A week prior to competing in the annual history fair at St. Giles School, 1034 N. Linden Ave., 14-year-old Drew Johnson is sitting comfortably at her dining room table.
The inquisitive teenager comes from a long line of admitted World War II history buffs, and she was eager to run through the extensive research she’s gleaned about the former head custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School, Reinhold Kulle, former SS Nazi.
On Jan. 18, in a competitive field of about 50 peers, Drew’s project, “Into the Janitor’s Closet: The Secrets of Reinhold Kulle,” advanced to the regionals of the Chicago Metro History Education Center’s national competition, said Susan Poetzel, principal at St. Giles.
On this day, though, piled at least an inch thick in front of her, are about 900 pieces of paper. Some photocopies are typed and contain an identifiable SS key stroke. Other SS files are handwritten, German only and hard to decipher, even for a family friend who is a German translator.
In the Johnson’s kitchen stands an oversized, three-dimensional demonstration board, a clever rendering of Kulle’s closet at OPRF, which pictorially holds the secrets he withheld for 25 years from everyone in Brookfield, where he resided, and in Oak Park, where he worked.
Getting to know him
Six months ago, Drew “met” Kulle when her mom, Diane Johnson, 48, planted a seed on an extremely hot day, suggesting that her daughter was more interested in being a bored couch potato then in venturing outside.
“All my friends were at their lake houses, and I was the only loser stuck at home,” Drew recalled. “‘My mom says, ‘Drew, have you thought about your history fair project?’ I say, ‘It’s July, Mom, why would I be thinking about that? It isn’t until January.’ So, of course I rolled my eyes and went back to watching TV reruns.”
Then, Diane handed Drew a a local history book to flip though.
“I said, ‘No way. A Nazi in Oak Park? That kind of thing doesn’t happen in Oak Park.'”
But sure enough, from 1959 to 1984, a former Nazi did, in fact, work here, and Drew had her history project topic.
“I Googled Reinhold Kulle, and there was a little bit of stuff, and it was interesting, but it was getting annoying because I couldn’t find anything else. I thought I’d have to choose another topic,” Johnson recalled. “Mom says, ‘Drew, how about if we head down to the Chicago Historical Society?'”
Road trip
“So I go down, type in [the name] and only find one thing. I’m reading. It works. But after that we keep looking for a couple of weeks, and there is just nothing more. Barely anything, except for newspaper articles, and I need primary sources.”
On a hunch, Diane called the National Archives in Washington D.C. Drew called the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in December they took a longer road trip.
Actually navigating all the security checkpoints at the National Archives was a trip in itself. But when they found Reinhold and Gertrude “Trudel” Fichtner Kulle’s SS files (in Deutsche), they knew they had found what they were traveling for.
%uF72B”Trudel, his wife, he knew her since she was 4 years old,” Drew explained. “They got married when she was 19 and he was 22. Back then you had to be at least a sergeant to get married, so if he was 22 he must have been pretty high up in the SS at a relatively young age.”
In addition, Trudel’s mother was an upper-level person in a Nazi women’s group and her father had owned a factory, so, through her, Reinhold had connections. The files indicate that the couple had a son whose last address was in Forest Park — Rainer Kulle — but their daughter’s name was blacked out, Drew noted.
At the U.S. Holocaust Museum, on microfilm, they viewed the U.S. Justice Department’s deportation trial transcripts (4,000 pages). The real coup was staff members allowing Drew to download to a zip drive of unpublished photos from the museum’s private collection from Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where Kulle was a guard.
“Personally, I had never seen documents like that before,” said Oak Parker Karin West, a family friend from Austria who is their German translator. “One was a curriculum vitae for him and her, from birth … to 1944.”
Back home, Drew, an avid reader, competitive swimmer and member of two choirs, filed an FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) petition with the Village of Oak Park to access Kulle’s OPRF personnel records and more, and spent time at the Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest as well as with Dan Haley, this newspaper’s publisher, to absorb and understand what people were thinking and saying at the time. Recently, two more books from the Oak Park Park Library added to her perspective.
Based on all this research, Drew surmised that Kulle was born in 1921, joined the Waffen SS of the German military from 1940 to May of 1945, and 30 years ago became the subject of a deportation trial at the behest of the U.S. State Department.
Kulle did indeed serve as an SS Nazi with the Death’s Head (Totenkopf) Division, she added, becoming a guard at Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp in 1942, where he allegedly participated in the persecution of the prisoners. Kulle denied the allegations and the feds never proved their case conclusively.
During an emotional public debate that played out in the local newspapers, in July of 1984, Reinhold Kulle was dismissed from his job at OPRF.
Three years later, a court transcript states that Kulle admitted to having lied about his Nazi past on a visa application, and was finally deported to West Germany in October 1987. He was never retried for crimes against humanity because the statutes of limitations had expired in that country.
If Reinhold Kulle is still alive, he’d be 90 years old, and the young girl who would like to be a lawyer some day would love to meet him.
“I’d want him to tell me truthfully what he really did during the Holocaust — without lies, what happened, and if I were a school board member back then, I would have probably decided that he should be terminated, but not deported,” concludes Drew, who muses that she might enjoy teaching a history class on Reinhold Kulle some day.