The Nazis Next Door (4 page)

Like Artukovic, many Nazi collaborators came from Eastern Europe. Hundreds of fugitives with Nazi ties came from Germany, but many more who wound up in America were collaborators from Nazi-controlled countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. American immigration policies made it easy for them to come. In the first few years after the war, fully 40 percent of all the visas granted by the United States were set aside for war refugees from the Baltics. The Baltic immigrants—unlike the would-be Jewish immigrants derided by Washington policymakers as lazy and ungodly—were seen instead as hardworking, industrious, and, in the racist language of the day, “of good stock and good breeding,” and they were welcomed eagerly to America. The bulk of the hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants claiming visas to the United States were no doubt legitimate refugees of war. But thousands among them were not. In vast swaths of Eastern Europe that had eagerly thrown their support behind Hitler, many of the people awarded visas from the Baltics were, as one immigration official put it, “individuals who served the Nazis as traitors and persons who committed atrocities against the Jews.” These were Hitler’s henchmen, collaborators who had greased the wheels of Hitler’s killing machine as concentration camp supervisors and guards; as SS “death squad” officers and “liquidators” of Jewish ghettos; as regional police chiefs who issued the racist decrees and death orders for thousands of Nazi victims. They were “a thousand little Führers,”
as Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice turned Nazi prosecutor at Nuremberg, called Hitler’s helpers. And yet, despite their dark pasts, they had little difficulty camouflaging themselves among the refugees seeking a haven in America. Immigration screeners were too ill trained, or uninterested, to spot them. A few immigration employees complained: ex-Nazis with the mark of the SS on their arms who had “committed atrocities against the Jews” were using fake papers to pass themselves off as war refugees and slip into America. Their protests went unheeded. The gates remained open.

For decades, the ex-Nazis lived American lives that were usually remarkable only for how quiet and uneventful they were. They were snapshots of the eclectic immigrant experience little different from those of millions of other immigrants. Whatever had happened during the war was now long passed. They became factory workers in Ohio and janitors in Illinois, car salesmen in New Jersey and life insurance agents in California. They raised children, sending them off to the military or to college. If their own wartime experiences in Europe seemed mysterious or unexplained, few noticed, and even fewer cared. A few muckrakers sounded a clarion call: there are Nazi war criminals living among us. But the gadflies were ignored or, worse, harassed by the FBI and the CIA for prying too deeply into America’s dark secret.

Only grudgingly, in the late 1970s, more than three decades after the war had ended, would the nation begin to wake up to the reality that there were indeed legions of ex-Nazis living freely in their adopted homeland, unburdened by their past sins. The shame of a decades-long silence began to lift, and the government committed itself belatedly to trying to track down the Nazi fugitives. It proved a quixotic journey. Hundreds were investigated, and dozens deported. But with every success came another setback, as America’s newfound desire to atone for the past collided squarely with the ongoing Cold War against the Soviets. America’s notions of justice and due process were tested. It was an imperfect justice, and it would pit eyewitness against eyewitness, immigrant against immigrant, prosecutor against prosecutor, even Jew against Jew in the struggle to rid America of Nazi war criminals. The American justice system had never undertaken a challenge quite so daunting and complex, as it sought to hold its own citizens accountable for horrific crimes committed decades ago and an ocean away. This long after the war, many asked, why bother? Even if prosecutors could beat the long legal odds, was it really worth dredging up the past?

“It is all forgotten,”
Jakob Reimer, the ex-SS officer in Queens, said when confronted with the details of his Nazi crimes in an American courtroom more than a half century later. “It’s all over.”

2

The Good Nazis

March 1945

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

The unholy alliance between the United States and the Nazis began with an ambitious American spy chief in Europe, a brutal Nazi general, a bottle of Scotch, and a secret fireside chat at a Swiss safe house.

