The Nazi Hunter

by Alan Elsner

  “He's extraordinary,” I said. Eric removed the disc from its case and inserted it into the CD player on his shelf. Once more, that rich, vibrant voice filled the room. We listened to the first couple of stanzas, then Eric flipped off the CD player, and we sat in silence for a couple of moments. The chords echoed in my head.

  “I see what you mean,” Eric said finally. “Extraordinary is the right word. Well, he wouldn't be the first classical musician to have been involved with the Nazis. Lots of them collaborated. Von Karajan for one, the son of a bitch! He joined the Nazi Party, started all his concerts with the Nazi anthem, and carefully weeded all the Jews out of his orchestra when they told him to.”

  “Shameful,” I said. “But that doesn't make him a war criminal.”

  “True. He was a coward, a scumbag, and a general shtinker, and he was an absolute tyrant as a conductor, but he wasn't a war criminal. Still, even collaborators should have paid a price for what they did.”

  “No one cared that he had been a Nazi stooge?”

  “It set his career back a few years right after the war, but everyone forgot about it soon enough. He became a huge star, a member of the international jet set. He was practically worshipped by classical music buffs all over the world. It almost made me puke every time I saw yet another article about him. Plus he made a ton of money.” He paused. “Though I did admire his management philosophy.”

  “What's that?”

  “Karajan was asked how he got the orchestra to obey him. He said,‘I give them all the freedom they need to make them do what I want.’”

  “Yes, I can see he's been quite an inspiration to you.”

  Eric looked at the Delatrucha disc again. “What do you think about the beard this dude is sporting? It hides half his face.”

  The idea of Delatrucha collaborating suddenly seemed repugnant to me. He had brought me back to classical music, and for that I was grateful.

  “It's just a beard. It doesn't really strike me one way or another,” I replied. I recognized the signs. Once Eric got curious about someone, he wouldn't stop until he had uncovered the truth. And he loved high-profile cases that got him into the newspapers and on TV. Eric never saw a TV camera he didn't want to stand in front of—a common Washington disease.

  “Mark, I think it would be worth taking a quick look into his background,” he said. “Just to satisfy my curiosity. But keep it tight. With this new Congress, the last thing we need is accusations that we go after people with no evidence. Another Demjanjuk fuckup would kill us.”

  Just the name made us both shudder. Demjanjuk may have been our most famous case; it was certainly our biggest embarrassment. A Ukrainian, Demjanjuk had emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled in Cleveland, where he worked as an auto worker until he retired. Based on what we thought was solid evidence, our department had identified him as Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic guard who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka. He was extradited to stand trial in Israel, convicted, and sentenced to death. Then new evidence turned up from the Soviet Union suggesting that Demjanjuk wasn't Ivan the Terrible after all, although he apparently had undergone Nazi training and had served at other Nazi camps. The Israeli court overturned the conviction, and Demjanjuk returned home. The department was trying to build a new case against him, but the whole episode had given our enemies valuable ammunition to attack our methods and existence.

  “Can I have a couple of people to help me do some research?” I asked Eric.

  “Yes, two. Who do you have in mind?”

  “I was thinking maybe George Carter and Lynn, my assistant.”

  “The pretty one?”

  “I hadn't noticed.”

  “Right. Sure you hadn't.”

  “We should brief Janet as well. She is George's boss.”

  Eric thought for a second. “No, she's leaving for Lithuania. Let's keep this to ourselves for now. Don't mention it at the staff meeting. If and when it turns into an official investigation, we'll bring everyone up to speed.”

  The three of us met next morning in my office. Carter was a lanky, bony man in his early thirties. With short-cropped hair, he looked more like a U.S. Marine than an academic. But he was a brilliant researcher, fluent in Russian, German, and Polish. He was teaching himself Romanian and was often overheard mouthing strange syllables to himself in the cafeteria. Since his recent marriage to a fellow linguist, he'd also taken to singing tunelessly in a language no one could identify. George was that rarest of creatures—a happy man.

