The Nazis Next Door (18 page)

Now, in the fall of 1974, Chuck Allen was looking for anything in the Nuremberg records that might tie Strughold to the medical atrocities, not just through his troubling associations but through his own words and deeds. Searching through a cryptic document that the Nuremberg prosecutors had put together in their investigation, he finally hit on something. Document No. 401 listed a roster of thirteen doctors “implicated” in the Nazis’ discussion of “Experimentation of Human Beings” at the Dachau concentration camp. The fourth name on the prosecutors’ list was “Prof. Dr. Strughold.”

Strughold’s ignominious spot on the list of doctors grew out of a macabre, two-day medical conference the Nazis had held in Nuremberg in October 1942. Luftwaffe doctors were meeting to explore “Medical Problems Arising from Distress at Sea and Winter Hardships.” German fighter pilots who were shot down or crashed into the icy waters of northern Europe were dying from overexposure to extreme cold and harmful seawater. Nazi doctors wanted to see what they could do to keep their pilots alive, so they began doing research on extreme cold. Much of the data on hypothermia was drawn from grisly experiments the Nazi doctors were performing on prisoners at Dachau: submerging them in tubs of ice or keeping them naked outdoors for long stretches to see how long it would take them to die. The Nazi doctors wanted to see how much the human body could withstand. The hapless prisoners at Dachau were their human guinea pigs.

The Nazis’ barbaric experiments were “clearly revealed” at the conference, causing a stir among the participants, the Nuremberg prosecutors reported. There at the conference was Dr. Strughold, a senior medical advisor to the Luftwaffe who
ran a medical research clinic in Berlin for the air wing. The Nazis had even created top-secret “minutes” documenting their morbid discussions in starkly clinical terms. Nearly a hundred pages of minutes showed that Dr. Strughold not only attended the event, but gave a talk and commented on gaps in the medical research as it related to ice-cold ocean waters. “With regard to the experimental scientific research,” Dr. Strughold said to the Nazi doctors at the conference, “. . . it is of interest to know what temperatures are to be counted on in the oceans concerned during the various seasons.” Strughold seemed to be suggesting that the Nazi researchers go back—back to the human guinea pigs—and get more precise data to resolve the cold-water dilemma.

At a minimum, the notes from the conference seemed to establish that Dr. Strughold knew of the experiments as they were going on in 1942. This alone was significant, Allen realized. On those rare occasions when Strughold discussed the human experiments at all after coming to America, he always insisted that he knew nothing about them until after the war, when a radio report first alerted him. Now, in the graying pages of an official Nazi document, Allen had evidence that Strughold was lying.

Beyond the cold-water tests at Dachau were other, equally troubling, wartime experiments connected to Strughold. At the medical research clinic in Berlin that he ran, researchers would place epileptic children from a nearby asylum in a high-altitude chamber and subject them to sudden changes in oxygen levels. The Nazis’ aim was to see if the conditions would trigger seizures in the children in the same way they did in rabbits. (Fortunately, they didn’t.) In a separate pressure chamber at Dachau referred to as the Sky Ride Machine, prisoners were locked in an airtight ball. Like the deli worker driven mad, they were subjected to sudden changes in pressure to simulate rapid drops from high altitudes. Prisoners killed as a result of the experiments were dissected under the guise of collecting research data.

Strughold was mentioned by name sixty-one times at the medical trials at Nuremberg, usually by his fellow Nazi scientists in discussing the medical experiments. His name surfaced dozens of times in the interviews leading up to the trials as well. In one interview, long hidden away, a Nazi doctor convicted at Nuremberg for medical atrocities had implicated Strughold in the experiments both at Dachau and at Strughold’s own medical institute in Berlin. A war crimes investigator grilled the Nazi doctor, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, about precisely what Strughold knew of the deadly experiments. Strughold knew all about the research, Dr. Becker-Freyseng asserted. He’d received all the medical team’s reports and advised them in particular about high-altitude testing. And if Dr. Strughold objected to conducting the human experiments on prisoners, the investigator asked, did he have the power to stop it? “Of course,” Dr. Becker-Freyseng answered. “He was the director
of the institute. He could do what he wanted there.”

