-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Inside The League
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson�1986
Dodd, Mead & Company
79 Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN 0-396-08517-2
322pps � out-of-print/one edition
[re-print/first edition available from:
W. Clement Stone, P M A Communications, Incorporated]
--[2]--
TWO
A good Ustashi is one who can use a knife to cut a child from the womb of its
mother.
Ante Pavelic
Croatian Fuhrer
ON A SEARINGLY COLD December day, one of the authors turned into the driveway
of a nondescript tract house in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester. A short,
elderly man in an overcoat waited for him on the front step, stamping his
shoes against the concrete to fight the cold. It was Janos, after months of
phone calls and letters, he had finally agreed to the interview.
The eighty-year-old emigre ushered the author into the living room of his
modest home. "Perhaps we should have postponed our meeting," Janos said,
sinking onto the uncomfortable couch. "With these winds, I was worried about
you."
The wall behind Janos was studded with two dozen framed photographs,
medallions, ribbons, and plaques. They ranged from citations from the deposed
king of his native country to letters of appreciation from the Republican
Party of New York for his selfless dedication. There was even one from Chiang
Kai-shek, the late generalissimo of Taiwan. The bright ribbons and shiny
metal did not, however, alter the general dreariness of the room, the house,
or the neighborhood.
The interview lasted nearly five hours, during which Janos's wife produced a
steady stream of sandwiches, coffee, and biscuits. Every time this doting,
plain woman in her late sixties entered the room, Janos stopped talking,
turned to her, and smiled, love showing in his sparkling eyes.
The author asked Janos about other emigres.
"Chirila Ciuntu? Very strong. Big, powerful arms. Short. Doesn't speak
English very much."
Yaroslav Stetsko?
"Stetsko." Janos sat back, cocked his head, and looked imperious. "Aloof. Not
arrogant, but aloof. He always has this took about him. He always looks ...
angry."
And Stejpan Hefer?
"Ah, Stejpan!" the old man cried, leaping to his feet. He puffed out his
chest, put his hands on his hips, and strutted about the small room. "This is
how Stejpan walked. And when he spoke, he always shouted and waved his hands.
Very intense, very emotional."
When the author was leaving, Janos resumed his vigil on the doorstep, waving
and watching after the car until it disappeared from sight.
There was no way one could dislike Janos. His solicitude and warmth, the
teenage adoration he showed toward his wife, all gave one a feeling of
affection for the old man.
Which was disquieting, because Janos was a Nazi war criminal. The friends he
had caricatured in his Chester living room were also war criminals.
While there is no evidence that Janos ever directly participated in
atrocities, his three friends certainly had. Each had played key roles in
three different genocide programs, in Romania, in the Ukraine, and in
Croatia, that had exterminated at least two million people.
The common bond of all four men was membership in the World Anti-Communist
League.
The League was founded in 1966 as a public relations arm for the governments
of Taiwan and South Korea. It has since grown to be something far more
important: an instrument for the practice of unconventional
warfare�assassinations, death squads, sabotage�throughout the world.
There is nothing new about the World Anti-Communist League. Its stated
purpose, to form a unified front against communism, was first expostulated in
Hitter's anti-Comintern policy. Likewise, the means it has chosen to fight
communism�unconventional warfare, counterterror, political warfare, it goes
by a variety of names�were first employed by the Nazis.
While the employment of unconventional warfare is certainly not solely the
domain of the ultra-right, as the pogroms in Stalinist Russia and Khmer Rouge
Cambodia make clear, it was the Nazis and their collaborators who "best"
employed it with such hideous efficiency.
The World Anti-Communist League hasn't merely borrowed these concepts or
tactics from the Nazis; it has incorporated the Nazis themselves as well.
Many of the major figures behind the creation and promotion of the League are
men who first practiced their brand of warfare in the streets, ghettos, and
concentration camps of World War II Europe.
The deserted gas chambers, ovens, and mass graves of Treblinka and Auschwitz
are not the only relics of the Nazis' and their collaborators' impact on
civilization. There are living relics scattered in every corner of the globe.
Even before the dust had settled on Hitler's shattered Third Reich, many of
those responsible were escaping to work for the formation of a Fourth Reich.
>From their havens, they have nurtured their cause and kept it alive, they
have recruited younger generations, and they have formed networks for safety
and strength, bonds that remain to this day.
When most people think of Nazis, two images are evoked: aging war criminals,
the Josef Mengeles and Klaus Barbies living in frightened obscurity somewhere
in South America, or else of disenchanted youths who, in brown shirts and
jackboots, vandalize synagogues and march through city streets. But there is
a third type of Nazi, who is far more powerful, public, and dangerous than
the other two: these are the Croatians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Latvians who
carried out the German-dictated massacres, who never faced a Nuremberg, and
who joined the World Anti-Communist League.
