The Nazis Next Door (21 page)

The long delays in the case only fueled the simmering tensions in New Jersey. Immigrants in town had to be on one side or the other: those who thought Soobzokov was a Nazi, and those who thought he’d been wrongly accused. Soobzokov and the Russian witnesses against him were regularly filing claims and counterclaims with the police, accusing one another of all sorts of threats and confrontations. One of the witnesses against him even reported that a menacing Soobzokov had tried to run down him and his wife as they were crossing a busy street in downtown Paterson.

Soobzokov’s neighbors and friends rallied to his defense, condemning all the attention he was getting. “When does World War II end
for some?” a local newspaper asked.

“Never,” came the answer from the Jewish Defense League. The group stepped up its demonstrations, wielding placards not just outside Soobzokov’s home, but at the county office building where he worked as well. As the protesters chanted his name one summer day, Soobzokov went about his business, checking on a delivery of shirts to the local jail. “I can’t let the hoodlums stop my duties,” he said.

Death threats to his home and office became routine. “You are a nazi butcher
of men, women, children and infants,” read one signed by “a child of a survivor.” The FBI had to put a tap on his home phone because of all the harassing phone calls and death threats he was getting. Then, someone mailed Soobzokov a package with a brown Te-Amo brand cigar box inside it. “Buddy, you didn’t kill enough of them,” a note read. Through the wrapping, Soobzokov could see what looked like a black button. He called the police, who had a bomb squad rush the package to a nearby rock quarry to blow it up. Among the fragments were a 9-volt battery, some yellow wiring, a few screws, and slivers of brown tape. It was a homemade bomb.

The situation was growing more volatile by the day. After four years of fits and starts in the case, the Justice Department was facing intense pressure from all sides to do something. Finally, on December 5, 1979—nearly thirty-five years after Soobzokov became an SS lieutenant; twenty-four years after he’d come to America; seventeen years after a screaming neighbor called him the “second Eichmann” in a Paterson courtroom; four years after his name first surfaced publicly in a Nazi investigation; three months after someone sent a bomb to his house—prosecutors were ready to move ahead. A grand jury in New York had already declined to bring criminal charges against Soobzokov, but prosecutors in Washington brought a civil lawsuit seeking to strip him of his citizenship and remove him from the country. Soobzokov, the Justice Department charged, had “willfully concealed from the authorities his membership in the German SS during the war.” The threat of being deported may have seemed like a small price to pay if Soobzokov was really the Nazi war criminal the reports made him out to be. But it was the best that federal prosecutors could do: there was no war crimes statute on the books in World War II that they could even seek to use against him thirty-five years later.

Facing formal charges for the first time, Soobzokov still had one card left to play. For three decades now, in CIA polygraphs, FBI interviews, court depositions, and newspaper interviews, he had offered a numbing and ever-widening array of roles he claimed to have played during the war, from hay-delivery man and forced laborer to local militia leader and anti-Nazi resister.

Now, Soobzokov put forth perhaps his most brazen claim, a story that was either preposterous or brilliant, or a bit of both. In a sworn deposition, Soobzokov acknowledged that he was an officer with the SS—not just in uniform, but in duties—but he claimed for the first time that he’d told the American diplomatic authorities in Jordan exactly that in 1954, before he ever set foot in America. He hadn’t concealed anything or lied to anyone, Soobzokov insisted. Yes, he really was a Nazi, he admitted; but the Americans—and the CIA—knew all that and more before they ever let him into the country.

To Justice Department prosecutors, it was just another in a long line of outrageous claims from Soobzokov. The idea that the United States would have let an admitted Waffen SS officer into the country was preposterous, they thought. Yet the Justice Department had to do its due diligence and run the claim aground. “The State Department was undoubtedly
well aware in 1955 that the Waffen SS had been found to be a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal,” Joseph Lynch, a Justice Department prosecutor, wrote in an internal memo assessing Soobzokov’s latest eyebrow-raising claim. The SS’s crimes “were so widespread and involved slaughter on such a gigantic scale that its criminal activities must have been widely known . . . I am assuming, pending confirmation from the State Department, that Soobzokov is lying and never made such an admission re his SS membership to [U.S. authorities] in 1955.”

