The Nazis Next Door (15 page)

In the midst of Allen’s fist-pounding oratory from the podium, the demonstration was brought to a halt when one of the counterprotesters, a young Latvian woman, let loose ten white mice
into the crowd, sending people scurrying in a momentary panic. It was a bizarre scene, but not unprecedented. A Jewish newspaper in Chicago noted bitterly a few weeks later that setting loose mice was “one of the cute tricks
used by the storm troopers in Hitler’s rise to power” as a way to disperse unfriendly crowds. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, had used the same tactic
to break up a showing of the 1930 film
All Quiet on the Western Front
because of its hostile, anti-German theme. Arrested, the Latvian woman in Chicago with the bagful of mice was fined $200 for disturbing the peace. But she had made her point: Allen and his ilk weren’t welcome in her town.

Indeed, the rally had barely picked up again when a group of young men standing unobtrusively amid the crowd removed their shirts to reveal Nazi uniforms adorned with swastikas. Even as Allen was calling for the expulsion of Nazi war criminals, the young men were there as proud representatives from the American Nazi Party—a new generation of storm troopers. Fourteen years later, the American Nazis in Chicago would set off a famous constitutional battle over free speech with a planned march in nearby Skokie. On this day, they set off a brawl as they marched toward the podium. Allen met one of them with a blow to the head that he later claimed, with pride, had broken the neo-Nazi’s jaw. In his struggle to defeat Nazis past and present, Allen counted the moment as a rare victory.

The neo-Nazis weren’t the only ones worried about Chuck Allen that day in Chicago. The FBI was secretly watching him too—that day and many more like it; in Chicago, in Washington, in New York, even in Europe. While the neo-Nazis were confronting Allen head-on, the FBI was watching him from the shadows.

Allen had always suspected the FBI might be trailing him. He would talk in code on the phone in case his line was tapped. He would tell friends about unexplained incidents—the time, for instance, when he met with an Eastern European source in Connecticut to discuss Nazi war crimes records and noticed that he and his contact were apparently being followed by two men in a 1976 Plymouth Fury. One of the men was taking pictures. Allen jotted down
the New York plates—51-DKL-1976—and traced the vehicle to a rental fleet used by the U.S. government.

As suspicious as he’d become, even Allen was dumbfounded when he discovered years later the full scope of the FBI’s surveillance. The government files on him—not just at the FBI, but at the CIA and other agencies as well—totaled thousands of pages. As the documents demonstrated, the FBI had waged a decade-long campaign against the Nazi hunter beginning in the late 1950s in the belief that he was a dangerous Communist agitator. With the FBI then at the peak of its monitoring of left-wing “subversives,” the bureau had set its sights on much higher-profile targets like Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Benjamin Spock, but its surveillance of Allen was every bit as aggressive. J. Edgar Hoover himself signed off on the extraordinary treatment. One secret memo “re Charles Russell Allen Jr.,” signed by Hoover and sent to the Secret Service, laid out the legal pretext for the government’s actions. Under FBI protocol for launching such operations, Mr. Allen needed to be watched, the bureau asserted, because he “is potentially dangerous;
or has been identified as a member or participant in communist movement” or other groups “inimical to US.”

In a cruel bit of historical irony, Allen had Hitler to thank, at least indirectly, for the powers the FBI claimed in spying on him. In 1933, the German Embassy in Washington turned over to the Americans an anonymous letter from someone in the United States threatening to kill Germany’s newly named chancellor, Adolf Hitler. The FBI was put on the case. At the time, its power to investigate subversive activity inside the United States was limited, but with the death threat to Hitler as an opening, Hoover secured from FDR
broad new authority to establish an intelligence branch and investigate insurgent activity not just by Americans trying to kill foreign leaders, but also by “Communists, fascists . . . or groups advocating the overthrow or replacement of the Government of the United States by illegal methods.”

And so Chuck Allen, chasing Nazis thirty years later, fell into the FBI’s dragnet. At a civil rights rally at the Statue of Liberty, at an anti-Nazi demonstration in front of the West German Consulate in New York City, at the Nazi protests in Chicago and Los Angeles and elsewhere around the country in the 1960s, the FBI would send agents to spy on him and report back on everything he said and did. The bureau paid informants to infiltrate his organization. Agents showed his photo to known Communists to see if they could confirm that he was a member of the party. (None could.) The FBI dutifully cataloged the many articles in left-wing publications in which Allen was quoted. One FBI report, recapping a 1966 article commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising, noted: “Allen said that although the United States did not have a Nazi tradition it was engaging in genocide in Vietnam.” It all went into his secret file.

