Useful Enemies

the original Trawniki card, which the Soviets had made available at its embassy there.

“After comparing the original document with the government Exhibits 5 and 6,” Horrigan asked Epstein, “what conclusions, if any, did you come to?”

“Government’s Exhibits 5 and 6 are photographic copies of that original document I examined at the Soviet embassy,” Epstein said. He went on to say that nothing he saw on the original Trawniki card changed his opinion about its authenticity.

As part of his examination of the original card, Epstein compared Demjanjuk’s Cyrillic signature on the original and two other Demjanjuk non-Cyrillic signatures—one from his visa application and one from a postal change-of-address card filed in a Cleveland post office. It was an apples-and-oranges comparison and Epstein was forced to conclude: “I was unable to reach a definitive conclusion as to the common authorship… due to the absence of sufficient individual handwriting characteristics between the questioned and the known.”

Epstein also admitted that he still had not conducted any ink, paper, or typeface analysis of the card. Neither the prosecution nor the defense asked him why.

Epstein’s final testimony was a disappointing conclusion to a strong government case. Demjanjuk’s signature on the Trawniki card was the most important element in determining authenticity or fraud.

On that somewhat disheartening note, the prosecution rested.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Fear’s the Thing

In quick succession, the defense called Michael Pap, Jerome Brentar, and Edward O’Connor to the stand. The three expert witnesses would constitute the core of the Demjanjuk defense. Martin gave them two tasks—suggest that the Trawniki card was a KGB forgery, and firmly establish the fact that Demjanjuk hid his true wartime activity from immigration officials because he was afraid of being forcibly deported to the Soviet Union and executed as a deserter.

Michael S. Pap, a Ukrainian American, was a professor of history at John Carroll University, outside Cleveland. He lectured across the country on the evils of communism, wrote extensively on the history of Ukraine, and directed John Carroll’s Institute for Soviet and East European Studies. He was bitterly anticommunist and anti- Soviet, and a national promoter of the Independent Ukraine movement.

“Pap” is a relatively common ethnic German name in Volksdeutsche communities in Bohemia, Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. OSI deposed him in 1980 in preparation for Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial. During the deposition, Pap made a distinction between his nationality (Ukrainian) and his citizenship (Czech). He argued that because he was born in Czechoslovakia, he was a citizen of that country and not a citizen of the Soviet Union. The distinction was important because as a Czech citizen he could not be forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war.

Pap testified that he was a student at the State College of Czechoslovakia when the war started. When the Reich invaded Czechoslovakia in 1941, the Germans deported him to Austria as a forced laborer. He worked in a factory outside Vienna until Austria was liberated by the Allies.

If Pap was an ethnic German (Volksdeutsche), he was a lucky one. The Reich had passed a law requiring all ethnic Germans living in the territories it occupied to enlist in the Waffen SS. The Displaced Persons Commission defined the Waffen SS as inimical to the United States. Therefore, its members were ineligible for a U.S. visa. (Members of the Waffen SS Baltic Legions were an exception.)

After the war, Pap studied at the University of Heidelberg. After receiving his doctorate in political science in 1948, he worked briefly for the International Refugee Organization as a counselor. More than likely he knew Edward O’Connor, who was the European director for the war relief services of the U.S. Catholic Church. Pap entered the United States in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1952. He taught at the University of Notre Dame before joining the history faculty of John Carroll University in 1958.

By any definition, Jerome Brentar was a controversial figure. He was either a Good Samaritan trying to save the life of an innocent man, or an intellectual who honestly questioned the “absurdities and contradictions in the Holocaust story,” or an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi revisionist.

Because he was a player in Republican Party politics, Brentar tried to hide whatever his true feelings were about Jews and the Holocaust. But he let his guard down during a live radio interview after the Demjanjuk trial. On the John McCulloch show at WJW in Cleveland he compared John Demjanjuk standing before American judges to Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate.

Asked if he meant that Jews today wanted to frame Demjanjuk as they had framed Christ, Brentar said: “Who else? Who else?… Here was the poor innocent man, standing there like Christ before Pilate. And [the Jews] had witnesses who were not telling the truth… yelling ‘Let his blood be upon us and our children.’”

Brentar went on in the interview to call all Jewish Holocaust survivors Nazi collaborators “because they cooperated with the Germans” to stay alive. Asked if he thought of himself as an anti-Semite, he replied: “Absolutely not! Look, I’m a Catholic. I pray to a Jew every day, and to his Jew-mother.”

Edward O’Connor, a right-wing Catholic, had graduated from the University of Notre Dame and the Jesuit- staffed Niagara University in Buffalo, New York. Immediately after the war, O’Connor headed the War Relief Services of the U.S. National Catholic Welfare Conference in Europe. He fully supported his church’s unspoken anticommunist platform—Catholic fugitives from communist countries would be sponsored by the American Catholic Church and once in America, they would be helped even if they had collaborated with the Nazis.

O’Connor’s actions and decisions clearly demonstrated his Catholic and pro-Nazi bias. As a member of the Displaced Persons Commission, O’Connor “forced through” the DPC decision to make members of the Baltic Legions eligible for U.S. visas. It was a position strongly supported by the American Catholic Church because so many former legionnaires were Latvian Catholics.

Also as a member of the DPC, O’Connor supported another controversial commission decision. In 1950, the CIA began asking refugee organizations for the names and addresses of all displaced persons in the United States. Some groups balked at the request because it was not clear whether the information the CIA wanted was “confidential.” DPC agreed to nudge the organizations that were refusing to cooperate. “It is altogether desirable,” the DPC advised, “that local representatives of the voluntary agencies and State Commissions and Committees make available to fully identified CIA agents the addresses of displaced persons.”

Two years later, O’Connor also championed the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act (Public Law 414), which opened America’s door to Nazi war criminals who had never been convicted. And as chairman of the National Security Council’s psychology and strategy board, O’Connor fully endorsed and participated in planning Cold War covert actions that depended on former Nazi collaborators.

O’Connor was “the single most important activist” in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a neo-Nazi group, according to Christopher Simpson, author of the 1988 groundbreaking book Blowback. Dominated by members of Ukrainian organizations defined as inimical to the United States by the Displaced Persons Commission, ABN had at least half a dozen well-known Nazi collaborators on its board of directors. Most notorious among them were Alfreds Berzins and Radoslaw Ostrowsky (in Belorussian, Radaslau Astrouski). Berzins was an anti-Semitic Latvian lieutenant in the Waffen SS accused of torturing, killing, and deporting two thousand Jews. He was on CROWCASS Wanted List Number 14. Ostrowsky was the former puppet president of Nazi-occupied Belorussia and president of Belorussia’s government-in-exile until his death in 1979. The Nuremberg tribunal defined Nazi quislings like Ostrowsky as criminals.

Funded by the CIA and billed as patriotic, pro-American, and anticommunist, ABN attracted right-wing Republicans, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers like Jerome Brentar and Austin App, author of The Six Million Swindle and the reputed father of Holocaust revisionism. ABN was so convincingly apple-pie American that it persuaded the U.S. Congress to pass unanimously a “Captive Nation Week” resolution in 1959.

O’Connor was no fan of OSI, whom he would later call a KGB collaborator, in a lengthy article in the Ukrainian quarterly.

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