The Nazi of Oak Park
chicagomag.com
chicagomag.com
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.
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
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.
Here’s a talk he gave at UCSB on the topic in 2015: https://youtu.be/eP3srgksUqU
The Soviets and British did the same thing, IIRC.
The lesson is simple: if you're going to lose a war, lose a war as a guy who is good at something, because the new management will be a lot less likely to hold crimes against humanity against you.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9735018/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/la-famine-...
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi, " says Wernher von Braun.
http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Humorous_Songs/Wernher-Von-...
Others were hired for their expertise as spies, secret police and worse:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/us/in-cold-war-us-spy-age...
"Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.
One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews."
If that slip is the reason for the downvotes, fine. Otherwise, blame the NYT.
But not just because of their 'impressive achievements' during their time as Nazi scientists, part of why they were hired was because the US was afraid to lose them to the Soviet Union based purely on _potential achievements_. Some scientists even played this as a card to get hired by the US.
An example of loyalty tests in current US politics did come to my mind, but it wasn't that one.
To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.
A significant amount of Soviet military “research” was done in the West.
Notably, nobody in this entire comment section has been able to articulate how the space race has improved humanity more than equivalent efforts that focus on human quality of life, like implementing a public healthcare system. Whitey On The Moon rings just as true now as it did 60 years ago. Political posturing that happened to spawn technological development is a poor excuse for lack of coherent values. The fact that we achieved something that is truly admirable does not excuse for the general lack of giving-a-shit-about-humans that surrounds national politics. You know what else would be admirable? Taking care of our neighbors even if they don't contribute to the GDP.
Essentially, the US seems to have a habit of being "forced" to ally with undesirable elements after some lapse in geopolitical awareness or effort leads to hostilities (sound familiar?).
Only if you ignore communist antagonism in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Up to and including their own allies when they gave their citizens a little too much freedom. I have several books in Czech on my shelf with a copyright date of 1968, a year in which far more books were published than years prior, I wonder why they share that year?
1) The Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The Soviets did this in response to the horrifically aggressive acts of the US, Britain, and France to... manage their occupation zones in Germany differently than the Soviets wanted them to, and economic and currency reform in West Germany.
2) The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As far as I can tell, western involvement in Dubcek's reforms and the Prague Spring were about as non-existent as possible. This didn't stop the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations invading their own ally, and in explicit violation of the Warsaw Pact itself.
3) The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The west's bizarre support of the Khmer Rouge after the successful Vietnamese invasion notwithstanding (for complex geopolitical reasons), prior to the invasion it treated both Cambodia and Vietnam as enemies and the war between the two nations was do to their own politics, not any US influence.
And there are plenty more. And I'm sure there are instances you can bring up where the combloc countries were reacting to clear aggression by the west, but here's the thing: I'm not claiming that such aggression never happened. Meanwhile you seem to be arguing that the combloc countries would have been perfectly peaceful if they didn't need to react to aggressions by those damn western capitalists.
Or even to the Soviets' stated rationale for taking action -- the introduction of the Deutsche Mark in West Berlin?
I'd really like to see your careful, considered response to this question.
Seems you can't bring yourself to simply say, "it was antagonistic" for some reason.
"Is the sky blue?" - "Well, it isn't non-blue ..."
Which was?
No need for fancy optic effects here - just say what you mean.
>Maybe I do, maybe I don't.
>But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
>Which was?
>No need for fancy optic effects here - just say what you mean.
I see that you're angry that I did not take the bait of trying to contradict your premise. Sorry; much as you may hate it, we agree that the siege was antagonistic. My straight answer, I'll repeat: antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable. In this case, "Who started it?" is significant.
I'm trying to falsify my own stance by finding an instance where the USSR did something aggressive and uncalled for that wasn't a response to Western rhetoric or behavior. One might say the various invasions in the run-up to WWII, but those come after Truman's famous, "Let 'em kill each other," line; Western enmity was preexisting, at that point. And I reject the notion that it comes down to their human rights record, considering our own (even at that time). It seems to come down to a bitterness over the West's inability to turn its totalitarian machine towards at least the facade of our desires and ends (a la China for much of the 90s and 2000s). It's just one of many examples where the West has interpreted a failure to kowtow to our ambitions as an existential threat. This is the dumbshit recklessness that I'm referring to when I say that we started the Cold War.
Also, this is the last time I'm assuming good faith on your part. I would say, "Don't fuck it up," but part of me thinks that you'll take that as a challenge.
