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The Nazi of Oak Park
- jterrys 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Hutrio 2y ago[flagged]
- garou 2y ago[flagged]
- GavinGruesome 2y agoSE Asians do too, ever been to JP, TH or PH?
- garou 2y agoSadly no. One day perhaps. But I know who did...
- klyrs 2y ago[flagged]
- gambiting 2y ago[flagged]
- bugtodiffer 2y agoThere wasn't a single KZ guard that did not know what they were a part of. > But being a nazi guard in a concentration camp is fine as long as you're a nice person I guess. The enemy of my enemy...
- aeneasmackenzie 2y agoHe was “just following orders”, which has been an airtight defense for the members of Tiger Force. If they’re going to be rounded up along with all the other Americans known to be guilty of war crimes, fine prosecute nazi soldiers. But if not their immunity should be equally as strong.
- 123sereusername 2y ago[flagged]
- hnpolicestate 2y ago[flagged]
- slater 2y agoFrom the guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." hth https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- parkaboy 2y agoThe even wilder thing is that the CIA actively hired former Nazis (and relocated them and their families) in Operation Paperclip after the war to aid in Cold War operations... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
- dnissley 2y agoIt's not really all that wild when you consider that they were hired for their impressive achievements in various fields and not their loyalty to the nazi party.
- tmiku 2y agoI don't think he's asserting they brought in Nazis for the fun of having them around. But it's surprising that while heightened ties to the Nazis would disqualify you from immigration eligibility, the most secretive circles of the state (and ones highly acquainted with Nazi brutality) were actively recruiting these people. Shows how deep the anti-Soviet derangement ran.
- zer8k 2y agoDerangement? Stalin was extremely suspicious of the west and even went so far as to accuse of us collaborating with Hitler himself. Not only that, the Soviet regime was excessively brutal. One of the worst in history despite not being mentioned much in modern history books. The treatment of captives during wartime, the Eastern Bloc in total, etc. While not a primary source "Soviet War Crimes" has a massive Wikipedia entry detailing just how bad the soviets were. At least related to WW2 alone we can look to how their treatment of the Polish was after pushing Germany out. They murdered Finnish civilians en masse during raids. Further, their deportation campaigns were enough to make most period despots blush. To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.
- FredPret 2y agoThey also had / have very deep spy networks of socialist sympathizers stealing secrets, including huge ones like plans for The Bomb. A significant amount of Soviet military “research” was done in the West.
- dventimi 2y ago[flagged]
- bcrosby95 2y agoYou can never win a war against an ideology.
- danaris 2y agoThe only way to destroy an idea is with better ideas.
- dartos 2y agoUnfortunately “better” is a subjective term.
- kerkeslager 2y agoDo you really intend to argue that "better than Nazism" is subjective?
- dartos 2y agoNot at all. Nazism is disgusting, horrific, indefensible, and should be condemned at every turn. But nazis would argue that it’s better (that’s why they’re nazis). That’s why it’s so hard to kill an ideology and why my original comment used the word “unfortunately.”
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago[dead]
- kerkeslager 2y agoOkay, but there are plenty of objective truths that people disagree with. The fact that the earth is approximately spherical is objective truth, regardless of the existence of flat earthers. I feel pretty okay saying "nazism is wrong" is about as objectively true as a statement of ethics can be.
- throw63738789 2y ago[flagged]
- sharpshadow 2y agoLiterally every statement is wrong.
- SoftTalker 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- decremental 2y ago[flagged]
- 486sx33 2y agoI think the term “volunteered” for the SS is a bit, lost in translation.
- rsynnott 2y agoThe SS was, generally, a volunteer thing; they did not conscript for the SS proper. The Wehrmacht was, at least by the period we're concerned with here, a conscript army, but the SS wasn't.
- wakawaka28 2y agoNot to defend any particular case but I think it is easy to see that there must have been a time when the volunteers had no idea what they were in for, and that after they were in too deep they might have feared for their lives. Many of them probably had no idea what atrocities were going on in the name of their country. So, I think you need to judge people on a case-by-case basis when it comes to alleged war crimes. The same goes for people who join political parties in countries where it is a virtual prerequisite to any kind of professional work. Not only may they be unaware of the bad deeds of the party, but they may have concluded that they could do nothing about the party's actions anyway.
- tptacek 2y agoHe didn't just volunteer; he volunteered for the SS-TV. Read up about what that unit was about. He had opportunities to stop what he was doing; he didn't take them.
