As the history of Nazi-hunting approaches its inevitable end, it could seem anticlimactic that one of its final chapters concerns a 98-year-old resident of an assisted living facility in a quiet, tree-lined section of northeast Minneapolis.
In March, a Polish judge issued an arrest warrant for Michael Karkoc for his alleged role as a “top commander” of a Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian nationalist unit that massacred 44 civilians, including women and children, in the Polish village of Chlaniow in 1944.
Last week, the Polish embassy forwarded that request to the US Department of State, where it is to be reviewed before being sent to the US Department of Justice.
Illustration: Yusha
If approved, from there it would go to the US attorney’s office in Minnesota, where a hearing would be set in front of a magistrate judge.
Age and health are not factors considered in extradition requests and the task of Polish prosecutors would be a narrow one: to establish probable cause that Karkoc committed the crimes.
AP EXPOSE
The request could be a decisive development in a saga that has made headlines since it first came to light four years ago, when The Associated Press (AP) published an expose of the unit that killed the villagers in a reprisal attack.
German prosecutors investigated Karkoc, but dropped the case in 2015 after determining he was unfit to stand trial.
This makes the Polish extradition request the first — and perhaps only — official legal action against Karkoc, who emigrated to the US in 1949 and is a naturalized US citizen.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Polish move comes as something of a relief to his most vigorous defender, his son Andriy, a retired mortgage banker.
Andriy Karkoc, who has in the past spelled his name Karkos for professional reasons, is eager to see the case tried in court, not just in the media.
“If the Polish government is stupid enough or shameless enough to continue this charade, at least at such time we will be presented, hopefully, with whatever it is they claim they have in the form of evidence,” Andriy Karkoc told reporters.
He brought a folder full of news clippings with him to his interview, most of them heavily underlined, with notes written in the margins.
When he read the more dramatic passages about his father, his voice dripped with sarcasm. He said he would not let any journalist speak directly with his father.
Michael Karkoc’s only comment on the record has been his brief remark to the AP: “I don’t think I can explain.”
However, Andriy Karkoc quoted his father asking: “How can such a thing happen in America? I fought the Germans, the Nazis tried to kill me and my family, and now they’re calling me a Nazi?”
“The horror inflicted on my father is immeasurable and incalculable,” Andriy Karkoc said.
“The physical, emotional and spiritual toll was/is devastating and debilitating,” he said in a text message. “The only way anyone will ‘hear’ from my father is directly from me.”
SMEAR CAMPAIGN?
Andriy Karkoc said the accusations were part of a Russian-led smear campaign against Ukrainian nationalists, and asked whether the AP’s sources are credible and will pass legal muster.
Was Michael Karkoc the “patriot, father and freedom fighter” his son describes, or a Ukrainian nationalist who helped kill innocent civilians on behalf of his Nazi benefactors, as his accusers have alleged?
Michael Karkoc’s military history was omitted from the forms that he — or, his son says, the US Army major assisting him — filled out when he came to the US, but he did not try to hide it later in life.
Much of what is known of Michael Karkoc’s war record comes from his own memoir, From Voronezh to the Legion of Self Defense, which he self-published in 1995 in Ukrainian.
He donated copies to the US Library of Congress and to the University of Minnesota, and also published it in Ukraine in 2002.
The cover lists his full name and his nom de guerre, “Wolf.”
Michael Karkoc was born on March 6, 1919, in Horodok, now in northwest Ukraine, but part of Poland until the outbreak of war in 1939.
Horodok and its surrounding areas were seized and occupied by the Soviet Union as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939.
In 1939, Michael Karkoc fled to escape a Soviet arrest warrant after refusing to join the local police and settled in German-occupied Poland and the town of Hrubieszow, the memoir says.
In 1941, he was conscripted into the German army and participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union, but deserted a year later after seeing the mistreatment of Red Army prisoners of war, a moment he recounts in his book.
He then joined the Ukrainian nationalist underground, which is where his history becomes more murky and contested.
GUERRILLA UNIT
Michael Karkoc joined what was an active underground guerrilla unit, the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, the memoir said, adding that they started with fewer than 100 men, but their ranks swelled to nearly 600 members.
They were affiliated with a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist called the OUN-M, a right-wing political party dedicated to an independent Ukraine.
In a key passage in his memoir described by his son, Michael Karkoc recounts the pact struck with the Germans, in which the Nazis agreed to stop killing Ukrainian civilians, release political prisoners and supply the legion with arms and ammunition — in return, the legion would agree to help the Germans fight the invading Red Army.
