Paul H. Rosenberg - The Nation
/ Foreign Policy In Focus
This article is a joint
publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In
Focus.
As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for
Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the
region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one
school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the United
States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ
Bellant in his book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South
End Press, 1991). Bellant's exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany's World
War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in
the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine, which
is why he was the logical choice to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi
and fascist elements among the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems
to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukrainians aren’t
Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their
true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the
spotlight.
Your book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, exposed the
deep involvement in the Republican Party of Nazi elements from Central and
Eastern Europe, including Ukrainians, dating back to World War II and even
before. As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in the last few weeks, there have been
scattered mentions of a fascist or neo-fascist element, but somehow that never
seems to warrant further comment or explanation. I can’t think of anyone better
to shed light on what’s not being said about that element. The danger of Russian
belligerence is increasingly obvious, but this unexamined fascist element poses
dangers of its own. What can you tell us about this element and those
dangers?
The element has a long history, of a long record that speaks for itself,
when that record is actually known and elaborated on. The key organization in
the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists [OUN], or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas [OUN-B].
They’re the group behind the Svoboda party, which got a number of key positions
in the new interim regime. The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off
from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s, began a campaign of
assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them.
As World War II approached, they made an alliance with the Nazi powers.
They formed several military formations, so that when Germany invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at
the time, where their base was, Lvov, or Lwow, it has a variety of spellings
[Lviv today]. They went in, and there’s a documented history of them
participating in the identification and rounding up Jews in that city, and
assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. They were
also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine
during the war.
Without getting deeply involved in that whole history, the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists to this day defend their wartime role. They were backers
of forming the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was the all-Ukrainian division
that became an armed element on behalf of the Germans, and under overall German
control. They helped encourage its formation, and after the war, right at the
end of the war, it was called the First Ukrainian division. They still glorify
that history of that SS division, and they have a veterans organization that
obviously doesn’t have too many of members left, but they formed a veterans
division of that.
If you look at insignia being worn in Kiev in the street demonstrations and
marches, you'll see SS division insignia still being worn. In fact, I was
looking at photographs last night of it, and there was a whole formation
marching, not with the 14th Division, but with the Second Division. It was a
large division that did major battle around Ukraine, and these marchers were
wearing the insignia on the armbands of the Second Division.
So this is a very clear record, and the OUN, even in its postwar
publications, has called for ethno-genetically pure Ukrainian territory, which
of course is simply calling for purging Jews, Poles and Russians from what they
consider Ukrainian territory. Also, current leaders of Svoboda have made
blatantly anti-Semitic remarks that call for getting rid of Muscovite Jews and
so forth. They use this very coarse, threatening language that anybody knowing
the history of World War II would tremble at. If they were living here, it would
seem like they would start worrying about it.
Obviously these people don’t hold monopoly power in Ukraine, but they
stepped up and the United States has been behind the Svoboda party and these
Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, the US connections to them go back to World War
II, and the United States has had a longstanding tie to the OUN, through the
intelligence agencies—initially military intelligence, later the CIA.
Your book discusses a central figure in the OUN, Yaroslav Stetsko, who was
politically active for decades here in America. What can you tell us about his
history?
Yaroslav Stetsko was the number-two leader of the OUN during World War II
and thereafter. In 1959, Stepan Bandera, who was head of the OUN, was killed,
and that’s when Stetsko assumed the leadership. Stetsko was the guy who actually
marched into Lvov with the German army on June 30, 1941. The OUN issued a
proclamation at that time under his name praising and calling for glory to the
German leader Adolf Hitler and how they’re going to march arm in arm for Ukraine
and so forth. After the war, he was part of the key leadership that got picked
up by the Americans.
There’s a number of accounts I’ve seen, at least three credible reports, on
how they were in the displaced persons camp—the Allied forces set up displaced
persons camps and picked up tens of thousands of these former allies of Hitler
from countries all over the East—Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania. There weren’t
Polish collaborators; I think most people know the Germans heavily persecuted
and murdered millions of Polish residents—but Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and so
forth, Belorussia. They had them in these camps they built and organized them,
where the Ukrainians were assassinating their Ukrainian nationalist rivals so
they would be the undisputed leaders of Ukrainian nationalist movement, so they
would get the sponsorship of the United States to continue their political
operation, and they were successful in that regard. So when Bandera was out of
the picture, Stetsko became the undisputed leader of Ukrainian
nationalists.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 under German sponsorship
organized a multinational force to fight on behalf of the retreating German
army. After the battle of Stalingrad in ’43, the Germans felt a heightened need
to get more allies, and so the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross,
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and others with military formations
in place to assist came together and formed the united front called the
Committee of Subjugated Nations, and again worked on behalf of the German
military. In 1946, they renamed it the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN.
