Main Street in Wallkill Central jackets and engineering boots.
The Lincoln cruised past Fescoe’s Feed & Grain. Frank’s Beauty Salon for Women. Western Auto. State Farm.
Nazi-hunters
, David thought in a daydream.
Dachau Two. Total insanity
.
Halfway down the main drag, the Lincoln slipped into a diagonal space in front of Robt. Hatfield’s Wallkill Inn. “Good food and grog,” the wooden sign read. “My beer is Rheingold.”
A strange thought occurred to David—at least something hit him the wrong way as he got out of the car in the haggard, peculiar farm town.
Inside this little bar was America’s
premier Nazi-hunter
.
CHAPTER 22
This much was documented everywhere.
Through the late 1960s and ’70s, the man most responsible for bringing Nazi war criminals living in America to justice wasn’t a sharp U.S. federal attorney or FBI department head. The man was a shy, skinny U.S. postal worker named Benjamin Paul Rabinowitz, a survivor of Auschwitz
Konzentrationslager
.
Working nights and weekends out of his Secaucus, New Jersey, studio apartment, it was Rabinowitz who had uncovered the fact that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had actually been protecting former Nazis for more than twenty-five years. The State Department had refused to turn Nazi mass murderers over to the Justice Department for prosecution. That high-ranking congressmen, the CIA, and maybe even a U.S. president had used special influence to get important Nazi files transferred around The System so fast and so frequently that they never seemed to be in one place, and thus were effectively closed to public scrutiny.
Benjamin Paul Rabinowitz. Postal worker. Chasing the Nazis through rain and sleet and snow.
Inside the Wallkill Inn, David, Rabinowitz, and the government agents huddled around a splintery pine table. They drank Rheingold beer so cold it might as well have been carbonated water.
Watching Rabinowitz, it was difficult for David to imagine much more than one of those pale, balding men who shuffle around the back rooms of every post office in America, quietly sorting the mail.
The government pensioner was under five feet, five inches, with mottled, mush-yellow teeth. His wrinkled cheeks and turkey neck were covered with dark gray stubble. He wore a stained gabardine suit bought in 1960 at the latest.
Benjamin Rabinowitz also had a great drooping wen on the right side of his nose and the disconcerting habit of saying
“bullchit”
every fourth or fifth word out of a slightly collapsed, somewhat feminine-looking mouth.
Rabinowitz knew his Nazis, though.
At the time of the Wallkill meeting, he was hard at work on a manuscript that was already some twenty-one hundred typewritten pages long. Titled
Leading American Nazis
, it traced, among other things, 400 of the 750 companies set up by Martin Bormann to protect the Third Reich. The book tracked several, of these companies right to the heart of some of America’s richest and most prestigious corporations: a major oil company—one of the “Six Sisters” a noted cereal maker; a corporation that owned one of the big television networks.
If Rabinowitz was correct, David figured, business fortunes, major stocks, and impeccable reputations would tumble like dominoes come publication time for
Leading American Nazis
.
Was that a clue to consider, David suddenly wondered? Could that possibly be connected with the Storm Troop? Or was his imagination simply getting out of hand?
“Let me ask you a rather strange, leading question, Dr. Strauss,” the Nazi-hunter rasped after all the general introductions were over.
David Strauss shifted uneasily on the wooden bench. He had no idea what to expect from a man whose obsession, hobby, whatever, was Third- and Fourth-Reich Nazis.
“What do you know about the Jews and President Franklin Roosevelt? This is during World War II I’m talking about. What do you think?”
David was noticing that he kept adjusting his gold
The Lincoln cruised past Fescoe’s Feed & Grain. Frank’s Beauty Salon for Women. Western Auto. State Farm.
Nazi-hunters
, David thought in a daydream.
Dachau Two. Total insanity
.
Halfway down the main drag, the Lincoln slipped into a diagonal space in front of Robt. Hatfield’s Wallkill Inn. “Good food and grog,” the wooden sign read. “My beer is Rheingold.”
A strange thought occurred to David—at least something hit him the wrong way as he got out of the car in the haggard, peculiar farm town.
Inside this little bar was America’s
premier Nazi-hunter
.
CHAPTER 22
This much was documented everywhere.
Through the late 1960s and ’70s, the man most responsible for bringing Nazi war criminals living in America to justice wasn’t a sharp U.S. federal attorney or FBI department head. The man was a shy, skinny U.S. postal worker named Benjamin Paul Rabinowitz, a survivor of Auschwitz
Konzentrationslager
.
Working nights and weekends out of his Secaucus, New Jersey, studio apartment, it was Rabinowitz who had uncovered the fact that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had actually been protecting former Nazis for more than twenty-five years. The State Department had refused to turn Nazi mass murderers over to the Justice Department for prosecution. That high-ranking congressmen, the CIA, and maybe even a U.S. president had used special influence to get important Nazi files transferred around The System so fast and so frequently that they never seemed to be in one place, and thus were effectively closed to public scrutiny.
Benjamin Paul Rabinowitz. Postal worker. Chasing the Nazis through rain and sleet and snow.
Inside the Wallkill Inn, David, Rabinowitz, and the government agents huddled around a splintery pine table. They drank Rheingold beer so cold it might as well have been carbonated water.
Watching Rabinowitz, it was difficult for David to imagine much more than one of those pale, balding men who shuffle around the back rooms of every post office in America, quietly sorting the mail.
The government pensioner was under five feet, five inches, with mottled, mush-yellow teeth. His wrinkled cheeks and turkey neck were covered with dark gray stubble. He wore a stained gabardine suit bought in 1960 at the latest.
Benjamin Rabinowitz also had a great drooping wen on the right side of his nose and the disconcerting habit of saying
“bullchit”
every fourth or fifth word out of a slightly collapsed, somewhat feminine-looking mouth.
Rabinowitz knew his Nazis, though.
At the time of the Wallkill meeting, he was hard at work on a manuscript that was already some twenty-one hundred typewritten pages long. Titled
Leading American Nazis
, it traced, among other things, 400 of the 750 companies set up by Martin Bormann to protect the Third Reich. The book tracked several, of these companies right to the heart of some of America’s richest and most prestigious corporations: a major oil company—one of the “Six Sisters” a noted cereal maker; a corporation that owned one of the big television networks.
If Rabinowitz was correct, David figured, business fortunes, major stocks, and impeccable reputations would tumble like dominoes come publication time for
Leading American Nazis
.
Was that a clue to consider, David suddenly wondered? Could that possibly be connected with the Storm Troop? Or was his imagination simply getting out of hand?
“Let me ask you a rather strange, leading question, Dr. Strauss,” the Nazi-hunter rasped after all the general introductions were over.
David Strauss shifted uneasily on the wooden bench. He had no idea what to expect from a man whose obsession, hobby, whatever, was Third- and Fourth-Reich Nazis.
“What do you know about the Jews and President Franklin Roosevelt? This is during World War II I’m talking about. What do you think?”
David was noticing that he kept adjusting his gold
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