Our Nazi

I am very grateful to UChicago Press and NetGalley for allowing me to access a digital copy before the book is published. Before I offer my honest review, I wonder what the intended audience is for this book. As someone with an academic background in German history, I skimmed through the first few chapters which outlined Reinhold Kulle’s life in Europe before emigration to America. My years spent in Chicago also allowed me to appreciate the Chicago vignettes of and references to different neighborhoods. My background and experience meant that before I picked up the book, I was already invested in the story, both as a historical-biographical account and one understood through a microhistory lens.

As much as this book is about a Nazi’s immigration to, integration in, and eventually, deportation from the United States, it is also inherently and intimately a story about American suburban life. The central theme I pondered throughout, to which the book provided an answer for, centers around empathy. How much empathy can we show Kulle? How, and if, can we distinguish individual agency from the grand scheme of inhumanity? And how much can criminal justice account for political violence? How to recognize and reconcile the definitiveness and volatility in the victim-perpetrator paradigm? By putting them on trial, are we actually “bringing Nazis to justice” or eliding the political accountability by focusing on the individual?

For the most part, I could extend radical empathy to Kulle and his longing for home, especially on his account that the Germany before and after the war made his definition and reminiscence of home difficult, and even impossible. I was hugely engrossed by Kulle’s testimony at the trial and his subsequent appearance at the school board meeting, which, upon hearing that his only regret was the fact that Germany did not win the war, my opinion of him cannot help but sway.

There are other works out there that discuss to what extent individual Nazis should be held accountable for the crimes of the Third Reich, but Our Nazi by Michael Soffer, at least what I found the most interesting, discusses Kulle’s life in Chicago, a place where he had established another life for many decades. In particular, the community reaction to the Kulle case illuminates all perspectives on the spectrum, from total forgiveness and acceptance to advocacy for complete ostracization and immediate deportation.

On a very personal level, Michael Soffer has inspired my confidence in a career as a high school history teacher, which has been his position at the Oak Park and River Forest High School for almost two decades. Besides, his acknowledgement section is just so sweet. It makes me so happy for him for publishing this work!

It's like Stanley Millgram's Dead Poet's Society.

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.

You might assume that this would come as a shock to the community, and rightfully a few were shocked. Most didn't care. 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 beside 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, and passes my citation test so utterly that I would name it after the author if I did that sort of thing. The tone is not sensational, but it does tend towards the breathless, but in the end, I felt this wholly justified by the story of the facts. 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.'

One of the most affecting choices is to focus on the students at the school, which belies the author's job as a high school history teacher, but is justified. 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, which admittedly I was not aware of and was interesting to learn), but Soffer 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 Soffer 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.

(Links to be added upon posting closer to publication)