  “What on earth are those awful tunes?” I asked him once.

  “Moldavian love songs,” he replied. “I like to sing them to Marie in bed.”

  “You'll have to teach them to me,” I laughed enviously.

  I gave him the CD liner notes, passed another photocopy to Lynn, and placed the disc of Delatrucha singing Schumann in the CD player. These songs were different from the Schubert—dreamier, more introspective, but equally enchanting. I had spent the previous evening listening to them, and reading the melancholy, haunting lyrics written by the famous German poet, Heinrich Heine, another tortured soul—a Jew who had converted to Christianity not from religious conviction but to escape discrimination and obtain, as he put it, an entrance ticket to Western civilization.

  George carefully read the notes, then looked at me quizzically. “What's this have to do with us?” he asked.

  I switched off the CD player. “First, this discussion stays between the three of us. We don't share it with anyone, not even colleagues in the department.”

  George frowned but said nothing. I continued, “I'm interested in this guy's background. Specifically, I want to know where he comes from and what he was doing during the war.”

  “And your suspicion is based on what?” George asked, dripping skepticism.

  “Let's just say we received a tip, and we'd like to check it out.”

  “A tip? Since when do we investigate tips? What are we, the police?”

  A legitimate question. Most of the information the OSI investigated came from foreign governments or was generated by our own researchers searching wartime archives. Forget the image of Israeli hit squads tracking down evil murderers in obscure hideaways. Most Nazi-hunting took place in libraries and archives. The most recent data came from the former Soviet Union, which had captured millions of Nazi documents but had only allowed us to see them in the past couple of years. We trawled the documents for the names of known perpetrators. Once we had a suspect's name, we could run it through U.S. immigration records and other databases. Ironically, the CIA was still keeping its own Nazi documents—believed to contain millions of pages—secret.

  Few Americans know that tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators came to the United States after the war without anyone asking any questions. At that time, our nation eagerly accepted Europeans as long as they were white, Christian, and anti-Communist. Little effort was made to verify their backgrounds. Over the years, our office checked over 80,000 names of concentration camp personnel, SS members, and the like. All these names were placed on the government's Watch List. If anyone on the list ever tried to enter the country, he was stopped and questioned. And people did regularly show up at U.S. airports, especially New York and Orlando. Former SS men were fond of vacationing at Disney World.

  Lufthansa and other airlines faxed us passenger lists while their transatlantic flights were still airborne. Once, a guard from the Birkenau death camp arrived in Orlando for a trip to the Magic Kingdom. We had no power to arrest him for crimes committed on foreign soil. The most we could do was to tell him he wasn't welcome in America and send him back to Germany on the next plane. Later, I debriefed one of the immigration officials who had questioned him. The old Nazi told them, “I can't believe anybody still cares about those events of so long ago.”

  If a name produced a hit from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it meant someone with that name had once immigrated to the United States. The next step was to figure out if he was
still alive. If we could prove he had lied about his Nazi past, we could deport him. With Delatrucha, we were working backward. We didn't have the name of a war criminal. All we had was that Sophie Reiner had called herself a lover of German songs and had one of the guy's CDs in her room. George and Lynn didn't need to know that.

  “I'm not comfortable with this, Mark,” George said, frowning. “Have you run it by Janet?”

  “Janet's about to leave for Lithuania. Eric approved it.”

  “But what is it that we suspect this guy of? What are we looking for? Isn't this an invasion of his privacy? We don't go around investigating people based on tips. That's not what we do.”

  “Look, George, we're interested in knowing if this guy had Nazi connections. If we can't find anything, we'll drop it. We won't be invading his privacy. I want to find out what there is about him on the public record. Lynn, that will be your baby. He's well known in his field, so there has to be a paper trail—magazine articles, interviews, profiles,TV documentaries. Are you okay with that?”