The participation of these Eastern Europeans in the Holocaust remains one of
the least-told stories in modern history. The reason this is so is simple:
many if them were recruited by American and British intelligence, brought
into the United States and Canada, allowed to rise to prominent positions in
their emigre communities, and ultimately to revise history.
Today, their rhetoric is different; they no longer talk very much about the
"Communist, Jewish, Freemason conspiracy," for now they have allies who need
them to be more discreet than that. In 1986, as in 1936, they hide behind the
buzzwords anti-Bolshevism and anti-communism to further their goals and to
forge links with others.
Through the World Anti-Communist League, the Ukrainian nationalists who
assisted the Nazis in their invasion of the Soviet Union, the Ustashi of
Croatia who murdered nearly a million Serbs, the Romanian Legionnaires who
slaughtered over four hundred Jews in one day in 1941�all have made contact
with their younger Latin, European, and Asian counterparts. Through their
front groups and their involvement in American politics, the Nazi
collaborators have blended in and become respectable.
Chirila Ciuntu. Yaroslav Stetsko. Stejpan Hefer. Three men from three
different countries without, at first glance, a lot in common.
Chirila Ciuntu, his close-cropped black hair now graying, is a refugee from
Romania who has labored for over thirty years in the steel mills of Canada. A
regular churchgoer to the Romanian Orthodox Church in Detroit, the retired
Ciuntu now spends his days in a high-rise apartment building in Windsor,
Canada.
Escaping the repression of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, the
stooped and bespectacled Ukrainian Yaroslav Stetsko formed and continues to
head an organization of Eastern European exiles called the Anti-Bolshevik
Bloc of Nations (ABN). Now residing in Munich, West Germany, Stetsko has long
been active in urging American and Western European governments to take a
firmer stand against the Kremlin. In 1983, he met with President Ronald
Reagan at the White House.
Stejpan Hefer, a Croatian lawyer who Red his homeland in 1945, resided in
Argentina until his death in 1973. Although he was a fiery orator in the
cause of Croatian independence, his short stature, angry gestures, and
slightly crossed eyes were sources of some amusement for his listeners. In
his capacity as president of the Croatian Liberation Movement, he established
ties with many American conservatives and made frequent trips to the United
States.
>From different places and with different causes, these three men are,
nevertheless, united by certain similarities. All were Nazi collaborators
before and during World War II. All were accused of war crimes. All escaped
the judgment of history. All built respectable new lives and carried on their
efforts for international fascism through front groups, intelligence
agencies, and churches. All joined the World Anti-Communist League.
Today in the United States, Canada, South America, and Western Europe there
exists an elusive network known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Also
called the Iron Guard, the Legion is composed of Romanian emigres and their
children. Calling themselves Legionnaires or Guardists, they have regular
gatherings and maintain contact through certain parishes of the Romanian
Orthodox Church. But the Legion is not primarily a fraternal or religious
organization; it is, foremost, a cult of death.
Today the Legion is run from a well-guarded building in Madrid by a
droopy-eyed, elderly man named Horia Sima. One of its chief lieutenants in
North America is Chirila Ciuntu.
As Legion spokesman in the Detroit-Windsor area, which has the greatest
concentration of Romanian exiles in North America, Ciuntu holds a position of
great power in the Iron Guard, which also explains his prominence in the
World Anti-Communist League. In 1981, he was in the Romanian delegation to
the fourteenth annual League conference held in Taiwan. He has also attended
League conferences in Washington and Luxembourg. He planned to attend the
1984 conference in San Diego but was ill.
Others might try to hide their involvement in an infamous organization, but
not Ciuntu. A Detroit reporter who met with him in 1980 described his home:
The wafts of the small flat are festooned with flags and tapestries.
The Romanian national flag-red, yellow and blue; flies atop his television
set. But his flag has, stitched at its center, three horizontal and three
vertical intersecting tines-the symbol of the Iron Guard. The same symbol
appears on wall tapestries and small embroidered doilies.... Books, many with
the Iron Guard cross on their bindings, are everywhere. A green
military-style shirt hangs from the back of a chair. [1]
Although he is obviously proud of his position within the Legion, Ciuntu is
also sensitive to criticism of it. "Most of the stories about the Legion,
with a few exceptions, are a complete distortion of truth and realities,"
Ciuntu wrote one of the authors in 1985. "The Britannic and American people
have permanently been deceived by those who wrote about the movement and did
not have the courage of objectivity to re-establish the truth."[2]
The Legion is still built around the idol worship of Corneliu Codreanu, who,
in 1927, literally galloped out of obscurity on a white stallion, clutching a
revolver in one hand and a crucifix in the other. He was the capitanul
(captain) of the Legion of the Archangel Michael and was dedicated to purging
Romania of Jews, foreigners, communists, and Freemasons. "Before we aspire to
take helm of the country's rule," he wrote, "we must mold a different type of
Romania totally cleansed of today's vices and defects.[3]
Handsome and articulate, Codreanu urged authoritarian nationalism to
implement this spiritual renaissance and purification, and his followers,
among them Chirila Ciuntu, steeped themselves in the eerie mysticism of his
brand of fascist Catholicism. Clad in green shirts and wearing silver
crucifixes, the Legionnaires took blood oaths to their comrades and their
capitanul. Each vowed to commit any act necessary, including murder, to
avenge the death of any Legion member.
