The Nazis Next Door (32 page)

Buchanan, a former Nixon aide with a rapier tongue and a pugnacious personality, didn’t mask his disdain for what he called the “revenge- obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” at the Justice Department. He believed that the entire Nazi-hunting team should be abolished, and from his prominent perch in Washington—as a top aide to Reagan at the White House, in his nationally syndicated newspaper columns, and in his frequent cable-TV appearances—he launched what amounted to a one-man PR assault
through the 1980s. The Justice Department had better things to do than “running down seventy-year-old camp guards,” Buchanan wrote, or “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime.”

Like J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles before him, Buchanan saw the Nazi issue as a reflection of the Cold War. The Soviets, Buchanan charged, were peddling manufactured evidence to American prosecutors to villify anti-Communists as supposed Nazis. “Totally innocent” men like Tom Soobzokov, he charged, were being wrongly accused, and even killed, because of the Justice Department’s misguided pursuits, he declared.
In actuality, little convincing evidence had ever emerged to show that the Soviets were doctoring evidence of Nazi ties against American suspects, but Buchanan and his supporters were unbowed. Even as many Jewish leaders accused him of anti-Semitism, Buchanan fired back. He couldn’t understand, Buchanan wrote, “how a handful of American Jews can routinely slander as ‘Nazi sympathizers’ their fellow Americans simply because we do not wish to collaborate with a brutalitarian and anti-Semitic regime that is Hitler’s surviving partner from World War II.”

The political maelstrom swirling around America’s Nazis came to a dramatic climax one spring morning in 1987 at the Justice Department in the elegantly appointed waiting room outside the attorney general’s office. Inside, Reagan’s oft-embattled attorney general, Ed Meese, was huddling with his top advisors to determine the fate of Karl Linnas, one of the worst Nazi collaborators ever to call America his home. Outside the attorney general’s office, in the anteroom, Justice Department prosecutor Neal Sher was pacing—and seething.
Sher was the aggressive young chief of the Nazi-hunting unit at the Justice Department, but despite the impressive-sounding title, he was not invited to the attorney general’s meeting; the question of what to do with Linnas, a sixty-seven-year-old retired land surveyor on Long Island, was a political decision that was being made on high within the Reagan administration. Sher, camped outside the attorney general’s office as he waited anxiously to find out what was happening inside, was an outsider looking in.

Just the night before, as he was about to head out of his office, Sher was stunned to find out from a colleague that top Reagan administration officials had come up with a surprise eleventh-hour plan to deport Linnas—not to Russia, where the courts and everyone else expected the onetime Nazi to be sent to face war crimes charges, but to Panama. The American courts had already stripped Linnas of his citizenship for running a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia, and he had been held in custody in New York for a year while U.S. officials figured out what to do with him. The Soviets had been all set to put Linnas on trial on charges that he ordered the murders of thousands of Jewish women and children at the Nazi camp. But now, Sher had learned, higher-ups in the Reagan administration had decided that Linnas would instead be getting on a 4:30 p.m. flight out of JFK bound for Panama in just a few hours, courtesy of the American government. Meese and his aides were meeting at this very moment inside his office, on the other side of those imposing wooden doors, to finalize the plans. And Sher had not been invited. Meese’s aides could guess what Sher thought of the plan, anyway. The thought of sending Linnas to Panama turned Sher’s stomach.
For Nazis facing deportation, South America was seen as less a punishment than a destination. Sher could almost picture a smiling Linnas relaxing under the palm trees on the beaches of Panama, living out his days as some sort of bon vivant in exile.

Sher had fought like hell to get approval for Linnas to be deported to Russia. With the mass murders at the Nazi camp committed in what was now part of the Soviet Union, and with no other country except Russia willing to take Linnas, it only made sense, Sher believed, to send him back there. The State Department had already signed off on Linnas’s deportation to the Soviet Union. Two U.S. courts had upheld the deportation plan. Five months earlier, in December of 1986, the Supreme Court had declined to stop it. All the boxes were checked. Everything was set. Karl Linnas was going to Russia.

