The Nazis Next Door (12 page)

The examiner continued prodding. So were there other Nazi enemies who were “disciplined,” others who were killed? It seemed hard to believe this was a onetime event.

Soobzokov paused. Yes, there was another episode that he remembered, he said.

Some other villagers in the encampment had purportedly hatched a plan to revolt, he recounted. They wanted to kidnap a Nazi platoon leader and turn themselves over to the Soviets with hostage in tow. Hans found out about the plot, and he was furious. He blamed Soobzokov for letting it happen; it was Soobzokov’s job, after all, to keep security and stifle dissent. In a profanity-laced diatribe, Hans ordered him to find one of the central players in the supposed coup and bring him in. Quickly, all the local Circassians in town were called to formation, with the accused conspirators pulled out of line. Then—this time on Hans’s orders, not his own—the men were shot dead by firing squad en masse, with the townspeople made to watch.

The spectacle, Soobzokov recounted to the examiner, was meant as “a lesson for any future conspirators.”

The veil over his Nazi past was finally lifting. Soobzokov had spent the past seven years giving the CIA so many versions of his life that he had trouble remembering them all. But now, in just a half hour or so sitting across from the stone-faced examiner, he had revealed far more than he ever intended, telling how he had hunted down Hitler’s enemies in house-by-house searches; how he had served the Nazis “as their informer against the Circassians (his own people),” as the examiner wrote; how he had ordered a Nazi execution squad to gun down a dissenter; and how he had been party to a mass killing ordered by Hans, his Nazi commander.

Yet if the confessional brought Soobzokov some sense of relief, the examiner was still not satisifed. For all that the interviewee had now admitted, the examiner believed there was still more to the story, much more. As damning as it was, large chunks of Soobzokov’s wartime history—dates, locations, his supposed assignments with the Nazis—still didn’t make sense. One of the biggest mysteries was what Soobzokov had done once he fled the Krasnodar region with the retreating Nazis in early 1943 in the face of the Russian counteroffensive. Soobzkov’s accounts of what came next were always vague. He admitted to traveling to Poland, to Austria, to Hungary, and even to Berlin in 1943 and 1944 with the Germans as an SS officer, but his role, he insisted, was largely limited to recruiting his brethren Circassian prisoners of war as German soldiers and ferrying them to safety on orders from his superiors. He was the Circassians’ helper and protector, he insisted. He did such a good job at it that the Nazis promoted him to
Oberleutnant
in the SS, the Germans’ notorious security and intelligence branch.

A Nazi SS officer on a goodwill mission through Europe to help his fellow refugees at the height of Germany’s power? It seemed preposterous on its face. One document in the CIA’s own files showed that Soobzokov, as usual, had far more power with the Nazis than he was willing to let on. It was a certificate issued in his name in Hungary in November of 1944—at a time when the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators were rounding up some half a million Jews from the countryside and sending them to ghettos in Budapest and other cities to be kept in “Jews only” buildings identified with a Star of David on the front. Most would ultimately be sent by the trainload to their deaths at Auschwitz. The Hungarian certificate, not unlike the one issued to him in Russia two years earlier authorizing him to search homes for Jews and Communists, bestowed on him certain powers. “Soobzokow [
sic
] tsherim,” identified as a “military commander’’ in a Circassian brigade, “has the right to reserve this building” for the military, it read. “The above mentioned building will remain under his reservation as long as this certificate is not withdrawn.” Exactly what type of building, and what purpose it served, the order did not say. But the implications were jarring.

What else was he hiding? the examiner demanded to know.

Soobzokov had promised to finally tell all, yet here he was, in this dank, barren interrogation room, accused of holding out on the CIA yet again. He was growing more flustered with each question. They had been at it for hours—interrogator and witness, locked in hostile cross-examination—and Soobzokov begged for a break. It had been an emotional day. Just give him some time to compose himself and “consolidate his thoughts,” he implored; he would spend the night “writing his autobiography.” They were getting nowhere anyway, and the examiner acquiesced, bringing the day’s interrogation to a close.