  “Totally cool,” Lynn said, tossing back her curls, delighted to be included. Even after months in the staid Department of Justice, Lynn still sounded like an eager sophomore sometimes.

  “If you're uncomfortable, George, you can bow out. It's purely voluntary. Otherwise, I'd like you to put in a standard request to Immigration to figure out where this guy came from and when he arrived. I'd like to know if and when he changed his name. Somehow I doubt he was born Roberto Delatrucha.”

  Once the war was over, it didn't take long for the army to decide I was “surplus to their requirements,” and before I know it I'm out of the service and back home in Knott County, the armpit of America. Momma was smart; she ran off a long time ago, when I was little. I don't even remember what she looked like. When I was a kid, I used to think it would be cool to track her down. If I found her, I could get away from Dad and his drinking and beatings, and we'd live together and be happy. Now, if I ever did see her, I'd ask her, “Remember me? I'm the son you dropped like a used tampon.”

  My father hasn't changed much. The old buzzard's still just as mean and ornery as he ever was, only now he doesn't dare raise a hand to me because he knows I'd beat the shit out of him. Most of the time, he's too fucked up to even try. I tell him, “Dad, the meth is dissolving your teeth; pretty soon your whole face is going to collapse.” He says, “Who the fuck asked you to open your pussy mouth, you undersized little fuck?” Some things never change.

  I needed work. But the only jobs are down the mines, and I'm never going down there. I filled out forms to drive a coal truck; the boss just laughed at me. “Your feet won't even reach the brake pedal, shrimp. Isn't there anything else you can do?” My high school diploma didn't impress him. “Didn't they teach you anything in the army?” Yeah, they taught me one thing real well. They taught me to kill people.

  I never planned the pretty lady. It was a crazy impulse. I started trailing her, not for any particular reason, more to test my skills. I need to stay sharp for the mission. So when she went down into the subway, I bought a ticket and went right down after her. And there she is, standing on the edge of the platform, and the thought comes to me to see how close I can get without her knowing. The train's coming, and by now I'm just behind her, and she still hasn't seen me or even felt me. My hand shoots out, giving her a shove, and just like that she's gone. At the exit, nobody says boo. Anyway, it was quick; she hardly suffered. It wasn't a cruel death, like those poor people in Waco, Texas. I was there, I saw the whole thing, the flames, the fire, the stinking federal agents who stood there and let them fry without lifting a finger.

  So if you want to talk about murder, talk to me about Waco, talk to me about Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge and his family, shot down like dogs by the ATF and the FBI. And while we're discussing murder, allow me to point out that infanticide is murder last time I checked. And when the regime in Washington legalized infanticide, they gave up any legitimacy they might have had. And when they started tolerating queers walking around in public flaunting their vile ways, it became the duty of all right-thinking folk to rebel. And when they built a museum with our tax dollars to glorify the historical lie they call the “holocaust,” it's time for the entire white nation to reclaim its history. So that's what we need to talk about, not this other shit.

  Burl called from West Virginia. He's already bought a couple thousand pounds of fertilizer with the five grand. He found an abandoned barn to store it. The plan is finally coming together. I tell him we need more, but not to buy it all at once and not all in the same place.

  I've been tracking the Jewish guy. He has no idea. It's just a question of where and when I carry out the sentence, but his death should also send a message.

  Timing is everything.

  6

  I could see that the lips and tips of their noses were a bluish color.

  Some of them had their eyes closed; others’ eyes rolled.

  —TESTIMONY OF KARL SCHLUCH

  A LARGE POSTER HUNG over the entrance of the health club. “Be all you used to be,” it exhorted. “For a no-nonsense workout, join the Sarge's Boot Camp. No music, no dancing, no spandex, no nonsense.” There was a picture of a line of balding, middle-aged men standing to attention, sucking in their bellies. Shuddering at the sight, I vowed never to let that happen to me. A little skinny guy was hanging around outside the gym. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. When I caught his eye, he looked away.

