The Nazis Next Door (2 page)

Twice more in the next few days, Grunz spoke with Soobzokov. There’d just been
another
story in the newspaper naming him as a Nazi, Soobzokov told him, and he was growing more unwound with each bit of notoriety.

Grunz sat down to warn his bosses.

The CIA was facing a “significant flap,”
Grunz wrote in a long memo apprising them of what was happening in New Jersey. “Soobzokov has assumed a posture of outraged innocence (a posture he adopts quite convincingly) and has made numerous attempts to smoke out the nature and source of the various allegations.”

The good news was that, so far, at least, Soobzokov was only looking for “advice”; nothing more. But to protect himself, Grunz warned, the ex-spy might well “begin to cash in what he considers to be certain ‘chips’ that he holds: namely, his record of clandestine cooperation with this or other agencies of the United States government.”

Besides the CIA, those “other agencies” meant one in particular: the FBI. Soobzokov had worked not only for the CIA, but for the G-men at the bureau as well. As a confidential FBI informant, Soobzokov had thrown its investigators countless leads about suspected Communists over the years, essentially infiltrating his brethren in the immigrant community. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had
personally referred him for the job. Soobzokov was a Communist hunter, and a passionate one at that. If there were Soviet sympathizers in New Jersey, he worked to find them. Anyone was fair game. A few years earlier, in 1971, Soobzokov had reported to his FBI handler that a twelve-year-old boy in the neighborhood had voiced a vague interest in someday visiting Russia to see his family’s roots in the Caucasus; Soobzokov suspected the boy might be vulnerable to Communist exploitation and advised the FBI to keep an eye on him. The FBI duly opened a file on the youngster.

Now, with his own name in the news, Soobzokov seemed ready to tell everything he knew. To protect himself from the curse of the Nazi label, he might fight back by blackmailing Washington’s whole intelligence apparatus.

Grunz was worried. He could only imagine the headlines:
CIA Tied to Nazi Henchman
. The spy agency didn’t need that kind of scrutiny, not with all the stories already bubbling up over the last few months about its ugly involvement in foreign assassinations, illegal spying on Vietnam protesters, and President Nixon’s dirty tricks in Watergate. Now it might be in bed with a Nazi, too? Wonderful.

Grunz laid out the unattractive possibilities for the CIA if Soobzokov were to go public with his story. “If in defending himself,” Grunz wrote his bosses, “he were to surface the fact that he had once worked for CIA, and given the present climate of intense media interest in anything having to do with CIA, it would seem likely that both the vote-hungry Congresswoman from New York and the Pulitzer-hungry journalist would very quickly zero in on the story and milk it for all it’s worth.”

How exposed was the CIA? Grunz couldn’t be certain. Soobzokov’s secret agency file from the 1950s had mysteriously gone missing, Grunz discovered after making a few calls. Even Nostril’s colorful code name had somehow been changed. It was all very odd.

One thing was clear: the CIA wanted nothing to do with Soobzokov. Four days after his initial phone calls, Grunz got his orders from CIA attorneys: Soobzokov could get a private lawyer or “pursue whatever course of action he may think desirable,” they said, but the CIA wouldn’t help him; Nostril was on his own.

So was Soobzokov actually the Nazi war criminal that his neighbors were making him out to be? Grunz provided his higher-ups at the CIA no answer to that central question. Whatever insight the CIA’s own files might provide—whatever America’s foremost intelligence agency had turned up in all those years of background checks and lie-detector tests and psychological reports on its Communist-chasing spy—remained hidden away, or destroyed. But whether Soobzokov was a monster or a martyr mattered little at the moment to Grunz. What mattered right now was shutting this thing down.

This could get messy, Grunz realized. Very messy.

1

Liberation

Spring 1945

FÖHRENWALD DISPLACED PERSONS CAMP, OUTSIDE MUNICH

While the Nazis fled, their victims were left to languish.

These were the “lucky” ones: hundreds of thousands of Jews, Catholics, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, Roma, and other “parasites” enslaved in Nazi concentration camps who, somehow, had managed to survive Hitler’s genocidal killing machine. Yet even after Germany’s defeat, the survivors remained imprisoned for months in the same camps where the Nazis had first put them to rot.