With a smile on our lips
We look death in the eye
For we are the death team
That must win or die.[4]
One who incurred the wrath of "the death team" was Mihail Stelescu, a
Legionary leader who had become disillusioned and split with Codreanu. Ten
Legionnaires, chosen by lot for the honor of silencing him, caught Stelescu
in July 1936, as he recovered in a Bucharest hospital from an appendectomy.
He was shot 120 times and mutilated with a hatchet; then, according to an
official account, the killers "danced around the pieces of flesh, prayed,
kissed each other and cried with joy."
When Codreanu was assassinated for his intrigues by King Carol in 1938,
leadership passed to his lieutenants who fled to the safety of Nazi Germany.
Among them were Horia Sima and Viorel Trifa, the latter the head of the
Legion's youth wing. Later, as an Archbishop in the United States, it was
Trifa who would be most responsible for resurrecting the Legion in North
America.
Those who remained in Romania, including the young Chirila Ciuntu, went
further underground and waited. They formed secret cells, or "nests." Each
nest consisted of thirteen members, who paid dues to propagate the "faith."
According to one Guardist, now living in the United States, "the Movement
spent the money obtained through the nest system exclusively for the
necessities of battle. [5]
In hiding, all remembered their blood oath to avenge Codreanu and, ten months
later, they did. As the limousine carrying the Prime Minister of Romania
entered a plaza in central Bucharest, it was riddled with machine-gun fire
from a Guardist hit squad.
The Germans used the Legionnaires as a trump card to control Romania. In May
1940, Nazis forced a detente between King Carol and the exiled Guardists.
Carol abdicated in September 1940. he made a mad dash for the border, chased
by Iron Guardists intent on killing him. He himself eluded the Legion of the
Archangel, but most of his entourage were caught and thrown in prison.
The government of Romania was now in the hands of two men, Iron Guard leader
Horia Sima (who had returned from Germany with Trifa) and non-Guardist
General Yon Antonescu. The alliance was an uneasy one, for each man was vying
for the favor of the Nazis. Iron Guard officials were placed in key
government posts, and Guard commissars were appointed to see to the
"Romanizing" (purging of Jews) of industry and commerce. Twenty-six-year-old
Viorel Trifa, who blamed the "kikes" for all the ills of the nation, was
named president of the National Union of Christian Romanian Students. As the
Legion of the Archangel gained power within the bureaucracy, the plan for a
complete takeover took shape. As was the Guard's custom, that plan was
executed in blood.
At 11:45 on the night of November 26, 1940, a gang of Legionnaires entered
the prison where King Carol's government ministers were being held. They
dragged the men, sixty-four in all, from the cells, shouted "For the Guard!"
and chopped them to pieces with axes, picks, and shovels. The butchery
signaled a holy call to arms, the followers of the Archangel answered the
cry. During the next three days, they tortured to death more than three
hundred victims throughout Romania. Typical was the case of Nicolae Iorga, a
preeminent Romanian historian and former prime minister. On the night of
November 27, a squad of Legionnaires raided his home. The Guardists ripped
his long white beard from his face and castrated him before stabbing and
beating him to death.[*] [*Traian Boeru, the leader of the Iron Guard squad
that murdered Iorga, was never brought to justice and, as of 1981, was living
in West Germany.]
The carnage of late November did not immediately result in the revolution
that many had expected, but it was the prelude to one. The final spark came
seven weeks later when, during a power struggle between Antonescu and Sima,
the Guard was called into action. "In Germany, national socialism ... is
preached by old foxhole fighters," Trifa 7 the student union leader, exhorted
on the evening of January 20, "is borne in the hearts of the German people
and is carried to triumph by German youth. Besides this huge battle for
national socialism which leads to unmasking and fighting Judaism, if Adolf
Hitler had done nothing else, he would still have risen to the highest peaks
of history for opening the way. "[6]
On January 21, 1941, throughout Romania the Iron Guard took to the streets,
roaming for loyalist soldiers, Antonescu supporters, and especially Jews.
Shortly after three in the afternoon in Bucharest, three hundred Guardists,
wearing the Legion's distinctive green shirt and silver crucifix and shouting
"Death to Freemasons and Kikes!" turned onto Calea Victoriei and moved toward
the Prefecture, the main police station. With them was Chirila Ciuntu.
