The Nazis Next Door (25 page)

Rosenbaum looks out on the Ponary killing pit outside Vilnius, where the Kaplans and thousands of other Lithuanian Jews were murdered at gunpoint by the Nazis.

9

The Sins of the Father

February 2, 1981

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

Gus von Bolschwing didn’t think much of it
when he first got the call that day in 1980. A Justice Department lawyer in Washington named Jeff Mausner wanted to speak with him. That itself was nothing unusual. As a successful malpractice attorney in San Francisco, Gus got lots of calls from fellow lawyers. Except that this lawyer didn’t want to talk to Gus about one of his malpractice cases; he wanted to talk to Gus about his seventy-one-year-old father, Otto “Ossie” von Bolschwing.

“Did you know,”
the Justice Department lawyer asked Gus, “that your father was a high-ranking Nazi in the SS?”

Whatever came after that was a blur; Gus couldn’t quite process the words. This must be a bizarre mistake,
he thought; maybe some sort of cruel hoax. “Are you kidding me?” he finally asked. No, he wasn’t, Mausner explained. The Justice Department’s new Nazi-hunting office wanted to ask Gus some questions about his father’s activities during World War II. Prosecutors were conducting a formal investigation into newly unearthed evidence that Otto Albrecht Albert von Bolschwing—a retired international businessman, husband and father, American citizen for twenty-two years, and now an ailing resident of a Sacramento nursing home—had a hidden past as a top Nazi war criminal and an aide to Adolf Eichmann in Hitler’s Jewish Affairs office.

Denial followed disbelief. In an instant, Gus’s mind raced through everything he knew about his father, or everything he thought he knew. He tried to view his father through this dark new prism, twisting and turning what he knew of Ossie’s life to see if he could recognize anything the Washington prosecutor was now telling him. His father had fought the Nazis in the underground movement in Austria. At least that’s what Gus had always been told. Gus had never heard him utter a single anti-Semitic word. Not once. After he and Gus’s mother had divorced, Ossie had even
married
a woman who was part Jewish. Ruth was her name, like the fabled character from the Old Testament, and her mother came from a prominent Jewish family in Austria. Ossie and Ruth, the baron and his half-Jewish bride, were married in Austria in 1942: in the midst of the war, in the midst of the Holocaust. Marrying a Jew could have gotten him killed by the Gestapo, but Ruth was “the love of my life,” Ossie always said.

Gus flashed back to his arrival in America in 1954 as a boy of fifteen. His father arranged for him to go to a prestigious high school in Boston and live there with the Fleischners, relatives of Ruth’s from Europe who had fled the Holocaust. They were a kind, generous Jewish family. They opened their home to Gus, giving him his own room. There was no hint of tension that Gus could recall, no sign that his father was suppressing any dark secrets. Sometimes, Gus remembered, his father would talk to him about the basic precepts of Judaism and Christianity, never disparaging one or favoring the other. Make up your own mind, his father always said when it came to religion. Find your own way.

This
was the man the Justice Department was now calling a Nazi? And not just any Nazi, but a senior SS officer, the author of a hate-filled primer on “the Jewish problem,” a man who signed “Heil Hitler” at the bottom of his memos to Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution?
This
was his father, Otto von Bolschwing?

No, it wasn’t possible, Gus von Bolschwing told himself. True, he and his father had never had a particularly warm relationship, and sure, Ossie could be many things: cold and aloof, moody, perhaps a bit arrogant and insensitive in the erudite manner one might expect of a man born a Prussian nobleman. But a Nazi? Was there any more vile pejorative to sling at a man, any man? No, this was not his father, Gus told himself. It couldn’t be.

There were hundreds of Gus von Bolschwings scattered across America: sons and daughters of accused Nazis swept up in the rising tide of investigations brought by the Justice Department’s aggressive new team of prosecutors.

Overwhelmingly, the children—many of them first-generation Americans and products of the war themselves—believed in their fathers and their innocence, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It was simply too painful to do otherwise. The father’s battle became the child’s. As prosecutors tried to throw their fathers out of the country, the children kept vigil at their fathers’ sides, protesting their fathers’ innocence to judges, to journalists, to neighbors, and to anyone else who would listen. Hadn’t the Nazi hunters at the Justice Department blown cases before, they would ask? Overzealous prosecutors could shade the evidence any way they wanted, they would insist. Elderly witnesses flown in from Israel were proven wrong sometimes, their memories skewed over what really happened in the concentration camps so many years ago. Nazi IDs could be forged, they would claim. Men could be wrongly accused, smeared because they came from a different land. Every child was convinced his father was one of the innocents.

