Nazi Is Exposed, but Did He Have Anything to Hide?

[azurnoir]

Mr. Gould prefers this description: a 43-year-old college dropout from Los Angeles who says he made a lot of money in finance, became interested in Nazi memorabilia and ended up on an undercover odyssey where he posed as a neo-Nazi to befriend a former Waffen SS officer and recorded many of their conversations with the plan to someday expose the man’s role in the Third Reich.

But an alternative description might read like this: a man on a self-appointed mission to expose an aging Nazi — one who has published an autobiography and has never been accused of war crimes — and hoping, in the process, to publish a book and land a movie deal.

<snip>

Mr. Gould announced Tuesday that he and his cousin, Burton Bernstein, were filing a federal civil lawsuit against Mr. Frank in Washington that would claim that the former Nazi officer was responsible for orders issued on July 28, 1941, that spurred troops from the SS, or Schutzstaffel, the Nazi special police, to kill their ancestors in an attack on the village of Korets, in Ukraine.

<snip>

The suit will close out the unusual journey of a self-styled historian with unorthodox techniques, and follow his staged friendship with a former Nazi officer who confided in one taped interview that Himmler “was a good man” and that the Jews “dug their own grave” by oppressing the Germans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/world/europe/08nazi.html

[Behind the Aegis]

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After reviewing the material, he said he thought Mr. Gould’s work raised an important question of how society defined culpability. “Of all the Nazis that have surfaced over the years, Bernhard Frank sends the biggest shiver down my spine,” Mr. Smith wrote in an essay. “Not because he was an outright killer, but because he was active right in the heart of darkness, at the epicenter of the Holocaust, at the scene of the crime. For some reason we let him get away with it.”