Then there were the medical experiments focused on the hazards of drinking seawater. Another Nazi doctor testified at the Nuremberg trials that during the war, Strughold had told him about a young associate at the Berlin institute who had finally “solved the question” of how to make seawater safe for downed Luftwaffe pilots to drink—by adding traces of silver.
As exciting as the breakthrough appeared, Strughold made no mention of just how his colleague had tested his theory: with Himmler’s approval, the researcher first starved “asocial gypsy half-breeds,” then gave some of them specially treated seawater while force-feeding others with putrid water until they became violently ill or died.

The deeper he dug into the Nuremberg files, the more convinced Allen became that Dr. Strughold—the noted alumnus of Project Paperclip—was directly connected to Nazi war crimes of the worst variety. Ten years earlier, Allen might have simply published the exposé in the same small Jewish magazine that had printed his 1963 report, without much notice or reaction, a tree falling silently in the forest. But now, Allen was looking for a bigger splash. So before he wrote anything, he went to the
New York Times
and offered to share with “the newspaper of record” what he had found out about Dr. Strughold. A young reporter at the
Times
named Ralph Blumenthal, who had returned to New York a few years earlier from covering the Vietnam War, had been working to uncover World War II secrets as well, writing a string of recent stories about suspected Nazis in America and the rising tensions they were creating within the INS and Congress. Blumenthal’s Nazi stories rarely made it onto the front page of the
Times
, but he had no complaints; at least the stories were running somewhere, even deep inside the paper, which was more than many newspapers could say.

Allen had noticed Blumenthal’s frequent byline on Nazi stories; he seemed like one of the few reporters out there with any interest in the issue. Allen called him from time to time to pitch an idea for some Nazi story or other, always with the same earnest intensity. “Ralphie!” he would chirp
on the phone in his high-pitched, mile-a-minute voice. “It’s Chuck Allen!”

When Allen told him about the Nuremberg documents he had found on Dr. Strughold, Blumenthal was immediately intrigued. The collaboration produced a story
in the
Times
a few days before Thanksgiving in 1974—deep inside the main news section, as always, on page 48—with a large photograph of Dr. Strughold staring off into the shadows, his mouth slightly agape, looking almost as if he had seen a ghost. The story examined the ongoing delays at the hidebound INS in investigating recent Nazi accusations, and it used the new evidence against Strughold as its centerpiece. Allen was credited with unearthing the documents that listed Strughold among the thirteen doctors “implicated” in human experiments and that placed him as a participant at the Nazi medical conference in 1942, where the tests were discussed. Now, the article reported, the INS was investigating Strughold among several dozen suspected Nazis in the United States.

Before going to print, Blumenthal tried for days to reach Strughold and get his side of the story, but the Air Force closed ranks around its star scientist. Strughold, the article noted, “has ignored repeated requests from the
Times
for an interview.”

Back in San Antonio, Strughold was livid over his newfound notoriety. The notion that he was somehow connected to medical war crimes, he told a local reporter, was “idiotic.” It was “nonsense and false to even think that I had ever been a Nazi,” he fumed. “It is so fantastic. I always have allied myself with the enemies of Hitler in those days in Germany. I sometimes had to hide myself because my life was in danger from the Nazis.”

Strughold had important defenders in the Air Force and in Congress, and they were angry as well. The doctor was a revered figure in San Antonio. His local congressman, Henry González, quickly came to his aid. So did Senator John Stennis, the powerful leader of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a military hawk who was a strong advocate for the Pentagon. There was little sign that the INS investigators had done any actual digging into Strughold’s past, or had even looked at the documents collected by the Nuremberg prosecutors that referred to him. Still, the mere mention of his name on a list of supposedly active Nazi investigations by the INS was reason enough for his supporters to worry. The two Washington lawmakers demanded to know why the immigration agency was interested in Dr. Strughold. González went on the House floor to denounce the investigation. Strughold was “a distinguished scientist of international reputation,”
the Texas congressman said. “This is hardly the kind of life a man would choose to lead if he had anything to hide.” For Strughold to come under public suspicion made the INS “no better than the oppressors we abhor,” he said.

Just as abruptly as it was opened, the INS inquiry into Dr. Strughold came to an end as the immigration service beat a hasty retreat. The inquiry, brief as it was, had found nothing to substantiate the allegations against Strughold, immigration officials assured González.
“Our inquiries were terminated,” the INS commissioner wrote, “and we consider the matter closed.”