Andriy Karkoc said his father indicated in his memoir that the Germans only had two “liaison officers” assigned to his unit, and that the legion acted independently, as Ukrainian freedom fighters defending their people from the Russians, Polish partisans and — when necessary — rival Ukrainian groups.
Toward the end of the war in January 1945, Michael Karkoc said that the legion’s remaining members were absorbed into Germany’s 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS at the Austrian-Yugoslavian border.
However, Ivan Katchanovski, a University of Ottawa historian who has researched the relationship between Ukrainian nationalist groups and the Nazis, said the bond between the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion and the Germans was much closer from the start.
The Nazis only released prisoners affiliated with the legion’s specific political faction — the OUN-M — he said, adding that in practice, the legion became a police unit tasked with doing the Germans’ dirty work.
“This battalion [the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion] and many ex-policemen in this battalion fought against Soviet and Polish partisans,” Katchanovski said. “But this ‘fight’ included massacres of civilians under pretext of anti-partisan actions. They were a special collaborationist police unit under overall German command.”
According to his son’s account, Michael Karkoc said the legion had a German commander, Siegfried Assmuss, who was killed by Polish partisans shortly after they crossed the Polish border.
However, he does not say anything about his unit attacking the village of Chlaniow the next day, when the massacre occurred.
While Polish authorities might have other evidence, so far, two sources form the basis for establishing Michael Karkoc’s alleged involvement in the killings.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPTS
First, the 1972 trial in Poland of another commander of the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, Teodozy Dak, who was convicted of war crimes in 1972 and later died in prison.
For its original expose, the AP relied in part on more than a thousand pages of trial transcript from the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw.
The papers contain a statement from another soldier in the legion, Vasyl Malazhenski, who said his unit were ordered to “liquidate all the residents” of Chlaniow as a reprisal for the death of a German SS officer.
“It was all like a trance: setting the fires, the shooting, the destroying,” Malazhenski said. “Later, when we were passing in file through the destroyed village, I could see the dead bodies of the killed residents: men, women, children.”
The trial documents also contain testimony from a witness who recalled how soldiers from a “Ukrainian SS force” machine-gunned villagers and set homes on fire.
The AP also obtained an SS document, separate from the trial files, which indicates that Dak and Malazhenski were under Karkoc’s command., and later, the AP conducted an interview with a survivor of the massacre, who recalled the moment a soldier aimed his machine gun at her, only for it to jam as he pulled the trigger, and how the men who raided the village appeared to be speaking Ukrainian.
However, for Andriy Karkoc, the statements are not reliable because the trial took place when Poland was under communist rule.
“It’s a show trial, because that’s what the communist government did,” he said. “I do know that it’s evidence provided by the KGB because that’s what they do, and that’s all I need to know.”
While the trial documents point to the role of the legion in the attack, they do not specifically indicate that Michael Karkoc gave the order.
KEY FILE
Evidence for that came five months after the AP’s original report, when it said it had received a 1968 interrogation file of a man under Michael Karkoc’s command, Ivan Sharko.
In the document, Sharko described how his commander, “the Wolf” — the same name Michael Karkoc used to sign his memoirs — ordered his men to cordon off the village.
“The legionaries surrounded the homes, set fire to them with matches or with incendiary bullets, and they shot anyone who was found in the homes or anywhere in the streets,” he said in the interrogation file, according to the AP.
However, Andriy Karkoc said the document is not credible because it comes from an agency that was under KGB control, adding that it would not be admissible in a US court: Sharko died in the 1980s and cross-examination would be impossible.
“Seriously, that’s your legitimate source to point the finger for war crimes on my dad? The KGB?” Andriy Karkoc said. “Why is somebody pretending that the KGB is the font of justice and truth, particularly when it comes to crimes against humanity?”
“The Associated Press stands by its stories, which were well-documented and thoroughly reported,” AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton told reporters.
At the end of the war, Michael Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced persons at Neu Ulm, Germany, with his wife and two young sons.
His wife died at the camp, but he and his children survived and emigrated to Minneapolis in 1949, eventually settling in a neighborhood with a pronounced Ukrainian immigrant population.
He took a job as a carpenter with a construction firm and remarried. He had four more children, a son, Andriy, and three daughters.
He retired in 1982, but continued to work as a carpenter for about a decade afterward, his son said.
The controversy surrounding Michael Karkoc goes beyond what is included in the Polish extradition request.
The AP’s reporting and Katchanovski’s research also indicate that the legion might have been responsible for other massacres, allegations that Andriy Karkoc again vigorously disputes.
However, for now, the case is focused on what happened in Chlaniow in 1944, and Andriy Karkoc is confident that his father will not die in jail.
“The Nazis didn’t kill him, the communists didn’t kill him. AP ain’t going to kill him,” he said.
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