That’s the way it was for Diane Lavoie when she learned the Justice Department was threatening to deport her father, a Lithuanian-born factory worker in central Massachusetts named Vladas Zajanckauskas. He was accused of unthinkable crimes: leading the massacre of Jews at the Warsaw ghetto. The Washington lawyers were cordial enough, and they certainly looked professional, with their leather briefcases and fancy suits, as they came up from Washington for depositions and court hearings. But the lies they told about her father: the things they told Diane were impossible for her to believe.
They wanted her to think that her father was a Nazi officer at Trawniki—promoted three times, in fact—and that he’d led a unit sent to Warsaw to “liquidate” the ghetto in one of the Holocaust’s bloodiest episodes. Zajanckauskas’s name, the lawyers explained to her, was right there at the top of a roster of Nazi officers at Trawniki sent to Warsaw. He went there, they said, as part of a Nazi unit that crushed the Warsaw ghetto uprising in a show of brute force notorious even by Holocaust standards. Nor was he just any officer, the prosecutors told her. He was a training officer; he schooled the rank-and-file Nazis at Trawniki in the tools of genocide.
This
was her father, they told her.

None of it made any sense to Diane. Her father had told her all about those brutal war years: how he worked at a canteen at the Trawniki camp, serving beer to the soldiers; how he’d secretly tried to
help
the Jews. There was a friendly Jewish boy named David he always mentioned. By his telling, in fact, Trawniki’s wartime experience was, as odd as it sounded, a love story of sorts. He told Diane how he wandered into the village for canteen supplies and cigarettes, and there met his beautiful bride-to-be: her mother, Vladislava. He had never even been to Warsaw, he told her, much less murdered Jews in the ghetto. Her father was a gentle man, a devout Catholic, a hardworking man who toiled at a plastics factory outside Worcester, Massachusetts, for thirty-five years. Zajanckauskas was “the best father anybody could have,” she told a judge, her native New England accent punctuated by pain.
This
was the man she knew.

The accusations, she said, had wrecked her family. The legal fees were crushing: $200,000 for a couple of well-heeled lawyers an hour away, in Boston. Her parents sold their home to cover the costs, and they moved into a small cottage on Diane’s lakeside property nearby. When they had to go to court for hearings, Diane tried to avoid the scornful faces in the courtroom. “Why are they looking at me like a criminal?” her father would ask. At least their supporters—friends, neighbors, church members—knew the truth, no matter what the government said. “Please don’t ever lose hope,”
a neighbor wrote.

With his life in limbo, Vladas Zajanckauskas sat out by the lake and painted nature scenes. The massacres in Warsaw were far from his mind. Sometimes he liked to write. In neat, angular handwriting, he kept a journal of his life story—the
real
story, he insisted, not the government’s horrific version—and he scrawled lines from the Bible that he said reflected his journey. “When I sit in darkness the Lord shall be a light to me,” he wrote. That was her father, Diane insisted, not the monster they made him out to be.

In New Jersey, Tom Soobzokov’s youngest son, Aslan, believed just as fervently in his own father’s innocence. The years-long defense of his father became an obsession. He was in high school in Paterson when the stories about his father first circulated. When he walked down the school’s hallway,
he felt as if everyone’s eyes were on him. He was Aslan Soobzokov, “son of the Nazi.” At the protests outside his house, with Jewish protesters calling his father a Nazi and worse, he and his Circassian friends would confront the troublemakers. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he would tell them angrily.