In San Antonio, the Air Force and its star scientist could rest a little easier. The doors to Dachau had closed once again.

7

Out of the Shadows

September 20, 1978

PATERSON, NEW JERSEY

Tom Soobzokov sat out on the front porch
of his aging, World War II–era row house one autumn evening in 1978, a defiant look on his face as he surveyed the crowd of people angrily shouting his name in the street. On normal nights, this was one of his favorite spots, out here on the porch. He would sit in his appointed chair, cigarette in hand, drinking whiskey and laughing gregariously into the late hours with friends and neighbors who came to visit. Often, fellow immigrants from the old country would stop by to ask a favor, walking up the creaky stairs, past the faux-Roman columns, and up to the porch to see if Papa Soobzokov might have a minute to speak with them. Could he help with an immigration problem, they would ask, or might he know of a good-paying job with his friends at the Teamsters union? He would happily oblige, so long as they showed him the proper appreciation. Here, out on his porch, Tom Soobzokov was king, and this was his court.

But this night was different. His kingdom was under siege. On this night, marching up and down Fourteenth Avenue with fists clenched were dozens of Jewish protesters bussed across the river
from New York. They were there because of him.
DEATH TO SOOBZOKOV
! their signs read. They had been sent by the Jewish Defense League, a militant group founded by the radical rabbi Meir Kahane with the aim of combating anti-Semitism “by any means necessary.” The JDL’s symbol was a Star of David within a clenched fist. The group now had its sights set on Soobzokov, who, at that moment, was New Jersey’s most notorious Nazi. The JDL had been shadowing Soobzokov for months, as details of his links to the Third Reich kept spilling out. The militant group’s leaders had even come up with a death toll, plucked from the air, for the number of Jews they claimed Soobzokov had murdered in the Holocaust: three hundred thousand.

“How do we want Soobzokov?” a bearded JDL member shouted to the crowd. “Dead!” came the thunderous response from the men, women, and even a few children gathered in front of the house. The Israeli flags they waved created a cascade of blue and white bouncing off the streetlights.

On the other side of the street, an even bigger throng of counterprotesters, many of them friends of Soobzokov’s and fellow White Russian immigrants, turned out to meet fire with fire. They drowned out the demonstrators with boos and chants of their own and threatened bloodshed against anyone who dared try to harm the old man.
WE LOVE SOOBZOKOV
, their own signs read. It had the makings of an ugly street brawl. Three police cars patrolled the scene, with officers pushing the two groups apart and breaking up a minor scuffle as things threatened to turn violent. After all the publicity surrounding Soobzokov the last few months, the last thing the police needed now was a melee in front of his house.

Soobzokov sat in stony silence on the porch, taking it all in. The cops wanted him to go back inside. His lawyer had urged him to leave the city altogether; go into hiding, go anywhere but here—out on that porch, in front of that angry crowd. Soobzokov wasn’t going anywhere. A hot-tempered brawler all his life, he had to resist the urge to go after the protesters. Even in silence, he was going to stand his ground. He’d raised his five children here in this house. Back down to a lynch mob? They’d have to carry him away first.

This was what America’s decades of resolute indifference to the Nazis in its backyard had wrought: a tinderbox in the gritty streets of Paterson, New Jersey, with one side demanding vengeance for historical wrongs, and the other rallying to the defense of an accused Nazi. The most striking thing of all about the scene was just how public a spectacle it had become for Tom Soobzokov. After decades spent in the shadows, first as a Nazi officer, then as a CIA spy, and finally as an FBI informant, Soobzokov was now a marked man living under the bright klieg lights of public scrutiny. There were no more camouflages to hide him. For more than four years now, he had been publicly identified as an accused Nazi over and over again—in the New Jersey newspapers, on local TV, in neighborhood coffeehouses, in the community halls favored by the immigrant community. He would turn on the TV, and there he was being mentioned yet again. Sometimes he would angrily pop in a VHS tape to record the offending program and document all the things being said about him. Other times, he would simply slam off the television and storm away. “They’ve got the wrong man,”
he would tell his bewildered children. Whether he was guilty or not—and most people in town had already made up their minds one way or the other—Soobzokov’s days of mystery and seclusion were long over. He was out of the shadows.