Allen Welsh Dulles was America’s top spy in Switzerland in charge of gathering wartime intelligence on Hitler. Nazi general Karl Wolff was the onetime right-hand man to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Together, they sat by a crackling fire
in the elegant library of a Zurich apartment for a pleasant conversation in early 1945. They spoke in German. America was still at war with Hitler, and the last shots of the Battle of Berlin would not be fired for another two months, but the two men—one the future director of the CIA, the other a leading Nazi general in the notorious Waffen SS—already had mutual interests to discuss. General Wolff realized the war was lost, and he wanted protection from the war crimes charges that were sure to follow him. Dulles wanted Wolff’s help in getting the Nazi SS men in Italy whom Wolff controlled to lay down their arms early—before what appeared to be the inevitable German surrender. Perhaps just as important in the long term, he saw the “moderate” Wolff as an ally in confronting the next big threat: the Russians. Wolff and his motley crew of Nazi underlings in Italy offered Dulles the promise of developing a long-term source of intelligence that could be turned against Stalin and the Russians once a postwar Germany was formed.

The moment was a harbinger. In the coming years, Dulles and America’s spy services would put to work hundreds of former Nazis as spies and operatives in both Europe and the United States as part of the new Cold War ethos. “Wolffie,” thanks to Dulles, was the first big-name Nazi to help open the floodgates.

This rapprochement was a turn few could have predicted. For three and a half years, Hitler and the Nazis had been America’s wartime obsession in the European theater. The Nazis were the tyrannical warmongers denounced by FDR for “acts of savagery” and “inhuman and barbarous activity.” More than 185,000 American soldiers had lost their lives fighting in Europe. America’s obsession with Hitler’s aggression knew few limits. Fears reached such a fevered pitch during the war that, in one little-known operation, American officials even persuaded their Latin American neighbors
to deport some four thousand ethnic Germans living in Colombia, Guatemala, and elsewhere—sending them to the United States to be imprisoned as “enemy aliens.” Every German in the Americas, no matter how assimilated, could be suspected of plotting a “fifth column” attack on the United States. Few if any of the German natives had actual ties to Hitler, but FDR was taking no chances.

Yet now here was Allen Dulles sharing a fireside Scotch with Himmler’s former chief of staff. To begin talks so abruptly with high-level Nazis was an astounding pivot. Even before Germany’s ultimate surrender, the fear of all things Nazi was cooling quickly in the minds of American military and intelligence officials. As Hitler’s war machine began to stall, the Nazis faded as the dominant threat they once were, and American officials were already beginning to plot how they would contain their new rival—the Soviets—in a Europe divided among the victors. A new mindset began to take shape: yes, there were ardent Nazi war criminals in Hitler’s murderous regime, but serving side by side with them were moderate and “repentant” ones whose “heart had not really been in the Nazi cause,”
as one intelligence official said of none other than the notorious Nazi leader Hermann Göring. Perhaps America could tell the good Nazis from the bad, the thinking went, and turn the reformed ones to its advantage against the Soviets in what was to become a new cold war.

Dulles was a champion of the new mindset. With an ever-present smoking pipe in his hand and a bow tie crowning his tweed jacket, the Princeton-educated Dulles was the personification of a type: the Ivy League intelligence agent who came of age during World War II and went on to dominate the American spy business for generations. Beyond their blue-blood background, Dulles and his compatriots shared a single-minded contempt for the Soviet Union. Hitler was yesterday’s enemy; Stalin was the existential threat that would outlive the war.

Dulles ran America’s wartime intelligence operation in Europe from his perch in Bern, Switzerland. During the war, the secret spy cables he sent to his bosses in Washington were filled with intelligence not only on Hitler’s military activities, but also on the ominous threat posed by America’s wartime ally: the Russians. Again and again, Dulles would opine to Washington on Stalin’s agenda and how it might affect the world balance after the war. Dulles appeared much less concerned about the everyday terror enveloping Europe. In Switzerland, he was getting regular reports about the Nazis’ widespread massacre of Jews and European civilians, but his secret cables back to Washington included remarkably little
on the topic. If reports of Jewish towns being evacuated and “liquidated” were mentioned at all in his cables, Dulles would pass them along to Washington either without comment or with an air of resignation. In 1943, his boss in Washington asked Dulles about a report that the Nazis had hauled four thousand children, some as young as two years old, in boxcars from Paris to “unknown destinations.” Dulles responded that such reports “exist in all countries under German domination,” but unless the United States was going to undertake a massive refugee program, “I do not see much that can be done in regard to this type of situation.”
Regardless, he said, the problem was outside his area of authority.

