Michael Soffer's "Our Nazi"

Michael Soffer is a history teacher at Lake Forest High School. During his tenure at Oak Park and River Forest High School, he taught Holocaust studies in a classroom that former Nazi camp guard Reinhold Kulle used to clean. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Forward, Chicago Jewish History, and the Times of Israel.

Soffer applied the "Page 99 Test" to Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil, his first book, and reported the following:

How did Americans respond when Nazis were uncovered living among them?

Though “Nazi hunters” occupy an almost mythical presence in the American imagining, the efforts to bring America’s Nazis to justice were fraught with controversy. Page 99 of my book, Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil, traces the early opposition to efforts to bring Hitler’s men in America to justice. Much of that early opposition, the page shows, emerged from emigre communities, who worried that revelations their countrymen participated in atrocities would diminish American support for the so-called “Captive Nations” - the Eastern European countries then under Soviet occupation. That opposition, the page shows, was adopted by far right, white nationalist groups; later a more sanitized version would filter to the mainstream. A reader turning to page 99 would encounter the shocking and frustrating reality at the core of Our Nazi: Americans across the country rose to defend the Nazis living in their midst.

Our Nazi’s central storyline follows Reinhold Kulle, a high school custodian whose past as a Nazi camp guard was revealed in 1982. Oak Park, the Chicago suburb where Kulle worked, had won national awards for its commitment to integration and diversity, and had shouted down an abortive neo-Nazi rally just two years earlier. But when Kulle’s past was uncovered, Oak Parkers rallied to his defense. Similar storylines occurred across the country, forcing Americans to grapple with the most fraught moral questions. What did the revelations mean about their friend or colleague? And - perhaps more importantly - what did the revelations mean about themselves, and their own moral standing?

Learn more about Our Nazi at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue