Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The argument was as ignorant as it was specious. Those who used it either did not know, or chose to forget, that the Nazi war machine killed more than thirty million European civilians who weren’t Jews, either directly through execution, deliberate starvation, and overwork, or indirectly through hunger and disease. Thirty million was more than the combined population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Dallas, San Diego, Detroit, and San Francisco. They were men, women, and children from the countries of Americans’ Christian grandparents: Poland, Bohemia, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. That fact alone made Nazi war crimes everybody’s problem.

After she finished reading the files, Elizabeth Holtzman felt an anger so intense that she made a promise to devote herself to getting as many Nazi criminals as she could deported, hopefully to stand trial for war crimes. Time was running out. Anger aside, Holtzman was a pragmatist. To find, prosecute, and deport even a thousand of the Nazi collaborators hiding in America would be a miracle. A hundred would be a victory.

When she got back to Capitol Hill, Holtzman called a press conference. The United States had wasted nearly thirty precious years. Six alleged Nazi collaborators on the Karbach list were already dead, and war criminals were literally getting away with mass murder. The rat in the woodpile was beginning to stink.

With cannons of outrage blazing, Holtzman accused the INS of “appalling laxness and superficiality… creating a safe haven for alleged Nazi war criminals” and of being “haphazard, uncoordinated and unprofessional.”

The release of the INS files to Holtzman, resulting in the fiery press conference, was the fourth domino to tumble in the row leading to John Demjanjuk. Three names on the Karbach list troubled Holtzman deeply. They sat festering under her skin like slivers. Two were alleged Nazi collaborators—Andrija Artukovic and Valerian Trifa. The third was a German scientist named Hubertus Strughold.

Andrija Artukovic was a leader in the Croatian Ustasha, whose fascist thugs (Ustashi) killed, or delivered to the SS, every Jew, communist, and Gypsy they could find. Their specialty was the slaughter of Orthodox Christian Serbs. Their brutality reached a new low in a war that was no stranger to inhumanity.

“Some Ustashi collected the eyes of the Serbs they had killed… proudly displaying them and other human organs in the cafes of Zagreb,” one observer wrote. “Even their German and Italian allies were dismayed at their excesses.”

The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Ustashi were inimical and barred them from entering the United States.

At first, the Catholic-based ethnic cleansing of Serbs followed a calculated rule of thumb: Kill a third, deport a third, convert a third. The formula didn’t work. So many Serbs chose conversion that “Catholic priests were besieged by crowds of panic-stricken men, women, and children clamoring for admission to the Church of Rome.”

With conversion no longer practical, the Ustashi simply murdered between 330,000 and 390,000 Serbs, numbers roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis. Much of the killing of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communists took place in the Jasenovac concentration camp, whose commandant was a Ustasha Franciscan priest, one of dozens of Ustasha Franciscans who took part in the ethnic cleansing.

As Ustasha minister of the interior and minister of justice and religion in the Nazi puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia, Andrija Artukovic was frequently called the “Himmler of Croatia,” responsible for implementing the genocides. After the war, Yugoslavia tried and sentenced him in absentia to life in prison.

Artukovic entered the United States with his wife, Anamaria, and their three children in 1948 on a ninety-day visa under the name Alois Anich. He joined his brother John in Surfside, California, where Andrija worked as a bookkeeper for John’s sewer and road construction company. When his visa expired, Artukovic never bothered to renew it. To make sure his brother wouldn’t be deported, John borrowed a move from the Nicolae Malaxa playbook. He and his rich friends “convinced” their congressman to introduce a private bill requesting that the Justice Department grant Andrija Artukovic permanent U.S. residency.

The bill was killed by Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, who was no more welcoming to Artukovic than he had been to Malaxa. But in spite of congressional refusal to grant Artukovic permanent residency and an eventual INS investigation into his wartime activities, Artukovic remained in the United States.

When Elizabeth Holtzman closed Artukovic’s incomplete file, she was torn between puzzlement and righteous anger. An alleged notorious Ustasha war criminal was basking in the California sun. He wasn’t a U.S. citizen, didn’t enjoy permanent residency, and lacked a valid visa.

Was someone protecting Andrija Artukovic? If so, who? And why?

Viorel Trifa was a top-echelon Romanian Iron Guardist and the beneficiary of Nicolae Malaxa’s guns and cash. A theologian, historian, and Gestapo school graduate, he was editor of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard newspaper Libertatea and leader of the nationwide National Union of Romanian Christian Students. The group was an anticommunist and anti-Semitic fraternity of university students and one of the Iron Guard’s most rabid cadres. An adjunct commander in the Iron Guard, Trifa was a charismatic speaker. Like Hitler, he could whip a crowd into a frenzy. But unlike Hitler, who used anti-Semitism as political glue, Trifa actually believed that communism was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

The Nuremberg Tribunal defined propagandists like Trifa as war criminals because they made genocide palatable to the public.

Trifa and the Iron Guard presented Hitler with two dilemmas. Although the Führer applauded their anti-Semitic zeal, he didn’t trust them because he couldn’t control them. Because Germany had no oil fields of its own, the oil deposits in Romania were critical to the Reich. To keep the oil flowing, however, Hitler needed political stability in that country. The Iron Guard was about as stable as nitro in a jar.

Hitler assigned SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, chief of the SS intelligence corps in Romania (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), to keep an eye on the Guard. Baron von Bolschwing was a good choice. He was a loyal Nazi and an aide to Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Bolschwing’s job was to craft solutions to the Jewish problem. His new assignment in Bucharest was to win the confidence of the Iron Guard, then report its every political move back to Berlin.

Nuremberg defined the SD as a criminal organization and the Displaced Persons Commission ruled its members to be inimical and barred them from entering the United States.

As a counterintelligence officer, Bolschwing knew that if he befriended the twenty-one-year-old Trifa, he would have entry into the inner sanctum of the Iron Guard (also called Legionnaires). Bolschwing stuck to Trifa like Liquid Nails.

Hitler’s worst Romanian nightmare became real in January 1941. On January 20, Trifa signed and issued an anti-Semitic and antigovernment manifesto prompted by the assassination of a high-ranking German officer in Bucharest. The manifesto, which was proclaimed over the radio on January 20, condemned the political regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu for protecting the “Satanic” assassins who had murdered the German officer and for allowing Jews in his government.