The Nazis Next Door (26 page)

There was no
aha!
moment for Gus, no deathbed confession or hidden journal that finally revealed his father’s true face. Gus could not even say exactly when or why he stopped believing in his father’s innocence, but he did.

Maybe it was the lawyerly detachment that Gus tried to bring to his father’s case, as he pored over the reams of Nazi SS documents the Justice Department lawyers had accumulated on him. The documents, littered with his father’s name and with accounts of his Nazi activities, seemed overwhelming and irrefutable. Some, in fact, were too painful to read. Gus could never quite get through the seventeen-page treatise his father wrote on ridding Germany of “the Jewish problem.”

Or maybe Gus stopped believing because, after the Justice Department came after him, his father would never really talk to him about what did or did not happen with the Nazis all those years ago. When Gus would ask, he would get a shrug of the shoulders, or silence, or dissembling. Once, Gus asked his father about a conversation the Justice Department lawyers said he’d had with Eichmann at a German prison. He couldn’t make heads or tails of his father’s rambling response.

Or maybe he stopped believing in his father simply because father and son had never been terribly close. He’d never idolized Ossie. For five years or so, beginning in the late 1950s, the two weren’t even speaking. They quarreled over typical things that a nineteen-year-old and a father quarrel about—money, college, freedom, career plans, promises made, promises broken. Gus, feeling spurned, joined the Army and went to Korea. Looking back, he realized that it was during their estrangement, when the Israelis captured Ossie’s old boss Eichmann in 1960, that his father was most in fear of seeing his Nazi past exposed. That was when Ossie figured the Israelis were coming after him next, and he went running back to the CIA for protection. If father and son had been on better terms then, would Ossie have confided in him in his time of fear? Would he have told him the truth, or some rough version of it? Might he have explained to him what had really happened in Germany? Gus could only wonder.

Gus came to a wrenching realization: his father was indeed a Nazi. It was difficult to fathom, but impossible to deny. The realization tore at him. He still found it too hard to believe that his father, a dispassionate man who had never said an anti-Semitic word and married a half-Jewish woman, was driven by pure Aryan ideology and genocidal rage. Instead, Gus came to view his father as a shrewd, amoral opportunist. Whether he was chasing German gold in Palestine, closing a business deal in America, or writing strategy memos for Adolf Eichmann, his father would see an opportunity and run to it. He seemed driven only by personal success. Morality was never a concern. But did motivations matter in understanding his father’s past? Gus wasn’t sure. Whatever devils drove the old man, he had done what he had done for Hitler. He had become an instrument of pure evil. Even more agonizing for Gus was the question: What did all this say about Gus himself? Was there some genetic flaw passed on from father to son, some DNA strain that made his father so detached and oblivious to the pain of others, and did it live in himself? Am
I
a bad person? Gus wondered.

Gus might never have found out about his father’s hidden past had it not been for a random records-check by the Justice Department that led them to a nursing home in Sacramento. The government’s Nazi hunters had never even heard of Otto von Bolschwing before 1979. The man they were chasing—the one who led them to von Bolschwing—was Bishop Viorel Trifa, the corrupt partner to von Bolschwing in the 1941 pogroms in Romania that left hundreds of Jews killed, with many skinned and hung from meat hooks. Bishop Trifa was the inspiration for the brutality, giving anti-Semitic speeches about the “kikes” to rally the masses to action. Von Bolschwing was Trifa’s Nazi SD patron and protector, giving operational advice and providing a Nazi safe house after the bloodbath to Trifa and his allies in Bucharest.

While von Bolschwing lived anonymously in America after the war, a businessman divorced from his old political life in Europe, Bishop Trifa embraced his past, almost taunting immigration authorities for more than thirty years to come after him. Politically well-connected, Trifa became the national leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America. Inside the serenity of his Michigan church compound, he gave an interview in 1973
to the
New York Times’
s Ralph Blumenthal readily admitting that he wore the fascist Iron Guard uniform in Romania and made anti-Semitic speeches leading up to the pogroms. Trifa was so established as a voice of Romanian expatriates in America that Radio Free Europe aired a forty-five-minute interview with him on Romanian affairs, even as the INS was pursuing war crimes charges against him.