The small army charged through the doors of the Prefecture, seizing the
building in the name of the revolution. Within minutes they had taken the
weapons from the loyalist policemen, disposed of those who refused to
participate, mounted machine guns on the fourthfloor balconies, and covered
the avenues of approach. With this secure base, they then dealt with their
victims in the basement.
Constantin Antonovici, a Romanian Christian, survived his internment in the
Prefecture and now lives in seclusion in the United States. Opposed to the
Iron Guard's anti-Semitism and violence, on January 21 he had been on a
Bucharest street urging people to ignore the Guard's call to murder. He was
spotted by Guardists, beaten, and dragged along to the Prefecture. He was in
the basement when Trifa entered.
When they [Trifa and his aides] arrived at the first cell, I heard them order
the guards to open it. Immediately, I heard a few pistol shots being fired
and cries from the people being killed. I had not reached the end of the
corridor before I heard more begging and shots in the next cell. My guards
said, "They will kill all the Jews who are in these cells."[7]
Ciuntu was also in the Prefecture at the time but denies any involvement: "I
didn't kill anyone .... I didn't see anything, just a few people running
around the streets .... I don't know what was going on in the basement. It
was a big building. I don't know anything."[8]
With the capture of the Prefecture, the members of the Legion of the
Archangel had achieved one goal, but they had still others. In the next
thirty-six hours, they razed eight synagogues, destroyed the Jewish ghetto in
Bucharest, and murdered over four hundred Romanians with gasoline, axes,
knives, meathooks, and shovels.
"A mob of several hundred attacked the Sephardic Temple," American
correspondent Leigh White reported at the time, "smashing its windows with
stones and battering down its doors with lengths of timber. All its objects
of ritual-prayer books, shawls, Talmuds, Torahs, altar benches and
tapestries-were carried outside and piled in a heap which was soaked with
gasoline and set afire. A number of Jewish pedestrians were herded together
and forced to dance in a circle around the bonfire. When they dropped in
exhaustion they were doused with gasoline and burned alive."
Jewish prisoners were taken by the Iron Guard to the municipal
slaughterhouse. "There," White wrote, "in a fiendish parody of kosher methods
of butchering, they hung many of the Jews on meat hooks and slit their
throatsothers they forced to kneel at chopping blocks while they [Iron
Guardists] beheaded them with cleavers."[9]
One of those who observed the scene was the American envoy to Romania,
Franklin Mott Gunther. In his report to Washington, he recounted seeing about
"sixty Jewish corpses on the hooks used for carcasses, all skinned. The
quantity of blood about [indicated] that they had been skinned alive."
By the twenty-third, the rebellion, which had failed to receive the support
of the Germans, had been put down. In the streets of the capital and other
Romanian cities and in the Bucharest slaughterhouse were the mutilated
remains of the Legion's victims. "In the morgue, bodies were so cut up that
they no longer resembled anything human. In the municipal slaughterhouse a
witness saw a girl of five hanging by her feet like a calf, her entire body
smeared with blood."[10]
The massacre did not mean the end of the Legion. The German SS commander in
Romania, Otto von Bolschwing,[*] hid the top Legion leaders and spirited them
across the border into Germany in SS uniforms. Among them were Horia Sima and
Viorel Trifa; they were shortly joined by many more. There they were placed
under "protective custody," in which they received the same privileges as
German officers.
[ *Otto von BoIschwing was never brought to justice for his role in harboring
the Iron Guardists or for his other war crimes; after the war, he worked for
the American army Counter-Intelligence Corps, emigrated to the United States
in 1961, and remained a free man until his death in 1982.]
In a letter to one of the authors, Chirila Ciuntu admitted as much giving the
lie to Guardist claims that they had been interred in concentration camps.
"They [were] offered a strange political asylum, because they were sent to
special camps to work for German industry ... It was a political game. The
presence of the Legionnaires in Germany represented, in Hitler's mind, a
permanent threat to Antonescu's government, in this way Hitler kept a tight
hand over Antonescu's rule."[11]
Ciuntu, one of several thousand Iron Guardists who surrendered after the
abortive coup, didn't share the benign fate of his superiors at first.
Although the Guard's atrocities in Romania demanded punishment, the Romanian
government knew that the German authorities wouldn't allow a wholesale
crackdown or dissolution of the Legion, a realization amply reinforced by the
SSs role in whisking the leaders out of Bucharest.
Given the narrow confines within which the Antonescu government found itself,
it decided to pursue only the most flagrant criminals among the remaining
Guardists and even then to make sanitized charges against them.