Stetsko was the leader of that until he died in 1986.
I mention this in part because the OUN tries to say, Well, during the war
we fought the Germans and the Communists. The fact of the matter is that they
were the leadership of this whole multinational alliance on behalf of the
Germans the last two years of the war and in the war thereafter. All the postwar
leaders of the unrepentant Nazi allies were under the leadership of Yaroslav
Stetsko.
What happened when Stetsko, and others like him from other German allied
forces, came to the United States?
In the United States, when they came, his groups organized "captive
nations" committees. They became, supposedly, the representatives of people who
were being oppressed in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries by the Soviet
Union. They were, in fact, being given an uncritical blank check to represent
the voices of all these nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact, when in fact
they represented the most extreme elements of each of the national
communities.
The Captive Nations Committee in Washington, DC, for instance, was run by
the person who headed the Ukrainian organization of nationalists; that was true
in a number of places. In my hometown area near Detroit, as well, they played a
major role. In the early 1950s, when they were resettled in the United States,
there were at least 10,000 of them that were resettled, when you look at all the
nationalities. They became politically active through the Republican National
Committee, because it was really the Eisenhower administration that made the
policy decision in the early 1950s, and brought them in. They set up these
campaign organizations, every four years they would mobilize for the Republican
candidate, whoever it would be, and some of them, like Richard Nixon in 1960,
actually had close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron
Guard, and some of these other groups.
When Nixon ran for president in 1968, he made a promise to these leaders
that they would—if he won the presidency, he would make them the ethnic outreach
arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis, so they wouldn’t
be a quadrennial presence, but a continuing presence in the Republican Party.
And he made that promise through a guy named Laszlo Pasztor, who served five
years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity. He was
prosecuted in 1946 by the non-Communist government that actually had control of
Hungary at the time (there was a period from ’45 to ’48 when the Hungarian
Communist Party didn’t run Hungary). They were the ones who prosecuted him. He
had served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin; he served
in the Berlin embassy of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. This is the guy
that got picked to organize all the ethnic groups, and the only people that got
brought in were the Nazi collaborators.
They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all
political stripes. There were no African-Americans or Jewish affiliates either.
It was just composed of these elements, and for a while they had a German
affiliate, but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate
caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained.
Your book was researched and published in the 1980s. What was happening by
that point in time, after these groups had been established for more than a
decade?
I went to their meetings in the 1980s, and they put out material that
really made clear who they were. One of their 1984 booklets praised the pro-Nazi
Ustashi regime in Croatia; these Ustashi killed an estimated 750,000 people and
burned them alive in their own camp in Croatia. And here they are praising the
founding of this regime, and acknowledging that it was associated with the
Nazis, and it was signed by the chairman of the Republican National Committee.
You couldn’t make this stuff up! It was just crazy.
I interviewed the Cossack guy; he showed me his pension from service in the
SS in World War II, and how he was affiliated with free Nazi groups in the
United States, and he was just very unrepentant. These are the umbrellas that
were called "Captive Nations Committees" by these people that Stetsko was over,
and was part of, too. The Reagan White House brought him in, and promoted him as
a major leader and did a big dinner. Jeane Kirkpatrick [UN Ambassador during the
Reagan administration] was part of it, George H.W. Bush as Vice President, of
course, Reagan—and Stetsko was held up as a great leader. And proclamations were
issued on his behalf.
When Bush Senior was running for president in 1988, he came to these,
basically one of the leading locations of the Ukrainian nationalists in North
America, which is just outside of Detroit, a suburb of Detroit, to their
cultural center, and one of their foremost leaders in the world is headquartered
out of there. At the time, he got Bush to come there and they denounced the OSI,
and Bush just shook his head; he wouldn’t say anything about it.
The OSI was the Office of Special Investigations. It was investigating the
presence of Nazi war criminals in the United States, and deporting those who
were found to have lied on their history when they applied to come into the
United States after the war. They had deported a number of people from all over
the United States. They had a lot of open investigations, and all these émigré
Nazis were trying to bring all the political pressure they could to stop these
investigations, including the Ukrainian nationalists.
So they denounced them, the OSI investigations, in front of Bush. Bush
nodded his head, but he wouldn’t say anything because he didn’t want to sound
like he was sympathetic to the Nazi war criminals, but at the same time he
didn’t want to offend his hosts by disputing the issue with them. So, the issue
of World War II was still being played out over four decades later, in the
politics of the presidency, and unfortunately Bush and Reagan continued to be on
the side that we defeated in World War II.