In 1979, as the Justice Department was finally pushing ahead with deportation
proceedings against Trifa after years of foot-dragging, prosecutors went looking for witnesses
who might bolster their case against the cleric. They went to the Germans for help: did they have information on any of the Nazis who may have had knowledge of the Romanian pogroms? One hit came back from the officials in Bonn: a man identified on an SS list only as “von Bolschwing.” And there was more: von Bolschwing had left Europe in the mid-1950s, the Germans reported, and he had gone to America.

Even then, Justice Department officials saw this new figure—Otto von Bolschwing—mostly as a witness to the Romanian bloodletting, a man who might be able to help seal the case against Trifa, not as a perpetrator himself. Not until Justice Department lawyers began digging more deeply into the background of von Bolschwing did they realize he was a much bigger cog in the Nazi machinery than they realized. Indeed, he was much bigger than Trifa ever was. Von Bolschwing had lived in the shadows, but he had been a top aide to Eichmann, and his fingerprints were all over Nazi SS documents in Germany, Austria, and Romania. The witness had now become the target.

There was one more list to be checked, and that one belonged to the CIA. Before it moved against von Bolschwing, the Justice Department needed to know whether the spy agency had any connection to him after the war. It wasn’t leaving anything to chance. The Justice Department had little reason to think the CIA had any dealings with von Bolschwing, but after the Soobzokov debacle, when the department saw its case implode because of the CIA’s involvement with their old Nazi spy, prosecutors weren’t willing to assume anything anymore.

A CIA official called Marty Mendelsohn, a senior official in the Nazi unit, to deliver the unwelcome news: yes, in fact, the CIA knew a lot about Otto von Bolschwing. For a decade after the war, he was one of theirs: a CIA spy in Europe. The news was jarring, so jarring that the very next day, Mendelsohn was in a car
with one of his lawyers, driving across the Potomac to CIA headquarters to find out exactly what the spies at Langley knew about the Prussian nobleman.

It was another disaster in the making for both the Justice Department and the CIA. For the second time in a matter of months, federal authorities were chasing an ex-Nazi who had worked for the CIA for years as a Cold War spy. But this one was worse. This time the target was a senior SS official much higher in rank than Soobzokov. If the CIA knew enough about Soobzokov’s true past with the Nazis to torpedo his deportation case, they knew even more about von Bolschwing’s ties to Hitler. Sure enough, his CIA handlers had helped get von Bolschwing into the country in 1954, whitewashing his record to clear his entry. And CIA officials had kept quiet six years later, in 1960, when a panicked von Bolschwing rushed back to them for help after Eichmann’s capture. The relationship between the CIA and the former Eichmann aide raised “obvious questions,”
CIA lawyers said with a bit of understatement, after scrubbing their own files. With the Justice Department now looking to prosecute von Bolschwing, officials at Langley worried about the prospect of their ex-spy “graymailing” them—using the threat of revealing classified information in court to thwart his deportation. The Justice Department, meanwhile, worried that the CIA’s own files would show that von Bolschwing, like Soobzokov, had told the CIA all about his Nazi past before he came to America. The Justice Department didn’t want to be sandbagged again by the CIA. “Most of our cases
are based on a claim that the defendant misrepresented his Nazi background at the time of his entry into the U.S. or at the time of his naturalization,” Mausner wrote to the CIA in a letter laying out his concerns. “It is therefore important to know exactly what the INS, State Department, and CIA knew about von Bolschwing at the time of his entry and naturalization.”

This was a case that everyone wished would just go away. Certainly Gus von Bolschwing did, as he prepared for a formal interview that the Justice Department wanted to conduct with his father about his wartime activities. Gus was acting as both Otto’s son and his lawyer. In the weeks leading up to the scheduled deposition, Gus spent hours on the phone with the prosecutor, Jeff Mausner, at all hours of the night, as they tried to agree on the ground rules. For reasons Gus never quite understood, his father had changed his posture and was now willing to admit to both the Justice Department and to Gus that, yes, he had been a Nazi. His father was willing to confirm his membership in the Nazi Party, the SS, and the SD, but nothing more, Gus told Mausner. No details, no explanations, no follow-up questions from Mausner or anyone else about Otto’s connections to Adolf Eichmann, the Romanian pogroms, Nazi atrocities in Austria, the white paper on the “Jewish problem,” or any other long-buried Nazi secrets. If the Justice Department wouldn’t agree to those terms, von Bolschwing wasn’t willing to talk at all. Mausner had a choice to make. He could take what Gus von Bolschwing was offering, or he could spend many months litigating the issue in the hopes of getting the full story. He took the deal.