After a restless night, Soobzokov was brought back the next morning for a second day of questioning. He had scribbled down a few notes the night before to try to clear up some of the unfortunate discrepancies that had surfaced the day before, and he began to go back through the problem spots. But his new autobiography was largely a regurgitation of the old one he had given for years before. The examiner stopped him as he went through it. He was certain—“convinced beyond all doubt,” he wrote in his notes—that Soobzokov had simply gone back to the outline he had long ago invented, freshening the details to shore up his crumbling life story. Again, the examiner confronted him. No, no; this time he hadn’t gone back to the outline, Soobzokov insisted. This time it was the truth. The examiner scoffed. There was no point in continuing the charade. He ended the interrogation.

“It is the examiner’s opinion,” he wrote in his formal report weeks later, “that Subject is an incorrigible fabricator who is still attempting deception about his past.”

Even now, Soobzokov was lying. Why? Why keep lying after he had already admitted so much? The fabrications may have made some sense when he first started inventing them, the examiner wrote; Soobzokov wanted to exaggerate his credentials to the people he was trying to impress—first the Nazis during the war, then the CIA afterward—and so he made up elements of his past out of whole cloth to make himself seem more important—more educated, more highly trained—than he really was. But why maintain the façade even now, even after he’d been caught? “The examiner can only draw one final conclusion about Subject and his unceasing deceitful attempts during interrogation,” he wrote. “The reason why Subject is continuing deception about his background must be so important and pertinent to Subject’s welfare that he cannot afford to tell the complete truth about his past without seriously jeopardizing his future.”

Whether a minor war criminal or worse, Soobzokov had always been regarded by the CIA as a valuable spy—but only if the agency could trust him. Whatever he did during the war for the Nazis was of much less consequence than whether CIA officials could count on him to tell the “unvarnished truth.” It was now clear they could not. What good was a spy if he couldn’t be trusted by his own people? In the CIA ethos, that was the ultimate sin.

“Dear Mr. Soobzokov,” began the official termination letter the agency sent Soobzokov seven weeks later. “I regret to inform you that the results of our interview on 19–20 November 1959, preclude the continuance of further mutual association. Further efforts to resolve the discrepancies are judged to be futile,” the letter read. “Enclosed find a money order for $50.00 for the period 1 October thru 31 December 1959, as final payment for services rendered.”

Nostril’s days with the CIA were finally over.

4

Echoes from Argentina

May 11, 1960

BUENOS AIRES

The world’s most wanted Nazi got off a ramshackle bus
in a quiet suburb of Buenos Aires one evening in the spring of 1960 after working an uneventful shift as a foreman at an Argentine auto plant. Ricardo Klement began the short walk home to his wife and four children when a stranger approached. “Un momentito, señor?” the stranger said. Suddenly, two Israeli agents were wrestling the bespectacled man into an awaiting car and whisking him away to a safe house. There, the agents went through the assigned checklist to confirm Ricardo’s true identity. The scar on his chest, the odd shape of his head, his size 8½ shoes, it all fit: this was Adolf Eichmann, the notorious architect of Hitler’s Final Solution.

They had him; all that was left now was the escape. Days later, their final plans complete, his captors led Eichmann—once so feared; now doped and disguised as an El Al flight crew member—past unsuspecting Argentine airport authorities and onto a flight to Israel to face war crimes charges in one of history’s most anticipated trials.

Eichmann’s capture, fifteen years after he’d escaped Allied custody at the end of the war, riveted the world with its bravado, its intrigue, and its implausibility. But in New York City, in a well-appointed apartment
along the East River, the episode carried a much more personal and harrowing resonance for a dapper fifty-one-year-old businessman who had immigrated to the United States just a few years earlier from Europe. For Otto von Bolschwing—“Ossie,” to his friends in Germany—Eichmann was much more than a bold-type newspaper headline and a mythical Nazi fugitive. For him, Eichmann was a onetime pupil, a partner in persecution, and a hidden keyhole to his own dark past. As long as Eichmann had stayed hidden, von Bolschwing’s Nazi secrets had seemed safe. With Eichmann now in an Israeli jail, everything changed. Von Bolschwing was terrified by the thought that he might be next. If the Israelis were to put Eichmann on trial and probe the Nazis’ notorious Jewish Affairs office, it wouldn’t be long, von Bolschwing feared,
before they stumbled onto his own role. The Israelis might not even wait for a trial. Perhaps, he thought, they would simply kidnap him from the streets of Manhattan the way they had with Eichmann in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

The well-heeled son of a Prussian nobleman, von Bolschwing had spent the postwar years reinventing himself with remarkable ease—first as a CIA spy in Austria, then as an international businessman in Manhattan. Trained in economics and law, von Bolschwing seemed to segue seamlessly into whatever new postwar role came his way. The CIA was often there to help him. But Eichmann’s capture threatened all that. As hard as Ossie had tried to erase his past, those words that he had written so long ago—words of hatred and terror that he had written for the Nazis twenty-three years earlier as a primer on Jewish persecution—still shadowed him.

