Our Nazi:
An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil
by Michael Soffer (University of Chicago Press)
The core of Our Nazi is a description of the deportation trial of Reinhold Kulle. Kulle was a Nazi soldier, a member of the SS with an airquotes distinguished war record on the eastern front and subsequently a guard at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The trial was interesting from a legal perspective as arising out of a new law regarding former Nazis, as unlike a lot of others, Kulle had not lied on his immigration papers, nor was any foreign power looking to extradite him, so the trial was Nurenburg Lite, where his defense amounted to proving that, while he was a Nazi, he wasn’t one of the bad ones.
The trial, however, is not the full narrative. The real story here is that Kulle was a custodian of long service at a high school in Oak Park, Illinois. Oak Park is a suburb of Chicago, and number two on the list of suburbs that people from Chicago make fun of. It is a place so liberal that even the highway exits are on the left. It is here that Kulle worked as a custodian, becoming a beloved institution at the school due to his demanding standards of work and volunteering his time to help others succeed. It was a shock when his history came out.
…wait, I read that wrong. Most people were not shocked. Most people defended him.
A few were shocked. But most locals ignored it. Or made excuses for him. Or misunderstood what was going on, somewhat dramatically in the case of the major newspapers. This included administrators quite literally standing with neo-Nazis rather than Holocaust survivors at his trial so as to stand with Kulle.
The book is superb. The writing is clear, and the author makes deft structural choices, such as in telling what we know of Kulle’s history as woven together with the histories of survivors from the camp where he worked. It is meticulously sourced. The tone is not sensational, but it does tend towards the breathless, which bothered me at first; by the end I was right there with it. Which is to say that this is the sort of book you will spend the fortnight after reading looking to grab people by the lapels and say ‘hey, you have to hear this story.’ Which I think
One of the most affecting choices is to focus on the students at the school, and how they are observing and reporting on the events. The students here often feel like the only proverbial adults in the room. And I love the author’s style in general. It would be wrong to call it apolitical, (aside from a bit on Regan administration policy), but Soffler understands that he does not need to amp up the rhetoric. Even as his own positions on things is not in doubt, he can let a unadorned statement of the facts speak for themselves.
It is the best sort of history, in how it feels like nothing has changed but everything has changed, how you can note all the ways this would play out differently but also how it reflects all the same problems. The ending could be unsatisfactory in the way that real life often is, but Soffler nails it in an epilogue about other, more recent looks at the story. Overall, it is an impressive book, and I hope the author writes more of them.
My thanks to the author, Michael Soffer, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 