After 911, public discussion shifted from totalitarianism to terrorism.
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.
We didn't "lose preoccupation" with Nazis; they just all died.
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.
That is a large part of it, but the shift was underway 20 years ago. Villains from WWII naturally get less airtime during a time when the public wants to mentally process WTC or Bataclan.
20 years ago was Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Maybe this is just an American perspective? We certainly didn't spend a lot of mental energy on Bataclan.
My comment was possibly too terse to make sense. Are we both referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks?
IDK, turn on showdead and you'll see plenty below
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.
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.
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...
That's not exactly a wild thing; it was no secret at all that Werner von Braun was at the heart of the Apollo program while it was happening.
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.
Even mentioned in a darkly humorous tone in the 1968 movie "Ice Station Zebra" (cold war thriller). The character played by Patrick McGoohan has a line: " The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists."
I mean, Tom Lehrer had a whole song about it and everything. It was on the radio quite a bit at the time.
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-...
It's not really all that wild when you consider that they were hired for their impressive achievements in various fields and not their loyalty to the nazi party.
Yes, they were hired _despite_ their loyalty (and sometimes despite their war crimes).
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.
That applies to the superb rocket scientists.
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."
The second sentence was supposed to mean: "hired for their expertise as spies, and despite having been in the secret police or worse".
If that slip is the reason for the downvotes, fine. Otherwise, blame the NYT.
I don't think he's asserting they brought in Nazis for the fun of having them around. But it's surprising that while heightened ties to the Nazis would disqualify you from immigration eligibility, the most secretive circles of the state (and ones highly acquainted with Nazi brutality) were actively recruiting these people. Shows how deep the anti-Soviet derangement ran.
Derangement? Stalin was extremely suspicious of the west and even went so far as to accuse of us collaborating with Hitler himself. Not only that, the Soviet regime was excessively brutal. One of the worst in history despite not being mentioned much in modern history books. The treatment of captives during wartime, the Eastern Bloc in total, etc. While not a primary source "Soviet War Crimes" has a massive Wikipedia entry detailing just how bad the soviets were. At least related to WW2 alone we can look to how their treatment of the Polish was after pushing Germany out. They murdered Finnish civilians en masse during raids. Further, their deportation campaigns were enough to make most period despots blush.
To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.
They also had / have very deep spy networks of socialist sympathizers stealing secrets, including huge ones like plans for The Bomb.
A significant amount of Soviet military “research” was done in the West.
If you take the Kolmogorov Option you’d better be Kolmogorov. Besides the creature being ended was Nazism, not its components. Some of its component individuals had to be ended (and if necessary, humiliated) to end it but that was the means.
In such a state, it's hard to be "respected in your field" unless you publicly pledge loyalty to the ruling party. This does not mean that all such people were all apolitical, just that their motives and outlook will vary. And that for people who were prominent when the Nazis came to power, there likely wasn't much middle ground between "leave the country, go far away" and "join the party".
This also applies to the US to a lesser extent. If you want to work in academia, there's a very strict subset of ideas you're allowed to even consider.
Academia is broad, what strict subset of ideas would apply to everyone in the US?
"Denial" crimes. There's at least 3 of them involving race, gender, and religion. Good luck getting funding or even keeping your shitty job if you commit any of these cardinal sins.
To which "ruling party" do you have to pledge loyalty to, in order to work in academia?
An example of loyalty tests in current US politics did come to my mind, but it wasn't that one.
It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war. This isn't passing judgment on Soviet policies, only a recognition that conflict might not have been so heated if we'd learned our lesson from how the disintegration of US-Japanese relations had drawn us into the previous war.
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?).
Are you saying the Soviets took the “kumbaya” approach to communism and if only the US chilled out, there would’ve been no conflict?
Surely you cannot believe that?
>It becomes again wild when you remember that the Cold War was only "necessary" because of US antagonism post-war.
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?
I think what people find "wild" is likely the blatant contradictions in rhetoric between valuing humans and valuing "impressive achievements". The US and the NAZIs are merely the best examples of valuing the latter over the former. At least, for now.
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.
Read this, this year: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333289-operation-paper... which is all about Operation Paperclip.
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.
This is even wilder than that.
The Soviets did the same. Wernher Von Braun was famously recruited despite his past. Top National Socialists were not only recruited for their skills, but also to deny their expertise from the opposing sphere. Many of the common soldiers and officers who were not in the same demand joined the Foreign Legion. Some of those continued on in Africa to become mercenaries.
Otto Skorzeny allegedly worked for the Mossad after working with Nasser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny#Alleged_recruitm...
Famous to the point of a song being written: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
Makes more sense when you realize the purpose of Nazi hunting wasn't really to catch enough of them to establish some level of justice. It was to keep them closeted so they would not attempt a comeback. Before getting kidnapped to Israel, Eichmann was more than ready to be the spearhead of a resurgent Nazi movement.
I'll ask for citations not because I am skeptical, but because I find the topic interesting. Thanks.
The most exemplary story was the killing of Herbert Kukurs. West Germany was about to apply a statute of limitations to war crimes, which would have emboldened Nazis to come out of the woodwork. To the Mossad found a Nazi and beat him to death.
