The Nazis Next Door (3 page)

The sense of hopelessness among the survivors trapped in the DP camps was overwhelming. They would sing old Yiddish folk songs with the children, with the words changed to reflect their plight.
Where can I go?
asked one song.
Who can answer me? Where can I go to? When every door is locked?

Föhrenwald, near Munich, where Jacob Biber was held, was considered one of the more humanely run camps, with passable conditions and decent hygiene, yet the desperation among the prisoners was wrenching.

“A general malaise was growing
as we realized how indifferent the world was to our tragedy,” Biber wrote of his experience there. “Soon we began seeing men and women who had survived the worst tragedies imaginable during the war years suddenly killing themselves, often by hanging. Such events, added to the news that Palestine remained closed to us, guarded by British soldiers who were turning away DP’s by the thousands, only added to our gloom.”

And what of the Nazis?

While the Jacob Bibers of the Holocaust remained trapped inside the barbwired DP camps in the spring of 1945, thousands of Nazis were en route to Italy, to South America, to Australia, to Canada, and to America. With Germany’s ultimate defeat foretold since early 1945, many of Hitler’s henchmen had been plotting their escape for months, complete with fraudulent paperwork, fake names, hidden cash, and possible escape routes.

Rescuing themselves meant remaking themselves, erasing their pasts as persecutors and inventing new futures for themselves as supposed refugees. They would no longer be Nazis; they would become the victims. The more brazen among them might even pose as
anti
-Nazis. Otto von Bolschwing had been an influential aide in the Nazi Security Service’s “Jewish Affairs” office before the war, but by 1945 he realized the days of the Third Reich were numbered. By war’s end he was reworking his biography—claiming to be an opponent of Hitler who had tried to assassinate him—and volunteering himself as an informant to American military officials in Germany. His work was so well regarded that he was able to collect letters of reference from the U.S. Army praising him for the intelligence he provided on his former Nazi partners; within a few years, the CIA would take him on as a spy of its own, cleanse his Nazi record, and relocate him to America to begin a lucrative career in the export business. His Nazi past was long forgotten.

Many of the self-styled refugees cast themselves as apolitical, men without a state whose lives had been torn apart by someone else’s bloody war. When Dmytro Sawchuk got a visa
to come to America in 1951 as a refugee and start a new life in the Catskills, he told U.S. immigration officials that he had been a common farmer and woodcutter in Poland during the war. In fact, he had been an armed guard at three Nazi concentration camps, lording over prisoners who were forced to burn the corpses of fellow Jews, and he had taken part in a mass murder at a Jewish ghetto in Poland. It would be nearly four decades before his lies were revealed.

And Tom Soobzokov? The Führer of the North Caucasus, as some of his fellow countrymen called him, was reinventing himself as well. He was still wearing his Waffen SS officer’s uniform when the Brits arrested him in Austria at the end of the war. But Soobzokov escaped from a truck full of Nazi prisoners and began a postwar journey that would take him from a DP camp in Italy to a refugee enclave in the Middle East and finally to a new life in Paterson, New Jersey.

In his official records, Soobzokov now listed himself as an ex–prisoner of war forced into hard labor by the Nazis. “Refugee + forced laborer,” a relief aide scrawled after interviewing him in 1946 at the Italian DP camp. “Asks for help
to emigrate . . . and help him financially,” his file noted.

He, too, was now a victim.

Italy would prove a popular transit point for thousands of Nazis looking to make their escape from Europe—not just because of its easy access to the sea, but because of its politics. Italy, of course, had been one of Germany’s original Axis partners under its fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and even after its surrender to the Allies in 1943, large pockets of the country remained in the stranglehold of the Nazis for the rest of the war. German was still the dominant language in some regions of northern Italy. Indeed, even after Hitler’s defeat, it was tough to tell who was running some regions. “Did We Beat the Nazis
or Not?” a headline in
Stars and Stripes
, the American military newspaper, asked days after the surrender, as uniformed SS officers were still roaming freely and running operations in the Tyrol region. With the Germans still in control, Nazi fugitives were able to navigate the area almost at will and make their escape out to sea and to points beyond.

