The Nazis Next Door (27 page)

Gus finished up his gut-wrenching soliloquy, then announced that his father was ready to answer the narrow set of questions that he and Mausner had agreed upon.

“Mr. von Bolschwing,” Mausner asked, “were you ever a member of the Nazi Party?”

“Yes,” Ossie answered.

“When were you a member of the Nazi Party?”

Von Bolschwing responded: “1932, I think, through 1945.”

And on it went, like a job applicant reciting lines from his resumé.

“When were you a member of the SS?” Mausner asked.

“From 1941 or ’42, I don’t know.”

Gus corrected him: the documents indicated that he had joined the SS in 1940, after passing an examination.

“It’s quite possible,” the father told his son. “I do not recall the exact dates.”

Around that same time, he had joined the SD, the Nazis’ political intelligence branch and a sister agency to the SS.

“What was your rank in the SD?” Mausner asked.

“I think
Hauptsturmführer
, which is the equivalent of captain.”

They were done. The end, brief as it was, seemed almost anticlimactic. They had stuck to the script. There were just ten questions about his Nazi allegiances and service, most of them answered in just a few terse words. Von Bolschwing had been a Nazi for thirteen years, reaching the rank of captain in the SS, writing strategy memos on purging Germany of the Jews, directing on-the-ground operations in his native Austria, giving safe haven to Bishop Trifa in Romania. All the bloodshed, all the hatred: all of that could be summed up neatly in a few short minutes of questioning. If there was regret, von Bolschwing did not voice it. If there was shame, he did not show it.

A few months after his deposition at the nursing home, word broke publicly about von Bolschwing, as the Justice Department brought charges to strip the Austrian native of his citizenship and deport him. Ossie denied everything. “I never served in the SS or Gestapo or SD,” he lied to one AP reporter who called him at the nursing home. Von Bolschwing made another claim, too: he told a few reporters that he had worked for the Americans and the CIA doing intelligence at the end of the war and afterward. Like his Nazi denials, this claim also sounded like an old man’s fanciful invention, and few people believed him. An Eichmann aide working for the CIA? Except that this claim was true. Both the CIA and the Justice Department knew that it was true, but they weren’t commenting.

For months afterward, von Bolschwing and Gus vowed publicly to fight the denaturalization. Gus reasoned that his father might be able to leverage his spy work for the CIA—and the admissions he had made to them years earlier—to counter the Justice Department’s charges that he had lied his way into America. But privately, even as he was plotting a possible defense, Gus was losing the will to fight. The more details he learned of his father’s Nazi past, the more difficult it became to represent him. He had already decided, in fact, to stop representing his father entirely and leave it to another Bay Area lawyer. The case was too emotionally laden. Gus wasn’t even sure his father would be allowed to put on a full defense, because the Justice Department had secured a gag order preventing his father from saying anything publicly about his CIA work. The CIA knew all along that von Bolschwing was a Nazi, he maintained, but he wasn’t allowed to say anything publicly about his dealings with the agency.

So Gus and his father took what his new lawyer called “the easy way out”: they cut a deal with Mausner and the Justice Department. Von Bolschwing agreed to give up his American citizenship, which he had held since 1959, and admit to his membership with the Nazis. But in exchange, the Justice Department allowed him to avoid deportation and remain in the United States indefinitely because of his failing health. If a doctor later found his condition was improving, the Justice Department could move again to deport him. No one considered that prospect likely, however.

The deal was attractive not only to von Bolschwing, but to the Justice Department and the CIA. Rockler, the head of the Nazi office, didn’t want a public trial with a defendant as frail and occasionally incoherent as von Bolschwing. Rockler called the old man a “wheelchair case”; he could only imagine the sympathy that von Bolschwing, in his condition, would elicit from a judge. A deal would save the years of litigation needed to take away his citizenship. More important, it would avoid the risk of another Soobzokov embarrassment, where von Bolschwing might prove that the CIA knew all about his Nazi history when it helped him into the country.

For the CIA, the deal was even more attractive. The gag order muzzling von Bolschwing would remain in place, and there would be no danger of the agency’s decade-long dalliance with a senior Nazi spilling into open court. Any discussion of von Bolschwing’s relationship with the CIA would remain, for now, just the fantastic claims of a dying old Nazi trying to save his own skin.