The names of their jailers had changed, with the dark Nazi swastikas now replaced by the bright-colored flags of the Allied victors flying above the camps, but the barbed wire fences and armed guards still encircled them. They were in a postwar purgatory, living in horrific conditions that a high-level emissary of President Truman would compare to those imposed by the Nazis themselves.

Jacob Biber, a Jew who survived the Nazi purge in the Ukraine, was among the masses confined in the American DP camp at Föhrenwald. “We felt like so much surplus junk,” Biber would write of his confinement, “human garbage which the governments of the world wished would somehow go away.”

The conditions faced by the survivors inside the Allied DP camps after Germany’s defeat that fateful spring of 1945 were revolting in their own right. What made their confinement even more unthinkable was that, all the while, their Nazi tormentors were scattering to the winds. With few obstacles in their path, thousands of Hitler’s helpers were heading to America, visas in hand, to start their lives anew. The flight of the Nazis, in the face of the survivors’ brutal treatment at the hands of their Allied rescuers, amounted to one final, damning indignity.

The chilling irony could be reduced to simple math: every Nazi who managed to get a golden ticket out of Europe for passage to America meant one fewer “displaced person” in the Allied camps who would be able to get out. Visas to America, especially in the early months and years after the war, were precious and few; with more than seven million people across Europe left stateless, only forty thousand people
were admitted to the United States in the first three years after the war, despite calls for America to open its shores. Lingering anti-Semitism meant the denial of visas en masse to Holocaust survivors crammed into the DP camps. Yet Nazi collaborators and even SS members in Hitler’s reign of persecution, men who had proudly worn the Nazi uniform, were often able to enter the United States as “war refugees.”

Thousands of Nazis sneaked in on their own, easily gaming the American immigration system. But hundreds more had help—from senior military and intelligence officials at the Pentagon, the CIA, and other agencies who believed that the new immigrants—despite their obvious Nazi ties, or sometimes because of them—could help vanquish the Soviet menace. No one hated the Soviets more than the Nazis, officials in Washington liked to say, and they wanted to exploit that enmity.

So it was that the United States became home to men like Jakob Reimer,
a Ukrainian who settled in Queens and made a good living running a restaurant and selling potato chips. In coming to America in 1952, Reimer described himself as a German POW who worked an office job in the war years. Left out of his official biography were the more haunting aspects of his wartime service: raiding Jewish villages as a decorated SS officer, and training Nazi guards at Trawniki. American immigration officials did not press him to explain what he had done during the war, and he wasn’t going to volunteer it. He got a visa with little difficulty, while Holocaust survivors in Europe struggled to find someplace that would take them. As an American prosecutor told a judge decades later: “He was never entitled
to immigrate to the United States . . . There were only a limited number of visas back then, and Mr. Reimer took the visa of a real victim.”

And so, with horror-ridden places like Warsaw and Trawniki and Auschwitz effectively whited out of their histories, Reimer and thousands like him were able to remake themselves into just the type of wartime refugee the United States was willing to welcome to its shores. They had become Americans.

The Allies had come at Hitler from all sides in those early months of 1945; the Russians from the east; the Americans and the British from the west. One by one, the Allied forces discovered scenes of horror and madness in concentration camps abandoned by the retreating Nazis. Inside the camps remained tens of thousands of survivors amid heaps of unburied corpses. Generations later, the mind’s eye imagines the world embracing the survivors: the iron gates to the camps swinging open at the arrival of the Allied forces, and a mass of bone-thin victims pouring into the awaiting arms of a world filled at once with shock, guilt, and joy over their rescue. Like trapped coal miners freed from a mineshaft, or a wrongly accused prisoner emerging from behind the prison walls, they were free at last. Hot meals, warm beds, showers, and doctors awaited them.

The reality was much darker.

Many thousands of the survivors did not leave the Allied camps; some not for months, some not for years, some not at all. Thousands died from disease and malnourishment even after Hitler’s defeat. At Dachau, at Bergen-Belsen, and at dozens of DP camps like them, they remained jailed inside the walls that Hitler had erected. With the survivors surrounded by the stench of death and squalor, the liberating Allied forces, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would not allow them to leave. The world didn’t know what to do with them.

