The Nazi in the school

This past summer, several hundred community members in Oak Park and River Forest filed a detailed complaint with the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Attorney General’s office, alleging that several teachers at Oak Park-River Forest (OPRF) High School created a “hostile antisemitic environment.” They requested that the state investigate their claims and that the OPRF School District hold its teachers accountable. All of this came in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Accusations of antisemitism at OPRF are not new, as a just-published book by Michael Soffer, a longtime OPRF history teacher, makes clear. The book, Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil , a University of Chicago Press title, grew out of a series of articles Soffer originally penned for the publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society.

The genesis of the book started with a Holocaust electives class Soffer had developed at OPRF in 2020 “in response to a slew of antisemitic hate crimes on the high school’s campus,” he wrote in the book’s preface.

Among the information that came to light for Soffer and his students was that OPRF had in its employ for more than 20 years a head custodian, Reinhold Kulle, who bad been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II. As Soffer wrote in one of his articles for the Chicago Jewish Historical Society (Spring 2021), Kulle was “assigned to the SS Death’s Head Battalion at Gross-Rosen concentration camp, which historians believe might have operated, along with Mauthausen, as the only Category III camp–the harshest possible designation.”

Soffer’s students were incredulous at learning of Kulle, whose Nazi history was initially revealed in 1982, when a local newspaper broke the story that the custodian had been accused of lying on his 1957 visa application about his wartime activities. The Department of Justice had begun proceedings to deport him.

Soffer, himself a graduate of OPRF, class of 1999, was intrigued. For the past several years, he dug deeply into the Kulle story, combing through volumes of government documents, newspaper accounts, and school records and interviewing countless community members, who recalled the unsettling episode in the school’s history.

Soffer’s book is an account of the lines that were quickly drawn during this time. Many OPRF parents, students, and faculty backed Kulle and raised money for his legal defense fund. They believed that whatever heinous crimes the custodian had committed were ancient history and that he should be forgiven. He was a loyal and hardworking OPRF employee.

On the other side were members of the Jewish community, some local religious leaders, and human rights activists, who argued that a former Nazi should not be on the public payroll. They followed Kulle’s case closely and regularly attended Department of Justice hearings.

Kulle was eventually placed on terminal leave at OPRF; his contract was not renewed. In 1987, he was deported to Germany, where he lived out his days a free man. Not before damage had been done to the OPRF community, though. “Friendships and relationships were permanently altered,” wrote Soffer in one a Chicago Jewish Historical Society article published in the summer of 2021, “and neighbors looked through one another when they passed each other in the alleys.”

The “lack of empathy for Jewish pain,” noted Soffer, was not atypical. Other American school districts in similar circumstances found themselves facing deep schisms.

After 17 years at OPRF, Soffer left this summer for a teaching job in Lake Forest. A July 2024 Chicago Tribune article noted that in his resignation letter, he cited “the continued toll of antisemitism at OPRF,” which had created “an untenable climate.”

Soffer will talk about his book at Evanston’s Bookends & Beginnings bookstore on Wednesday, November 13, at 6 p.m. To learn more, visit tinyurl.com/MichaelSoffer .