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoThere was never a time when people had to fear for their life for not wanting to work at a concentration camp. It was a volunteer assignment. Transferring to a different assignment would lead to a loss of status, but not serious punishment.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- kayodelycaon 2y agoThis story has been up for three hours and every comment on it has either been flagged to death or is in the process of being downvoted into oblivion. I think it's an interesting story but I don't have a lot to comment on. This isn't the first time person with a dark history became a pillar of society and later was found out. It's human nature that people will defend those they think they know. It's not surprising that there would be insufficient evidence to have anything to charge him with in Germany.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gambiting 2y agoI just said I can't believe Americans were defending him and it got flagged, so......I don't actually know what that means. Never seen a comments section like this on HN.
- palmfacehn 2y agoWhen you write your comment you have your intent in mind. However the readers often project their own ideas into your comments. You need to tread carefully with this subject matter. Try to be aware of what others may imagine you are saying. Next, write your comment in way that explicitly removes those possible misinterpretations. As an example: I haven't reviewed your other comments and I do not wish to discuss them.
- anigbrowl 2y agoNeo-nazis are a real problem on the internet, as I have been pointing out for many years.
- farceSpherule 2y ago[flagged]
- clucas 2y agoMy understanding is that the American soldiers who violated the rules of engagement or other rules of war have been rounded up and prosecuted. Can you provide any evidence to the contrary? Anyone who slipped through the cracks? Honestly asking, I haven't looked too closely.
- gambiting 2y agoWell, one famous example is this dude who was killing civilians for fun and taking selfies with their corpses as some kind of trophy - to be fair he was caught and prosecuted, but then Trump pardoned him because apparently he's a brave american hero and not a guy killing civilians for amusement: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallagher-trump-navy-seal-iraq https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
- nickdurfe 2y agoPerhaps if in the future the US army is found to be a criminal organization, like the Schutzstaffel is considered to be today.
- tptacek 2y agoI live in Oak Park, and have been doing a bit of archival research about this (it's been politically relevant lately, for complicated reasons). Soffer's book ("Our Nazi") is very well written, better than you'd expect for what I assumed (wrongly) would be just a local interest story. This all happened back in 1982-1984. I don't think you're going to find a lot of living camp guards in the US work force today. The craziest detail about this story is that, in the early 1980s, there was an organized effort to pressure the White House and pass legislation to make it impossible to deport Nazis. The effort was led by a group of Baltic and Eastern European ethnic affinity groups, largely out of Chicago. They were called "Americans For Due Process", and their ambition was to pass legislation requiring something like an international Nuremberg Tribunal process in order to anyone deported. Reinhold Kulle, the specific Nazi in Soffer's story, was not a sympathetic case. He volunteered for the SS Totenkopf, guarded Gross-Rosen, assisted its evacuation to Mauthausen, lied about it when immigrating to the US, lied about the camp (claiming its victims were never beaten, shot, or killed) to investigators and in court, and ultimately confessed to those lies before being deported to West Germany, where he lived out his days (still collecting an OPRF pension!) as a free man. Other cases were more complicated. One person was almost deported before evidence was discovered conclusively showing he had been confined to a work camp for the duration of the war. Two others were deported to Soviet controlled countries where they had been sentenced to death in absentia.
- defen 2y agoOne thing that's not clear from the article (perhaps it's explained in the book) is why the school had his marriage certificate on file. Since it listed his SS rank and the fact that he worked at a concentration camp, I'm assuming the US immigration authorities did not see it. But then the question is ... clearly he realized that being a Nazi was frowned upon in the US, so why would he provide that document to the school?
- tptacek 2y agoThe book looks at that document as a sort of smoking gun, too. I think the simplest explanation is that Kulle didn't think the SS thing was a big deal, just a technicality he had to work around to get into the US, and that OPRF (our high school where he worked) didn't really know much about it either. It wasn't unusual for someone to have contemporaneous German documentation --- especially in Chicago, which was a hub for post-war immigration. Gross-Rosen in particular was not well known, even into the 1980s --- the centerpiece of the book is a sort of courtroom drama wherein Kulle's lawyer attempts to convince a judge that there wasn't much of anything untoward about the camp at all. So the short answer is probably that nobody looked too carefully at Kulle's documentation when he signed on to a low-level janitor's job at a high school.
- thomassmith65 2y agoAfter 911, public discussion shifted from totalitarianism to terrorism. I was raised long before this shift. Going by the comments here, many readers of HN were not. Today's equivalent, in the public's view, of this school janitor would be a janitor who joined ISIS in his youth, and stuck around for the beheadings. In a couple decades, society will lose its preoccupation with terrorism, too. Then we'll all get to read "so he was in ISIS, big deal" comments together.
- tptacek 2y agoWe didn't "lose preoccupation" with Nazis; they just all died. Later The quotes here probably make this sound harsher than I meant it to! I'm just saying: it's harder today to make Nazi immigrants salient, because those people are all around 100 years old now.