Among the hundred-odd men charged with insurrection and rebellion was Chirila
Ciuntu. He was found guilty of rebellion and sentenced to five years in
prison and three years of interdiction (loss of civil rights). It was one of
the more severe sentences passed by the Martial Court of Bucharest, but
Ciuntu would never serve it. "The Nazis offered Legionnaires protection," he
explained to Windsor Star reporter Lynda Powless. "I left in a German jeep
with two SS officers- they took me to Bulgaria."[12]
Once in Germany, the Romanian fascists were housed in an SS "home," and
photographs of the period show them relaxing in the sunshine. Viorel Trifa,
the future archbishop in the United States, took the waters in a spa in
Bavaria and beseeched an SS commandant for a special diet to nurse his
ulcers. In their wartime exile, the Iron Guard continued to be ardent suitors
for Nazi favor.
"Your Excellency," Iron Guard leader Sima wrote to Himmler in 1944, "has
surely heard that His Excellency Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop has
authorized the formation of the topmost Romanian commandos of the Romanian
national forces. Along with this body, a future Romanian army is to be
prepared under my supervision. My wish is that out of the ranks of the best,
Legionnaires will join the accomplished Waffen-SS in which they will, I am
convinced, not only receive the best technical military training but, above
all, the best political world view."
Ciuntu was among the "ranks of the best"- in 1944 he joined a
contingent of Iron Guardists who were fighting the Soviets on the Eastern
Front. Sima remained in Germany, awaiting approval from the German high
command to return to Romania and finish the job the Legion had begun in 1941.
It was not to be. In August 1944, a new Romanian government signed an
armistice with the Allies and declared war on Germany. The Germans responded
by launching a massive air strike against Bucharest and racing the Legion
leaders to Vienna in preparation for infiltrating them into Romania. Within a
week, however, the Soviet army entered Romania, and the remnants of the Iron
Guard fled to safety before the onslaught. Sima declared a
government-in-exile in Vienna, a shadow government that did not disband until
nine days after the death of Hitler in his bunker.
Yaroslav Stetsko is chairman of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) and
a major leader of the World Anti-Communist League. He was involved with the
League even before its official founding in 1966. In journeys to Taiwan in
1956, 1957, 1961, and 1964, and at many Asian People's Anti-Communist League
conferences (the precursor to the World League), Stetsko pursued his long
interest in Taiwan and its generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. Stetsko found a
reflection of his own beliefs in the ferocious anti-communist stance of the
Taiwanese government and in its willingness to combat communism by any means
necessary. In 1958, he took part in the preparatory conference of the World
Anti-Communist League in Mexico City and was one of those most responsible
for its ultimate creation. In 1970, he was elected to the executive board,
the League's elite governing body.
Today, Stetsko maintains his respectability and authority in anticommunist
circles throughout the world. Those introducing him at receptions or forums
describe him as a patriot and a freedom fighter as well as a "survivor of
Nazi concentration camps." He has conferred with prominent conservatives,
among them heads of state and American congressmen and senators.
Stetsko has covered his tracks well. According to his official biography,
during World War II he fought against both the Soviets and the Germans in his
struggle for Ukrainian independence. Thrown into the Nazi concentration camp
at Sachsenhausen, so the account goes, "he was subjected there to continuous
and inhuman torture which was to have a permanent effect later upon his
physical condition."
It is an interesting claim by one of the most important Nazi collaborators
alive today.
In 1938, Stetsko's physical appearance was deceiving. It was hard to imagine
that this son of a priest, with his thinning hair, sparse goatee, and round
spectacles, was capable of anything at all malicious, let alone murder. But
there were clues in the face: the thin lips were fixed in a permanent bitter
sneer, and the eyes, cold and angry, glared out from behind the glasses with
charismatic rage. Even in prison, there was no softening of the hatred, no
weakness in the resolve to attack again; perhaps this was why the Nazis
showed a special benevolence toward Yaroslav Stetsko.
By the time the Nazis took notice of him, Stetsko had spent nearly two years
in a Polish prison for his role in the murders of Polish government
officials. As a leader of the Galician[*] branch of the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Stetsko's disdain for parliamentary rule and
his proven willingness to liquidate its proponents were qualities the Germans
were looking for.[ *Present-day southeastern Poland and western Ukraine
S.S.R.]
The Nazis saw the Ukrainians as potentially important allies. Their
ideology-fanatical racism against ethnic Poles and Russians, and virulent
hatred of Jews-meshed perfectly with the Germans'. In the late 1930s, they
had grand plans for the Ukrainian nationalists, and they organized them in
earnest while planning the invasion of Poland. The Germans even bandied about
the idea of setting up a nominally independent Ukrainian government in
Galicia under OUN control- this would depend on whether the Ukrainians could
"produce an uprising which would aim at the annihilation of the Jews and
Poles."[13]
By 1938, the Nazis had compelling reasons to save Stetsko from penal
obscurity. The previous year, a Soviet agent had slipped a bomb into the coat
pocket of the pre-eminient pro-German Ukrainian leader and killed him. Since
then, the OUN had lost much of its direction. Two opposing camps had formed:
the cautious old guard, and the young radicals like Stetsko, bold and ready
for war. Once plucked from jail, Stetsko became a driving force behind the
creation of a new Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN/B, led by
Stefan Bandera. Bandera chose Stetsko to be his second-in-command, forming
an alliance that would last nineteen years. (Bandera would be assassinated on
a Munich street by a KGB agent in 1959; Stetsko would go on to meet the
president of the United States.)