He was right about the State Department. A report came back from Foggy Bottom that nothing had turned up. There were no records in Soobzokov’s immigration file indicating that he had ever admitted his membership in the SS to the United States when he entered the country. Lynch and the other Justice Department prosecutors were now set, with any last-minute doubts erased.

In a case already filled with improbable turns, that was when the unthinkable happened. With Soobzokov still claiming that he had told American authorities of his Nazi ties back in 1954 and hadn’t concealed anything, his lawyer, Michael Dennis, went to the CIA with a formal demand: give us any records that would corroborate his claim that the United States knew all along that he was a Nazi. It seemed like another far-fetched gambit by Soobzokov and his lawyer. With an intensive search at the State Department already turning up nothing, there was little reason to think the CIA’s search would turn out differently.

Except that it did.

The CIA produced
not one but two 1950s-era documents showing that Tscherim Soobzokov, then working for the agency, had told American authorities of his collaboration with the Nazis and his role as a Waffen SS officer. One was a formal immigration form, known as a V-30 document. The second was an intelligence memo assessing Soobzokov’s application to come to the United States. These documents were both created by the State Department, but somehow, mysteriously, had ended up in the records of the CIA, even though the State Department itself didn’t have them.

Justice Department officials were flabbergasted. Some inside the building even suspected that the CIA might have fabricated the documents just to avoid a public trial that would have surely shed light on the agency’s own twisted relationship with Soobzokov. But an examination of the typing appeared to show that the documents were authentic. Worse, they established that Soobzokov, remarkably, was telling the truth: when he had come to the United States a quarter century earlier, he had in fact told American authorities that he was a Nazi collaborator with the Waffen SS. They had let him into the country anyway. Joe Lynch was livid. The CIA’s lawyers had been involved in monitoring the Soobzokov case step by step for nearly a year because of concerns about the agency’s own role with their onetime agent Nostril, and now, at the eleventh hour, they had sandbagged prosecutors. Why hadn’t we known about this? Lynch demanded.

The CIA’s explanation was a model of bureaucratic legerdemain: the documents weren’t the CIA’s to turn over because, technically, they belonged to the State Department, the spy agency’s lawyers explained. Moreover, the CIA hadn’t let the Justice Department know
of the documents’ existence because the Justice Department had never specifically asked about them. We didn’t tell you, the CIA insisted, because you didn’t ask.

Outraged though they were, Justice Department lawyers saw no way out of the fiasco the U.S. government had created for itself. Prosecutors did not believe
they could move ahead in good conscience with a case against Soobzokov for concealing his Nazi ties, since he had actually admitted them to American officials decades before. Red-faced, Justice Department prosecutors went to court and asked a federal judge to throw out their own denaturalization case against Soobzokov. The judge acquiesced. “Some may find it ironic that we must terminate this litigation because the defendant admitted his affiliation with organizations loyal to the Third Reich,” said Justice Department prosecutor Allan Ryan. “It is a step I take only after concluding that the law and the evidence leave me no choice.”

Soobzokov had taken on the best lawyers the Justice Department could throw at him, and he and his own attorney had beaten them at their own game. It may have come on a legal technicality, with some last-minute help from his friends at the CIA, but the end result was the same. A quarter century after the United States welcomed an admitted Nazi SS officer, Tom Soobzokov was still an American citizen. He had won.

Outside the federal courthouse in New Jersey on a hot summer’s day, a jubilant Soobzokov exchanged hugs with his tearful children in an emotional scene of vindication. Then he went home to celebrate with friends and neighbors at an impromptu party
at his house on Fourteenth Avenue. “I was never afraid,
because I knew I was innocent,” he declared. “I am overwhelmed,” he said, “not only for my sake, but for the sake of my belief in the Constitution and the justice system of the United States.”