- thomassmith65 2y agoThat is a large part of it, but the shift was underway 20 years ago. Villains from WWII naturally get less airtime during a time when the public wants to mentally process WTC or Bataclan.
- tptacek 2y ago20 years ago was Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Maybe this is just an American perspective? We certainly didn't spend a lot of mental energy on Bataclan.
- thomassmith65 2y agoMy comment was possibly too terse to make sense. Are we both referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks?
- TheCoelacanth 2y agoEven then they were 80. It's hard to get people riled up about someone in a nursing home.
- danans 2y agoIt's not terribly surprising that a former Nazi guard would be able to immigrate to the US and integrate with American society. Nazism and its adjacent movements and organizations like the KKK have been a persistent background feature of the US cultural landscape for a long time [1]. The post Civil-war American racism/segregation model (AKA Jim Crow) was seen by the Nazis as a model for their own society. There were and still are many who agree with many aspects of the ideology, especially if they aren't specifically associated with the term "Nazi". WW2 may have caused overtly Nazi-associated movements to fall out of mainstream regard, but as examples like the individual in the article demonstrate, it wasn't that hard for him to hide his level of involvement in the Nazi party, especially in suburban America, which was itself born of America's own internal racist convulsion. Those who grew up in American suburbs during that time period are aware of the persistent background racism and anti-Semitism they harbored. This was a society primed to give a well-spoken and hard working white immigrant a huge benefit of the doubt, as it demonstrably did. In the end, it seems like he was legally deported based on the law that no Nazi camp guards can immigrate to the US, not because the society itself hadn't found a comfortable place for him. 1. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-usa/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...
- tptacek 2y agoNah. He didn't have to hide anything. He was asked once, when he immigrated, if he'd been a member of the SS (we explicitly disallow immigration by SS members), and he lied then. He was never really asked again, until 1981, and then was more or less immediately deported. Over his 30 odd years working here, there wasn't ever any concerted effort to protect him, until the very end.
- danans 2y ago> He was never really asked again, until 1981, and then was more or less immediately deported. That's my point - it was relatively easy for someone like him not to raise suspicion in 1950s American society, because the society was very open to accepting and integrating someone like him. Like a "Don't ask, don't tell" for Nazis. It finally took a government commission nearly 30 years to find out the truth about his past and deport him. Contrast this with the very active threats we hear today from some of the loudest political voices to deport legal migrants to the US from Haiti. Both the post-war German migrants of the 1950s and the legal Haitian migrants of today are escaping war and violence, working at manual labor jobs that Americans won't take, and economically revitalizing previously declining communities by starting small businesses, yet the tone toward the Haitians today is starkly different than it was for the Germans.
- robjwells 2y agoEric Lichtblau wrote a good book on the resettlement of Nazis in the US, beyond the usual Paperclip names, called The Nazis Next Door. Here’s a talk he gave at UCSB on the topic in 2015: https://youtu.be/eP3srgksUqU https://youtu.be/eP3srgksUqU
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago[dead]
- RIMR 2y agoWhat a complete moral failure that this man never saw a prison cell of his own.
- red014 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tristan957 2y agoThere is a great documentary on Netflix called "The Devil Next Door." It covers a similar story.
- mewse-hn 2y ago[flagged]
- ein0p 2y agoCanada just had this a few days ago: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/government-should-remove-more-than-330-names-on-victims-of-communism-memorial-because-of-potential-nazi-or-fascist-links-report-recommends https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/govern.... They willingly and enthusiastically imported literal Nazis that Britain didn’t want, to own Stalin or something, and now they give them standing ovations in their parliament, build monuments for them, and their deputy prime minister is the granddaughter of a prominent Nazi collaborator. Prediction: in another 50 years nobody would remove anything off such monuments, and Hitler will just be known as an amateur painter who wanted to bring unity to Europe, but the bloody dictator Stalin got in the way of that noble aim.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- emergie 2y agoOak Park guy is a little fish. Nuernberger trial was mostly a vae victis show. They hanged few high level Germans and left tens of thousands of war criminals free. Adenauer's governments (1949-1963) were full of former nazis, amnesties of 1949 and 1954 cleared the slate of many mass murderers.
- tptacek 2y agoHe was a little fish, yes, but the effort to prevent his deportation was part of something much bigger, carefully organized, and, in retrospect, pretty gross.
- shrubble 2y agoIt seems in retrospect, quite ridiculous to be hunting this guy down and deporting him. And I don't see the need for a new book on the subject (though an author should always to free to write what they want to). In the context of immigration to the USA it seems risible given what we know about the last 2 decades of immigration policy: full medical workup, with no communicable diseases or even a weak heart permitted; immigrant must have a job already lined up, etc. The policies of today are far, far looser.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoObligatory Blues Brothers vignette: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0