The Nazis Next Door (33 page)

Almost simultaneously, the embassy put out a statement for the many reporters still asking unpleasant questions about Linnas. Panama joined with “important sectors of the Hebrew community and the rest of the world,” the embassy said, in condemning “the crimes committed by fascism.”

The first thing Rosenbaum did
as he left the embassy was to look for a pay phone on the street. He needed to call Neal Sher, his old mentor and frequent cohort at the Justice Department, to make sure he’d heard the news. The Panama plan was dead. Karl Linnas wouldn’t be spending his days sunning himself in the Caribbean after all.

Five days later, with his last appeals to the Supreme Court rebuffed, a handcuffed Linnas was shoved into a police car at JFK and driven up to the tarmac where a Czechoslovakian airliner awaited. He tried jumping out of the police car on the way. “What they’re doing right now is just murder and kidnapping!” an agitated Linnas shouted to the crowd of reporters gathered at the airport to watch him leave. Then, as if in final salute to his thirty-six years as an ex-Nazi living a life of comfort in the United States, he yelled: “God bless America!”

By the time Karl Linnas was flown off to Russia in the spring of 1987, Sher and his band of once-obscure lawyers, investigators, and historians had established themselves as a force to be feared. They no longer had to explain to outsiders who they were or what the Office of Special Investigations did. People already knew.

Since its creation eight years earlier, the Nazi office had investigated many hundreds of leads and brought more than fifty cases against Americans suspected of links to the Third Reich, from anonymous camp guards at Auschwitz to major figures like rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph, Eichmann aide Otto von Bolschwing, and Croatian minister Andrija Artukovic. In cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, in immigrant neighborhoods throughout the Midwest, and along the beaches of Southern California, it was big news whenever the Nazi hunters at the Justice Department came calling to accuse an unknown, elderly man in the area—always a decent individual, stunned neighbors would inevitably say; always a hard worker—of having secretly helped Hitler decades before. “Former Nazi Death Camp Guard Relieved from School Job,” read a typical headline
in Chicago in 1984 after the Justice Department came after a well-liked school janitor who had been an SS guard at a death camp in Poland.

The reach of the Office of Special Investigations extended beyond American borders. The Nazi unit was roiling international waters, too. In 1983, after former Gestapo chief Klaus “the Butcher of Lyon” Barbie was arrested in Bolivia and sent back to France to stand trial for war crimes, the United States took the extraordinary step of formally apologizing to France for its longtime complicity with Barbie. The apology grew out of a scathing Nazi office investigation
that Allan Ryan conducted into the American military’s protection of a man who was notorious for using an acetylene torch to torture his prisoners during the war. Over the course of more than three decades, Ryan revealed, American officials had coddled Barbie as an anti-Soviet operative, paid him for Russian intelligence, spirited him away to safety in South America, lied to the French about his whereabouts, obstructed the search for him, and covered up his crimes. America’s protection of such a notorious war criminal was illegal and unjustifiable, Ryan concluded. As one newspaper put it after Ryan’s 218-page report made headlines around the world, “the obsession to oppose communism at any cost led six U.S. Army officials to make a pact with the devil
—Klaus Barbie.”

America, it seemed, was finally starting to come to terms with its own past as a safe haven for the Nazis.

The Nazi investigators were making headlines in Austria, as well. But this time, there were no mea culpas, and the United States played the part not of guilty collaborator, but of brash accuser. In 1986, Eli Rosenbaum got a tip at the World Jewish Congress suggesting that Austria’s Kurt Waldheim—a well-known presidential candidate at the time who had been the secretary-general of the United Nations for ten years—had covered up his wartime service with the Nazis. Rosenbaum learned that Waldheim had secretly been an intelligence officer
with a German unit in the Balkans that took civilian hostages, shot prisoners, burned homes, and deported Jews.

