WHEN YALE HARBORED A NAZI, PART 2: THE OPEN SECRET

Years after one Nazi was exposed at Yale, another remained on the faculty of the Slavic Languages and Literatures department.

By Zachary Groz

In November 1985, nine years after his past as a Nazi propagandist came to light and his life as a Yale lecturer fell apart, Vladimir Sokolov was still enduring what he called, in letters to the local Russian press, the “torture of waiting.” He had waited three years for the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations to conclude its investigation of his career with the Nazis and his deception of American immigration officials in the 1950s. He had waited three more years for the trial––which would revoke his U.S. citizenship––to begin. And now, after 11 days of court proceedings, it would still be several more months before Judge Thomas F. Murphy of the Federal District Court for the District of Connecticut rendered a verdict.

As the investigations continued, and Sokolov inveighed in emigre newspapers against the DOJ and the “Devil and his henchmen,” things at Yale returned to normal. The Slavic Languages and Literatures Department filled the position Sokolov had vacated and Russian classes in the basement of the Hall of Graduate Studies resumed as before.

But even after the scandal broke, even after Sokolov retired from Yale early in disgrace and left New Haven for good, and despite a three-year Justice Department effort that compiled depositions of Yale faculty, forensic analyses of German war documents, and interviews with historians of the Holocaust, there was still a former Nazi on the faculty of the Slavic department.

The full article appears exclusively online at: https://thenewjournalatyale.com/2023/02/ when-yale-harbored-a-nazi-part-2/