On October 26, 1957, Reinhold Kulle and his family departed from Cuxhaven, Germany aboard the MS Italia to begin a new life in America.
But, as Michael Soffer points out, “Our Nazi: An American Suburb's Encounter with Evil” According to (University of Chicago Press), Kulle had a dark secret.
During World War II, Kulle was not only a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS, but he also worked at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where 40,000 Jews died.
Kulle was one of about 10,000 Nazis who entered the United States after the war and, like many others, assimilated into his community, his neighbors unaware of his past.
Born in 1921, Kulle was a member of the Hitler Youth before volunteering for the combat branch of the Waffen-SS in 1940.
“Other boys in the Hitler Youth were wary of joining the SS, terrified by the prospect of committing atrocities,” Soffer writes.
“Kulle was unperturbed.”
After being drafted into the army, Kulle was wounded fighting the Russians and was transferred to his hometown of Gross-Rosen in Silesia, exempting him from front-line action.
Gross-Rosen was to be a labor camp, not a killing center like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka.
But it was not like that.
“The Nazi leadership reached an agreement: They would murder the old, the young, the sick, and the weak, and any Jews left who were capable of exploitation would be sent to labor camps like Gross-Rosen,” he writes.
“Then he too will be murdered.”
Kulle achieved high office in Gross-Rosen and oversaw the construction of a new crematorium.
But by the spring of 1944 the number of prisoners had become excessive, with more than 40,000 prisoners instead of a maximum of 13,000.
“The sewage system had collapsed, and fecal matter was flowing into the stream that provided drinking water to the prisoners,” Soffer writes.
“Even the new crematorium could not match it.”
When the war ended in 1944, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act (DPA) in 1948, making it easier for immigrants to access the United States.
Kulle saw an opportunity.
After receiving visas, Kulle, his wife Gertrud, and children Ulrike and Rainer were allowed to enter the United States.
After arriving in New York in 1957 he moved to Oak Park, near Chicago, where in 1959 he took a job as a custodian at Oak Park and River Forest (OPRF) High School.
He was a model employee.
No job was too difficult for the reliable and hard-working Kulle and in 1963 he was promoted to chief night custodian.
“Kulle was indispensable in the high school,” Soffer writes. “He was a guide to every faculty member.”
Kulle and his family soon moved into a bungalow. “They moved into anonymity, just like another blue-collar worker in Middle America with a thick accent and an untold past,” Soffer says.
He wasn't the only Nazi in the neighborhood.
Albert Deutscher lived in nearby Brookfield.
Sofer states that during the war, Deutscher “shot and killed hundreds of unarmed Jews, including children.”
“His neighbors never suspected anything.”
In December 1981, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), set up to exonerate Nazi war criminals, formally charged Deutscher with war crimes and visa fraud.
A few hours later, Deutscher was run over by a train.
While Deutscher's neighbors expressed disbelief, Kulle knew the trap was drawing closer.
In the summer of 1981, OSA investigators launched a “DORA” (“dead or alive”) investigation into suspected Nazis, including “a former camp guard from German Silesia: Reinhold Kulle.”
In July 1982, Kulle (now 61) received his first OSI correspondence, and when he met with prosecutor Bruce Einhorn, he knew the game was up.
They had everything, from Kulle's personal SS file to his handwritten marriage application detailing his Nazi credentials. “They even had photographs of Kulle in his SS uniform,” says Soffer.
Kulle said that he had only worked to transport prisoners around Gross-Rosen and that he had never killed anyone.
But he had lied in his visa application.
This was the only reason he was deported.
When the Chicago Sun-Times ran the story: “Deportation Bid on Suburban Man,” on December 4, 1982, it was game over. “After decades of silence, Kulle’s secret was now public,” Soffer writes.
When the story spread throughout the community many wanted him removed.
But surprising statistics defended him.
The school board also received an anonymous letter, presumably from faculty members, urging Kulle to stay on.
After much deliberation, Kulle was sent on temporary leave on 24 January 1984.
“Right now, there are no Nazis operating in the school,” Soffer says.
Meanwhile, in November 1984 Judge Olga Springer ordered Kulle’s deportation, but it took nearly three years for the decision to be confirmed by the appeals court.
On October 26, 1987, Kulle was taken to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and put on a plane bound for West Germany.
“He got off the plane at 12.45 a.m. on Tuesday morning and went to a relative's home in Lahr, the town he left thirty years ago,” Soffer writes.
Kulle lost touch with most of the friends he had made in Oak Park.
The only reminder of his time there was a monthly pension check from the Illinois Metropolitan Retirement Fund. “He lived almost long enough for charges to be brought against him, but when he died in Germany in 2006, the pension payments stopped, and he was still a free man,” Soffer says.
