The Nazis Next Door (30 page)

He did nothing: that was his ultimate defense. He was one of the decent Nazis, one of the good ones.

Rosenbaum was unimpressed. “Do you have anything further you want to say?” he asked Rudolph finally.

“No, no,” Rudolph mumbled in that same small, soulless voice.

The lawyers went back to Washington, and Rudolph finally decided to hire a lawyer, an immigration specialist in San Jose. By then it was too late. The evidence of his role in the barbaric abuse of prisoners at Dora—both from his own admissions at the interviews and from the documents that Rosenbaum had unearthed—was overwhelming. Rudolph recognized that, and his lawyer offered Rosenbaum and the Justice Department a deal: Rudolph would agree to leave the United States for good and renounce his American citizenship. The Justice Department would not prosecute him. He would go back to Germany voluntarily, and it would let him keep his U.S. pension and benefits. That was crucial to Rudolph in the deal: he needed to hold on to his pension
to support his family. He couldn’t risk losing that.

But Rudolph had another demand, too. Keenly aware of his stature as a leading American space scientist, Rudolph didn’t want there to be any announcement of the deal when he slipped out of the country. He would agree to a deal only if it were kept secret, Rudolph’s lawyer said. Rosenbaum balked at that. “We don’t make secret deals with Nazis,” he told the lawyer.

The deal was struck, but getting Rudolph back to Germany would require maneuvering around normal diplomatic protocols. The West Germans had made it clear that they didn’t want to take back any of America’s Nazi war criminals, and so, without Bonn’s consent or even its knowledge, the Justice Department secretly arranged months later for Rudolph to return to Germany on his own. Neal Sher met him and his wife at the airport in San Francisco to make sure he got on the plane. Their grown daughter, Marianne, waiting with them at the gate for a tearful goodbye, shot Sher a look of disdain. She still couldn’t believe
the Justice Department was doing this to her father. He was just doing his job, she said.

Once he arrived in Germany, Rudolph simply walked into a consulate’s office and renounced his U.S. citizenship to the surprised American officials, just as Sher and Rosenbaum had arranged it. He was a stateless man now, an American in exile, and he was Germany’s problem, whether they wanted him or not.

The Germans were furious about the maneuver, but they grudgingly let Rudolph stay in the country and decided not to bring any war crimes charges against him. The statute of limitations had passed for most of the crimes anyway. He and his wife, Martha, moved into a one-bedroom condominium in Hamburg with a nice view of the city. Still, the Nazi scientist regretted giving up his American citizenship. The decision was “dumb, dumb, dumb,” and talking to the Justice Department people without a lawyer was an especially bad move, he said. When old friends from America would come see him in Germany, he would show them
the stacks of legal files laid out on his dining room table that he had collected to try to win back his citizenship. He did not deserve to be exiled, he insisted. “It was just bad luck
that put me there in that factory,” he told one visitor.

Five years after he left, he tried to come back to America for a celebration honoring the twentieth anniversary of the moon landing, but the United States turned him down. He was a bitter man. “They only wanted me for what I could do,” he said, “and when it was finished they did not care what happened to me.”

A year later, Rosenbaum got a tip
at the Justice Department: Rudolph was planning to sneak back into the United States via Canada. The Nazi scientist had arranged to fly into Toronto, then meet up in Niagara Falls with some of his American defenders—he had a number of them, especially among his fellow space scientists—and then cross into the United States to reunite with his daughter. Rosenbaum wasn’t about to let that happen. He had forced Rudolph out of the country for his Nazi past, and he was determined not to let him sneak back in. The Justice Department let the Canadians know that the notorious ex-Nazi was coming their way, and they were there at the airport to meet him, blocking his entry and ultimately sending him back to Hamburg unceremoniously after hearing the war crimes charges against him.

Rudolph never made it back into the United States. In 1996, twelve years after he was forced out of the country, he died at the age of eighty-nine as a free man in Germany—in the place he had first made his name as one of Hitler’s missile men.

11

“An Innocent Man”

June 1983

NEW YORK CITY

“Well,” the
New York Times
publisher wanted to know, “was he a Nazi or not?”