A largely anti-Jewish atmosphere
must be created among the people in order to form the basis for the continued attack and the effective exclusion of them . . . The most effective means is the anger of the people leading to excesses in order to take away the sense of security from the Jews. Even though this is an illegal method, it has had a longstanding effect . . . The Jew has learned a lot through the pogroms of the past centuries and fears nothing as much as a hostile atmosphere which can go spontaneously against him at any time.

Von Bolschwing was a twenty-eight-year-old SS lieutenant in the Nazis’ Jewish Affairs office in 1937 when he wrote what amounted to an official Nazi white paper on waging anti-Semitism. His report was called
Zum Judenproblem
(On the Jewish Problem). In it, he laid out the terrifying bureaucratic arsenal—economic restrictions, special taxes, passport denials, systematic isolation, and more—that the Nazis could unleash to “purge Germany of the Jews.” Heinrich Himmler liked what he read, and von Bolschwing was put to work under an eager-to-please young officer named Adolf Eichmann. Still an unknown in the Nazi hierarchy, Eichmann was not even working on the Jewish “problem” at the time. He was toiling at the Freemasons section—another outcast group targeted for Nazi persecution—when von Bolschwing, a polished, well-spoken young man who exuded the confidence of his aristocratic upbringing, began his twisted tutelage of Eichmann, teaching him all he knew of Jewish persecution. With his mission at hand, von Bolschwing would write dozens of chilling memos and reports to Eichmann on how best to make Germany a place of abject misery for the Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust. Seizing the Jews’ money, labeling them on their passports, letting them leave the country but not reenter—he laid out all these tools of ethnic targeting and more for Eichmann.

“Heil Hitler,”
von Bolschwing signed his memos.

The Nazis had already been moving with brutal precision to ostracize and oppress the Jews since Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Four years later, what von Bolschwing was proposing went much further in its systematic campaign of terror. He didn’t advocate killing the Jews outright. Instead he advised making their lives so terrifying and unbearable that they would be forced to flee Germany. Eichmann himself credited von Bolschwing as the “originator” of this idea; compared to the gas chambers that came a few years later, Eichmann said snidely, this was “the least of all evils.”

As hate-filled as his words were, von Bolschwing seemed motivated less by deep-seated anti-Semitism—in the midst of the Holocaust, he married a half-Jewish woman—than by a thirst for power and self-promotion in the Nazi hierarchy. He was a man who had always craved glory and adventure. In the 1930s, he had ventured to Palestine in search of a cache of gold that, according to legend, the Germans had buried there during World War I. His rise in the Nazi Party under Eichmann seemed to offer him another gateway to power, riches, and relevance.

At Eichmann’s side in the late 1930s, von Bolschwing began to put the building blocks of Jewish persecution in place—first in Germany, then in Austria, then in Romania. Tall and lanky, with a long, angular face and a receding hairline, he moved from an idea man to an on-the-ground practitioner. Dispatched to Bucharest in 1941 as the head of the Nazi SS espionage unit, von Bolschwing joined with members of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard. There he teamed with Viorel Trifa, the fascist student leader who riled a fiery crowd of demonstrators one Sunday, littering the January air with praise for Hitler, denunciation of the “kikes,” and a promise to “eliminate [the Jews’] domination.” The hate-filled oratory exploded into a particularly gruesome, days-long pogrom in Bucharest that left synagogues burned, Torahs defiled, and hundreds of Jews killed—dozens skinned and hung from hooks like carcasses at a slaughterhouse. When the spasm of violence had ended, von Bolschwing, the Iron Guard’s patron in Romania, hid away Trifa and other militant leaders in a Nazi safe house in Bucharest.