Less than three months after the plea deal was reached, Otto “Ossie” von Bolschwing died. Fifty years after he joined the Nazi Party, von Bolschwing—Prussian nobleman, Nazi SS officer, CIA spy—succumbed at the age of seventy-two to the disease that had ravaged his brain. Mausner, the prosecutor, wasn’t sorry to see him go. He had no mercy for a man so despicable. He was just glad he had been able to strip the ex-Nazi of his citizenship first. It was a small victory. He didn’t die an American. To Mausner, von Bolschwing died in disgrace. That was something.

Even at the end, Gus von Bolschwing was still struggling to understand his father’s dark past. When the local newspaper called to ask him for a comment about his father’s death, Gus spoke not from a place of mourning or anger, but of confusion. He was still unable to reconcile the two men he now knew as his father. “I would say,” Gus told the reporter, “that in all my lifetime, my father never made an anti-Semitic comment.”

In 1989, just as the Justice Department’s Nazi team was gaining wide-scale notice, a Hollywood film was released that captured the emotional tumult of the daughter of an accused Nazi. In
Music Box
, a Chicago lawyer played by Jessica Lange defends her father against accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator in Hungary, only to discover photos hidden away in a music box that showed him torturing and killing his Jewish victims.

The film was fiction, written by one of Hollywood’s most bankable screenwriters, Joe Eszterhas, who normally veered toward flashier fare like
Basic Instinct
and
Showgirls
. Eszterhas was born in Hungary at the very end of the war, and the film grew out of the shame he felt over his native country’s anti-Semitism and complicity in the Holocaust. But as he told interviewers when the film came out, Eszterhas had questioned his parents and other relatives at length about the war years in Hungary and was satisfied that no one in his own family was involved.

The very next year, he discovered the truth. The Justice Department opened a Nazi investigation into his own father. Prosecutors suspected
eighty-three-year-old Istvan Eszterhas, the retired editor of a Hungarian-language newspaper in Cleveland, of war crimes. To his shock, Joe Eszterhas learned that during the war his father had written hundreds of anti-Semitic screeds for the pro-Nazi propaganda ministry in Hungary and had penned a book that said of the Jews: “The iron fist of the law must be applied to this parasitic race.”

To Joe Eszterhas, the book read like a Hungarian version of
Mein Kampf
. His father hadn’t killed anyone with his own hands, at least as far as the prosecutors knew, but he had no doubt inspired hatred and rage in his countrymen through his words of official propaganda. The Justice Department didn’t end up prosecuting his father, but Joe Eszterhas cut off contact with him for a time, and their relationship was irreparably damaged by his father’s dark past.
Music Box
was supposed to be a made-up story, but the Hollywood screenwriter’s own life had come to imitate his art in haunting ways, and the guilt and shame of his father’s role with the Nazis were passed from one generation to the next. Like Gus von Bolschwing and others confronted by the sins of their fathers, Eszterhas felt that his father’s hidden past had left him with a moral burden of his own. “It’s the responsibility of the son to do penance,” Eszterhas said, “to correct what the father has done.”

10

A Good Party Spoiled

October 13, 1982

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

In the early 1980s, the surge of interest in America’s long-hidden war criminals brought a new generation of Nazi hunters to the cause. Two decades before, Chuck Allen’s solitary crusade had met with indifference or even hostility. But a new band of lawyers, lawmakers, and Jewish activists was now determined to seize the issue as their own, and the results proved far different this time.

Eli Rosenbaum was still a third-year law student at Harvard when he wandered off to the bookstore
in Cambridge one autumn day in 1980 and got his first scent of the hunt. He should have been in the law library studying for his copyright class. Instead, he was thumbing through tomes on World War II history in the back of the store. This was his guilty pleasure: he would sneak off to the bookstore and lose himself for hours, usually in the section dedicated to the war and the Holocaust. That day, he came across an obscure book on a Nazi concentration camp called Dora, the barbaric place where tens of thousands of slave laborers lived—and died—to build Hitler’s “revenge” missiles.