Even after Aslan went off to the Air Force, he was haunted by the thought of his father, Papa Soobzokov, hounded by the ongoing accusations back home in New Jersey. On one blustery day in 1977, Aslan left his air base
in northern Michigan and drove four hours to a book signing he had seen advertised at a Jewish Community Center north of Detroit. It was a solitary trek to avenge his father’s honor. Howard Blum, author of the best-selling
Wanted!
was there, signing copies of his book, smiling, posing for pictures without a care in the world. Aslan walked up to Blum, handing him a copy of the book with all the vile things it said about his father. He had never met Blum, but he instantly detested him. “My name is Aslan Soobzokov,” he said with a mock smile. Blum stiffened up and moved back a pace. He seemed afraid that Aslan, a tall, burly military man, might punch him. “How could you write this about my father!” Aslan finally said, jabbing his finger at the book. “This, this garbage!” He walked away. He had to admit: it felt good to confront one of Papa’s accusers.

For Rad Artukovic, the accusations against his own father—Andrija Artukovic, the so-called Butcher of the Balkans—colored his earliest memories.
The on-again, off-again effort to deport the elder Artukovic, implicated in the deaths of six hundred thousand Roma, Serbians, and Jews when he served as the interior minister in the Nazi puppet state in Croatia, was one of the longest immigration cases in U.S. history, stretching back three decades to the early 1950s. Rad was just a toddler, three years old, playing with a red fire truck in the back of a Los Angeles courtroom, when his father—his arms in handcuffs raised triumphantly over his head to the cheers of his Yugoslavian supporters—made his very first court appearance
in the deportation case in 1951. Whether Rad actually remembered the fire truck, or had simply been told about the scene so many times that he felt he had, was unimportant. What mattered was that he was at his accused father’s side every step of the way, every phase of the fight, for the next thirty-five years. He never seriously doubted his father’s innocence, no matter what the federal prosecutors said about him. As a boy of eleven, Rad posed with his exuberant father for a newspaper photo after Artukovic won a critical court decision blocking his deportation in 1959. Years later, as a young stockbroker in the 1980s, Rad would sneak off the trading floor at the Pacific Stock Exchange and head to the nearby Los Angeles courthouse for dozens of immigration hearings in his father’s never-ending case. And after the elder Artukovic was finally extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986 on war crimes charges, Rad made repeated trips to Europe to prepare for a trial he regarded as “a kangaroo court.”

Even long after his father died in a Yugoslavian prison while awaiting execution by firing squad, Rad kept up the fight, writing letters, meeting with federal officials, and filling file cabinets in his Southern California home with records on wartime Croatia and his father. Every scrap of paper he found, every official he contacted, he believed, could be the breakthrough he needed to exonerate his father posthumously. His father, he believed, was simply an administrator in the Nazi puppet state, a figurehead with no real authority to send anyone to their death. He wrote once to Allan Ryan, the Justice Department prosecutor, to lay out his case for his father’s innocence one more time. Ryan was sympathetic but left no doubt he still considered Rad’s father a brutal war criminal. “Unfortunately,” Ryan wrote in response to Rad, “in prosecutions of this kind, the family inevitably suffers.”

Let it go, friends would tell Rad. But he never would. Bright moments were few in the decades that Rad spent trying to exonerate his father. One came, oddly enough, from one of his father’s most ardent accusers. Irv Rubin, the militant leader of the Jewish Defense League in Los Angeles, staged raucous protests at Artukovic’s many deportation proceedings, denouncing his defenders as “Nazi pigs,” or worse. Artukovic’s supporters would sit on one side of the courtroom, Rubin and his accusers on the other, with shouting matches breaking out during recesses and at dueling press conferences staged on the courthouse steps at the end of each day. Rad, a seminary student in high school, pulled Rubin aside and told the militant Jewish leader that he hoped to reach a peace of sorts with his rival, or at least an understanding. Rubin seemed to appreciate the gesture. “You’re an honorable son,” Rubin told Rad. “I hate your dad,
but you’re an honorable son, and my faith teaches me that’s something to be respected.”

In the beginning, Gus von Bolschwing was just like Rad Artukovic and Aslan Soobzokov and Diane Lavoie and all the other children whose fathers were accused of being Nazis. Gus, too, wanted badly to believe
his father was an innocent victim, a man wrongly accused, not the monstrous Eichmann aide that prosecutors made him out to be. He wanted to believe that the stories his father told him as a child about fighting Hitler and the Nazis in the underground movement were all true. He wanted to believe that his father was an honest man. Yet the day came when Gus von Bolschwing simply stopped believing.