They had help—from two of the most powerful institutions in the region. The Vatican and the Red Cross were each complicit in helping the fleeing Nazis gain shelter, travel documents, and escape routes from Italy, years of documentation would show. The Italian “rat line,” as the escape route became known, was no secret to the United States. In 1947, two years after the war, a secret cable on the Nazis’ flight
from a State Department official based in Italy called the Vatican “the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants,” and concluded that church leaders had helped “former Nazis and former Fascists” to flee Europe for South America and elsewhere “so long as they are anti-Communist.”

One Catholic bishop, a longtime anti-Semite named Alois Hudal, was so sympathetic to the Nazis, and so prolific in shepherding them to safety, that he became known as the Brown Bishop, an ode to the color of the Nazi uniforms. Church leaders like Hudal wanted not only to thwart the godless Communists, but also to expand their religious base—the “propagation of the faith,” as the State Department cable put it. If expanding the faith meant protecting Nazis, so be it. “It is the Vatican’s desire to assist any person, regardless of nationality or political beliefs as long as that person can prove himself a Catholic,” the memo said. “This of course from the practical point of view is a dangerous practice.”

With easy passage overseas, notorious Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, fugitives implicated in millions of murders during the Holocaust, were soon on their way to Latin America after the war ended. American officials knew that the Nazis had “easy entrée to South America” from Italy, with false documents rampant, but they decided not to press their allies to keep them out. There was nothing to be gained, U.S. officials concluded.

There was good reason to go easy on the Nazis’ rat line. Not only did American officials know about its existence within a few years of the war’s end, but they sometimes used the line themselves—through their contacts with another infamous Catholic clergyman, a Croation fascist named Krunoslav Draganovic. Father Draganovic ran a black-market operation smuggling war fugitives out of Europe, and American officials sometimes went to him for assistance. When U.S. Army officers needed help finding safe passage for a group of anti-Communist “visitors” in Austria who were wanted by the Russians—men who no doubt had ties to Hitler—they turned to the priest to hide them in “safe haven houses” in Italy and then get them to South America. “This, of course, was done illegally, inasmuch as such persons could not possibly qualify for eligibility” under refugee guidelines, an Army officer wrote in a top-secret memo. The rat line was a useful tool for American officials in their new Cold War struggle, but they couldn’t admit that publicly. Officially, the United States needed to keep its distance from the priest, even as it was using him to shuttle fugitives to South America. Draganovic “is known and recorded as a Fascist, war criminal, etc, and his contacts with South American diplomats of a similar class are not generally approved by U.S. State Department officials,” the secret cable said. “It is better that we be able to state, if forced . . . that we are not engaged in illegal disposition of war criminals, defectees and the like.”

U.S. officials had a second powerful reason for wanting to play down the Nazis’ escape route to South America. They knew that another lesser-known route, largely invisible to the public, was also being plowed, and it led straight to America. The United States, fabled refuge for the world’s tired, its poor, and its huddled masses, was a beacon for Nazi war criminals as well. Even as the United States was casting blame on the Vatican for shepherding Hitler’s minions to freedom, it was doing much the same itself, creating a safe haven for the Nazis in America.

Just months after Germany’s surrender, U.S. Army investigators made a startling discovery: the flight of Nazis to the United States had actually started years earlier—during Hitler’s rise to power. Four gunnysacks retrieved at a paper mill near Munich, filled with German war documents that were destined for shredding, led the investigators to a hidden trove of Nazi Party ID cards that cataloged Hitler’s rank-and-file supporters. To the alarm of Army officials, nearly seven hundred of the card-carrying Nazi Party members had left Germany for America beginning in the mid-1930s; many of them were allowed into the country even after Hitler and the Nazis had invaded Poland in 1939 and set off World War II.