General Wolff was one of the senior SS leaders responsible for those massacres during the war. The general was a personal favorite of Hitler’s; they were so close that the führer personally blessed Wolff’s divorce and remarriage to his mistress after lower-level Nazis objected on principle. With a perpetual smile on his face, the blond, Nordic-looking Wolff would often appear at Himmler’s side as the two men toured the concentration camp at Dachau, inspected French POWs, picked over antique Chippendale furniture and ornate rugs seized from Jews in occupied countries, or simply enjoyed a stroll in the countryside.
The savagery of the camps was far from his mind. He “did not find the concentration camps pleasant,” he conceded to one interviewer. Still, Wolff always made it a point to ask the prisoners how they were treated, he insisted; “none of them had ever complained.” And what of those yellow Stars of David the Jews had to wear? “I had the impression,” Wolff said, “that for the racially conscious Jews, it was an honor.”

Prosecutors at Nuremberg weren’t fooled by his shameless sophistry. Wolff, they concluded after the war, was Himmler’s “bureaucrat of death.”
He had worked with steel-cold precision to help set up the network of boxcars used to “resettle” the Jews of Poland and herd them like cattle to their deaths. He watched the grisly medical experiments that Himmler wanted performed on prisoners at Dachau. He commanded the SS troops in Italy responsible for killing thousands of Italian women and children. Dulles’s own spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services, in a report just months after the war ended, blamed Wolff personally for the “wholesale slaughter of populations.”

High-level Nazi or not, General Wolff proved to be more an opportunist than a loyalist. He realized in early 1945 that despite Hitler’s promise of a secret weapon to win the war, the defeat of the Third Reich was inevitable. So, for weeks, a small group of Nazi SS officers in Italy who were loyal to him—Members of the Black Order, they called themselves—held clandestine meetings at his direction with Dulles’s men to discuss a possible surrender. Wolff’s motives were plain: he and his men saw in Dulles the chance, as one of them said, to “save their skins.”

This was a dangerous game for both sides. Wolff and his men faced execution if Hitler were to find out about their treasonous talks. Dulles, meanwhile, risked contravening the unambiguous declaration from FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Casablanca two years earlier that the Allied powers would accept nothing less than an unconditional surrender from the Nazis. There could be no negotiated concessions from a regime as heinous as Hitler’s, and “the monstrous crimes of the Hitlerites” would not go unpunished, the Allied leaders had insisted. Stalin would no doubt be furious if he knew of the secret talks between the Americans and the Nazis. Officially, Dulles could offer Wolff nothing in return for his cooperation; no leniency, no immunity, nothing. Just the chance to surrender, with no official promises. But unofficially, it was clear that the conniving General Wolff saw Dulles as his best hope to escape the gallows for his war crimes.

Dulles had personally approved the secret meeting. “An intelligence officer should be free to talk to the Devil himself,”
he would later write, “if he could gain any useful knowledge for the conduct or the termination of the war.” For his part, Wolff was thrilled that Dulles had agreed to sit down with him. To prepare for the meeting, the Nazi general sent along a glowing curriculum vitae with his credentials, his wartime accomplishments with the Nazis, and even a list of character references.
Among them was Pope Pius XII, whom Wolff had met in Italy a year earlier. The documents represented what the Nazis called their
Persilscheine
, or “detergent,” meant to wipe clean the past. Wolff’s record needed scrubbing.

Although Dulles was impressed by the material, some Allied officers involved in preparing for the talks were repulsed at the very thought of meeting with Wolff and vowed indignantly that they would never shake hands with the Nazi general. Dulles held no such reservations. As they met that day in Zurich under heavy guard, the two men greeted each other warmly. Sitting around the fireplace, they discussed a few mutual acquaintances before turning to the prospects for a military surrender in Italy. Dulles had the right man, the general told him. “I control SS forces in Italy,” Wolff said, and he could get them to lay down their arms for him with the war all but ended.