Meet the Nazi who hid in plain sight in suburban Chicago for nearly 30 years

On Oct.26, 1957, Reinhold Kulle and his family departed on the MS Italia from Cuxhaven, Germany, destined for a new life in America.But as Michael Soffer reveals in “Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil” (University of Chicago Press), Kulle carried a dark secret.Throughout World War II, Kulle had not only been a member of the Nazi’s Waffen-SS, but had worked at Gross-Rosen concentration camp where 40,000 Jews died.Kulle was one of around 10,000 Nazis who entered the US after the war and, like others, blended into his community, his neighbors oblivious to his past.Born in 1921, Kulle was a member of the Hitler Youth before volunteering for the combat wing of the Waffen-SS in 1940.

“Other boys in the Hitler Youth were wary of joining the SS, alarmed at the prospect of committing atrocities,” writes Soffer.“Kulle was undeterred.”Having joined the army, Kulle was injured fighting the Russians and was transferred to Gross-Rosen in his native Silesia, excusing him from frontline action.Gross-Rosen was meant to be a labor camp, not a killing center like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka.But it wasn’t so.“A compromise was forged among Nazi leadership: they would murder the old, the young, the sick and weak, and any Jews who remained capable of exploitation would be sent to labor camps like Gross-Rosen,” he writes. “Then they, too, would be murdered.”Kulle rose through the ranks at Gross-Rosen, overseeing the construction of a new crematorium. But by spring 1944, overcrowding meant there were over 40,000 prisoners instead of a maximum of 13,000.“The sewage system was overwhelmed, and fecal matter flowed into the stream that supplied prisoners’ drinking water,” writes Soffer. “Even the new crematorium couldn’t keep up.”When the war ended in 1944, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act (DPA) in 1948, making access to America easier for immigrants.Kulle saw an opportunity.After being granted a visa, Kulle, wife Gertrud...