8

“An Ugly Blot”

July 10, 1980

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The stunning collapse of the Justice Department’s attempt to throw Tom Soobzokov out of the country attracted little notice outside New Jersey. But in Washington, Elizabeth Holtzman was livid.
The Brooklyn congresswoman had been watching the long-playing drama surrounding Soobzokov with keen interest, and she was seething over how it had ended. The CIA’s eleventh-hour discovery of long-buried documents that had saved its ex-spy from deportation seemed almost too convenient to believe. If the 1950s-era documents really were authentic, that seemed almost worse: it would mean that the State Department and the CIA had decided to let into the country an admitted member of the Waffen SS. Either scenario was damning. The CIA sat Holtzman down for a briefing
to explain its version of what had happened, but she was not mollified. “This once again raises the specter of connivance and collusion on the part of our government in admitting and providing sanctuary to suspected Nazis,” she fumed.

For seven years, Holtzman had been waging a lonely fight in Congress to shine a spotlight on Nazis living in America. She had made more progress than anyone else, but too often, her efforts had fallen into the usual black hole of government inertia: one step forward, two steps back. It was inconceivable to her that an issue as black and white as Nazis living in America could be met with callous indifference or, worse, active obstruction. Yet this was where they stood: listening to Tom Soobzokov praise the virtues of the American justice system outside the courthouse in Newark because he had actually admitted years before that he was a Waffen SS officer.

When she was first elected to Congress in 1972, Holtzman had no inkling there were suspected Nazis living in America. Less than a year on the job, a midlevel official at the INS scheduled a confidential meeting with her to discuss something that was gnawing at him. The INS, he told her, had a list of dozens of suspected Nazis living in the country, and the agency was sitting on it. “It is doing nothing
about them,” the official told her. Holtzman was dumbfounded. The tip seemed implausible, but she felt obliged to follow up on it. At a House hearing not long after, she asked the immigration commissioner whether the INS actually had a list of suspected Nazis in America. She expected an outright denial. Instead, the commissioner acknowledged that, yes, there was in fact such a list. “How many names are on the list?” she asked, taken aback. “Fifty-three,” he said. And what, she wanted to know, was the INS actually doing to investigate these people and deport them? The answer struck her as a maze of bureaucratic doublespeak. It wasn’t clear what, if anything, the INS was actually doing. So Holtzman, a Harvard law school graduate and a future DA in Brooklyn, decided to visit the agency’s Manhattan office to examine the case files herself. The files were laid out for her neatly on a metal desk,
dozens of dusty folders with Nazi atrocities hidden inside. The first one contained accusations that an American immigrant had been a Nazi police officer involved in the massacre of Jews. That was about it: no follow-up by the INS, no witness interviews or record checks, no real attempt to corroborate such serious accusations. The rest of the files proved just as sparse. If INS agents did anything at all, they might knock on a suspect’s door and ask a few cursory questions. Nothing more. Some of the cases had stagnated for so long that seventeen men on the list had died while the INS “investigated” them.

Holtzman’s tipster was right: the INS really was doing nothing about the Nazis.

The congresswoman was determined to change that. Although she was among the youngest members of Congress, at thirty-one, Holtzman was already making a name for herself as a woman willing to ask unpopular questions. When President Gerald R. Ford testified at a dramatic televised House hearing to discuss his pardon of President Nixon after Watergate, the junior congresswoman pointedly asked the president whether he and Nixon had struck a deal. Older lawmakers looked askance at Holtzman’s temerity, but she did not shy away from a fight.

Holtzman, along with Congressman Joshua Eilberg, a senior Democrat from Philadelphia who ran the immigration subcommittee, began bombarding federal officials with questions about the INS’s failure to investigate Americans with clear links to the Third Reich. The pair demanded documents, traveled to Russia to interview witnesses, dispatched congressional investigators to examine possible obstruction by the INS, and looked to fix the law to make it easier to deport war criminals. They were riding a surge of interest in the Nazis. An ABC miniseries,
Holocaust
, was bringing genocide into the open; the book
Wanted!
was naming names. Survivors were becoming increasingly vocal in demanding justice for Nazi fugitives.