While the Germans had hoped to use Stetsko to unify the OUN, throughout the
war they would support both major Ukrainian camps. The dirty work, however,
would be OUN/B's chief domain.
While preparations were under way for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of
the Soviet Union, the Nazis organized their Ukrainian helpers into regiments.
One regiment, the Nightingales, which consisted mainly of Bandera-Stetsko
followers, would be in the vanguard of the German invasion of the Ukraine
wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. The Nightingales' mission was to carry out
sabotage and to engage the Red Army in rearguard skirmishes and guerrilla
warfare.[14] The OUN/B also formed a secret police, the Sluzhba Bezpeky,
which would see to the purging of Jews, ethnic Russians, and Communist Party
members for their Nazi allies- they would accomplish this mission with
terrible skill. Its chief was Mykola (Nicholas) Lebed, who, according to even
a sympathetic writer, John Armstrong, "was to acquire for himself and his
organization an unenviable reputation for ruthlessness."[15] Lebed was named
third in command of OUN/B, behind Bandera. and Stetsko. He would be
responsible for the murder of thousands of Germany's enemies in the Ukraine
and of scores more in the displaced persons camps in Western Europe after the
war. He lives today in New York City.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they were greeted by
the people as liberators from the horrible repression of the Stalin regime.
They struck deep into the heart of the Soviet empire as the Red Army fell
back in disarray- tens of thousands deserted or surrendered. By June 30,
1941, advance units of the Wehrmacht had reached the city of Lvov. With them
were the Ukrainian Nightingales, led by a German officer, Theodore
Oberlander, and Yaroslav Stetsko.
Stetsko immediately organized a "congress" in a small meetingroom. From the
podium, he announced the creation of the Ukrainian State, and named himself
premier. Whether Stetsko thought he had tacit approval from the Nazis for the
independence declaration or whether he was attempting to present them with a
fait accompli is open to debate. But certainly the news, broadcast out of
Lvov by Stetsko over the radio station, did not have the desired effect on
his allies: The Germans were outraged, but, not wanting to alienate their
Ukrainian surrogate soldiers, they vacillated. In the confusion, Stetsko
scrambled for approval, crowing his obedience to the Nazis:
The Ukrainian State will closely cooperate with great National Socialist
Germany which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler will create a New Order in
Europe and throughout the world. The Ukrainian army will fight together with
the allied German army for the New Order in the world.[16]
The shaky alliance held long enough for the average Ukrainian peasant to
realize that the liberating Nazis and the OUN were just as brutal as the Red
Army had been. The pogroms, code-named "Action Petlura," began within hours
of Stetsko's arrival in Lvov. Jews, intellectuals, greater Russians,
Communist Party officials�anyone suspected of opposing the "New Order"�were
rounded up and executed in these joint operations of the Nazis and the
Ukrainian nationalists.
"The Galician capital of Lvov," wrote historian Raul Hilberg, "was the scene
of a mass seizure by local inhabitants. In 'reprisal' for the deportation of
Ukrainians by the Soviets, 1000 members of the Jewish intelligentsia were
driven together and handed over to the security police.[17]
This roundup took place on July 2, 1941, two days after Stetsko had arrived
in Lvov and assumed the premiership of the Ukraine. During the period in
which Stetsko was in Lvov and, by his own claim, in charge of the city, an
estimated seven thousand residents, mostly Jews, were murdered. Tens of
thousands more were exterminated in the surrounding countryside by marauding
OUN/B units. In the following four years, the entire Jewish population of
Lvovabout one hundred thousand-and more than a million Jews in greater
Ukraine would be annihilated by the Nazis and their coworkers, the Ukrainian
auxiliary police.
Moving with speed, the Einsatzgruppe (German mobile killing units) organized
a network of local Ukrainian militias, making them partly self-financing by
drawing upon Jewish money to pay their salaries. The Ukrainians were used
principally for dirty work�thus Einstatz- commando 4a went so far as to
confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian
helpers to shoot children.[18]
Stetsko would not be a witness to these later activities of his followers. On
July 9 he, Bandera, and their immediate aides were placed under "honorary
arrest" by the Germans because of the independence proclamation and sent to
Berlin. After refusing to rescind the proclamation, they were placed in
Sachsenhausen prison.