And so, on an unusually cold February day in Sacramento in 1981, the lawyers met for the deposition at the suburban nursing home where the seventy-one-year-old von Bolschwing had been living for the last year. Doctors determined he was suffering from a rare and incurable brain disease known as progressive supranuclear palsy, which was eating away at his mind and body. One day he would seem fine and lucid; the next, he might not even know where he was. In other investigations, Justice Department lawyers suspected that some of the aging defendants—Rad Artukovic’s father, for one—were feigning illness to escape deportation. But in Otto von Bolschwing’s case, the Justice Department lawyers were convinced that his debilitating condition was real.

On this day, Ossie seemed lucid enough as he sat down for the interview in a conference room at the nursing home. Among the phalanx of lawyers in the room were two from the CIA. The pair said little, but their purpose was clear: they were there to ensure that neither von Bolschwing nor the Justice Department slipped up and revealed any compromising CIA secrets that could spill onto the public record. The CIA was already exposed enough in its dealings with von Bolschwing. It didn’t want to risk further damage.

Officially, this was Otto von Bolschwing’s deposition, but it was his son, Gus, who did most of the talking. He had been brooding for weeks over what he would say. Dispensing with a few legal formalities at the outset, he quickly tossed aside his lawyer’s hat and began speaking not as an attorney representing his client, but as a son wounded by a father. His words were raw, unscripted, and intensely personal. He was angry, Gus told the government lawyers: angry at the Justice Department for trying to deport his father for war crimes committed so long ago; angry at the CIA for shielding its own duplicitous role in the ugly affair; but mostly, angry at his father for the secrets he had kept for so long.

“I am deeply disturbed
by the morality of my father’s even belonging to the Nazi Party,” Gus began, his Austrian accent still thick after more than a quarter century in America. His father had many relatives in Europe who lived through the war; none that he knew, Gus said, had taken the sordid path his father chose. “I don’t know what was in my father’s mind when he did what he did when he was a Nazi.”

When he was a Nazi
. When he had first heard the accusation on that phone call from Mausner the year before, Gus couldn’t believe such a thing could be true. Even now, the words were difficult for him to say aloud. “I cannot condemn him,” Gus said. “I was not there at the time. I do not know all the facts that were involved in these very unusual times,” he said.

“Possibly as he grew older and hopefully wiser, he examined his past,” Gus went on. He seemed to be struggling to convince himself as much as anyone. His father sat quietly, but Gus spoke of him only in the third person, as if he were not there. It was difficult to even look at the old man.

Again, Gus mused aloud about how strange it was to consider his father a Nazi: how Gus had never heard him utter an anti-Semitic word; how he had married a half-Jewish woman; how his wife’s Jewish relatives in Boston had welcomed the family with open arms after the war. “Never in all that time—they all came from Vienna and Germany, they all had been there—did I ever hear one bad word about my father,” Gus said, rambling a bit, still trying to understand it all.

“Although I question my father very seriously,” he continued, “I also question the morality and ethics of the United States government in this case.” It was the CIA, Gus reminded the lawyers, that had urged Ossie “not to reveal his background, his activities prior to 1945, to anyone.” His father’s CIA handlers, he believed, had directed the cover-up.

The idea of trying to deport an ailing man for things he had done forty years earlier—things that he had told the CIA about—seemed blatantly unjust, Gus added; it reminded him, he said, of the laws Hitler and the Nazis had imposed in the 1930s to lock up dissidents. “So I wonder as I sit here,” Gus said, “does the means justify the end?” Should unjust laws be used to prosecute abhorrent crimes? After so many years, he asked, how could his father be expected “to prove his case, to disprove pieces of paper that are now forty years old? . . . I think we should question ourselves morally. I think it is the height of hypocrisy . . . and I think the time has come to bring an end to such hypocrisy.”