Antagonism in response to previous antagonism is, at the very least, understandable.
Next question then: was the response ... proportionate? You know, blockading a a whole city, so that nothing can get in, not even diapers or baby food? That's like, an act of war, right? In response to -- currency reform?
More specifically: would you say the Soviet response to that situation was -- "understandable"? Would you now?
Or was it more like -- dumbshit recklessness?
Wait, why would the Soviet Union see a pledge to protect nations from authoritarian threats as aggression?
Later developments would also prove the doctrine's stated intentions to be a farce, as much of its execution involved toppling democracies in favor of US-backed autocrats.
Yes.
>and that made it justified
I didn't say that. Their reaction may not have been justified, but it, or some like reaction, was understandable, even predictable - and, most importantly, a reaction. Speaking from the perspective of the West, who could not control the USSR's behavior, but who could measure its own actions against what would provoke or placate them: did we do everything we could to avoid the Cold War? Did we AVOID doing anything that might have pushed both states towards it? Clearly not.
So, circling back: when we talk about the US spiriting Nazis away to America, setting them up with a happy American life, justified by the necessity of staying ahead of the Soviets in a military and technological arms race... Where does that necessity come from? Something unavoidable, or not? That's my only point here. It's wild that America created conditions where we felt the need to harbor mass murderers and/or their enablers, when we needn't have had to. I don't know why that idea makes you so angry.
Surely you cannot believe that?
I'm not saying that the US and Soviets ever would have been strict allies like we became with Japan, but a calmer entry to the post-war period might have cooled nerves and prevented the worst excesses of the Cold War. Do they seek the bomb? Do they ruin Afghanistan? Do we have flashpoints in Korea, Vietnam, South America? Are we still dealing with the negative ramifications of these events, decades on? And, in this hypothetical alternate history, did we have to employ and grant amnesty to literal Nazis to counter Soviets threatened by the Truman Doctrine? We can't know, but surely it's believable. Unless you think that mid-century communists were evil and irrational (and I suppose that you could (not me)).
This is an extremely myopic point of view, and ignores a whole host of major events in Europe and Asia in the key years 1946-1950. I don't have time to lay them out for you, but if the topic is of interest to you, then you're welcome to do your own research.
Maybe I do, maybe I don't.
But this we do know: per previous replies, if we can't agree on appropriate language to discuss the color of the sky on a given day -- that is, if I can't get a straight answer from you in response to an extremely straightforward question about a single event in 1948 -- then we're not going to be able to communicate with each other in regard to the bigger-picture stuff.
Otto Skorzeny allegedly worked for the Mossad after working with Nasser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny#Alleged_recruitm...
And perhaps on larger scale in terms of raw headcount. But significantly, there were apparently no "rock stars" like Gehlen, von Braun, Skorzeny or Barbie in their pack. Nor did any of these characters end up (like the first two) leading mission-critical organizations/programs up until the 1960s.
I think it's a decent book. If you end up reading / liking this book, I'd also recommend her book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182733784-nuclear-war. Both are well researched, the second one (Nuclear War) was a more entertaining read, in a morbid kind of way.
Before someone thinks I'm a nazi apologist, I want to clarify this is about making a point of the world being extremely grey, even in areas where you perceive the good guys to operate.
The BRD was like that famous Fawlty Towers sketch. "Don't mention the war!".
Just to be curious, what did you write about Israel and Germany?
Portions of the city that were razed weren't rebuilt until into the Nineties (the 1990s).
But somehow, a mythology clings on that the Union were the problem, not the people carrying the torches.
Unfortunately, a campaign of terrorism that culminated in the crooked compromise of 1877 brought an end to that.
> Green Cross was founded in 1950 as Japan's first commercial blood bank and became a diversified international pharmaceutical company producing ethical drugs for delivery or administration by doctors and healthcare workers. Its founders included war criminals such as Masaji Kitano who performed torture and experiments on humans in the Japanese military's notorious Unit 731 during World War II. Also serving as a consultant for the company was Murray Sanders, the American officer and physician who had petitioned for Kitano's acquittal after the war.
> In the late 1980s, Green Cross and Takeshi Abe were at the center of a scandal in which up to 3,000 Japanese people contracted HIV through the distribution and use of blood products which were known to be unsafe.
And I don't see the need for a new book on the subject (though an author should always to free to write what they want to).
