The petition for naturalization for Michael Karkoc, who is now 94 and living in Minnesota

This is the oath of allegiance on Michael Karkoc’s petition for naturalization, signed May 6, 1959

‘It
was all like a trance: setting the fires, the shooting, the
destroying,’ Malazhenski recalled, according to the 1967 statement found
by the AP in the archives of Warsaw’s state-run Institute of National
Remembrance, which investigates and prosecutes German and Soviet crimes
on Poles during and after World War II.

‘Later,
when we were passing in file through the destroyed village,’
Malazhenski said, ‘I could see the dead bodies of the killed residents:
men, women, children.’

In a
background check by U.S. officials on April 14, 1949, Karkoc said he
had never performed any military service, telling investigators that he
‘worked for father until 1944. Worked in labor camp from 1944 until
1945.’

However, in a Ukrainian-language
memoir published in 1995, Karkoc states that he helped found the
Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943 in collaboration with the Nazis’
feared SS intelligence agency, the SD, to fight on the side of Germany –
and served as a company commander in the unit, which received orders
directly from the SS, through the end of the war.

It was not clear why Karkoc felt safe
publishing his memoir, which is available at the U.S. Library of
Congress and the British Library and which the AP located online in an
electronic Ukrainian libary.
Karkoc’s name surfaced when a retired
clinical pharmacologist who took up Nazi war crimes research in his free
time came across it while looking into members of the SS Galician
Division who emigrated to Britain.

This monument pays tribute to Ukraine civilians burned alive by German troops during the war – evidence suggests Mr Karkoc’s unit was in the area at the time of the massacre

He tipped off AP when an Internet search showed an address for Karkoc in Minnesota.

‘Here
was a chance to publicly confront a man who commanded a company alleged
to be involved in the cruel murder of innocent people,’ said Stephen
Ankier, who is based in London.

The
AP located Karkoc’s U.S. Army intelligence file, and got it
declassified by the National Archives in Maryland through a FOIA
request. The Army was responsible for processing visa applications after
the war under the Displaced Persons Act.

The intelligence file said standard
background checks with seven different agencies found no red flags that
would disqualify him from entering the United States. But it also noted
that it lacked key information from the Soviet side: ‘Verification of
identity and complete establishment of applicant’s reliability is not
possible due to the inaccessibility of records and geographic area of
applicant’s former residence.’

Wartime
documents located by the AP also confirm Karkoc’s membership in the
Self Defense Legion. They include a Nazi payroll sheet found in Polish
archives, signed by an SS officer on Jan. 8, 1945 – only four months
before the war’s end – confirming that Karkoc was present in Krakow,
Poland, to collect his salary as a member of the Self Defense Legion.
Karkoc signed the document using Cyrillic letters.

Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk in 1919, according to details he provided American officials.

At
the time, the area was being fought over by Ukraine, Poland and others;
it ended up part of Poland until World War II. Several wartime Nazi
documents note the same birth date, but say he was born in Horodok, a
town in the same region.

Ivran Hrushka, 69, near some trees underneath which stood a house where 21 people, nine of them children, were burnt alive in 1943 in his home village of Pidhaitsi, Ukraine. Karkoc’s unit was the only one said to be in the area at the time

He
joined the regular German army after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941 and fought on the Eastern Front in Ukraine and Russia,
according to his memoirs, which say he was awarded an Iron Cross, a Nazi
award for bravery.

He was
also a member of the Ukrainian nationalist organization OUN; in 1943, he
helped negotiate with the Nazis to have men drawn from its membership
form the Self Defense Legion, according to his account. Initially small,
it eventually numbered some 600 soldiers.

The legion was dissolved and folded
into the SS Galician Division in 1945; Karkoc wrote that he remained
with it until the end of the war.

Policy
at the time of Karkoc’s immigration application – according to a
declassified secret U.S. government document obtained by the AP from the
National Archives – was to deny a visa to anyone who had served in
either the SS Galician Division or the OUN.

The
U.S. does not typically have jurisdiction to prosecute Nazi war crimes
but has won more than 100 ‘denaturalization and removal actions’ against
people suspected of them.

Department
of Justice spokesman Michael Passman would not comment on whether
Karkoc had ever come to the department’s attention, citing a policy not
to confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

Though
Karkoc talks in his memoirs about fighting anti-Nazi Polish resistance
fighters, he makes no mention of attacks on civilians. He does indicate
he was with his company in the summer of 1944 when the Self Defense
Legion’s commander – Siegfried Assmuss, whose SS rank was equivalent to
major – was killed.

