all cases, these individuals had sunk roots into their communities. They lived quiet, un-political lives, and usually developed reputations as effective employees and helpful neighbors. Few of those who knew them could believe the allegations. Many were from Eastern Europe and claimed to have been persecuted themselves by the Nazis and insisted they were the current victims of Soviet propaganda. Deporting them would mean surrendering them to totalitarian, communist regimes. Church groups and ethnic newspapers objected to this variety of response, and garnered the support of conservative legislators. Jews were a small and sometimes distrusted minority in these communities, and many Americans believed they were exaggerating the Holocaust or clinging to its memory too long. Quite a few ordinary people were genuinely confused about the moral issues entailed by these proceedings: What constituted guilt when you were a cog in a giant state machine? How long were you expected to bear responsibility for actions committed forty years earlier? Weren’t Christians required to forgive in such cases? What was the point of spending public resources on hounding people now in their sixties out of the country?
Kulle’s case was not complicated. He had committed fraud during his immigration interviews, concealing his SS membership; and he had served in a unit detailed to a concentration camp where persecution took place. He admitted to both. These were deportable offenses. Yet he believed he had done nothing wrong. In his interviews with the Justice Department he seemed genuinely convinced that if he explained himself his case would be dismissed and he could go home. He only joined the SS to get off the farm and away from his stepfather. He had committed no atrocities himself, never witnessed any, and never mistreated anyone. On occasion he’d given inmates food he brought from home. He served his country faithfully. He was now one year away from retirement, a popular figure at the high school where he’d worked for decades. He had children and grandchildren who were American citizens.
School officials were concerned about the disruption to their organization occasioned by the proceedings and they worried about negative publicity. But publicity came. Former Nazis were in the news, and Kulle’s case was appearing in the papers. For the most part, the community—neighbors, the school board, faculty, students, most reporters—took to Kulle’s defense. Concern about employing a former Nazi was cast as a peculiarly Jewish issue. Jews, it was said, majored in vengeance, whereas Christians believed in forgiveness. Investigating Kulle looked like a witch-hunt; holding him responsible for things done in his past was uncharitable; holding him responsible for whatever the Nazis did or whatever occurred at Gross-Rosen mirrored the bigotry of the Nazis.
Though the Holocaust was getting some attention in popular culture, along with the beginnings of curricular experiments in some school districts, there was also at the time a back-to-basics movement that stressed essential skills. Too much focus on things like the Holocaust were seen as a distraction. Activists like Lyndon LaRouche and politicians like Pat Buchanan, working in the Reagan White House, criticized Nazi hunters. Reagan himself visited Bitburg cemetery in Germany and laid a wreath where SS officers were interred. When it was suggested that he also visit a concentration camp, Reagan demurred, explaining it might cause Germans to feel unnecessary guilt.
But by 1985 questions posed to the school board were becoming difficult to ignore. Though the board insisted it could not discuss “personnel issues” in public, it couldn’t avoid questions about the morality of employing a former Nazi in an institution that was supposed to be molding future citizens, and on the taxpayer’s dime at that. Since Kulle was an “at-will” employee, they decided to simply not renew his contract that year, and the pressure subsided. The pressure might have increased further, however, had they revealed how generous they were, paying his full salary for the remainder of the year, compensating him for unused sick and vacation days, and awarding him a pension he collected until his death two decades later.
The Justice Department’s investigations continued, whatever signals Reagan’s White House might be sending. Kulle had clearly violated the law by concealing his SS membership and by engaging in the persecution of minority groups during his Gross-Rosen service. There was also little reason for clemency. His testimony was unconvincing, consisting of the usual protestations of ignorance. Kulle did himself no favors when—asked if he had any regrets about that time—he responded, “I just wished we had won the war.” He was deported in 1987.
