Chapman’s response was the only straight answer Holtzman got that day.
The files were waiting for Holtzman the following weekend, thirty-eight folders stacked neatly on a metal table, each labeled with the name of an alleged Nazi collaborator. The more she read, the sicker she felt. Each file told the same story over and over: negligence in locating alleged Nazi collaborators; failure to interview eyewitnesses named in the files; refusal to seek help from Germany, Israel, and the Soviet Union and its satellites; interference in opening new cases, reopening old ones, and aggressively pursuing those already in play.
Holtzman came to the same conclusion as Anthony DeVito, Vincent Schiano, Otto Karbach, and the anonymous INS whistle-blower. To open the INS files was to come “face-to-face with evil and indifference to evil.” Where was the national moral outrage?
There was no simple answer. No single explanation.
Americans felt a deep need to forget. Although World War II had been fought in Europe and Asia, it touched most of them. If they hadn’t lost a member of their family on the battlefields or in the jungles and the seas, their next-door neighbors had. To some extent, the country was in deep denial, caught in the vise of post-traumatic shock. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter summed it up in four simple words. “I can’t believe you,” he told Jan Karski after the Polish emissary described the gassing of Jews in death camps.
Karski’s message was so big, so tragic, and so far outside the realm of human experience that Frankfurter simply couldn’t digest it. Neither could the rest of America. The numbers were numbing, and Americans felt there was nothing they could do about them but plant white crosses and begin to rebuild their families and their country.
At the same time, America had just shifted from a hot to a cold war without missing a step and without taking time to reflect. The United States had a new enemy dedicated to destroying the very freedoms that half a million of its young soldiers had just died for. And this threat was not across an ocean in countries that were, for most Americans, just colored shapes on a world globe. The enemy was inside America, in classrooms and government offices, in labor unions and movie studios. A hundred rabid J. Edgar Hoovers and Joe McCarthys sprouted up overnight, riveting the attention of Americans on today’s “enemy within”—not on yesterday’s leftover Nazis. The only colors their demagoguery could see were red and pink.
In the face of this new threat, who had time to worry about former war criminals who posed no danger to America and who were, for the most part, staunch anticommunists and valued members of their communities?
Finally, many Americans chose to view the Nazi issue as a Jewish problem. If Jewish organizations wanted to hunt down the killers of their people, good luck. Their hunt was not relevant to the rest of Americans, who had more important things to do.
The argument was as ignorant as it was specious. Those who used it either did not know, or chose to forget, that the Nazi war machine killed more than thirty million European civilians who weren’t Jews, either directly through execution, deliberate starvation, and overwork, or indirectly through hunger and disease. Thirty million was more than the combined population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Dallas, San Diego, Detroit, and San Francisco. They were men, women, and children from the countries of Americans’ Christian grandparents: Poland, Bohemia, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. That fact alone made Nazi war crimes everybody’s problem.
After she finished reading the files, Elizabeth Holtzman felt an anger so intense that she made a promise to devote herself to getting as many Nazi criminals as she could deported, hopefully to stand trial for war crimes. Time was running out. Anger aside, Holtzman was a pragmatist. To find, prosecute, and deport even a thousand of the Nazi collaborators hiding in America would be a miracle. A hundred would be a victory.
When she got back to Capitol Hill, Holtzman called a press conference. The United States had wasted nearly thirty precious years. Six alleged Nazi collaborators on the Karbach list were already dead, and war criminals were literally getting away with mass murder. The rat in the woodpile was beginning to stink.
With cannons of outrage blazing, Holtzman accused the INS of “appalling laxness and superficiality… creating a safe haven for alleged Nazi war criminals” and of being “haphazard, uncoordinated and unprofessional.”
The release of the INS files to Holtzman, resulting in the fiery press conference, was the fourth domino to tumble in the row leading to John Demjanjuk. Three names on the Karbach list troubled Holtzman deeply. They sat festering under her skin like slivers. Two were alleged Nazi collaborators—Andrija Artukovic and Valerian Trifa. The third was a German scientist named Hubertus Strughold.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Andrija Artukovic was a leader in the Croatian Ustasha, whose fascist thugs (Ustashi) killed, or delivered to the SS, every Jew, communist, and Gypsy they could find. Their specialty was the slaughter of Orthodox Christian Serbs. Their brutality reached a new low in a war that was no stranger to inhumanity.
“Some Ustashi collected the eyes of the Serbs they had killed… proudly displaying them and other human organs in the cafes of Zagreb,” one observer wrote. “Even their German and Italian allies were dismayed at their excesses.”
The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Ustashi were inimical and barred them from entering the United States.
At first, the Catholic-based ethnic cleansing of Serbs followed a calculated rule of thumb: Kill a third, deport a third, convert a third. The formula didn’t work. So many Serbs chose conversion that “Catholic priests were besieged by crowds of panic-stricken men, women, and children clamoring for admission to the Church of Rome.”
With conversion no longer practical, the Ustashi simply murdered between 330,000 and 390,000 Serbs, numbers roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis. Much of the killing of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communists took place in the Jasenovac concentration camp, whose commandant was a Ustasha Franciscan priest, one of dozens of Ustasha Franciscans who took part in the ethnic cleansing.
As Ustasha minister of the interior and minister of justice and religion in the Nazi puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia, Andrija Artukovic was frequently called the “Himmler of Croatia,” responsible for implementing the genocides. After the war, Yugoslavia tried and sentenced him in absentia to life in prison.
Artukovic entered the United States with his wife, Anamaria, and their three children in 1948 on a ninety-day visa under the name Alois Anich. He joined his brother John in Surfside, California, where Andrija worked as a bookkeeper for John’s sewer and road construction company. When his visa expired, Artukovic never bothered to renew it. To make sure his brother wouldn’t be deported, John borrowed a move from the Nicolae Malaxa playbook. He and his rich friends “convinced” their congressman to introduce a private bill requesting that the Justice Department grant Andrija Artukovic permanent U.S. residency.
The bill was killed by Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, who was no more welcoming to Artukovic than he had been to Malaxa. But in spite of congressional refusal to grant Artukovic permanent residency and an eventual INS investigation into his wartime activities, Artukovic remained in the United States.
When Elizabeth Holtzman closed Artukovic’s incomplete file, she was torn between puzzlement and righteous anger. An alleged notorious Ustasha war criminal was basking in the California sun. He wasn’t a U.S. citizen, didn’t enjoy permanent residency, and lacked a valid visa.
Was someone protecting Andrija Artukovic? If so, who? And why?
Viorel Trifa was a top-echelon Romanian Iron Guardist and the beneficiary of Nicolae Malaxa’s guns and cash. A theologian, historian, and Gestapo school graduate, he was editor of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard newspaper