Chomping on a cigar at his desk, Punch Sulzberger was upset even to have to ask the question. He was sitting across from Floyd Abrams, his go-to lawyer on big First Amendment cases, and they were talking about Tom Soobzokov. The publisher gazed out his fourteenth-floor window at the newspaper’s corporate offices and mulled over the distasteful scenario that was now laid out before him. Soobzokov was suing a book publisher owned by the New York Times Company over what he charged were libelous accusations making him out to be a Nazi. Abrams, grudgingly, was recommending that the company pay Soobzokov $450,000 to settle the case.
Neither Abrams nor Sulzberger was happy about the thought. Twelve years earlier, the two men—newspaper titan and star lawyer—had joined together in the
Times
’s landmark First Amendment victory in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Now, Sulzberger and his lawyer found themselves in a much less enviable situation: debating whether to pay off an accused Nazi war criminal to make him go away.

Soobzokov, on his heels for so long, was now on the offensive. Three years earlier, the Justice Department had dropped its deportation case against him after the CIA’s last-minute discovery of the records showing he had actually admitted his Waffen SS membership when he came to America. He had won on a technicality. Another man might have taken the win and thankfully dropped out of sight with his American citizenship still intact. Not Soobzokov. He had been a fighter all his life, and he wanted retribution. To pay for all the lawsuits that he was planning to bring to clear his name, he tried to borrow money
from his old friends in the royal family in Jordan, who had been so welcoming to him and his refugee clan after the war. Don’t bother with lawsuits, a member of King Hussein’s entourage told him; leave all the messiness in America behind and come back to live in Jordan. But he was staying. “How can I go back?”
he asked his family. “I need to protect my name.”

Freed of his legal troubles, Soobzokov mounted a furious public relations and legal campaign to confront his accusers. He demanded that prosecutors investigate four of his original accusers in New Jersey because of what he charged were
their
Nazi ties in the war. He gave his Long Island lawyer the go-ahead to negotiate the rights to “the story of my life”
for a book or movie deal. He gave triumphant interviews to some of the same local newspapers that had been describing him for years as an “accused Nazi.” And he pressed his libel suit against what he charged was a cabal of critics who aimed to destroy him through the publication of
Wanted!
, the 1977 bestseller published by Quadrangle Books, a division of the New York Times Company. The book’s author, Howard Blum; the pit bull investigators Tony DeVito and Reuben Fier; Soobzokov’s archrival, Dr. Jawad Idriss—all had conspired “to carry out their false and evil designs”
as a personal vendetta against him, Soobzokov thundered.

Two decades before, trying to hold on to his job as a Cold War spy, Soobzokov had admitted to the CIA his role in rounding up Jews and Communists, executing townspeople, and spying on his fellow Russians for the Nazis. Those secret CIA files were still secret, of course. Soobzokov was now declaring publicly, with typical hubris, that he was no Nazi, he had never taken part in any executions, and he had never even been in the villages where the Nazi atrocities occurred. He abhorred the Nazis, he said, and he had worn the Nazi uniform only as a disguise to help his countrymen flee to safety. “I am totally committed to the effort to bring to justice all Nazis and all enemies of our great country, the United States of America,” he wrote. He was, he said, “an innocent man.”

The New York Times Company was determined to fight the libel suit. Abrams and the company’s other lawyers
on the case had read through Blum’s notes for
Wanted!
from his interviews with the New Jersey witnesses who placed Soobzokov at the scene of myriad Nazi atrocities in Russia. The notes were solid, the lawyers concluded; they lined up almost line for line with what he wrote in the book. DeVito and Fier were resolute, too: they believed Soobzokov was a brutal Nazi collaborator. The Russians, meanwhile, turned over to the company’s lawyers the witness statements taken during the war, in 1943, from Russians who identified Soobzokov by name as a member of a deadly German militia that rounded up locals from their homes as Nazi enemies. One Russian refugee reported that Soobzokov was one of four Nazi collaborators who came to his home around midnight in October 1942 and abducted his son as a supposed “partisan.” Two days later, the father found the young man shot to death in the nearby woods.