Soffer’s book opens a window on a rarely investigated dynamic: What happens when “big history”—and it doesn’t come any bigger than the Holocaust—collides with local community? In the mix are multiple forces: documents and testimony, curiosity and indifference, moral concern and political calculation. Government officials, lawyers, journalists, educators and ordinary people from different ethnic and religious locations all bring their viewpoints to bear. At the center of it all: a man who was a small cog in the largest of crimes.
There is, perhaps, no more damaging myth than that of individual unimportance. Ideologies don’t become genocides without thousands of ordinary people dedicating the hours of their lives and the work of their hands to the cause. Crimes are not forgotten without millions of ordinary minds choosing to ignore them. Poor moral judgment doesn’t occur without regular people failing to take the measure of what’s before them.
“We cannot escape history,” warned Abraham Lincoln. “We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”
Michael Soffer’s eminently worthwhile study is an extended meditation on the ineradicability of moral responsibility.
John H. Haas is a retired professor of history and Contributing Editor at Current.
From what I recall, President Reagan in 1985 laid a wreath at a German war cemetery where the vast majority of soldiers that were buried were regular Wehrmacht solders, not SS. In that particular cemetery there were about 20 SS buried there, a tiny percentage of all of those that had been interred. However, John Haas has tried to make it look as though Reagan was specifically honoring the SS officers, which is mistaken at best and dishonest at worst.
The theme here that Haas apparently wanted to portray was that Reagan was a secret Nazi or someone who admired fascism. That is dishonest, but also it is what I have come to expect from Current, which really does not make an attempt to be truthful when lies are politically useful.
William makes some factually correct points, that the majority of the graves at Bitburg were not those of Waffen-SS (it was 49 of about 2000), and that President Reagan wasn’t there specifically to honor the SS. He spoils those observations by then claiming the intention here was to portray Reagan as a “secret Nazi” or fascist, a claim which, I think, any fair reading of the review would judge absurd. The Bitburg visit and the controversy that ensued were an important part of the context around the events described in the book.
We can argue whether what’s most significant about Bitburg–for an American president–is that it was a minority of the soldiers buried there who were Waffen-SS, or that it’s to be found in the sheer fact that there were Waffen-SS buried there. For a contemporary hypothetical, imagine your reaction to a Middle Eastern head of state who laid a wreath at a cemetery where the majority of the graves were of Iraqi insurgents, but also some were members of Al Qaeda. Would you say “Well, it’s only a few Al Qaeda members,” or would you focus on the fact that there were any Al Qaeda members there? That’s how this event hit people back in 1985.
There was another factor in that context, one that Americans typically forget now: the new, conservative West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was perceived as attempting to rehabilitate the reputations of Nazi Party members. Kohl had removed the veterans’ organizations of the Waffen-SS from a list of extremist right-wing groups, and refused to ban highly controversial reunions of former Waffen-SS members. Reagan’s action was perceived as–being very charitable–his having been unwittingly manipulated into serving Kohl’s agenda. Reagan may have encouraged such an interpretation when he said, explaining why he thought it “unnecessary” to visit a concentration camp too, “the German people have very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way,” a statement that was simply grossly inaccurate. A 30 year-old in 1945 would have been 70 in 1985. This was very much living–not ancient–history.
Reagan made things even worse when, at a press conference, he said of the soldiers in the Bitburg cemetery, “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” The feelings stirred were large enough that Elie Wiesel actually confronted Reagan about it the next day on television, as he was receiving the Congressional Medal of Achievement. Many other Jewish leaders similarly called on Reagan to reconsider, as did 53 U.S. senators and 101 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, both Democrats and Republicans.
We’re reminded that polarization and culture wars are nothing new when we note that former President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and conservative columnist William F. Buckley, among others, endorsed the Bitburg visit.
I’m sorry William considers my brief allusion to this event as a bundle of “lies,” but I stand by the statements made and invite readers to examine the record for themselves. Reagan’s Bitburg visit was a fascinating moment in American political and cultural history, one that will reward your attention, irrespective of this little fracas.