07/31/2015 06:51:00 capitalbay.com
Germany DROPS investigation of 96-year-old alleged Nazi SS commander living in Minnesota after he is deemed unfit for trial
Mathias Dillion

Retired Minnesota carpenter, Michael Karkoc, was shown in a June 2013 expose to be a former commander in a Nazi SS-led unit.

German prosecutors have shelved their Nazi war crimes investigation of a retired Minnesota carpenter who was exposed as a former commander in an SS-led unit, saying the 96-year-old is not fit to stand trial.

Munich prosecutor Peter Preuss told the Associated Press, which unmasked Michael Karkoc as a suspected Nazi, that the elderly man’s attorney had refused to allow him to be examined by a medical expert from Germany, and that his office's decision was based on ‘comprehensive medical documentation’ from doctors at the geriatric hospital in the US where he is being treated.

He said doctors there had provided prosecutors with a comprehensive assessment of Karkoc's health over the past year, which was evaluated by a medical expert in Germany.

German prosecutors have shelved their Nazi war crimes investigation of 96-year-old Michael Karkoc, pictured here in 1990, who was exposed as a former commander in an SS-led unit.

‘There are no doubts about the authenticity of the documentation of his treatment,’ said Preuss, who declined to provide specifics about Karkoc's health on privacy grounds.

The German investigation began after AP published a story in 2013 establishing that Karkoc commanded a unit in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion accused of burning villages filled with women and children, then lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States a few years after World War II.

A second report uncovered evidence that Karkoc himself ordered his men in 1944 to attack the Polish village of Chlaniow in which dozens of civilians were killed, contradicting statements from his family that he was never at the scene.

Karkoc's family, who live in Minneapolis, have denied he was involved in any war crimes.

Who is Michael Karkoc? Truth about suspected Nazi war criminal revealed

Michael 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.

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.

Following the war, Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu Ulm, Germany, according to documents obtained from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany.

The documents indicate that his wife died in 1948, a year before he and their two young boys - born in 1945 and 1946 - emigrated to the U.S.

After he arrived in Minneapolis, he remarried and had four more children, the last born in 1966.

Karkoc told American officials he was a carpenter, and records indicate he worked for a nationwide construction company that has an office in Minneapolis.

A longtime member of the Ukrainian National Association, Karkoc has been closely involved in community affairs over the past decades and was identified in a 2002 article in a Ukrainian-American publication as a 'longtime UNA activist.'

The Galician Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organization Karkoc served in were both on a secret American government blacklist of organizations whose members were forbidden from entering the United States at the time.

Karkoc's son and family spokesman, Andriy Karkos, said by phone Friday that he planned a statement later in the day about the case and that he looked forward to clearing his father's name, but declined further comment.

The US Department of Justice has refused to say whether it has ever investigated Karkoc, citing its policy of neither confirming nor denying investigations.

Department of Justice spokesman Peter Carr said Friday he also could not comment on whether his office would now pursue deportation proceedings against Karkoc.

‘As we have said previously, we are aware of the allegations but will decline further comment at this time,’ he said in an email.

Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, criticized the department for not having initiating deportation proceedings against Karkoc over failing to disclose to American authorities his role in the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion when he entered the US in 1949.

‘They should have been aware of his presence in the United States a long time ago, and if they were aware and did not take any action, that's very unfortunate, and I would say atypical, but it's obviously a failure,’ he said by telephone from Lithuania.

‘If they weren't aware of him then it means he slipped through the cracks, but once AP exposed him they should have moved ahead as quickly as possible.’

Poland also initiated an investigation into Karkoc, which remains open.

State National Remembrance Institute spokesman Andrzej Arseniuk said Friday that his office's prosecutors are currently awaiting a reply from the US to a request for help identifying handwriting believed to be Karkoc's.

The German investigation has taken longer than usual, because prosecutors first had to wait for a court ruling that they had jurisdiction in the case.

That came last year, when the Federal Court of Justice said Karkoc's service in the SS-led unit made him the ‘holder of a German office.’

That gave Germany the legal right to prosecute him even though he is not German, his alleged crimes were against non-Germans and they were not committed on German soil.

Someone in that role ‘served the purposes of the Nazi state's world view,’ the court said.

When cases in Germany are shelved they can be reopened at any time if circumstances change, but in this case Preuss said that is very unlikely.

The news came on the day a Jewish newspaper in Britain reported that Stephen Ankier, a retired clinical pharmacologist and Nazi war crimes researcher who helped unmask Krakoc, had located a former rifleman in Karkoc's unit living near Manchester.

Ankier said he hadn't found anything linking the 90-year-old man to war crimes but passed details on to German, American and Polish prosecutors many months ago in case they wanted him as a possible witness in the Karkoc case.

Preuss would not say whether German investigators had planned to question him, but said the man is not considered a suspect.

Germany has in recent years taken the position that people suspected of Nazi crimes must be prosecuted, no matter how old or infirm, as it did in the case of retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in 2012 year at age 91 while appealing his conviction as a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

An investigative file originally from the Ukrainian intelligence agency's archive but unearthed and published in 2013 by The Associated Press, revealed that a private under Michael Karkoc's command testified in 1968 that Karkoc ordered the assault on Chlaniow in retaliation for the slaying of an SS major.

The major, slain by resistance fighters, led the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, in which Karkoc was a company commander.

A German roster of the unit confirms that Pvt. Ivan Sharko, a Ukrainian, served under Karkoc's command at the time.

An initial order was given by a separate officer, Sharko testified, before Karkoc told his unit to attack the village.

'The command was given by one of the commanders to cordon off the village and prepare for battle,' Sharko said, according to the Russian-language investigative file, which bears the stamp of Ukraine's Volyn regional prosecutors' office.

'The commander of our company, Wolf, also gave the command to cordon off the village and check all the houses, and to find and punish the partisans.' Karkoc fought under the wartime nom de guerre 'Wolf,' and he wrote a 1995 Ukrainian-language war memoir under both his real name and the pseudonym 'Wolf.'

According to the document, Sharko described how nobody was spared in the ferocious onslaught on Chlanow.

'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,' Sharko said. 'Most of the houses were burned as a result of this action. How many people were killed in all, I don't know. I personally saw three corpses of peaceful inhabitants who had been killed.'

The AP learned of the file's existence after its initial report and subsequently tracked down and reviewed its contents.

Other eyewitness accounts, both from villagers and members of Karkoc's unit, corroborate the testimony that the company set buildings on fire and gunned down more than 40 men, women and children. Michael Karkoc continues to live quietly in Minneapolis as he has for decades.

One of Karkoc's men, Vasyl Malazhenski, told Soviet investigators that in 1944 the unit was directed to 'liquidate all the residents' of the village of Chlaniow in a reprisal attack for the killing of a German SS officer, though he did not say who gave the order.

'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.'

Nazi SS files say he and his unit were also involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which the Nazis brutally suppressed a Polish rebellion against German occupation.

when asked by the AP about his wartime serice for Nazy Germany, he said: 'I don't think I can explain.'

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