Neighbors Recall Accused Nazi as Friendly, Menacing

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Michael Kolnhofer, who is suspected of being a former Nazi concentration camp guard, sometimes would talk for hours to children who gathered to watch his pet parrot walk along the split-rail fence in front of his home, neighbors say. He was friendly, some say, quick to share the green peppers he grew in his back yard.

But others recall a glaring, menacing Kolnhofer who walked the neighborhood with a tumbler of vodka in hand, sometimes snarling or shouting. Said one former neighbor, Nick Ventura: “He wasn’t the type of neighbor you were sad to see move away.”

Kolnhofer, 79, was in critical condition Wednesday with a gunshot wound to his left leg, a day after police said he stood on his porch and fired a gun at them and journalists.

Hours earlier, Justice Department prosecutors had filed papers to strip Kolnhofer of his citizenship, accusing him of applying for a visa in 1952 while concealing his past as a guard at Nazi concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald during World War II.

Citing captured Nazi records, the Justice Department said Kolnhofer became a guard at Sachsenhausen in 1943 and later was transferred to Buchenwald.

Since the department’s Office of Special Investigation was set up in 1979, 57 former Nazis have been stripped of U.S. citizenship; 48 have been deported.

Police said prosecutors would consider criminal charges in the shooting today. Kolnhofer’s lawyer, Robert DeCoursey, said his client denied being a concentration camp guard. But a WDAF-TV reporter said Kolnhofer had answered “yes” just before the shooting when asked if he worked in a camp.

The news about the former construction worker and widower stunned his friends.

John and Anna Hlade, part of Kansas City’s close-knit Croatian community, shared their home with Kolnhofer for four years and looked after him after his wife, Eva, died of cancer. They say they never heard a word about his military career.

“I asked his old friends, his old neighbors; he never tell nobody,” Anna Hlade said Wednesday, just before she and her husband left to visit Kolnhofer in the hospital. “We never know about this.”

The couple recalled that he sometimes drank a lot of vodka.

Kolnhofer, a large, square-jawed and balding man, lived in the neighborhood where he was shot about 18 months, neighbors said. Some chuckled at Christmas when he put up a lighted Santa Claus amid statues of classic Greek nudes in his yard.

“I thought it was kind of cute for an old man to have,” Helen Podrebarac said. “I felt so bad when I heard, because he seemed like a nice person.”

Other neighbors said Kolnhofer often spent warm days sitting in a lawn chair in his open garage, watching the goings-on of the neighborhood.