In the context of immigration to the USA it seems risible given what we know about the last 2 decades of immigration policy: full medical workup, with no communicable diseases or even a weak heart permitted; immigrant must have a job already lined up, etc. The policies of today are far, far looser.
Nazism and its adjacent movements and organizations like the KKK have been a persistent background feature of the US cultural landscape for a long time [1]. The post Civil-war American racism/segregation model (AKA Jim Crow) was seen by the Nazis as a model for their own society. There were and still are many who agree with many aspects of the ideology, especially if they aren't specifically associated with the term "Nazi".
WW2 may have caused overtly Nazi-associated movements to fall out of mainstream regard, but as examples like the individual in the article demonstrate, it wasn't that hard for him to hide his level of involvement in the Nazi party, especially in suburban America, which was itself born of America's own internal racist convulsion. Those who grew up in American suburbs during that time period are aware of the persistent background racism and anti-Semitism they harbored. This was a society primed to give a well-spoken and hard working white immigrant a huge benefit of the doubt, as it demonstrably did.
In the end, it seems like he was legally deported based on the law that no Nazi camp guards can immigrate to the US, not because the society itself hadn't found a comfortable place for him.
1. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...
That's my point - it was relatively easy for someone like him not to raise suspicion in 1950s American society, because the society was very open to accepting and integrating someone like him. Like a "Don't ask, don't tell" for Nazis.
It finally took a government commission nearly 30 years to find out the truth about his past and deport him.
Contrast this with the very active threats we hear today from some of the loudest political voices to deport legal migrants to the US from Haiti.
Both the post-war German migrants of the 1950s and the legal Haitian migrants of today are escaping war and violence, working at manual labor jobs that Americans won't take, and economically revitalizing previously declining communities by starting small businesses, yet the tone toward the Haitians today is starkly different than it was for the Germans.
Had Kulle been openly a Nazi during his time here, things would have gone very differently. But it basically never came up until the very end, and, when it did, people were extremely squicked out about it.
For whatever it's worth: I'm guessing our politics are very similar. Despite the very grim consequences for some of the people we deported, I think we generally made the right decision to do so. And I have no doubt that at every point from 1948 through 2024 that a Haitian immigrant would have had a far different experience in Chicagoland than a German one.
I intuited that, which is a reason why I think this is a worthwhile debate vs debating with someone who doesn't have similar basic values about our shared humanity. Thanks for your thoughtful responses!
> I'm pushing back on the idea that Oak Park was open to Nazis in the 1950s and 60s. It was not. What there was was a rapid influx of Germans after the war, and not even 1/4th the knowledge we have today about the Holocaust and Germany's conduct during the war. The fact is: people in Oak Park had the (reasonable!) assumption that if you were allowed to immigrate into the US, you were not a war criminal.
Clearly, once it's known that someone is a Nazi war criminal nobody wants them, in no small part because no community wants to be associated with the Nazis in particular, but yes also because Nazism is deplorable, and it is the law that Nazi war criminals must be deported.
I can't look into the hearts of people of 1950-1980s Oak Park to know what they really thought or felt. I can't demonstrate what motivated them to accept migrants whether goodwill, humanity or any other number of factors.
However, arguably WW2 caused people to be repulsed by the word Nazi, their actions, and their associated imagery, more than the nuances of the ideology itself.
That incongruity persists, and there is still widespread ignorance about the connections - both explicit and thematic - between Nazi ideology and America's own history of racism, as recent high profile events in politics and society have demonstrated.
> And I have no doubt that at every point from 1948 through 2024 that a Haitian immigrant would have had a far different experience in Chicagoland than a German one.
That's my main point. It is easier for a person like this to pass in the specific context of American white suburban society if nothing else is known about them, vs someone who comes from a different racial and ethnic group.
Conversely, it is not a coincidence that the false claims about Haitian migrants in Ohio were started by a local Neo-Nazi group.
Overall, I feel Oak Park should be commended for how open and welcoming it was to this person, while not knowing his true history. The same charity ought to be extended to anyone fleeing strife and willing to work hard, contribute, and follow the law. (and PS I know I'm preaching to the choir of you).
Another bit of context is that there's a modern political dimension to some of the claims being made about 1980s antisemitism. If you're not familiar with Oak Park, it is very liberal; think of it as the Berkeley† of Chicagoland. There is a deep division between activist progressive Oak Park and normie Democrat Oak Park (I'm the latter), and, for obvious reasons, the last year that division has involved Israel and a rhetorical conflict between people concerned about Islamophobia and people concerned about antisemitism††. So, I read claims that Oak Park was distinctively antisemitic in that light.