The FBI had plenty of help
from other agencies, including not just the CIA, but the U.S. Postal Service and the State Department as well. With Allen exchanging numerous letters and documents with sources in Eastern Europe as he gathered war crimes evidence, the CIA opened and photographed the documents, adding them to its burgeoning file on him. He was placed on a secret “Lookout” list, so when he would travel overseas the eyes of the American government would track his movements and report when he left and when he reentered the country. “Will ascertain subject’s plans
for travel to Russia and East Germany,” promised one FBI memo in 1965.

The one thing the FBI was hesitant to do was simply ask Allen himself: Are you a Communist? The bureau thought about interviewing him directly, but decided the risks were too high. Because Allen was “a free-lance writer and might well use this interview for one of his attacks on the impairment of civil rights, and harassment by the FBI,” one early memo in his file noted, it was felt that “an interview might prove to be a source of embarrassment to the Bureau.”

Besides, the bureau noted almost as an afterthought, “a review of the file does not indicate CP [Communist Party] membership for the subject, or that he is an officer in a front group.”

In fact, the FBI didn’t need to go to Allen to find out what he was doing. He came to them. Weeks before his 1963 series on Nazi war criminals went to print, Allen wrote to the Justice Department
and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with his findings, along with all the detailed evidence he had accumulated in the United States and Europe. He was hoping to get at least a formal comment from the department to include in his series. Perhaps, if he was lucky, the government might even cooperate with him in ferreting out the Nazis living in America. Allen was in essence offering to share a trove of documents on Nazi war crimes unavailable in the Justice Department’s own threadbare files.

Allen’s overture did attract attention at the Justice Department, but not for the reasons he’d hoped. A top aide in Hoover’s inner circle, a trusted FBI advisor named Deke DeLoach, read through Allen’s plea for help. DeLoach was adamant in his response: ignore him. Hoover, of course, was already on record telling his aides years before that he found “no substantiation” to allegations that a large number of Nazi fugitives were living inside the United States. DeLoach, in an internal memo
to fellow FBI officials in January 1963, sidestepped entirely the substance of Allen’s letter to Kennedy—“the presence of alleged war criminals now living in the United States,” as DeLoach characterized it. He focused instead on Allen’s own nefarious background—his “connection with various Communist front groups”; his association with a prominent labor leader of the day; and his “militant” public opposition to a McCarthy-era law used to prosecute “subversives.” Given his background, DeLoach concluded, “Allen most certainly deserved no reply to his request for assistance in connection with his planned series of articles.”

Three months later, long after Allen had published his Nazi series with a “no comment” from the Justice Department, a top aide to Kennedy finally got back to Allen with a perfunctory response. “Dear Mr. Allen,”
the letter began. “The Attorney General has asked me to respond to your most recent letter regarding the 16 individuals about whom you inquired earlier. After reviewing the correspondence, I am afraid I cannot see what further information this Department is able to supply you.”

Allen, as always, got in the last word. Perched at his typewriter, he rapped out a follow-up story for the next issue of
Jewish Currents
detailing the vague and unsatisfying responses he’d gotten from the Justice Department and other federal agencies.

“Our Government ‘Replies’ to Charges,” the headline read. “State Department and Immigration Service evade issue of Nazi war criminals among us.” Above the story was the familiar byline that so irked the FBI:
BY CHARLES R. ALLEN, JR
.

Despite Chuck Allen’s best efforts to shake America out of its Nazi slumber, the country remained largely indifferent. But sometimes, a reminder of the United States’ links to Hitler’s minions became too jarring to simply ignore. Such a moment came in early 1964, just months after the raucous anti-Nazi demonstration that Allen led in Chicago. And it began with a chance conversation
in an outdoor café in Tel Aviv.

Simon Wiesenthal, Chuck Allen’s better-known counterpart in Europe, was there for a bite to eat when three middle-aged Israeli women heard him being paged over the loudspeaker. They hurried over to his table to speak with him. Wiesenthal had attracted a measure of fame recently after outing an active-duty Austrian police officer who, as a Nazi officer two decades earlier, had seized Anne Frank from hiding. Wiesenthal’s three visitors at the café—all Polish natives who had survived the Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek in Poland—knew of his growing reputation, and they approached him now with a question that had haunted them since their emancipation: What happened to Kobyla?

