The Nazis Next Door (14 page)

No, von Bolschwing agreed. He did not want to take such a risk. Realizing there was no way to press on with his job application, he agreed to withdraw his name from consideration for the post. He would cite personal reasons: his health, perhaps. The Nazi issue would not be mentioned. His handler would draft a telegraph to send to the State Department the following day, along with a letter to one of his congressional supporters who had strongly backed him for the job, they agreed.

Von Bolschwing was despondent over seeing his Nazi past suddenly thrown back at him fifteen years after the war. Twice he mentioned suicide to his CIA friends. He was particularly worried about how to explain to his wife his sudden change of heart over the India job. She had been depressed recently, and she was still recovering after a car accident. This would no doubt upset her even more, he confided. She knew little about his past, he said, and she wasn’t the type who could live out her life with a “guilty secret.” Grudgingly, he settled on a plan: he would admit to his wife that before the war, before they were married, he had worked for the Nazis in “emigrating Jews” out of Germany. His work was now being subjected to unfair “misinterpretation” in the wake of Eichmann’s capture, he would tell her, and he was pulling his name for the State Department job as a result. That was all she needed to know.

And what about his American citizenship? Von Bolschwing was worried about that, too. He had received his citizenship papers only two years before. Was his immigration status in danger too? The CIA couldn’t make any guarantees, his handler told him, but the agency would do what it could for him by working to ensure that no one else outside the CIA’s security channels found out about his deep ties to Eichmann. Von Bolschwing’s dark secrets were safe with the CIA. No one else needed to know.

Von Bolschwing was satisfied. As upset as he was over the sudden turn of events, his mood seemed to brighten as he and his old CIA friends agreed on a course of action to contain the damage from this ugly episode. “He showed surprising resilience and apparent courage,” his handler wrote admiringly. Von Bolschwing “is tough and resourceful,” he was glad to report; the ex-Nazi would no doubt soldier on. He was already looking to the future and seemed intent on “clearing his record and reinstating himself as a first-class citizen.”

5

Tilting at Swastikas

May 19, 1963

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Eichmann’s capture proved more a blip than a turning point. The broad global manhunt that Otto von Bolschwing had so feared never really materialized, and he and thousands of other ex-Nazis in America lived with little fear of scrutiny in the era of Camelot.

But a blue-blooded Quaker from Philadelphia was determined to change all that.

His name was Chuck Allen, and on a drizzling spring day in Chicago in 1963, he stood at the center of a raucous crowd of protesters and denounced “the Nazi war criminals in our midst.” Even before the white mice were let loose and the neo-Nazis showed up, the day’s event was shaping up as one of the odder protests that Chicago had seen in quite a while.

A diverse crowd of left-wing demonstrators—card-carrying Communists, an Orthodox rabbi, black civil rights activists, union leaders, and more—packed into a meeting hall
to rally for a cause few outsiders even knew existed: expelling Nazi fugitives from America. Allen was their unlikely young leader.

A writer, activist, and provocateur, Allen was a celebrity among the Chicago protesters, almost a folk hero, thanks to a searing forty-two-page exposé he had just published in
Jewish Currents
, a tiny Communist-affiliated magazine in New York. In it, he made a startling charge: at least fifteen ex-Nazis were living openly in America, some of them right here in Chicago. He realized that his was a lonely cause. “What can a single journalist say about the story of the war criminals living among us?” Allen wrote. “We as a people are quite responsible for letting this happen, and are now doubly obligated to resolve this deeply moral issue. Now just what are we going to do about it?”

The righteous indignation was typical for Allen. A modern Don Quixote, armed with a poison pen instead of a lance, he tilted not at windmills, but at swastikas. A gifted athlete who played semipro football after college, Allen was known to his friends as Baby Bull. It was as much for his aggressive personality as his athletic build. He had no time for niceties. Long-haired and loquacious, Allen figured that if Americans were blind to the Holocaust and its aftermath, he would strongarm them into remembering.