Crowded and ill fed, the survivors were left to wear their striped camp uniforms, the same uniforms that had become such a toxic symbol of Nazi oppression. In some DP camps, they were bunked
side by side with Nazi POWs who were held there as well—people who, just months earlier, had been their wartime tormentors. Some Nazi prisoners were even put in charge of Jewish inmates at the Allied camps, ruling over them even in defeat. Exiled Jews in the camps who were originally from Germany, Austria, and other Axis nations were classified and treated by the Allies not as victims but as “enemy nationals” because of their countries of origin, no different from the Nazi prisoners jailed with them.

Just as remarkably, thousands of German doctors and nurses who had inflicted the Nazis’ grotesque brand of medical care at the concentration camps were still being deployed at the DP camps—except now they worked for the Allies. At Dachau alone, more than six hundred medical personnel from the Germans’ Wehrmacht military division—doctors, dentists, nurses, and orderlies—now counted themselves as members of the Allied medical staff, handling the survivors.

Many of the Germans had it better. At Allied-run camps reserved for German prisoners of war, ex-Nazi officers watched movies, played soccer, even took college courses. At Jewish DP camps, meanwhile, the Holocaust survivors fought merely to get extra rations of soggy black bread and coffee to make up for the starvation of the war years. American officials resisted; they complained that the Jews were getting “preferential” treatment and were using black-market systems at the camps to violate limits on food rations. The situation became so volatile that German police—with the consent of American officials—staged a raid on black-market activities in the Stuttgart and Landsberg camps in early 1946; rioting broke out, with police killing one Jewish DP. He had survived the Holocaust, but not its aftermath.

With word of the survivors’ conditions filtering back to Washington, President Truman sent a special emissary, Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner who was dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, to inspect the DP camps and assess the plight, in particular, of the Jewish refugees. The World Jewish Congress and other humanitarian organizations were protesting “conditions of abject misery.” The reports seemed unbelievable. Could these horrific accounts of squalor, desperation, and mistreatment among the survivors—all in the wake of the Allied victory—really be true? Harrison was told to find out.

Harrison’s blistering conclusions cast a pall over America’s postwar euphoria. His findings were an indictment of the United States’ refugee effort in the harshest terms he knew. “As matters now stand,” Harrison wrote to Truman after touring the DP camps, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.”
The Nazis’ victims, the dean found, were being victimized once again—but this time by the Americans.

General George S. Patton, the gruff war hero whose soldiers ran the American DP camps, fumed over Harrison’s findings. Publicly, the general—Old Blood and Guts, as he was famously known—had adopted a posture of shock and revulsion that spring over the Allies’ discovery of the Nazi death camps, and he urged journalists to see for themselves the horrors inflicted on the victims. Privately, however, General Patton held the surviving Jews in his camps in utter contempt.

“Harrison and his ilk
believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote in his diary after learning of the scathing report to Truman. Laying bare the rabid anti-Semitism that infected the American refugee effort, Patton complained of how the Jews in one DP camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts.” He told of taking General Eisenhower to tour a makeshift synagogue that the Jews in the camp had set up to celebrate the holy day of Yom Kippur. “We entered the synagogue which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen.” This was Eisenhower’s first glimpse of the DPs, Patton wrote, so it was all new to him. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.”

Sadly, Patton’s contempt for the Jews—from the man responsible for overseeing the survivors of the biggest genocide in world history—was not that unusual among Washington’s elite. The Jews “do not desire to work, but expect to be cared for,” one Senate lawyer wrote in seeking to limit the number allowed into the country after the war. “It is very doubtful that any country would desire these people as immigrants.” President Truman’s wife, Bess, did not welcome Jews in her home, and the president himself was known privately to deride “kikes” and “Jew boys.”
Still, with Britain blocking Jews from going to Palestine and the United States closing its own doors for the most part, Truman agonized over the situation in the DP camps. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has somewhere to go back to,” Truman said, “but the Jews have no place to go.”