It's only wild if you're incredibly naive and divide the world into "good" and "bad" guys.
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.
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to execute people with knowledge that would otherwise be useful to the enemy. If we didn't, the soviets would. There was a lot to learn from them that didn't have to do with their prior allegiances that proved valuable for weapons development, spycraft, and space exploration.
Even in post-war West Germany, "denazification", e.g. excluding ex-nazis from roles in the new German society, was a failed policy that got discontinued after a few years.
If memory serves the entire West German intelligence apparatus was run by ex Nazis.
The BRD was like that famous Fawlty Towers sketch. "Don't mention the war!".
For all it's flaws, it was far more successful than reconstruction.
Germany as a whole hates Nazis, both because they were absolute monsters in human skin, and because they brought unprecedented and absolute ruin and devastation to the country.
Any right-thinking southerner should feel the same way about the Confederacy. And yet, a good chunk of them actively think that those animals were some kind of national heroes, unafraid of proudly broadcasting their affiliation with them.
For all the apologists white-washing history, you don't see a lot of elementary schools named after Heinrich Himmler in Berlin.
The world might not have a lot of heroes, but it has no shortage of utterly irredeemable villains.
It got sabotaged by the ex-Nazi West Germans, who realized they could use West German re-armament and NATO membership (which was needed against the Soviets) as leverage to pressure the Allies to drop denazification and look the other way at them pushing the "Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht."
Eric Lichtblau wrote a good book on the resettlement of Nazis in the US, beyond the usual Paperclip names, called The Nazis Next Door.
Here’s a talk he gave at UCSB on the topic in 2015: https://youtu.be/eP3srgksUqU
What a complete moral failure that this man never saw a prison cell of his own.
It's not terribly surprising that a former Nazi guard would be able to immigrate to the US and integrate with American society.
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-...
Nah. He didn't have to hide anything. He was asked once, when he immigrated, if he'd been a member of the SS (we explicitly disallow immigration by SS members), and he lied then. He was never really asked again, until 1981, and then was more or less immediately deported. Over his 30 odd years working here, there wasn't ever any concerted effort to protect him, until the very end.
> He was never really asked again, until 1981, and then was more or less immediately deported.
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 from the US. 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, yet the tone toward the latter is starkly different than the former.
This story has been up for three hours and every comment on it has either been flagged to death or is in the process of being downvoted into oblivion.
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.
I just said I can't believe Americans were defending him and it got flagged, so......I don't actually know what that means. Never seen a comments section like this on HN.
When you write your comment you have your intent in mind. However the readers often project their own ideas into your comments. You need to tread carefully with this subject matter. Try to be aware of what others may imagine you are saying. Next, write your comment in way that explicitly removes those possible misinterpretations.
As an example: I haven't reviewed your other comments and I do not wish to discuss them.
Neo-nazis are a real problem on the internet, as O have been pointing out for many years.
I think the term “volunteered” for the SS is a bit, lost in translation.
The SS was, generally, a volunteer thing; they did not conscript for the SS proper. The Wehrmacht was, at least by the period we're concerned with here, a conscript army, but the SS wasn't.
You could read the article if you want to. It says that he voluntarily joined the SS Totenkopf division, committed atrocities at a concentration camp, and he openly stated that is biggest/only regret was that Germany lost the war...
Point of order: it was never demonstrated that he directly committed atrocities at Gross-Rosen or Mauthausen (where he was never stationed). Of course, his work guarding prisoners there enabled those atrocities, as both the courts considering his case immediately pointed out.
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.)
He volunteered.
not uncommon
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
tell me again who won the war against fascism?
by body count? the soviets
You can never win a war against an ideology.
If it's an ideology of genocide, there is a way to win that war. Kill them first.
The only way to destroy an idea is with better ideas.
Yeah, that's why the war on terrorism is going so well. It's only been 24 years, I'm sure we'll have that stamped out any minute.
Unfortunately “better” is a subjective term.
Do you really intend to argue that "better than Nazism" is subjective?
Not at all. Nazism is disgusting, horrific, indefensible, and should be condemned at every turn.
But nazis would argue that it’s better (that’s why they’re nazis). That’s why it’s so hard to kill an ideology and why my original comment used the word “unfortunately.”
Fascists don't believe that, and will happily kill people with different ideas if they get the power to do so.
This is the paradox of tolerance. It's pretty well understood, except apparently on online message boards where there are somehow always a bunch of people ready to jump to the intellectual defense of Nazis (evidence: this comments page.)
>Fascists don't believe that, and will happily kill people with different ideas if they get the power to do so.
That belief is one of the reasons Fascism is wrong.
Communists have killed their political opponents as well. I don't think it's limited to Nazis.
I never said it was.
FYI, whataboutism in a thread about Nazis makes it look a little like you're defending Nazism. Was that your intent? If not, what did you intend to add to the conversation with this (true) observation?
Counterpoint: Nazis aren't here to engage you in good faith debates, so it would be a mistake to attempt to defeat them by doing that.