These were not Germans who were somehow “forced” into Nazi membership and were fleeing Hitler, the Army investigators concluded. These were Nazi Party members who had passed rigorous loyalty oaths, marched with the Nazis, and volunteered their support for the party and its racial ideologies. They were all listed with their names and new addresses in the United States. A banker in New York City. A chemist in Pennsylvania. A musician in Chicago. A pastry chef in New Orleans. A doctor in Oakland. A student in Los Angeles. All had pledged their allegiance to Hitler and the Nazis, yet now called themselves Americans. Nothing was ever done about them.

With Hitler’s defeat, the flight of the Nazis to America only accelerated. The true total of fugitives may never be known, but the number of postwar immigrants with clear ties to the Nazis likely surpassed ten thousand, from concentration camp guards and SS officers to top Third Reich policymakers, leaders of Nazi puppet states, and other Third Reich collaborators.

Some entered openly. In through the front door came more than sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and doctors, men who were eagerly recruited to the United States by the Pentagon. Military leaders wanted desperately not only to exploit their scientific and medical achievements, but also to prevent the Russians from seizing their work first. They provided the scientists with visas, houses, offices, and research assistants. Officially, the top-secret program—known as Project Paperclip—was banned to any “ardent” Nazi who took part in wartime persecution. But this was a fig leaf, a bureaucratic cover that was routinely ignored, as the U.S. government brought in professionals with direct links to Nazi atrocities and helped some of them “cleanse” their war records. The fact that a number of them had built rockets on the backs of slave laborers at concentration camps, or performed hideous medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, was of little concern. Whatever moral baggage they brought with them was outweighed, military officials believed, by the promise of technological breakthroughs.

The most famous of these scientists was Wernher von Braun. At the very end of the war, at a ski chalet in the Alps along the German-Austrian border, von Braun, a committed Nazi under Hitler who used slave laborers in a mountain factory to build the V-2 rockets that bombed London, was already planning his exit to America as he listened to radio reports on Hitler’s suicide. The war seemed far away. “There I was living royally in a ski hotel
on a mountain plateau,” he boasted years later from his new home in Huntsville, Alabama, where he had become an honored American scientist. “The hotel service was excellent.”

Then there were the Nazi spies, hundreds of them, employed by U.S. intelligence agencies in both Europe and the United States. They came in through a side door—not formally invited to the postwar party, but welcomed eagerly nonetheless. Rabid anti-Communists like Tom Soobzokov in New Jersey and Otto von Bolschwing in New York, they had been recruited by American intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, to help get information on the Soviets. The intelligence that most of America’s Nazi spies peddled to the government usually proved useless or, worse, flat-out wrong. But they were anti-Communist, and in the Cold War era, that was all that mattered. Like Hitler’s scientists and doctors, the Nazi spies were now part of the American team, too.

And in through the back door came the biggest group yet: thousands of everyday SS personnel, war criminals and collaborators like Jakob Reimer, the SS officer turned potato chip salesman. They sneaked into America as reformed “refugees,” with their only help from the American government coming in the form of an inept immigration system that made it easy for them to bury their pasts. They came because no one stopped them. False documents might get them entry, or a relative in America willing to vouch for them, or even a friendly American immigration interviewer who could coach them on what to put in a visa application—and what not to mention. Doing farm work during the war was a definite plus; wearing the SS uniform or serving in a concentration camp was not. “Better you don’t put that in the papers,” one Nazi SS officer at Trawniki was told by an interviewer after he claimed to be a lowly bartender at the concentration camp.
   

For Andrija Artukovic, getting into the United States was as simple as using a fake name. After he was granted what was supposed to be a ninety-day visitor’s visa in 1948, Artukovic settled on a quiet beach south of Los Angeles and began working for a construction company that his brother owned. He ended up staying for nearly forty years. Had he used his real name, or had immigration officials dug deeper, it might have been evident that Artukovic was a top cabinet minister in the Nazi puppet government in Croatia, or that he had reputedly ordered the murder and imprisonment of some 600,000 of his countrymen, or even that Yugoslavian war crimes investigators wanted to arrest the man known there as the Butcher of the Balkans. But none of that was revealed. To immigration officials, he was simply another visitor traveling to the United States from Europe.