Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“We beseech General Antonescu,” the manifesto concluded, “to do justice by [the] Romanians. We demand the replacement of all Masonic and Judized persons in the government.

“We demand a Legionnaire Government.”

The next night, January 21, between three thousand and ten thousand Iron Guard students rallied in the square in front of the state university to hear Trifa deliver a rousing, thirty-minute speech over a loudspeaker expanding the incendiary themes of his manifesto. He demanded the overthrow of the Antonescu regime and the establishment of a new Iron Guard government. He went on to praise Hitler as the savior of the world and demanded the execution of all Jews and Freemasons, whom the Iron Guard considered antifascist and pro-Jewish.

After the speech, Trifa led an orderly column of Iron Guard students through the streets of Bucharest singing Legionnaire songs and chanting “Death to Freemasons and Kikes.” As they passed the German legation, where von Bolschwing lived, they shouted “Sieg heil!” and “Long live Germany!” By the time they reached Antonescu’s headquarters, the crowd had swelled to twenty thousand angry, chanting students.

Trifa’s call to action ignited a military coup and a three-day, anti-Semitic pogrom in Bucharest that quickly spread to eleven other Romanian cities. Iron Guard Green Shirts attacked the regular army and stormed into the capital’s Jewish quarters.

Besides the usual burning of synagogues and the desecration of sacred Torah scrolls, Iron Guardists hung Jews on hooks in a meatpacking plant and skinned them alive, later using the skin for trophy lampshades and shoes. They cut throats in a parody of the kosher killing of chickens and hung “Kosher Meat” signs around the necks of the dead. They raped, stoned, and decapitated. One eyewitness described a group of Green Shirts kicking three naked Jewish women into a temple they had set on fire: “The wretched victims’ shrieks of despair tore through the sky.” When the four-day carnage finally ended, between five hundred and one thousand Bucharest Jews had been tortured and butchered.

After government soldiers quashed the leaderless coup, thousands of Iron Guardists scurried off to European capitals to set up intelligence cells and to plot the eventual liberation of Romania. They skipped town so fast that they left behind two hundred trucks filled with plundered jewels and cash, and a very unhappy Marshal Antonescu. In retaliation, he ordered the execution of every Iron Guardist foolish enough not to flee. Trifa was at the top of the hit list, but Antonescu couldn’t find him. Von Bolschwing was hiding his friend in the German legation.

The Reich welcomed the exiled pro-Nazi Guardists into Germany and provided them protective custody. Trifa ended up in Dachau. Not in the Dachau prison, but in the prison’s guesthouse, where he enjoyed a private room with heat, free access to a community lounge with a radio, and a monthly stipend for cigarettes, books, and movies. When he developed bleeding ulcers, the Nazis sent him to the best German hospitals and health spas.

In August 1944, the SS released Trifa from Dachau. He eventually made his way to Italy, where he taught history at a Catholic college.

Meanwhile, Romania sentenced him to death in absentia. Eyewitnesses testified at the trial that Viorel Trifa was more than just an instigator of carnage. He personally gave execution orders, they said. In one instance, according to an eyewitness interviewed by the FBI, Trifa ordered a squad of Green Shirts to cut out the tongues and pluck out the eyes of three families of Jews, then toss the bodies out a three-story window one at a time. The eyewitness accounts have never been independently authenticated.

Trifa received a visa to the United States in 1950, two years before John Demjanjuk. He told immigration officials that he had been the editor of a religious newspaper but was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau, where he spent four years before escaping. He denied being a member of the Iron Guard, which would have excluded him from U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) knew that Trifa was lying. In its background check, it had learned that he was indeed an Iron Guard member and a propagandist ineligible for a U.S. visa. How and why the United States granted him a visa, given his known Nazi collaboration, is not clear.

Like Demjanjuk, Trifa settled in Cleveland, home to the oldest and largest Romanian community in America and its Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC). While editing the church’s newspaper, Solia (Herald), Trifa found himself caught in the middle of an unholy episcopal war that would both define and destroy him.

The ROC was hopelessly split over the authority of its spiritual head, Romanian patriarch Justinian Marina. The problem was that Justinian, who claimed an unbroken episcopal bloodline back to the apostles, was a puppet of the Romanian communist government. It was no secret that Romania wanted control over the fifty-five ROC parishes in the United States and Canada. The majority of Romanian Americans, who were more anticommunist than religious purists, rejected the “Red Patriarch”; a minority led by Father Andrei Moldovan accepted him as their true spiritual leader.

At the invitation of Justinian and with the approval of Romania’s communist government, Father Moldovan went to Romania, where the patriarch anointed him bishop. Back in the United States, he declared himself the valid leader of the ROC. The Romanian American majority immediately elected Viorel Trifa to oppose him. That choice posed a major problem. To be a bishop, one had to be a priest. Trifa was a layman, and Moldovan and his fellow bishops refused to either ordain him a priest or consecrate him a bishop.

To solve the problem, Trifa supporters went to other U.S. Orthodox episcopates looking for someone willing to do the job. They ultimately settled on the Ukrainian Orthodox metropolitan, head of John Demjanjuk’s church. The Ukrainian archbishop agreed to ordain and consecrate the Romanian Trifa even though the Moldovan faction warned him that Trifa “was a Nazi collaborator responsible for the murderer [sic] of thousands of Romanian Jews.” The archbishop couldn’t have cared less. To him, Trifa was a loyal anticommunist and a war hero.

In shotgun fashion, the archbishop ordained Trifa subdeacon, then deacon, then priest. He received Trifa’s vows as a monk, then consecrated him Bishop Valerian Trifa. The feast of St. Valerian is January 21, the day the pogrom took place. The newly minted bishop moved from Cleveland to the Romanian American episcopate’s headquarters, a 250-acre farm in Grass Lake, Michigan, fifty miles west of Detroit.

Before long, Trifa was nationally recognized as a religious leader. As head of the forty-five-thousand-member ROC, he became a governor on the board of the National Council of Churches. And at the recommendation of Nicolae Malaxa, his and Richard Nixon’s friend, he delivered the opening prayer of the 1955 session of the United States Senate.

While Bishop Valerian was caring for the spiritual welfare of his Romanian Orthodox flock, including dozens if not hundreds of Iron Guard war criminals, Charles Kremer, a Romanian American Jew, was building a file on Viorel Trifa. Like Javert chasing Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris, Kremer had been on Trifa’s trail for more than thirty years in between filling teeth as a Manhattan dentist.

Then, one day in the early 1970s, Bishop Moldovan whispered in Kremer’s ear that the balding and bespectacled Archbishop Valerian was none other than the Viorel Trifa he was looking for. Kremer wasted no time. He wrote to President Nixon demanding an immediate investigation of Trifa, unaware that Nixon was tied to the bishop through Malaxa. INS deputy commissioner James Greene—the same Greene who tried to snow Holtzman during the congressional oversight hearing—answered Kremer’s letter. “These charges were exhaustively examined and extensively investigated by this Service over a period of years,” Greene wrote. “The conclusion was reached that grounds for deportation proceedings—or that he was excludible at the time of his entry—had not been established.”