Allen was ready to back up the sensational charges he was making. One of those named in his report was a leading figure in Chicago with the Catholic Church—a bishop from Lithuania named Vincentas Brizgys who was widely admired for ministering to war refugees in America. Allen unearthed a document prepared by American prosecutors at Nuremberg fifteen years earlier on the Nazi occupation of Lithuania and the bishop’s long-hidden role there. The American prosecutors portrayed the bishop not as an exile of the war, but as a Nazi ally who cast his lot with the “liberating Germans” after they overran his country. Citing a secret SS report on the murders of some sixteen hundred Lithuanians in 1941, the Nuremberg report included a particularly chilling line on the clergyman’s wartime role: “Bishop Brizgys has forbidden all clergy to aid Jews in
any way.”

In his exposé, Allen declared the bishop a war criminal. He made no distinction between the Nazis themselves and an apparent Nazi sympathizer like Brizgys; Allen was never one for nuance or subtlety in his writing, and he made no pretense of sober journalistic objectivity. His screed was a call to action, a boldface indictment of America’s complicity in allowing ex-Nazis and their collaborators to live in their adopted homeland with impunity. The three-part series, accompanied by wartime photos and reproductions of documents like the Nuremberg SS report on Bishop Brizgys, was so voluminous that the editors at
Jewish Currents
printed it as a separate pamphlet and sold it for a quarter a copy. It caused a sensation among left-wingers, and the magazine had to order more printings to meet the demand.

Yet within the “establishment” that Allen so detested—mainstream newspapers, political organizations, and prominent Jewish advocacy groups—his report went essentially unnoticed. Those even aware of what he was writing dismissed him as a Russian mouthpiece who was parroting Soviet disinformation in order to damage the reputations of staunch anti-Communists. Who was Chuck Allen, they asked, to be making such outrageous charges? He was an outlier, a man with a political bias, no credibility, and a tiny audience.

It became easy for his critics to dismiss him not only as a loudmouthed know-it-all, but a Marxist-spouting ideologue as well. Allen didn’t care; he made no attempt to hide his lefty views. While he always denied being a member of the Communist Party, he refused on principle to sign the loyalty oaths popular at the time; his stance cost him several jobs in journalism, and he struggled to find anyplace that would print his stories as a result.

“My principle has always been that I’ll work with you—no matter who you are, including a raving Communist—so long as you are anti-fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-racist, and anti-anti-Semite,” he once said. Allen reveled in the attacks against him: the tougher the fight, the better. He got up every morning “looking forward to doing combat against these wahoos,”
he once remarked.

Nothing in Allen’s Christian background suggested he would become one of America’s first Nazi hunters or, for that matter, that he would end up in the FBI’s crosshairs because of it. If Americans thought at all about Nazi fugitives after the war—and few did—the image of the relentless Nazi hunter was embodied across the Atlantic in the slight, balding frame and thick Austrian accent of Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.

Chuck Allen was different. A self-described WASP, Allen wasn’t Jewish, and he traced his ancestors not to war-torn Europe but to early settlers in America in the seventeenth century. He came to the Holocaust by chance in college at Swarthmore, when he fell for a Jewish refugee from Germany.
They would read together late into the night, and the wrenching stories she told him of Kristallnacht, the notorious night of terror for German Jews in 1938, obsessed Allen long after the two parted ways.

What Allen lacked in Holocaust pedigree he made up for in an outsize passion for social causes, a trait he credited to his grandmother, a Pennsylvania Quaker who worked as a physician and pushed for women’s rights. As a journalist for left-wing publications in the 1950s, Allen wrote about McCarthyism, racial injustice, the KKK, and Nazism long before such topics were in vogue. He often came across—both in person and in his writings—as bombastic, self-righteous, abrasive, and hot-tempered. In college, a classmate analyzed Allen as the subject for a psychology paper on “natural superiority complex.” He couldn’t disagree with the assessment. Like a district attorney giving his closing argument, Allen would announce with dramatic flair, “I have proof that . . .” or “now it can be revealed that . . . ,” as he spoke before audiences, launching into the evidence he had gathered against another accused Nazi in America.