These were damning accusations, especially in a country with as tortured a Nazi history as Austria.
As he would often do, Rosenbaum passed on what he had learned to his friend Neal Sher, who soon began collecting wartime documents himself at the Justice Department. Convinced that Waldheim was a Nazi collaborator, Sher proposed to his bosses what amounted to diplomatic hari-kari. The United States, he wrote, should bar Waldheim from the country under a provision that denied entry to Nazi persecutors. When his first recommendation got him nowhere, Sher wrote another memo, then another. New evidence from Yugoslavian archives pointed to Waldheim’s role in personally processing Nazi prisoners for deportation and execution. Sher kept up the pressure. Finally, Attorney General Meese decided to look at the Nazi roster himself. Waldheim’s name was on it. What struck Meese as much as anything
were Waldheim’s many contortions over the years in covering up his Nazi service; the diplomat had always maintained that he had been a law student in Vienna for most of the war, but the Nazi roster clearly showed otherwise. As the evidence against him mounted, Waldheim tried to explain it all away, but his shifting stories were starting to “sound like the ‘I just worked there and followed orders’
explanation,” a senior aide to Meese remarked.

In the spring of 1987, just a week after sending Karl Linnas to Russia, Meese signed off on an order barring Waldheim, the newly elected president of Austria, from coming into the United States. It was an astonishing moment: America was branding a foreign head of state as a Nazi. It was an audacious step unlike anything the United States had ever done before. Furious, Austria pulled back its ambassador to the United States in protest for a time. Later, Austria barred Sher himself
from coming to Vienna to interview an Austrian witness in a Justice Department investigation. Meanwhile, Waldheim and the Austrians lobbied in vain to get his name taken off the “banned” list. The embarrassed Austrian president wasn’t even allowed to come to New York City to attend anniversary celebrations at the United Nations—the organization he had proudly led for a decade. In 1989 Waldheim sent a handwritten
note to President George H. W. Bush, pleading that his diplomatic privileges be restored. The White House turned him down flat.

The Nazi hunters at the Justice Department were now at the height of their power, shining a harsh light onto places that had remained dark for decades. But with the newfound prominence came a wave of counterattacks—not just from foreign allies like Austria, but from anti-Soviet hawks in Washington, rocket scientists in Alabama, Eastern European immigrants around the country, and even from some Jews. Their particular agendas differed, but the opponents shared one overriding theme in their blistering attacks on the Justice Department: this long after the war, the “zealots” in the Nazi-hunting office were going too far.

For Sher and his deputies, power made them a target. Besieged Justice Department lawyers didn’t realize just how far their opponents were willing to go to ruin them. In the midst of several particularly sensitive investigations, Justice Department officials began to suspect a leak. Verbatim accounts of confidential internal documents prepared by the Nazi team’s investigators were mysteriously showing up in the pages of newspapers and on the desks of defense lawyers. Officials figured that there must be a mole
inside the Nazi office who was exposing its secrets. They were so alarmed that they brought in the FBI to investigate the leaks.

The truth proved to be more embarrassing. There was no mole. Instead, FBI investigators discovered that, almost every workday for two years beginning in 1985, a group of immigrants opposed to the Nazi team was secretly collecting all the office trash
from a dumpster behind the building; poring over the thousands of pages of discarded leads, memos, and case reviews; and doling out copies to lawyers and relatives of the accused who were equally upset about what the Justice Department was doing. The rogue trash-collection operation was all perfectly legal. Belatedly, the Nazi team began burning its trash.

Baltic immigrant groups with inspiring names like Americans for Due Process and Latvian Truth Fund began sprouting up around the country in opposition to what they charged were biased and unjustified inquisitions targeting entire ethnic communities. An investigation into a camp guard from Ukraine or Lithuania was seen as a slur against his whole ethnic enclave. That Sher and a number of his top people were Jewish did not go unnoticed. In a letter to the Reagan administration demanding the Nazi office be shut down, one ethnic leader in New York railed against the “Jewish Zionist special interest groups,”
charging that officials in the Justice Department’s Nazi office had “greater loyalty” to Israel than to America. Sher and his people were regarded as the enemy. Ethnic newspapers posted the names of “known employees” of the Justice Department team and warned their readers not to say anything if they came calling at their door asking questions about the war years. “Let us chase
these interviewers from our homes,” urged one Lithuanian-language newspaper in Cleveland.

