|
| People walk past the home in Minneapolis, Minn., where 94-year-old Michael Karkoc lives, Friday, June 14, 2013. Karkoc, a top commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States and has been living in Minnesota since shortly after World War II, according to evidence uncovered by The Associated Press. He told American authorities in 1949 that he had performed no military service during World War II, concealing his work as an officer and founding member of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion and later as an officer in the SS Galician Division, according to records obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request. |
BERLIN (AP)
-- A top commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages
filled with women and children lied to American immigration officials to
get into the United States and has been living in Minnesota since
shortly after World War II, according to evidence uncovered by The
Associated Press.
Michael Karkoc, 94, told
American authorities in 1949 that he had performed no military service
during World War II, concealing his work as an officer and founding
member of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion and later as an
officer in the SS Galician Division, according to records obtained by
the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Galician
Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organization he served in were both
on a secret American government blacklist of organizations whose
members were forbidden from entering the United States at the time.
Though
records do not show that Karkoc had a direct hand in war crimes,
statements from men in his unit and other documentation confirm the
Ukrainian company he commanded massacred civilians, and suggest that
Karkoc was at the scene of these atrocities as the company leader. Nazi
SS files say he and his unit were also involved in the 1944 Warsaw
Uprising, in which the Nazis brutally suppressed a Polish rebellion
against German occupation.
Polish prosecutors
announced Friday after the release of the AP investigation that they
will investigate Karkoc and provide "every possible assistance" to the
U.S. Department of Justice, which has used lies in immigration papers to
deport dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals. The AP evidence of
Karkoc's wartime activities has also prompted German authorities to
express interest in exploring whether there is enough to prosecute.
Karkoc
refused to discuss his wartime past at his home in Minneapolis, and
repeated efforts to set up an interview, using his son as an
intermediary, were unsuccessful.
Efraim
Zuroff, the lead Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem, said that based on his decades of experience pursuing Nazi
war criminals, he expects that the evidence showing Karkoc lied to
American officials and that his unit carried out atrocities is strong
enough for deportation and war-crimes prosecution in Germany or Poland.
The
deputy head of the German office that investigates Nazi war crimes,
Thomas Will, said that based on the AP's evidence, he is interested in
gathering information that could possibly result in prosecution.
Karkoc
now lives in a modest house in northeast Minneapolis in an area with a
significant Ukrainian population. Even at his advanced age, he came to
the door without help of a cane or a walker. He would not comment on his
wartime service for Nazi Germany.
"I don't think I can explain," he said.
Members of his unit and other witnesses have told stories of brutal attacks on civilians.
One
of Karkoc's men, Vasyl Malazhenski, told Soviet investigators that in
1944 the unit was directed to "liquidate all the residents" of the
village of Chlaniow, Poland, in a reprisal attack for the killing of a
German SS officer, though he did not say who gave the order.
In
a background check by U.S. officials on April 14, 1949, Karkoc said he
had never performed any military service, telling investigators that he
"worked for father until 1944. Worked in labor camp from 1944 until
1945."
However, in a Ukrainian-language memoir
published in 1995, Karkoc states that he helped found the Ukrainian
Self Defense Legion in 1943 in collaboration with the Nazis' feared SS
intelligence agency, the SD, to fight on the side of Germany - and
served as a company commander in the unit, which received orders
directly from the SS, through the end of the war.
The AP located a copy online in an electronic Ukrainian library.
Karkoc's
name surfaced when a retired clinical pharmacologist who took up Nazi
war crimes research in his free time came across it while looking into
members of the SS Galician Division who emigrated to Britain. Stephen
Ankier, who is based in London, tipped off AP when an Internet search
showed an address for Karkoc in Minnesota.
The
AP located Karkoc's U.S. Army intelligence file, and got it
declassified by the National Archives in Maryland through a FOIA
request. The file said standard background checks found no red flags
that would disqualify him from entering the United States but noted that
key information from the Soviet side was missing.