What was the response when your book came out, with all this information?
How was the information received, and what was the political reaction?
Prior to the book’s publication, Washington Jewish Week had done a story
about some of the ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign and their history, like
denying the Holocaust, or being involved with these émigré Nazi groups. They
named a couple of them that weren’t part of the Heritage Groups Council, but
they were part of the Bush campaign.
Then, when I published the book, it brought out a lot more names, and the
Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe did stories on them. It got to the
point where when a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer would call them about
one of their ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign, the standard response was,
he’s no longer part of the campaign, and they’d say that almost as soon as the
name would get mentioned. So that they would call that person—and I’ll give the
example of Florian Galdau, he was, he ran the Romanian Iron Guard in New York
City. He had a wartime record. [Romanian Archbishop Valerian] Trifa himself was
implicated in the mass killing of Jews in Bucharest in 1941, I believe. Galdau’s
record is clear, because when Trifa was prosecuted he was one of the people
targeted by the Office of Special Investigations, and he was forced into
deportation in the 1980s, but in those records, they identify Florian Galdau as
one of his operatives, so his history is known—except, apparently, to the Bush
campaign.
So when he was identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer, they immediately
said he wasn’t part of it, so the Inquirer called Florian Galdau, and he said,
“No, I’m part of it. They never said anything to me. As far as I know I’m still
part of the campaign.” And that was the pattern.
The Republican National Committee said after the election that they were
going to put a blue ribbon committee together and do an investigation of the
charges in my book. I was never contacted, nobody affiliated with the book
project, the publisher wasn’t contacted. None of the sources I worked with was
contacted. And after about a year, with nobody raising any issues or questions
about it, they just folded it up and they said, well, we have not had the
resources to investigate this matter.
I did publish an op-ed in The New York Times about two weeks after the
election was over, and I think that was the last time anybody said anything
publicly about it that got any kind of forum. I think they were allowed to just
die and wither away—that is, those leaders. The Republican idea was probably to
bring in another generation of people who were born in the United States as
these émigré’s died off, but they never did anything about this history that
Nixon had bequeathed them with. The Reagan White House had really made deep
political commitments and alliances with them. They didn’t want to look like
they turned their back on them, and Bush wanted them for his re-election
campaign, so he wasn’t going to turn his back on them either.
If you want an anecdote, I know that 60 Minutes was working on a piece that
Bradley’s team was working on. Nancy Reagan herself called the executive
producer and said that we would really like it if you wouldn’t do this story,
and they killed it. Because, basically, it’s not just about Nazis and the
Republican National Committee and the White House. It inevitably raises the
question of, who are they, how did they get here, who sponsored them? And it
goes back to the intelligence agencies at that point. And some people don’t like
treading there; if it’s tied to an intelligence agency, they prefer to just stay
away from the subject. So, some people at 60 Minutes were frustrated by it, but
that’s what happened. I think that they were able to effectively kill the story
when people tried to cover it. They were able to persuade news managers to not
delve into it too much.
What’s happened since you wrote your book, and most of the World War II
generation died off? What have the OUN and its allies been up to since then that
we should be aware of?
Once the OUN got sponsored by the American security establishment
intelligence agencies, they were embedded in a variety of ways in Europe as
well, like Radio Free Europe, which is headquartered in Munich. A lot of these
groups in the ABN were headquartered in Munich under the sponsorship of Radio
Free Europe. From there, they ran various kinds of operations where they were
trying to do work inside the Warsaw Pact countries. When the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, a number of them moved back into Ukraine as well as the other
respective countries and began setting up operations there, and organizing
political parties. They reconstituted the veterans group of the Waffen SS, they
held marches in the 1990s in Ukraine, and they organized political parties, in
alliance with the United States, and became part of what was called the Orange
Revolution in 2004, when they won the election there.
The prime minister [a reference to Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine
from 2005 to 2010] was closely allied with them. They worked with the new
government to get veterans benefits for the Ukrainian SS division veterans, and
they started establishing the statues and memorials and museums for Stepan
Bandera, who was the leader of the OUN, and who I should say were despised by
other Ukrainian nationalists because of their methods, because they were extreme
and violent toward rival Ukrainian nationalist groups. So Bandera wasn’t a
universal hero, but this group was so influential, in part because of its US
connections, that if you go online and you Google "Lviv" and the word "Bandera"
you’ll see monuments and statues and large posters and banners of Bandera’s
likeness and large monuments—permanent erected monuments—on behalf of Bandera so
they made this guy like he’s the George Washington of Ukraine.
