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.
Oak Park guy is a little fish.
Nuernberger trial was mostly a vae victis show.
They hanged few high level Germans and left tens of thousands of war criminals free. Adenauer's governments (1949-1963) were full of former nazis, amnesties of 1949 and 1954 cleared the slate of many mass murderers.
The even wilder thing is that the CIA actively hired former Nazis (and relocated them and their families) in Operation Paperclip after the war to aid in Cold War operations...
tptacek ·74 days ago
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.
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emergie ·74 days ago
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robjwells ·74 days ago
Here’s a talk he gave at UCSB on the topic in 2015: https://youtu.be/eP3srgksUqU
parkaboy ·74 days ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
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tristan957 ·74 days ago