The Nuremberg Tribunal defined propagandists like Trifa as war criminals because they made genocide palatable to the public.
Trifa and the Iron Guard presented Hitler with two dilemmas. Although the Fuhrer applauded their anti- Semitic zeal, he didn’t trust them because he couldn’t control them. Because Germany had no oil fields of its own, the oil deposits in Romania were critical to the Reich. To keep the oil flowing, however, Hitler needed political stability in that country. The Iron Guard was about as stable as nitro in a jar.
Hitler assigned SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, chief of the SS intelligence corps in Romania (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), to keep an eye on the Guard. Baron von Bolschwing was a good choice. He was a loyal Nazi and an aide to Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Bolschwing’s job was to craft solutions to the Jewish problem. His new assignment in Bucharest was to win the confidence of the Iron Guard, then report its every political move back to Berlin.
Nuremberg defined the SD as a criminal organization and the Displaced Persons Commission ruled its members to be inimical and barred them from entering the United States.
As a counterintelligence officer, Bolschwing knew that if he befriended the twenty-one-year-old Trifa, he would have entry into the inner sanctum of the Iron Guard (also called Legionnaires). Bolschwing stuck to Trifa like Liquid Nails.
Hitler’s worst Romanian nightmare became real in January 1941. On January 20, Trifa signed and issued an anti-Semitic and antigovernment manifesto prompted by the assassination of a high-ranking German officer in Bucharest. The manifesto, which was proclaimed over the radio on January 20, condemned the political regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu for protecting the “Satanic” assassins who had murdered the German officer and for allowing Jews in his government.
“We beseech General Antonescu,” the manifesto concluded, “to do justice by [the] Romanians. We demand the replacement of all Masonic and Judized persons in the government.
“We demand a Legionnaire Government.”
The next night, January 21, between three thousand and ten thousand Iron Guard students rallied in the square in front of the state university to hear Trifa deliver a rousing, thirty-minute speech over a loudspeaker expanding the incendiary themes of his manifesto. He demanded the overthrow of the Antonescu regime and the establishment of a new Iron Guard government. He went on to praise Hitler as the savior of the world and demanded the execution of all Jews and Freemasons, whom the Iron Guard considered antifascist and pro- Jewish.
After the speech, Trifa led an orderly column of Iron Guard students through the streets of Bucharest singing Legionnaire songs and chanting “Death to Freemasons and Kikes.” As they passed the German legation, where von Bolschwing lived, they shouted “Sieg heil!” and “Long live Germany!” By the time they reached Antonescu’s headquarters, the crowd had swelled to twenty thousand angry, chanting students.
Trifa’s call to action ignited a military coup and a three-day, anti-Semitic pogrom in Bucharest that quickly spread to eleven other Romanian cities. Iron Guard Green Shirts attacked the regular army and stormed into the capital’s Jewish quarters.
Besides the usual burning of synagogues and the desecration of sacred Torah scrolls, Iron Guardists hung Jews on hooks in a meatpacking plant and skinned them alive, later using the skin for trophy lampshades and shoes. They cut throats in a parody of the kosher killing of chickens and hung “Kosher Meat” signs around the necks of the dead. They raped, stoned, and decapitated. One eyewitness described a group of Green Shirts kicking three naked Jewish women into a temple they had set on fire: “The wretched victims’ shrieks of despair tore through the sky.” When the four-day carnage finally ended, between five hundred and one thousand Bucharest Jews had been tortured and butchered.
After government soldiers quashed the leaderless coup, thousands of Iron Guardists scurried off to European capitals to set up intelligence cells and to plot the eventual liberation of Romania. They skipped town so fast that they left behind two hundred trucks filled with plundered jewels and cash, and a very unhappy Marshal Antonescu. In retaliation, he ordered the execution of every Iron Guardist foolish enough not to flee. Trifa was at the top of the hit list, but Antonescu couldn’t find him. Von Bolschwing was hiding his friend in the German legation.
The Reich welcomed the exiled pro-Nazi Guardists into Germany and provided them protective custody. Trifa ended up in Dachau. Not in the Dachau prison, but in the prison’s guesthouse, where he enjoyed a private room with heat, free access to a community lounge with a radio, and a monthly stipend for cigarettes, books, and movies. When he developed bleeding ulcers, the Nazis sent him to the best German hospitals and health spas.
In August 1944, the SS released Trifa from Dachau. He eventually made his way to Italy, where he taught history at a Catholic college.
Meanwhile, Romania sentenced him to death in absentia. Eyewitnesses testified at the trial that Viorel Trifa was more than just an instigator of carnage. He personally gave execution orders, they said. In one instance, according to an eyewitness interviewed by the FBI, Trifa ordered a squad of Green Shirts to cut out the tongues and pluck out the eyes of three families of Jews, then toss the bodies out a three-story window one at a time. The eyewitness accounts have never been independently authenticated.
Trifa received a visa to the United States in 1950, two years before John Demjanjuk. He told immigration officials that he had been the editor of a religious newspaper but was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau, where he spent four years before escaping. He denied being a member of the Iron Guard, which would have excluded him from U.S. citizenship.
The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) knew that Trifa was lying. In its background check, it had learned that he was indeed an Iron Guard member and a propagandist ineligible for a U.S. visa. How and why the United States granted him a visa, given his known Nazi collaboration, is not clear.
Like Demjanjuk, Trifa settled in Cleveland, home to the oldest and largest Romanian community in America and its Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC). While editing the church’s newspaper,
The ROC was hopelessly split over the authority of its spiritual head, Romanian patriarch Justinian Marina. The problem was that Justinian, who claimed an unbroken episcopal bloodline back to the apostles, was a puppet of the Romanian communist government. It was no secret that Romania wanted control over the fifty-five ROC parishes in the United States and Canada. The majority of Romanian Americans, who were more anticommunist than religious purists, rejected the “Red Patriarch”; a minority led by Father Andrei Moldovan accepted him as their true spiritual leader.
At the invitation of Justinian and with the approval of Romania’s communist government, Father Moldovan went to Romania, where the patriarch anointed him bishop. Back in the United States, he declared himself the valid leader of the ROC. The Romanian American majority immediately elected Viorel Trifa to oppose him. That choice posed a major problem. To be a bishop, one had to be a priest. Trifa was a layman, and Moldovan and his fellow bishops refused to either ordain him a priest or consecrate him a bishop.
To solve the problem, Trifa supporters went to other U.S. Orthodox episcopates looking for someone willing to do the job. They ultimately settled on the Ukrainian Orthodox metropolitan, head of John Demjanjuk’s church. The Ukrainian archbishop agreed to ordain and consecrate the Romanian Trifa even though the Moldovan faction warned him that Trifa “was a Nazi collaborator responsible for the murderer
In shotgun fashion, the archbishop ordained Trifa subdeacon, then deacon, then priest. He received Trifa’s vows as a monk, then consecrated him Bishop
Before long, Trifa was nationally recognized as a religious leader. As head of the forty-five-thousand-member ROC, he became a governor on the board of the National Council of Churches. And at the recommendation of Nicolae Malaxa, his and Richard Nixon’s friend, he delivered the opening prayer of the 1955 session of the United States Senate.
