Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“We are facing an enemy who has the advantage of a gigantic, well-orchestrated, secret apparatus around the world,” said Bittman, who directed Czechoslovakia’s dirty tricks against the United States from 1954 to 1968. “The basic principle of the communist espionage imperium is to use and abuse every weakness of the opponent.”

John McMahon, CIA deputy director for operations, testified that forgery was one of the Soviet’s “major weapons” in its propaganda arsenal. The KGB office responsible for deploying that arsenal, he pointed out, was Service A of the First Chief Directorate, a bureau high on the Soviet organizational chart. Service A specialized in forgeries, the planting of press articles and rumors, disinformation, and media control.

McMahon noted that not only had the number of forgeries increased in recent years, but they also had become technically more sophisticated. “Forgeries are a preferred weapon,” he said, “because they do not involve a high degree of political risk… or high operational risk.” The hearing report contained an appendix of more than fifty pages of what the CIA classified as Soviet forgeries.

The Soviet forgery hearing reflected Ukrainian mistrust of the Soviet Union and its fear and hatred of the KGB. The Ukrainian community believed that Moscow was dangling John Demjanjuk as bait, and OSI had swallowed it. For Ukrainian Americans, the Nazi hunt in America had become an OSI-Jewish conspiracy with the KGB pulling the strings.

Given the émigré suspicion and hatred of the KGB, the Demjanjuk case stirred deep emotions in greater Cleveland’s thirty thousand Ukrainians. On Sunday, February 9—two days before the Demjanjuk trial opened—St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church held a standing-room-only service on behalf of Demjanjuk and his family. Conducted by four priests, it was a traditional old-world service with men on one side of the church and women on the other.

After the service, 450 people gathered in the church hall for a political rally and traditional Ukrainian music and dancing. The keynote speaker was Valentyn Moroz, a professor of history and a leader of the Committee Against the Use of Soviet Evidence (CAUSE). Moroz was a Ukrainian hero. A former dissident and member of the Ukrainian national movement, he had been arrested in Ukraine, tried, convicted on trumped-up KGB charges, and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. After fourteen years in a gulag, Moroz was released in a U.S.-Soviet prisoner swap in 1979.

“Soviet evidence and witnesses are bluffs,” Moroz said. “The Soviets don’t need Demjanjuk. He is not a political force. But what they are looking for is a precedent. If it works, they will try again and again. The Soviets are doing their work with American hands.”

As Demjanjuk supporters left St. Vladimir’s social hall, they dropped bills into cardboard boxes sitting at the doors. Demjanjuk’s trial had not yet begun, and his legal fees were already more than $112,000. CAUSE was a major contributor to the Demjanjuk Defense Fund, along with the neo-Nazis.

On February 10, 1981, the eve of Demjanjuk’s trial, seventy-five Ukrainians gathered in front of Cleveland’s old Federal Building on Public Square to hold a vigil. Most, if not all, were members of St. Vladimir’s parish. A nun with a large cross dangling from her neck waved a burning Soviet flag. Nearby, a group of Jewish students standing under a Star of David flag shouted, “All Ukrainians are Nazis! All Ukrainians kill Jews!” while U.S. marshals and mounted police stood guard around the perimeter of the square.

The next morning, an estimated 150 Ukrainian protesters marched in front of the Federal Building. Cleveland was in the middle of the biggest snowstorm of the season, and the demonstrators walked in freezing rain. Some carried signs demanding a ban on the use of Soviet-supplied information.

“We are protesting against a Soviet trial in American courts,” Moroz told reporters. Others held up yellowed copies of old newspapers featuring stories about Ukrainian peasants starving to death during Stalin’s forced famine. An elderly Ukrainian woman in a babushka held a poster that said, “Russia murdered 7,000,000 Ukrainians in the artificial famine in 1933 alone.”

That sign triggered another deep emotion running through the heart of the Ukrainian community—resentment against Jews, rarely talked about publicly for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, but deeply felt.

In their unrelenting emphasis on the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, Jews and most of the rest of the world paid scant attention to the estimated three to four million Ukrainians Stalin starved to death in the genocidal famine of 1932–33. Some Ukrainian scholars refer to it as the Ukrainian Holocaust. Add to that figure the estimated three to four million Ukrainian civilians killed during World War II and the resulting six to eight million Ukrainians murdered is staggering.

Why should six million Jews get all the attention and sympathy?

Then there was the Ukrainian community’s anger at the media. A few alleged Ukrainian Nazi collaborators got the spotlight, the rest stood in the shadows of suspicion. The media made it look as if the majority of Ukrainians were Jew-haters and murderers. What about the two million hardworking Ukrainians in America and Canada, their staunch anticommunism, and their refusal to forget their countrymen suffering behind the Iron Curtain?

Why did the media portray the North American Ukrainian community as a hiding place for Nazi collaborators? The simple fact was, if all of the 260 alleged Nazi collaborators on the OSI target list were Ukrainian, it would amount to only one one-thousandth of 1 percent of the total Ukrainian population in America and Canada.

Why did the media overlook the role Ukrainian nationalists played in World War II? Twenty percent of the Red Army that fought the Nazis were Ukrainians. Thousands of Ukrainians dogged the Nazis in partisan units. Some Ukrainians were even imprisoned in concentration camps for helping Jews. And the Ukrainian Catholic metropolitan, Andrei Sheptytsky, was one of the few high-ranking Catholic Church leaders who spoke out specifically against Hitler and the systematic murder of Jews—unlike Pope Pius XII, who never condemned Hitler or Nazism by name, and Archbishop Stepinac, who supported the Nazis and the Ustasha in Croatia.

Why couldn’t the media understand the difference between a Ukrainian and a Volksdeutsche living in Ukraine? It was true that some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis as Einsatzkommandos. Historians placed the number at an estimated one thousand out of a population of forty million. But historians failed to point out that the majority of those Einsatzkommandos were Volksdeutsche , not real Ukrainians. Didn’t every other country in Europe, from France to Lithuania, have its share of Nazi collaborators? What about Japan? Why pick on Ukrainians, the strongest anticommunist community in America?

Finally, Ukrainian Americans were deeply upset at the inherent bias of the denaturalization process. It denied the defendant a jury trial because the issue at stake was civil , not criminal. But if an American citizen was entitled to a jury trial over a leg splintered in a car accident, why wasn’t he entitled to a jury when the “precious gift” of U.S. citizenship was at stake? And why didn’t Jewish judges and prosecutors disqualify themselves from OSI cases?

Didn’t OSI and the American legal system understand that a guilty verdict in a denaturalization trial did more than reduce the defendant to a man without a country? It might be a death sentence. Could there be any doubt that if John Demjanjuk were deported to the Soviet Union, as OSI wanted, he would be executed based on the verdict of a single American judge, perhaps a biased Jew like Julius Hoffman? What would have happened to Frank Walus if he had not gone to expensive lengths to prove the government had the wrong man?