Bandera and Stetsko were now quarantined in Germany, but this did not mean
that the Germans had lost faith in the Ukrainians, or vice versa. The OUN/B
continued to do the German's bidding at the same time as they fought for
Ukrainian independence. While attacking units of the Red Army, the OUN/B also
launched frequent purges of other partisan groups whom they suspected of
communist or Russian sympathies.[19] For most of the rest of the war, their
chief field commander was Mykola Lebed, who in turn carried out orders from
Bandera and Stetsko. At least once, in 1943, Stetsko went to Poland to confer
with Lebed; this was at a time when, according to his own account, he was
languishing in a Nazi concentration camp.
Having proved themselves trustworthy Nazi allies, many Bandera-Stetsko
followers were later recruited to assist in the transfer of Jews from the
ghettos to the concentration camps or to serve as guards in the camps
themselves.
The Ukrainians were involved in the fate of Polish Jewry as perpetrators. The
SS and Police employed Ukrainian units in ghetto-clearing operations, not
only in the Galician district but also in such places as the Warsaw ghetto
and the Lublin ghetto. The Ukrainians have never been considered
pro-Jewish.[20]
As the war turned against the Germans, they increasingly relied on their
nationalist allies. By 1944, Ukrainian assistance was desperately needed to
harass the advancing Soviets and try to slow their advance. To this end, the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed, and Stetsko, Bandera, and other
leaders were released from their confinement-to-quarters in Germany to lead
the struggle. Toward the end of the war, when it was clear that the "Thousand
Year Reich" was finished, some Ukrainian elements also began sniping at the
retreating Germans; this allowed Stetsko later to claim that the UPA fought
the Nazis as well as the Soviets, an assertion that continues to serve him
well.
Stejpan Hefer was a short, bespectacled man, one who didn't attract much
notice at World Anti-Communist League conferencesuntil he took the podium.
Then his fiery oratory, the harsh, rapidfire succession of his words 7 the
wild gestures of his hands, the strong timbre of his voice, all served to
energize-and amuse-the crowd.
Until his death in 1973, Hefer was an important and frequent visitor to the
United States. As the world leader of the Croatian Liberation Movement (known
by its Croatian acronym, HOP), he oversaw a network that spanned the globe.
>From his headquarters in Buenos Aires, Hefer established Central Boards of
Croatian Societies designed to coordinate the activities of HOP chapters in
Europe, Australia, and the United States. Those activities were directed
against the Yugoslav government of Josip, Broz "Tito."
This campaign operated by rallying Croatian emigre groups, by building
support within their communities and churches, by holding anti-Yugoslav
rallies, and by joining organizations such as the World Anti-Communist
League. On another level, the work was less benign: through hijackings,
assassinations, bombings, and sabotage of civilian aircraft, the Croatians
waged a war of terror.
Hefer did not always enjoy so much power as he wielded in the HOP and in the
World Anti-Communist League. In the spring of 1941, he had played a
subservient role to another Croatian, Ante Pavelic.
The two men had had much in common. Both had been lawyers, both were
middle-aged Roman Catholics, both had been members of parliament, and both
were officials of a terrorist group called Ustasha (roughly translated "to
rise" or "to awaken"). Both men participated in the genocide of their
countrymen, in murders carried out with sadism that would shock even their
Nazi allies. Ante Pavelic, as poglavnik (Fuhrer) of the nation of Croatia,
and Stejpan Hefer, as governor-general of Baranja County, assured their
places in history atop the mutilated bodies of nearly a million victims.
(After the war, the similarity of their lives would continue, for both would
escape to Argentina to resurrect their movement in exile.)
The nation of Yugoslavia in the 1920s was an amalgam of six republics, with
four main languages, a half-dozen distinct ethnic groups, and three
religions. In the complex maze of Balkan politics of the time, this made the
country unusually easy prey: Yugoslavia's neighbors could always find one
group or another to work toward the dissolution of the nation. A favorite
such group were the ultranationalistic Croatians.
Croatia, a large area in northern Yugoslavia, has never been a region of
either distinct borders or homogeneous people. At the outset of World War II,
Croatia had a population of about three million Catholic Croatians, nearly
two million Serbs (most belonging to the Orthodox faith), a million Moslems,
and about fifty thousand Jews. Nationalistic Croatian zealots were pounding
home a doctrine of racism and historical revisionism to appeal to the
suspicions and prejudices of the people and gain support. The extremists had
a solution for the dilemma of the melting-pot nature of Croatia: the removal
of non-Catholic, non-Croatian citizens either by deportation or liquidation.
Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha movement were the voice for these fanatics.
In order to make Croatia racially and religiously pure, it was, of course,
first necessary to destroy the Yugoslav state, and to this end Pavelic could
depend on the help of foreigners. By 1929, when the government of King
Alexander clamped down on the Croatian nationalists, Pavelic had his external
contacts well in place. He simply led his Ustashi into training camps in
Italy and Hungaryfrom these bases, they kept up a steady terror campaign
against the Yugoslav government, which culminated in the assassination of
King Alexander in Marseille in 1934, a killing that Pavelic personally
supervised.