That government was in power until 2010, when there was another election,
and a new regime was elected with a lot of support from the East. Ukrainian
nationalist groupings around the Orange Revolution were sharply divided against
each other, and there was rampant corruption, and people voted them out. The
United States was very aggressive in trying to keep the nationalists in power,
but they lost the election. The United States was spending money through the
National Endowment for Democracy, which was pumping money into various Ukrainian
organizations, and they were doing the same thing in Russia and many other
countries around the world as well. We’re talking about many millions of dollars
a year to affect the politics of these countries.
When the occupations came in Independence Square in Kiev late last year,
you can see Svoboda’s supporters and you can hear their leaders in the
Parliament making blatant anti-Semitic remarks. The leader of the Svoboda party
went to Germany to protest the prosecution of John Demjanjuk, who was the
Ukrainian who was settled in the United States who was implicated as a
concentration camp guard in the killing of innocent people. The German courts
found him guilty, and the Svoboda leadership went to Germany to complain about
convicting this guy. The reason? They said they didn’t want any Ukrainians
tainted with it, because they live a lie: that no Ukrainian had anything to do
with the German Nazi regime, when history betrays them, and their own
affiliations betray them. But they don’t like that being out there publicly, so
they always protest the innocence of any Ukrainian being charged with anything,
regardless of what the evidence is.
Your book was an important revelation but was not alone. Your book notes
that Jack Anderson reported on the pro-Nazi backgrounds of some of the ethnic
advisors as far back as 1971, yet when your report came out almost two decades
later, everyone responded with shock, surprise and even denial. What lessons
should we draw from this history of buried history? And how should it influence
our thinking about the unfolding crisis in Ukraine?
I don’t believe it’s ever too late to become familiarized and educated
about the history of this phenomenon—both the wartime history and our postwar
collaboration with these folks. There were a number of exposés written about the
émigré Nazis. There was a 1979 book called Wanted, and it did a number of case
stories of these people being brought into the United States, including the
Trifa story. Christopher Simpson did a book called Blowback that discussed the
policy decisions; it’s an incredible book. He’s a professor at American
University, and he did years of research through the Freedom of Information Act
and archives, and got the policy documents under which the decisions were made
to bring these folks together, and not just into the United States but to deploy
them around the world.
Like my book, it didn’t get the attention it deserved. The New York Times
book reviewer was negative toward the book. There are people who really don’t
want to touch this stuff. There’s a lot of people who don’t want it touched. I
think it’s really important for people who believe in openness and transparency
and democratic values, who don’t want to see hate groups come back to power in
other parts of the world, to know what happened.
There aren't very many Americans who really even know that the Waffen SS
was a multinational force. That’s been kind of kept out of the received history.
Otherwise people would know that there were Ukrainian Nazis, Hungarian Nazis,
Latvian Nazis, and they were all involved in the mass murder of their fellow
citizens, if they were Jewish, or even if they were co-nationalists that were on
the other side of the issue of the war. They were just mass murderers, across
Eastern Europe. And that history, those facts, aren’t even well-known. A lot of
people didn’t even know this phenomenon existed.
I think all Americans have a responsibility to know what their government
is doing in the foreign policy in Europe as well as elsewhere around the world,
as well as Latin America, as well as Africa. Since our policy was to uphold
apartheid in South Africa, why weren’t Americans challenging that more? They
began challenging that in the '80s, but the apartheid regime was run by the Nazi
party. They were allied with Germany in World War II. They were the Nationalist
party and they took power in 1948 and the United States backed that for decades.
We backed the death squads in Latin America, even though they massacred tens of
thousands of people—200,000 people in Guatemala alone. Americans aren’t being
attentive to what their government is doing abroad, even though it’s being done
with their tax dollars and in their name, and I think we just have a general
responsibility.
I went to these meetings, I went to these conferences, I went over a period
of years. I met with them directly, most of the people I wrote about, I met with
them personally or in group meetings. People can’t afford to do that on their
own, timewise, but there’s enough literature out there so they can read about
it. They will get enough of a handle to get what the real picture is, to demand
change. I’m not totally partisan: I think the Republican Party was extreme on
this, but the Democrats folded and didn’t challenge this when they knew it was
going on.
There is an old Roman poet who once said truth does not say one thing and
wisdom another. I’m a believer in that. Tell the truth and wisdom will
follow.
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