But Linnas’s fate had now become a Cold War quagmire for the White House, with Pat Buchanan fueling the conservative backlash. The idea of sending an American citizen back to the Soviet Union, a place that Reagan had dubbed “the evil empire” just a few years earlier, was “Orwellian and Kafkaesque,” Buchanan said. “Soviet justice is an oxymoron,” he said. It was an odd and polarizing situation: a senior aide in the White House publicly attacking his own Justice Department’s legal position and lobbying to undermine it. A presidential aspirant, Buchanan was a skilled politician and noted wordsmith, and he knew how to make his case. On White House letterhead, he told Meese that Russia did not have the “moral authority” to try war criminals. As support, Buchanan pointed to some fifteen thousand postcards, letters, and calls
that he said he had received from people sharing his concerns.

For all the heated political rhetoric, there was legitimate reason to question whether Linnas or anyone else could get a fair trial in Soviet Russia. The Soviets had already put Linnas on trial once before, in absentia, a quarter century earlier, and the Soviet press reported at that time that he was sentenced to death even
before
the supposed trial took place. Even some people inside the Nazi-hunting unit, normally insulated from outside politics, were upset over the idea of sending Linnas to the Soviet Union. One Justice Department historian in Sher’s office quit in protest over the plan. As a Nazi war criminal, Linnas deserved to be deported, the historian wrote to Sher in his letter of resignation, “yet I cannot help but feel that no person should be deported to a dictatorship which . . . has no moral right to try anyone, least of all, for crimes against humanity.”

Until now, Panama had never even been mentioned as a possible home for Linnas. Yet the Panamanians, in this last-minute deal of mysterious origins, were agreeing to take him off the Americans’ hands on “humanitarian” grounds. It wasn’t clear if the Panamanians even realized who Linnas was, or what the American courts concluded he had done in that Nazi concentration camp so long ago. Sher knew there was almost no chance Linnas would be put on trial in Panama. In the hours since he found out about the plan, in fact, Sher had already decided to quit the Justice Department in protest if the decision stood. Congress had created his office to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, but now, after Linnas’s case had wound through the Justice Department and the courts for eight years, its very mission was being undermined by Pat Buchanan and Cold War politics. The Panama plan, as Sher saw it, didn’t just provide a sanctuary for Linnas; it threatened the very existence of his office and its ability to bring future cases. If the decision stood, the government’s Nazi hunters would become paper tigers.

It didn’t help matters that President Reagan’s own record on the Nazis was already suspect—and not just because of Pat Buchanan’s vitriolic attacks on Sher’s office. Holocaust survivors had been aghast five years earlier, in 1982, when the White House defended Reagan’s presidential appointment of an industrialist who had employed a convicted Nazi war criminal from Germany’s IG Farben as a chemical consultant.
Then there was Bitburg, the infamous German cemetery that Reagan visited two years earlier. Plans for Reagan’s trip became an international spectacle when it was revealed that the president was going to be visiting the cemetery where some four dozen Waffen SS officers were buried. It was Buchanan, not surprisingly, who had pushed hardest for Reagan to go ahead with the visit even in the face of Jewish pressure, and it was Buchanan who was blamed as the behind-the-scenes source of the single most damaging element of the whole Bitburg affair: Reagan’s jaw-dropping, public insistence
that the German SS officers and soldiers buried at the cemetery were “victims” of the Nazis “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

And now, Reagan and his administration were ready to give one of America’s worst Nazi collaborators a free pass to Panama, with Pat Buchanan paving the way. As he waited for the meeting to break up, Sher had no real idea what to do, but he knew that if he didn’t do something, Linnas would be on his way to Panama in just a few hours. He needed help—from outside the Reagan administration. On an impulse, he picked up the phone in the anteroom, got an outside line, and dialed the first person who came to mind—Elizabeth Holtzman, the onetime congresswoman who had spearheaded the creation of the Nazi office. She was in a meeting, Holtzman’s secretary at the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn said. Was it important? “It couldn’t be more important,”
Sher said. Holtzman got on the line. “The Justice Department is planning to send Linnas to Panama today,” Sher told her. He was practically shouting. He wanted Meese’s secretary,
within earshot across the waiting room, to be able to hear him. He was going to make sure that word got back to the attorney general that the head of his own Nazi-hunting team was not going to stay quiet while the government sent Karl Linnas, a Nazi mass murderer, to Panama. He wanted Meese to know that he was pissed. “They’ve worked out an arrangement for the Panamanian government to take him,” he told Holtzman.