Wartime
documents located by the AP also confirm Karkoc's membership in the
Self Defense Legion. They include a Nazi payroll sheet found in Polish
archives, signed by an SS officer on Jan. 8, 1945 - only four months
before the war's end - confirming that Karkoc was present in Krakow,
Poland, to collect his salary as a member of the Self Defense Legion.
Karkoc signed the document.
Karkoc, an ethnic
Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk in 1919, according to details
he provided American officials. At the time, the area was being fought
over by Ukraine, Poland and others; it ended up part of Poland until
World War II. Several wartime Nazi documents note the same birth date,
but say he was born in Horodok, a town in the same region.
He
joined the regular German army after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941 and fought on the Eastern Front in Ukraine and Russia.
He
was also a member of the Ukrainian nationalist organization OUN; in
1943, he helped negotiate with the Nazis to have men drawn from its
membership form the Self Defense Legion, according to his account. The
legion eventually numbered some 600 soldiers and was folded into the SS
Galician Division in 1945.
Policy at the time
of Karkoc's immigration application - according to a declassified secret
U.S. government document obtained by the AP from the National Archives -
was to deny a visa to anyone who had served in either the SS Galician
Division or the OUN.
In Washington, Justice
Department spokesman Michael Passman said the agency was aware of the AP
story but could neither confirm nor deny details of specific
investigations as a matter of policy.
Though
Karkoc talks in his memoirs about fighting anti-Nazi Polish resistance
fighters, he makes no mention of attacks on civilians. He does indicate
he was with his company in the summer of 1944 when the Self Defense
Legion's commander, Siegfried Assmuss, was killed by a partisan attack
near Chlaniow.
He did not mention the
retaliatory massacre that followed, which was described in detail by
Malazhenski in his 1967 statement. An SS administrative list obtained by
AP shows that Karkoc was Malazhenski's commander.
Malazhenski
said the Ukrainian unit was ordered to liquidate Chlaniow in reprisal
for Assmuss' death, and moved in the next day, machine-gunning people
and torching homes. More than 40 people died.
"The
Ukrainians were setting fire to the buildings," Chlaniow villager
Stanislawa Lipska told a communist-era commission in 1948. "You could
hear machine-gun shots and grenade explosions. Shots could be heard
inside the village and on the outskirts. They were making sure no one
escaped."
Witness statements and other
documentation also link the unit circumstantially to a 1943 massacre in
Pidhaitsi, on the outskirts of Lutsk -today part of Ukraine - where the
Self Defense Legion was once based.
A total of 21 villagers, mostly
women and children, were slaughtered.
Heorhiy Syvyi was a 9-year-old boy when troops swarmed into Pidhaitsi on Dec. 3 but managed to flee with his father and hide.
"When
we came out we saw the smoldering ashes of the burned house and our
neighbors searching for the dead. My mother had my brother clasped to
her chest. This is how she was found - black and burned," said Syvyi,
now 78.
There is evidence that the unit took
part in the brutal suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, fighting the
nationalist Polish Home Army as it sought to rid the city of its Nazi
occupiers.
The uprising was put down by the Nazis in a house-to-house fight characterized by its ferocity.
The Self Defense Legion's exact role is not known, but Nazi documents indicate that Karkoc and his unit were there.
An
SS payroll document, dated Oct. 12, 1944, says 10 members of the Self
Defense Legion "fell while deployed to Warsaw." Karkoc is listed as the
highest-ranking commander of 2 Company - a lieutenant - on a pay sheet.
Following
the war, Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu Ulm,
Germany, according to documents obtained from the International Tracing
Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The documents indicate that his wife
died in 1948, a year before he and their two young boys - born in 1945
and 1946 - emigrated to the U.S.
After he arrived in Minneapolis, he remarried and had four more children, the last born in 1966.
Karkoc
told American officials he was a carpenter, and records indicate he
worked for a nationwide construction company that has an office in
Minneapolis.
A longtime member of the
Ukrainian National Association, Karkoc has been closely involved in
community affairs over the past decades and was identified in a 2002
article in a Ukrainian-American publication as a "longtime UNA
activist."