Allen worked out of his small apartment in Manhattan, surrounded by dozens of boxes and a steamer trunk packed with material he had gathered over the years: war crimes documents from Nuremberg, alphabetical filings on the accused Nazis he was chasing, notebooks from interviews he conducted, letters from Holocaust survivors he’d contacted, photos from concentration camps, and macabre Nazi memorabilia. In the weeks and months before his big Nazi series ran in 1963, Allen trekked to dingy apartment buildings, a church, even the U.S. State Department, to try to locate the men he was about to name as war criminals. Some of his targets had been dogged by rumors of Nazi ties for years, with their names appearing in published reports before. Others faced war crimes accusations for the first time when they opened their doors to the intimidating stare of Chuck Allen. Almost to a man, those who spoke to Allen blamed the accusations against them on “Communist lies,” and invariably, Allen would press them for more. So where had they actually been during the war? Did they serve with the Nazis? How had they gotten into the United States? He was more hardball detective than inquiring reporter. He tracked down the phone number for a New Jersey immigrant who, he learned, had been convicted in absentia as a member of a Nazi execution squad in Byelorussia, and called him up, demanding to know not only about the immigrant’s Nazi past, but also the current whereabouts of another ex-Nazi who came to America from the same concentration camp. “Listen, mister,”
the man shot back. “You bother me any more and I get the FBI on you!”

The men Allen named publicly as war criminals had little reason to fear scrutiny in the United States, no matter what he wrote about them. One of them, the high-profile Hitler aide Dr. Gustav Hilger, was even listed in the Washington phone book by his real name in the 1950s as he traveled seamlessly between the worlds of academia, diplomacy, and intelligence as an undercover “consultant” to the CIA. A decade earlier, as the Nazis’ top specialist on Moscow, Dr. Hilger had been with Hitler in the Nazis’ headquarters for the eastern front after Germany’s murderous invasion of Russia. He was implicated in the roundup of Jews in Italy as well. After the war he was wanted in Europe for war crimes. Yet George Kennan at the State Department and Frank Wisner at the CIA had arranged in 1948 to spirit him and his family away to safety in Washington, where he became an éminence grise on all things Russian. “We were very glad he was here
because we were worried that if we didn’t [bring him over], the Soviets would get him,” Kennan said. At the CIA, Hilger met secretly with analysts every two weeks to assess the latest developments in Moscow, and he could often be found at the Library of Congress, researching his memoirs as part of his CIA cover story. Raul Hilberg, a leading Holocaust researcher, would sometimes spot the ex-Hitler advisor working nearby in the federal archives, whereupon Hilberg would walk out in silent protest. The scholar finally decided to send Dr. Hilger a letter posing a series of uncomfortable questions about his role with the Nazis. Not surprisingly, he never heard back.

Allen, however, managed to reach Hilger on the phone one day as he prepared to go to print with his Nazi investigation.

“Hilger?” Allen barked when he picked up the phone.

“Ja?” came the answer.

Never one for the conventions of mainstream journalists, Allen didn’t bother to identify himself as he launched into a series of pointed questions about Hilger’s past activities in Germany and his role in Washington with the U.S. government.

“Just a minute! Who
is
this?” Hilger asked.

“Look, you are Dr. Gustav Hilger?” Allen responded. “Dr. Hilger, what precisely is your work with the U.S. State Department?”

“I have nothing to say. Nothing to say.”

With that, he hung up. The next day, he had a new, unlisted phone number.

Few people outside the far left paid much attention to Allen’s writings. Nor did many outsiders notice when, in the wake of his “Nazi War Criminals Among Us” series, Allen and his band of supporters formed a group calling itself the National Committee Against Nazism and Nazi Criminals. In Brooklyn, in Chicago, and in Los Angeles, the group organized rallies protesting fugitive Nazis—the first protests of their kind anywhere in America. It seemed an unobjectionable cause on its face. Yet at the Chicago demonstration, dozens of counterprotesters turned out to picket, many of them local immigrants from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and other Eastern European countries occupied by the Nazis during the war. The picketers had heard about the journalist’s crusade and believed their countrymen were being unfairly smeared by accusations of Nazi collaboration. Defending their homelands, the counterprotesters saw Allen and his left-wing cohorts as troublemakers and interlopers.