Generally, I think Oak Park was not distinctively antisemitic over the time periods we're discussing (1950-1980, when Kulle worked here, and 1981-1984, during which he was deported). It was better than most of the surrounding communities. But: everywhere was worse about antisemitism than they are now, which is a subtlety these conversations tend to miss.
So, it's true that, for instance, both the private athletic clubs in Oak Park disallowed Jewish members throughout most of the time period we're talking about --- like clubs everywhere. The local council of churches, a player in the newspaper war about Kulle, did not include Jewish congregations (or Catholics, for that matter). The sort of ambient 20th century antisemitism you'd expect to see was definitely on display here.
But Oak Park didn't see itself as prejudiced against Jewish people; in fact, a huge part of its identity, especially from 1965 onwards but also prior to that, was about us being at the vanguard of equity and inclusiveness. Soffer is right to take VOP to task for never living up to that narrative. But at the same time, you can't have that narrative and also actively hide a Nazi war criminal.
I think the reality here is really simple: in the American system, it was simply not Oak Park's job to determine whether Reinhold Kulle was a Nazi war criminal. Everyone here assumed the federal government had done that job. Nobody probed Kulle; everyone accepted his story that he'd served honorably in the German army (he lied to immigration and said he served in the Wehrmacht, but the "Wehrmacht" vs "Waffen-SS" distinction probably wouldn't have even been legible to most Oak Parkers of the time, the way it is to us now).
This is what historians are talking about when they worry about "presentism".
† ironically, the muni that originated racially-motivated single-family zoning!
†† :why-not-both:
Thanks for the context. I support your cause to end racially exclusionary zoning!
> This is what historians are talking about when they worry about "presentism".
If I understand what presentism means, I don't think I committed it in my argument.
Contrasting the openness of the US at a policy level to immigrants like Kulle in the 1950s vs the threats to the status of Haitian TPS holders being made today isn't applying a standard from today to the past.
Rather, it's applying a just standard from the past to today.
People look back at like 1959 Oak Park and say it was wild this guy wasn't reported to immigration as soon as he turned in his marriage certificate with the Reichsadler and "Gross-Rosen" on it, but the superintendent of OPRF high school almost certainly had no idea what the hell Gross-Rosen was; even the OSI had to go consult experts to work that out.
I'm a little bit judging other people --- not you --- for judging local civic officials for not meeting the standards of a society where everybody has virtually all the world's knowledge in their pocket at all times.
Perhaps you genuinely want to clarify that these "legal migrants" (per grandparent post) are not permanent residents, but it's not a very meaningful distinction here[1], so your post comes off as trying to blur the lines in order to benefit right-wing talking points wherein they are termed "illegal" in order to dismiss their rights and evoke xenophobia.
[1] The grandparent post was decrying those who would deport them despite their current permission to stay. The fact that their status could/will change in 2026 (the current Haitian TPS deadline) isn't relevant to whether they deserve deportation today.
I was raised long before this shift. Going by the comments here, many readers of HN were not.
Today's equivalent, in the public's view, of this school janitor would be a janitor who joined ISIS in his youth, and stuck around for the beheadings.
In a couple decades, society will lose its preoccupation with terrorism, too. Then we'll all get to read "so he was in ISIS, big deal" comments together.
Later
The quotes here probably make this sound harsher than I meant it to! I'm just saying: it's harder today to make Nazi immigrants salient, because those people are all around 100 years old now.
I think it's an interesting story but I don't have a lot to comment on. This isn't the first time person with a dark history became a pillar of society and later was found out. It's human nature that people will defend those they think they know.
It's not surprising that there would be insufficient evidence to have anything to charge him with in Germany.
As an example: I haven't reviewed your other comments and I do not wish to discuss them.
He didn't say Germany losing was his "only" regret and he didn't say that openly --- he said that in a private session with the OPRF school board (the only citation we have for it --- I have no doubt he said it, given what his son Rainer wrote in our local newspaper at the time --- is an interview Soffer did with one of the school board members). He was not an out-and-proud Nazi or a public advocate for Germany.
(To be clear: I think his case was handled properly by the authorities, and OPRF's protection of him after they discovered his Nazi past was not good.)
† Ironically, his combat service on the Eastern Front has more problematic documentation; he got a commendation for his involvement in the capture of 250 Soviet soldiers, and it's tacitly understood that those soldiers were then killed.