Doors were shutting in Huntsville, Alabama, too. Arthur Rudolph’s expulsion to West Germany in 1984 had angered his fellow rocket scientists at the NASA flight center there—and triggered fears among the German scientists that the Justice Department might be coming after them as well. A number of the scientists who had come to America with Rudolph through Project Paperclip retained a prominent Huntsville attorney
to represent them in case the Justice Department came calling. They had seen the mistake that Rudolph had made in that hotel room in San Jose in answering hours’ worth of questions from Sher and Rosenbaum—all without a lawyer. He had been too trusting. The Saturn V legend had admitted what he did about the horrific conditions at the slave factory at Dora only under duress from the Nazi prosecutors, his friends in Alabama insisted, and they were determined not to make the same mistake.

They had reason for concern. Fresh off their success in expelling Rudolph, the Justice Department lawyers had created a secret “Paperclip” team in Washington to investigate more than a dozen German rocket scientists
and doctors in connection with evidence that they, too, had engaged in atrocities. If von Braun hadn’t died a decade earlier, prosecutors would almost certainly have opened a war crimes file on him, they said amongst themselves. The Justice Department lawyers approached several of the key surviving Huntsville scientists to see if they might sit down voluntarily to discuss what they had done in the war years. No thanks, they were told. The Justice Department could contact their lawyer. The scientists weren’t talking.

The prime suspect from the start—the target of what the Justice Department lawyers called a “promising investigation”
—was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the Air Force’s renowned space medicine researcher. His Texas congressman had helped quash the INS’s investigation after Strughold’s name surfaced publicly in 1974, but with its congressional mandate, the Nazi unit at the Justice Department had begun looking anew at Strughold and his role in the Nazis’ infamous 1942 “cold conference” at Nuremberg. The lawyers examined not only his role in subjecting prisoners to extreme cold and high pressure, but a new avenue as well: his possible involvement in experimenting on human guinea pigs at the camps with live explosives and chemical weapons.
Investigators had information that Strughold and two other Paperclip scientists now in America “participated in chemical experiments
forcibly conducted on human beings during the Second World War.” Some lawyers on the Paperclip team believed they had enough evidence to finally confront Strughold directly. He was in his mideighties, in failing health, and they wanted to try to interview him before he died. There seemed little chance of actually deporting Strughold at his age, but the lawyers believed that, if nothing else, his legacy should not go unchallenged.

This time, however, Sher, usually so aggressive, was ambivalent about going after the doctor. While there was plenty of evidence showing that Strughold knew about the horrific human experiments conducted by the Nazis on camp prisoners, it would be more difficult
to prove his active participation. Sher wanted to make sure they had the goods on him before they confronted an ailing, elderly doctor so esteemed that in 1985 the Texas Senate had declared a “Dr. Hubertus Strughold Day.”

It all came to naught. Strughold died in Texas in 1986 at the age of eighty-eight, still an American citizen after four decades in the country, still remembered as a medical legend. As Rosenbaum often liked to say when chasing elderly Nazi suspects, “We’re always in a race with the grim reaper.”

The Justice Department lawyers could take some small solace, though. A medical library at Strughold’s old air base in San Antonio had been named after him years before, and his image, alongside the likes of Hippocrates and Marie Curie, adorned a stained glass mural at Ohio State depicting medical heroes in history. After Strughold’s death, prosecutors forwarded what they’d found to officials in Texas and Ohio and helped get Strughold’s name stricken from the library and his image removed from the mural. Strughold, the so-called father of space medicine, may never have been deported as a war criminal during his life, but his legacy, like his image on the stained glass mural, was irreparably shattered after his death.

With the Paperclip scientists in Alabama finding themselves in the crosshairs of the Justice Department, they looked to the Reagan administration for help. Pat Buchanan, as always, offered a sympathetic ear. He agreed to meet with two leaders in the Alabama space community at the White House in the summer of 1985. A Paperclip rocket scientist and an aerospace writer were upset about rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph’s expulsion the year before. Rudolph had been wrongly thrown out
of the country, his enormous contributions to American science shunted aside, and the Paperclip scientists en masse were being unfairly targeted as well, Buchanan’s visitors told him as they pleaded their case. They didn’t have to plead very hard. He, too, believed the Justice Department had strayed too far from its mission in going after a much-admired scientist like Rudolph, he told his visitors. What Rudolph had done for American space exploration had earned him a right to stay in America. He would help them
if he could, Buchanan promised.