But while the Russians were opening their files to the libel lawyers in defending the case, American officials were shutting them down. The lawyers put in requests to U.S. intelligence agencies seeking access to reams of secret records on Soobzokov, only to be told that none existed. They approached the Justice Department as well, hoping that the department’s files on Soobzokov might corroborate what was printed in
Wanted!
Prosecutors told them they couldn’t help. Soobzokov, they said, was too hot to touch.
Justice Department prosecutors had spent six years investigating Soobzokov, but now that the deportation case against him had collapsed so spectacularly, they wanted nothing to do with him. The libel lawyers were on their own.

Witnesses began shutting down in New Jersey, too. Immigrants who a few years earlier had given vivid accounts of Soobzokov’s wartime role with the Nazis suddenly went silent, or changed their stories altogether, as the libel suit ground on. One witness insisted that Dr. Idriss, Soobzokov’s rival in the immigrant enclave, had “brainwashed” him
into making his original accusations. Another refugee, Hadgmet Neguch, an electrical worker who came to New Jersey in 1969, had originally recounted that he saw Soobzokov, in full Nazi uniform, take part in the execution of three boys in his town. When his account was published in
Wanted!
, however, his fellow immigrants in New Jersey called him “a liar,” he said, and “for this, I got [into] trouble.” Soobzokov sued him for libel. When it came time to testify, Neguch changed his story. He never saw Soobzokov in any execution squad, he said. “I don’t know nothing
for him killing,” Neguch said in his fractured English. Yes, he had seen Soobzokov wearing a Nazi uniform, he acknowledged, but he didn’t know where he had gotten it. “This uniform—he steal, he buy, it was given to him, this I never asked. Not my business.”

So bitter was the libel suit that Tony DeVito ended up in jail because of it. The former INS investigator traveled to the Soviet Union to gather evidence to defend himself, but when Soobzokov’s lawyer demanded to know who had paid for the trip, DeVito refused to say. That was confidential, he said, and besides, it was irrelevant. A judge disagreed and held him in contempt of court. DeVito spent ten days in jail, and the episode left him even more embittered over America’s frustrating hunt for Nazis. “The hunter goes to jail,” he said, “and the Nazis are running around.”

With unanswered questions swirling, Abrams saw the New York Times Company’s chances of winning the lawsuit as essentially a tossup.
Wanted!
was a solid piece of reporting, he believed, but witnesses were recanting, and Soobzokov himself would no doubt make a compelling witness. He had been telling his sanitized story for many years now. Abrams could only imagine the impact it might have on a jury to hear Soobzokov, forceful and emotional as always, telling of the pain of coming to America as a war refugee only to be unfairly branded a Nazi war criminal. A jury might well buy it.

There was another powerful factor to consider: the insurance company for the Times Company was willing to cover the entire cost of a settlement. With Soobzokov’s lawyer hinting that he wanted a settlement in the mid six figures, the insurance company did not want to risk a jury ruling that could total millions. For this reason especially, a reluctant Abrams believed a settlement was the prudent course, and so he scheduled a meeting with Sulzberger.

The publisher didn’t normally get involved in legal matters like this, and Abrams had never met with him before to discuss such a case. He knew there would be resistance. The
Times
, as a matter of proud policy, did not settle libel cases; it defended its journalism. On principle, the newspaper itself did not even carry libel insurance. But its book-publishing unit did. This case, if Sulzberger did decide to settle it, would come with an asterisk, since it involved not the newspaper itself but the company’s book publisher. But asterisk or not, the idea of the company settling with Soobzokov was still unnerving.

Sitting in Sulzberger’s office, Abrams laid out the case and the obstacles—the competing bits of evidence, the recanting witnesses, the stonewalling by the U.S. government—and why he thought it made sense to settle it.

Abrams finished up his summation. Sulzberger, now on his second cigar of the meeting, had one overarching question. “Well,” he said, “was he a Nazi or not?” As a businessman, he understood the legal and financial pressures to settle the case, especially with the insurance company willing to cover all the costs. But he was a World War II veteran and a Jew, too, and he was loath to settle if the core accusations against Soobzokov were actually true. “I’m not going to pay money to a Nazi,” he said flatly.