Holtzman was almost as incredulous as Sher over the news. Nazis in America had remained a sacred cause for her even after leaving Congress, and she, too, wanted to see Linnas deported to the Soviet Union to stand trial. What time was he supposed to leave? she wanted to know. He had a 4:30 flight, Sher said. That didn’t leave much time. Holtzman would see what she could do, she promised.

Sher left the attorney general’s suite and went back to his own office to start drafting his letter of resignation.
He wanted his protest on record. He hunted for a copy of a court ruling—an opinion issued a year earlier by an appeals court giving its legal blessing to Linnas’s deportation to the Soviet Union. The twenty-one-page decision
laid out what the judge called “overwhelming” evidence: how Linnas had served as the chief of the Nazi concentration camp in Tartu, Estonia; how he ordered Jewish women and children to be led to the edge of a death pit in their underwear, their hands tied, and then shot dead; how one witness remembered him personally leading a Jewish schoolgirl from a bus and then, after she was killed, placing the doll she was carrying in a ghastly pile of the victims’ belongings; how he lied to the INS when he came to America and claimed to have been a university student during the war, not the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. Linnas had never really challenged
the accusations against him, even as he fought his deportation. One particularly powerful section of the court’s ruling had always stuck with Sher, and he had practically memorized it. It was the judges’ rejoinder to Linnas’s pleas for the court’s decency and compassion. “Noble words such as ‘decency’ and ‘compassion’ ring hollow when spoken by a man who ordered the extermination of innocent men, women and children kneeling at the edge of a mass grave,” the ruling read. “Karl Linnas’ appeal to humanity, a humanity which he has grossly, callously and monstrously offended, truly offends this court’s sense of decency.”

Court ruling in hand, Sher headed to the Panamanian Embassy in Washington and hand-delivered it to the ambassador’s staffer. He wanted to be sure the Panamanians knew exactly what kind of man they were welcoming into their country. Holtzman and her aides, meanwhile, were working the phones. It was Passover, and she knew that many of the Jewish advocates who had been pushing so hard for Linnas’s removal to Russia would be busy preparing for the holiday. She didn’t think that this was by accident:
the Reagan administration, she suspected, was looking to sneak Linnas out of the country just when the people who cared most weren’t looking. She called Eli Rosenbaum. The young lawyer had left the Justice Department’s Nazi unit and was now general counsel at the World Jewish Congress and had pushed to deport Linnas to Russia. Rosenbaum, in turn, tipped off reporters at major newspapers to what the Reagan administration was about to do. Meanwhile, Holtzman and Rosenbaum got on a plane from New York to Washington for a hastily scheduled meeting that same afternoon at the Panamanian Embassy. She intended to give the Panamanians an earful.

By the time she arrived at the embassy with Rosenbaum and another lawyer from a Holocaust survivors’ group, a thicket of tipped-off reporters and photographers was already camped outside. The outlines of a diplomatic brouhaha were taking shape: Panama, a refuge for the deposed shah of Iran in 1980, was now about to accept a top Nazi collaborator onto its shores. The press wanted to be there for the fireworks, and the Panamanians seemed blindsided by the sudden interest in their affairs. It was the most attention
the embassy had gotten since the United States agreed to return the Panama Canal ten years earlier, the bewildered ambassador admitted to his visitors.

With court files stuffed in his briefcase, Rosenbaum came ready with a presentation for the ambassador about Linnas’s war crimes and the damage Panama was risking to its world standing if it took him in. But soon after the meeting started, it became clear that the big lobbying push was unnecessary. Rosenbaum didn’t need to make his pitch, because Panama was already caving in. The embassy had been hearing from reporters all day with questions about Linnas. Meanwhile, a senior Reagan administration official—equally upset about the idea of sending Linnas to the beaches of Panama—had already called the ambassador with his own concerns. “We would like to make sure
that you know precisely who this person is and what you’re getting into,” the official told the ambassador with a note of warning. The Panamanians got the message. Their government had already decided,
the ambassador told a surprised Rosenbaum and Holtzman as they sat before him, that it would withdraw its hasty offer to take Linnas off the Americans’ hands. The deal was off.