The Ustashi emulated Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, cloaking themselves
in the physical trappings of fascism and adopting the upraised arm salute and
the goose-step march. Under Italian supervision, wearing the black uniforms
of the Italian fascist militia, the Croatians prepared for guerrilla
operations and the "liberation" of their homeland.
That opportunity came in March 1941, when the Yugoslav people rebelled after
the government signed an accord with Hitler.
"It is especially important," Hitler demanded as the Germans prepared to
invade, "that the blow against Yugoslavia be carried out with inexorable
severity."
A Ustasha unit entered Zagreb, the Croatian capital, with the German army on
April 10 and declared the independent nation of Croatia in the name of Ante
Pavelic. Decamping from Mussolini's Italy, Pavelic and his followers,
carrying Italian rifles, arrived in Zagreb. A thug and a sadist, Pavelic was
not about to show himself to be an unreliable ally of the Nazis and
immediately set about purifying the new Croatian nation. The new
governor-general of the Veliki Zupan (county) of Baranja, Stejpan Hefer,
would prove himself to be the model of a fascist bureaucrat, so endearing
himself to the poglavnik that their partnership would last until 1959. Hefer
zealously put the Ustasha creed to practice in Baranja.
The principles of the Ustashi were officially declared to be "the actual
needs of the Croatian people." In theory, this meant "the virtues of ancient
heroism and courage." . . . In practice, it meant that the slaughter of Serbs
and the deportation of Jews to the Nazi SS was official state policy, carried
out by vigilante bands of Croatian terror
squads who traveled the hills and valleys in search of families.[21]
The Ustashi did not dispatch their victims with the clinical efficiency of
their German masters. Rather, they derived pleasure from torturing before
killing. Most of their victims were not shot but were strangled, drowned,
burned, or stabbed to death. Serbs were herded into Orthodox churches by
Ustashi who then barred the doors and torched the timbers. One captured
photograph shows Ustashi smiling for the camera before a table displaying the
body of a Serbian businessman whom they had castrated, disemboweled, carved
with knives, and burned beyond recognition.
"The massacres began in earnest at the end of June [1941]," wrote Fitzroy
Maclean, Britain's military liaison to the anti-Ustasha partisans, "and
continued throughout the summer, growing in scope and intensity until in
August the terror reached its height. The whole of Bosnia ran with blood.
Bands of Ustase roamed the countryside with knives, bludgeons and machine
guns, slaughtering Serbian men, women and little children, desecrating
Serbian churches, murdering Serbian priests, laying waste Serbian villages,
torturing, raping, burning, drowning. Killing became a cult, an
obsession."[22]
The Ustashi competed among themselves on how many of "the enemy" they could
kill. In order to impress the poglavnik�Pavelic�and be promoted or singled
out for "heroism," the bands would pose with their victims before cameras.
Captured photographs-they are too grisly to reproduce-show Ustashi beheading
a Serb with an axe, driving a saw through the neck of another, carrying a
head through the streets of Zagreb. In all of them, the Ustashi are smiling
and crowding themselves into the picture, as if to prove they had a role in
the atrocity. "Some Ustase collected the eyes of Serbs they had killed,
sending them, when they had enough, to the Poglavnik for his inspection or
proudly displaying them and other human organs in the cafes of Zagreb."[23]
Eventually, the obscenities that the Ustashi reveled in committing were too
much even for some of the Germans and the Catholic clergy who had initially
backed them.[24] The Nazis went so far as to intervene and disband one
Ustasha regiment in 1942 in reaction to the atrocities it had perpetrated.
Italian troops stationed in the coastal areas Mussolini had annexed hid Jews
and Serbs and refused entry to Ustasha bands, declaring that to do otherwise
was "incompatible with the honor of the Italian Army."
But as governor-general of Baranja County, Hefer was able to fulfill his
duty. "In this capacity he issued orders for the mass deportation of the
Serbian and Jewish population of the area concerned particularly in the
Podrevska Slatina district. These people were taken by Ustashi men to
different concentration camps and partly driven out into Serbia. Most of
those held in camps perished.... In the Slatina district alone 35 Serbian
families were so depossessed. Besides these there were driven from their
homes all Jewish families and they were sent to many camps, any further
traces of them disappeared in the Auschwitz butchery.[25]
Although it could be said that Hefer had an easier time than other Ustasha
governor-generals since the terrain of Baranja County is flat and
agricultural and hence afforded few hiding places for the hunted Serbs and
Jews, he was promoted in 1944 to minister of food for his exemplary record
and transferred to Zagreb. He remained there until the government collapsed
before the advancing Soviets in 1945. Then he joined Pavelic in the Ustasha
exodus to Austria, where both would slip away and keep the fires of Ustasha
burning in exile.
pps.10-29
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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