The book that caught his attention was the English translation of a memoir called
Dora
,
written by one of the camp’s survivors, a French prisoner of war named Jean Michel. Its description of the hell that was Dora both captivated and repulsed Rosenbaum. How was it, he wondered as he skimmed through the atrocities described in the book, that he knew nothing of the Dora camp? He considered himself a student of the Holocaust. He had spent the last summer as an intern working on legal briefs in the Justice Department’s new Nazi-hunting office, and he had organized a petition drive at Harvard urging continued war crimes prosecutions in Germany. Yet, like most Americans, he had never even heard of this uniquely perverse place, where prisoners were made to build their jailers’ bombs and dig their own graves. Americans knew plenty about the glistening marvels of aviation produced at the camp: the gravity-defying V-2 missiles launched across Europe by Hitler and then imported to America. But they knew virtually nothing about how and where the Nazis had built those missiles, even as books in Europe, like the one in Rosenbaum’s hands, were being written on the place. The anonymity of Dora was no accident. General Patton and the military had eagerly publicized America’s liberation of Dachau and other concentration camps, but they wanted no such publicity surrounding the secrets of Dora, as America claimed the mountain factory’s scientists and its rockets for itself. It was as if the place had never existed.

A few days after he found the French memoir, Rosenbaum went back to the bookstore in search of more information. In the science section, he found a book called
The Rocket Team
,
written from a very different perspective. This one, a newly published book by two American scientists, was a glowing account of the technological feats of Wernher von Braun and the Nazi scientists in building the V-2 missiles at Dora’s factory, known as Mittelwerk, and its predecessor, Peenemünde. As he skimmed the pages, a photo jumped out at Rosenbaum. It showed Russian prisoners, their heads shaved, working on the machinery. A pleasant caption under the photo read: “Contributing to the manufacture of A4s at Peenemünde were skilled Russian prisoners of war, always under the watchful eyes of German supervisors.” Rosenbaum grimaced at the whitewashed account. Prisoners of war “contributing” to the A-4 production under the “watchful eyes” of the Germans? “Slave laborers forced at Nazi gunpoint to build Hitler’s missiles” was more like it. Where had this photo even come from? he wondered. He looked in the back for the photo credit:
courtesy of Wernher von Braun
. The father of rocket science himself had apparently kept the photo of the slave laborers as some sort of macabre souvenir. The callousness grated at Rosenbaum. He bought the book and scribbled two large asterisks next to the photo credit, underlining von Braun’s name.

A second passage in the book caught his attention, too. A top Nazi scientist under von Braun named Arthur Rudolph, an engineer who was the operations chief at Dora’s missile factory, recounted an episode in which he had to rush back to the factory after hours to tend to an unexpected engineering glitch. Remarkably, Rudolph’s main concern seemed to be the nuisance it had created for him. It was New Year’s Eve, and “I was relaxing at a get-together with a few close associates, enjoying a respite from the horrible pressure of the plant.” Rudolph groused about having to put down his champagne and find prisoners to fix the problem. “It was very cold and I cursed at having to leave the party
just to get those missiles out,” he said.

Rosenbaum shook his head in disbelief. Slave laborers were dying by the day at Rudolph’s missile factory from disease and malnutrition, while others were hanged, and this Nazi, a so-called scientist, had the nerve to complain about being forced to put down his champagne to handle an engineering glitch? It was the height of audacity. Rosenbaum wanted to know more about this man Rudolph. When he checked the footnotes in the back of the book to see if he was mentioned, disgust turned to disbelief. The story about the scuttled New Year’s Eve party, it turned out, came from an interview the book’s authors had done with Dr. Rudolph himself in 1971—an interview conducted at the military installation in Huntsville, Alabama. It took a moment for the realization to set in.
Arthur Rudolph had come to America. To work for the United States military
.

Like a dog with a bone, Rosenbaum couldn’t let go of the idea that a top scientist at a brutal Nazi camp like Dora had come to America—and not just as any ordinary American but, from what he learned, as the top engineer with the Saturn V space program. Rudolph was “Mr. Saturn,” a man who helped put America on the moon and received the highest honors from NASA for his work. He had served at the depths of Nazi depravity and the height of American achievement, bookending his life. It was a scandal, Rosenbaum thought. How could this have happened?