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| In this May 22, 1990 photo, Michael Karkoc, photographed in Lauderdale, Minn. prior to a visit to Minnesota from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in early June of 1990. Karkoc a top commander whose Nazi SS-led unit is blamed for 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. |
MINNEAPOLIS
(AP) -- The revelation that a former commander of a Nazi SS-led military
unit has lived quietly in Minneapolis for the past six decades came as a
shock to those who know 94-year-old Michael Karkoc. World War II
survivors in both the U.S. and Europe harshly condemned the news and
prosecutors in Poland have said they'll investigate.
An
Associated Press investigation found that Karkoc served as a top
commander in the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion during World War II. The
unit is accused of wartime atrocities, including the burning of villages
filled with women and children.
"I know him
personally. We talk, laugh. He takes care of his yard and walks with his
wife," his next-door neighbor, Gordon Gnasdoskey, said Friday.
"For
me, this is a shock. To come to this country and take advantage of its
freedoms all of these years, it blows my mind," said Gnasdoskey, the
grandson of a Ukrainian immigrant himself.
Karkoc
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 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.
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.
No
one answered the door Friday morning at Karkoc's house on a residential
street in northeast Minneapolis. Karkoc had earlier declined to comment
on his wartime service when approached by the AP, and repeated efforts
to arrange an interview through his son were unsuccessful.
Late
Friday, Karkoc's son, Andriy Karkos, read a statement accusing AP of
defaming his father. Karkoc became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1959.
"My
father was never a Nazi," said Karkos, who uses a different spelling
for his last name. He also said the family wouldn't comment further
until it has obtained its own documents and reviewed witnesses and
sources.
Family attorney Philip Villaume said
Saturday that the family may comment further within a few days. "Their
intention is to investigate the matter and research it, and then they'll
make a further public statement," he said.
Polish
prosecutors announced Friday 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. In Germany, Nazis with
"command responsibility" can be charged with war crimes even if their
direct involvement in atrocities cannot be proven.
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 of Karkoc's lies as well as
the unit's role in atrocities is strong enough for deportation and war
crimes prosecution in Germany or Poland.
Former
German army officer Josef Scheungraber - a lieutenant like Karkoc - was
convicted in Germany in 2009 on charges of murder based on
circumstantial evidence that put him at the scene of a Nazi wartime
massacre in Italy as the ranking officer.
Members of Karkoc's 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 in a reprisal attack for the killing of a German SS
officer, though he did not say who gave the order.
"It
was all like a trance: setting the fires, the shooting, the
destroying," Malazhenski recalled, according to the 1967 statement found
by the AP in the archives of Warsaw's state-run Institute of National
Remembrance, which investigates and prosecutes German and Soviet crimes
on Poles during and after World War II.
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.
It
was not clear why Karkoc felt safe publishing his memoir, which is
available at the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library and
which the AP located online in an electronic Ukrainian library.
Karkoc
currently lives in a modest house in an area of Minneapolis that has a
significant Ukrainian population. He recently came to the door without
help of a cane or a walker. He would not comment on his wartime service:
"I don't think I can explain," he said.
Karkoc and his family are longtime members of the St. Michael's and St. George's Ukrainian Orthodox
Church.
"All
the time I am here, I know him as a good man, a good citizen," said the
Rev. Evhen Kumka, the church's pastor. "He's well known in the
congregation."
Kumka moved from Ukraine to
Minnesota 19 years ago to lead the congregation, and said Karkoc was
already active in the church. Kumka wouldn't say whether he'd spoken to
Karkoc about his past, but said he was skeptical.
"I don't think everything is correct," Kumka said. "As I know him, he is a good example for many people."
Karkoc
worked as a carpenter in Minneapolis, and appeared in a 1980 issue of
Carpenter magazine among a group celebrating 25 years of union
membership. He was a member and a secretary in the local branch of the
Ukrainian National Association, a fraternal organization, and voting
records obtained by the AP show he regularly voted in city, state and
general elections.
Karkoc's name surfaced when
a retired clinical pharmacologist who researched Nazi war crimes in his
free time came across it while looking into members of the SS Galician
Division who immigrated to Britain. He tipped off the AP when an
Internet search showed an address for Karkoc in Minnesota.
The
AP located Karkoc's U.S. Army intelligence file, which was declassified
by the National Archives in Maryland through a FOIA request. The Army
was responsible for processing visa applications after the war under the
Displaced Persons Act.
The intelligence file
said standard background checks found no red flags that would disqualify
Karkoc from entering the United States. But it also noted that it
lacked key information from the Soviet side regarding the verification
of his identity.
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.
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,
according to his memoirs, which say he was awarded an Iron Cross for
bravery.
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. In 1945, the legion was dissolved and
folded into the SS Galician Division.
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.
Justice
Department spokesman Michael Passman in Washington said the agency was
aware of the AP story and could not confirm or deny an investigation.
News
of Karkoc's past prompted anger from World War II survivors in
countries where the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion was active. In Poland,
Honorata Banach told the AP she wants Karkoc to apologize. She was 20
when she fled the Polish village of Chlaniow before it was burned down
by the legion.
"There was so much suffering,
so many orphans, so much pain," Banach said. She and her mother returned
the day after the attack, she said, to see that "everything was burned
down, even the fences, the trees. I could not even find my house."
Survivors told her the Ukrainian legion did it, she said.
Sam
Rafowitz, an 88-year-old Jewish resident of the Minneapolis suburb of
Minnetonka, grew up in Warsaw, Poland, and spent four years working in
concentration camps. He took a hard line after hearing the news about
Karkoc.
"I think they should put him on
trial," said Rafowitz, who lost his mother and other relatives at the
Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. He said soldiers in the
camp were German but that it was run by Ukrainians.
"You
don't forget," Rafowitz said. "For me, it's been almost close to 70
years those things happened, but I still know about it. I still remember
everything."
Menachem Rosensaft, who was born
in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, now teaches the law of
genocide and war crimes at several New York universities. He said Karkoc
is a reminder that the Holocaust and other genocides "cannot be viewed
as abstract history."
"I have every confidence
that if Mr. Karkoc was not already on the Justice Department's radar
screen, he now is," Rosensaft said.