Heorhiy Syvyi, 78, left, with Ivan Hrushka, remembers hiding from the Germans as a nine-year-old when they stormed Pidhaitsi. He and his father survived but his mother and four-year-old brother did not

‘We lost an irreplaceable commander, Assmuss,’ he wrote about the partisan attack near Chlaniow.
He did not mention the retaliatory massacre that followed, which was described in detail by Malazhenski in his 1967 statement used to help convict platoon leader Teodozy Dak of war crimes in Poland in 1972.

An SS administrative list obtained by AP shows that Karkoc commanded both Malazhenski and Dak, who died in prison in 1974.

Malazhenski said the Ukrainian unit was ordered to liquidate Chlaniow in reprisal for Assmuss’ death, and moved in the next day, machine-gunning people and torching homes. More than 40 people died.
‘The village was on fire,’ Malazhenski said.

Villagers offered chilling testimony about the brutality of the attack.

In 1948, Chlaniow villager Stanislawa Lipska told a communist-era commission that she heard shots at about 7 a.m., then saw ‘the Ukrainian SS force’ entering the town, calling out in Ukrainian and Polish for people to come out of their homes.

‘The Ukrainians were setting fire to the buildings,’ Lipska said in a statement, also used in the Dak trial. ‘You could hear machine-gun shots and grenade explosions.

Shots could be heard inside the village and on the outskirts. They were making sure no one escaped.’

Witness statements and other documentation also link the unit circumstantially to a 1943 massacre in Pidhaitsi, on the outskirts of Lutsk -today part of Ukraine – where the Self Defense Legion was once based. A total of 21 villagers, mostly women and children, were slaughtered.

Karkoc says in his memoir that his unit was founded and headquartered there in 1943 and later mentions that Pidhaitsi was still the unit’s base in January 1944.

Another legion member, Kost Hirniak, said in his own 1977 memoir that the unit, while away on a mission, was suddenly ordered back to Pidhaitsi after a German soldier was killed in the area; it arrived on Dec. 2, 1943.

The next day, though Hirniak does not mention it, nearly two dozen civilians, primarily women and children, were slaughtered in Pidhaitsi. There is no indication any other units were in the area at the time.

Heorhiy Syvyi was a 9-year-old boy when troops swarmed into town on Dec. 3 and managed to flee with his father and hide in a shelter covered with branches. His mother and 4-year-old brother were killed.

‘When we came out we saw the smoldering ashes of the burned house and our neighbors searching for the dead. My mother had my brother clasped to her chest. This is how she was found – black and burned,’ said Syvyi, 78, sitting on a bench outside his home.

Villagers today blame the attack generically on ‘the Nazis’ – something that experts say is not unusual in Ukraine because of the exalted status former Ukrainian nationalist troops enjoy.

However, Pidhaitsi schoolteacher Galyna Sydorchuk told the AP that ‘there is a version’ of the story in the village that the Ukrainian troops were involved in the December massacre.

‘There were many in Pidhaitsi who were involved in the Self Defense Legion,’ she said. ‘But they obviously keep it secret.’

Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian political scientist who has done extensive research on the Self Defense Legion, said its members have been careful to cultivate the myth that their service to Nazi Germany was solely a fight against Soviet communism. But he said its actions – fighting partisans and reprisal attacks on civilians – tell a different story.

‘Under the pretext of anti-partisan action they acted as a kind of police unit to suppress and kill or punish the local populations.

‘This became their main mission,’ said Katchanovski, who went to high school in Pidhaitsi and now teaches at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

‘There is evidence of clashes with Polish partisans, but most of their clashes were small, and their most visible actions were mass killings of civilians.’

There is evidence that the unit took part in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, fighting the nationalist Polish Home Army as it sought to rid the city of its Nazi occupiers and take control of the city ahead of the advancing Soviet Army.

The uprising, which started in August 1944, was put down by the Nazis by the beginning of October in a house-to-house fight characterized by its ferocity.

The Self Defense Legion’s exact role is not known, but Nazi documents indicate that Karkoc and his unit were there.

An SS payroll document, dated Oct. 12, 1944, says 10 members of the Self Defense Legion ‘fell while deployed to Warsaw’ and more than 30 others were injured.

Karkoc is listed as the highest-ranking commander of 2 Company – a lieutenant – on a pay sheet that also lists Dak as one of his officers.

Another Nazi accounting document uncovered by the AP in the Polish National Archives in Krakow lists Karkoc by name – including his rank, birthdate and hometown – as one of 219 ‘members of the S.M.d.S.-Batl 31 who were in Warsaw,’ using the German abbreviation for the Self Defense Legion.

In early 1945, the Self Defense Legion was integrated into the SS Galicia Division, and Karkoc said in his memoirs that he served as a deputy company commander until the end of the war.

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