Wiesenthal had no idea what they meant. What, or who, was Kobyla? Soon enough, the women’s story poured out: at Majdanek, the Nazi graveyard for an estimated 1.5 million Jews and other undesirables, there was a female guard, an Austrian woman who, even by the camp’s gruesome standards, was infamous for her sadistic treatment of the female prisoners. “She was the worst of them all,” one of the women told Wiesenthal. They called her Kobyla—the Polish word for mare—because of the ruthless way she would kick the women with her steel-toed boots. Her real name, one of the women recalled, was Hermine Braunsteiner. They couldn’t put her out of their minds. She would march through camp with a whip, they said, lashing the prisoners at will. Leading the prisoners to the gas chamber at Majdanek was not enough for her; she seemed determined to humiliate them first, robbing them of whatever human dignity they had left. She was particularly cruel to the children. One of the women recalled for Wiesenthal the time when a new prisoner was brought to the death camp with a toddler on his back hidden in a rucksack; Braunsteiner whipped the child to tears,
then shot him dead.

Back at his office in Vienna, Wiesenthal checked his files and discovered that a Hermine Braunsteiner had in fact been put on trial after the war in Austria—right there in his own city. She was sentenced to three years in prison for kicking and whipping female prisoners—not at Majdanek, but at a different concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Three years for such savagery seemed like a pittance to him, with no punishment at all for what she did to those women and children at Majdanek.

What had happened to her? Wiesenthal didn’t know. But he and a researcher soon managed to track her hopscotch travels from Austria to Halifax, Canada, and on to Queens, New York, where, the last anyone seemed to know, she was living with her American husband, a construction worker named Russell Ryan. It was an improbable journey that had led a notorious Nazi guard—a woman, no less—to America.

Even Wiesenthal didn’t consider the United States much of a destination for Nazi war criminals. Only a small number of suspected Nazis had ever been identified publicly in America, despite Chuck Allen’s best efforts, and there was little political will during the Cold War to do anything about those few who had been identified. Despite many formal extradition requests from Russia and its Eastern European satellites seeking to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals, the United States had never agreed to send any of them back to stand trial. But the case of Kobyla—the “mare” of Majdanek—seemed different to Wiesenthal, if nothing else for its raw brutality and the power of the eyewitnesses who survived the terror.

Wiesenthal went first
to U.S. government officials with what he knew. Like Chuck Allen a year before, he heard nothing back from them. American officials seemed to have no interest in the case. But Wiesenthal was adept at working not only with myriad governments, but with reporters, Jewish organizations, and survivors’ groups, often leveraging one against the other to get results. Where Chuck Allen was determined to fight the system, Wiesenthal adroitly worked within it. So he brought his tip to a
New York Times
reporter in Vienna who had just written a long and flattering profile of Wiesenthal a few months earlier under the headline: “Sleuth with 6 Million Clients.”
Within days, Braunsteiner’s name, along with all the damning information Wiesenthal had compiled on her, landed on the desk of a rookie metro reporter in New York named Joe Lelyveld.
Wiesenthal had narrowed down Braunsteiner’s apparent whereabouts to a blue-collar, immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Queens called Maspeth, but he did not have an exact address for her. So the young reporter began looking in the phone books for Ryans—the married name she had taken—and started knocking on doors.

He got lucky:
the first Mrs. Ryan that he approached knew precisely the Austrian namesake he was trying to find; she pointed him to an address nearby at Seventy-Second Street. There, a tall, big-boned woman with a stern face and thin lips locked in what seemed a perpetual pucker answered the door. Her blond hair, now turning gray, was in curlers, and she had a paintbrush in her hand; she’d been painting the interior of her house. She was friendly enough, until she found out who Lelyveld was and what he wanted. “Mrs. Ryan, I need to ask about your time in Poland, at the Majdanek camp, during the war,” Lelyveld began. Braunsteiner, a housewife who had become an American citizen just the year before, began sobbing. “Oh, my God, I knew this would happen,” she said. Quickly, the tears were overtaken by an angry and rambling defense of her actions. Yes, she had worked at Majdanek, she acknowledged, but “all I did was what guards do in the camps now,” she said. It was all so long ago, she said. “On the radio all they talk is peace and freedom. Then fifteen or sixteen years later, why do they bother people? I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?”