  After five miles on the treadmill and half an hour lifting weights, I came home feeling unusually virtuous, preening in front of the wall-length lobby mirror while I waited for the elevator.

  In the apartment, messages were blinking on the answering machine. Jennifer, my ex, saying she'd be over later that night to collect her CDs, and another one from Detective Novak, asking me to call her back. I was put on hold—naturally—to a mushy string orchestra playing “White Christmas,” composed by one Israel Isidore Baline, better known to the world as Irving Berlin. Further evidence that musicians do often change their names. Novak finally came on the line and got straight to the point: “What do you know about criminal activities of Nazis in the United States?” she asked in her breathless voice.

  “During World War II?”

  “No, I mean now, today.”

  “You mean neo-Nazis? I don't know much. It's not my field. Lately I've been getting even more hate mail from them than usual. I have a friend who's an expert. I can give you his number if you like. Is there a connection?”

  Muffled talking in the background, as if she were consulting with someone. Then she was back. “Okay, I'm going to tell you something, but you have to keep it strictly confidential.”

  “Sure, no problem,” I agreed.

  “We found something that may show a neo-Nazi connection. On the other hand, it may be nothing. Have your kind of Nazis ever gotten involved with the American type?”

  “My kind of Nazis?”

  “The ones you investigate.”

  “My kind of Nazis generally keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. Most of them are solid, upright citizens. The last thing they want is to get involved with a band of crazies. They generally keep their noses clean. What did you find?”

  More background muttering before she came back on the line. “It was a piece of paper in her pocket. It had the numbers ‘6-6-6’ written on it.”

  “Six-six-six?” I repeated, not understanding. “I found a piece of paper like that stuck under my windshield the other day. I thought it was some kind of prank.”

  “Do you still have it?” she asked.

  “I think I threw it away. No, wait, I balled it up and stuffed it in my coat pocket. It's probably still there. Why? Is it important?”

  “Send it over here if you still have it. We can analyze the paper and handwriting to see if it's the same. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”

  “No, never. But you still haven't told me what it means. What's going on
here? Should I be worried?” I was getting nervous.

  “Six-six-six is the ‘mark of the beast.’ From the Bible, I forget where. It's a symbol used by white supremacists, especially the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  “Aryan Brotherhood?” I kept repeating everything she said, but I couldn't help myself. The whole conversation seemed unreal. Was I in some kind of physical danger?

  “They're a prison gang,” she said calmly, unaware of how much she was rattling me. “Very strong in federal prisons and now spreading outside as well. Very violent. Involved in lots of murders, often against their own guys—anyone they suspect of snitching.”

  “What do you mean,‘snitching’?”

  “Cooperating with the police. Informing, squealing, whatever you like to call it.”

  “You mean the people who killed Sophie may be after me as well? What the hell am I supposed to do about this?”

  “Hey, Prof, calm down. It's just a piece of paper. Maybe it's a coincidence.”

  “I don't believe in coincidences. And I bet you don't either.”

  “No, you're right, I don't. Send the paper over. That's the first step. We'll take it from there.”

  “How would anyone link me to the Reiner murder?”

  “You're jumping to conclusions. You don't know there's any such link.”

  “There has to be a link. Maybe they were following her and knew she came to see me. Maybe your office leaked the fact that I was helping you.”

  “Stop right there, Professor. You're way outta line. It didn't come from this office.”

  “Okay, okay. It's just that I didn't expect this. She walks in off the street one day, she gets killed the next. She gets the 6-6-6, I get the 6-6-6.”

  “I still think you're jumping to conclusions.”

  “So you think I should ignore this?”

  Novak paused. “No, I think you should have a word with the head of security at your office about possibly providing some protection. The FBI tracks neo-Nazis. Maybe you should call them. After all, don't y'all work for the same government department over there?”