Fascist Vanguards of Eastern Europe and the Republican Heritage Committees of the USA

"Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party" (1991, South End Press) [http://books.google.com/books?id=ZWAHmLuZeIoC]
Read the book (preview edition provided by Google books) [http://books.google.com/books?id=ZWAHmLuZeIoC&printsec=frontcover]
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Book review by Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.:
Bellant convincingly documents three arguments in this short, journalistic book. First, many people who had been active in Nazi or pro-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s subsequently came to this country, often under the auspices of the Displaced Persons Commission. Second, many of these emigres then became active in political and ethnic groups affiliated with the Republican Party, providing financial and electoral support and crusading relentlessly against Communism. Third, and most important, some of the most unsavory elements of the anti-Communist right gained a foothold in official foreign policy circles under Reagan. Bellant's case is strong and disturbing, but his book is terribly organized, and the meaningful arguments are mixed in with overstated claims (especially the suggestions of a fascist conspiracy) and charges based only on political disagreement, not malfeasance. An optional purchase.
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Response from a reader:
Most (95% ?) of Bellant's book wouldn't be the least bit controversial (even to hard core rightists) if the Nazi Wartimes Disclosure Act had been passed by congress in 1999. But alas, it was not. According to a Baltimore Sun article ('Government May Soon Open Files on Nazi War Criminals', Aug. 2, 1998, p. 20A): "Under pressure from Congress, the Justice Department and other agencies may be forced to declassify tens of thousands of top-secret documents describing the U.S. intelligence community's dealings with Nazi war criminals in the Cold War years. Legislation to open most of those files has already passed the Senate and could come up for a vote in the House this week. Some historians suspect that the opened files could cause 'tremendous embarrassments' for the United States."
Less than one year later the GOP congress voted against passage, and that was it. No one has heard much about it since.
The reason for reinforcing Bellant's book is that the putative basis for widespread former Nazi use and recruitment (including in our intelligence agencies, e.g. CIA) would have been laid bare....but it seemed evident to me even then that the GOP congress wished to cover its party tracks and all possible links to Nazi interests. This point has also been made by author Christopher Simpson in his book, 'Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy', Collier / Macmillan, 1988.
This is why I believe, that for the general reader with political interest, it may be advisable to read Simpson's book and Mann's- Ornstein's before going to Bellant's. Let us say if that order is adhered to there is less likelihood of outright disbelief or criticisms of evidence lacking. Indeed, it would be ludicrous to believe that if Nazi recruitment were made (e.g. from Gehlen Org) there could also not be political influence.
Bellant, in his book, merits kudos for going one step further and documenting the insertion of Nazi-affiliated S.S. groups from Latvia, and the Ukraine into the Republican Heritage Groups Council in the 1980s. Many of Bellant's conjectures on associations, groups - apart from establishing direct ties of former S.S. affiliates to the GOP, were also well substantiated in the Newsweek article ('The Right Wing Web', February 22, 1999, p.34). This was especially in regards to the connections of the Regnery Press and its propagandizing.
I originally had some reservations regarding Bellant's treatment (on page 18) of Philip Guarino and his links to Licio Gelli, a 'Blackshirt' member of Mussolini's Fascist Party. I was happy to find subsequent confirmation in David Yallop's (1984) book, 'In God's Name' (p. 442). Another interesting tidbit is that Guarino was involved in John Connally's 'Committee for the Defense of the Mediterranean' which propagandized on the Italian Communist Party (PCI) threat to the West. (Recall Connally was seated with JFK in his limo when the shots rang out in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and he was wounded by a separate shot, contrary to the Warren Commission's fabrication of a single bullet.)
All in all, Bellant's book is an excellent read and provides a plausible basis for understanding the extremist swing of the current GOP.


"Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.?" (1988) [http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/bushnazi.htm] [https://archive.today/DBmMB]

"George Bush, anti-Semites and the Big Lie: Chronology of a Coverup" (1988-09-01) [http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/bushhoax.htm] [https://archive.today/Twfyg]

"Nazi-affiliated Emigres And The Republican Party" (1988-09-18) [http://articles.philly.com/1988-09-18/news/26229962_1_ethnic-coalition-emigres-american-nationalities] [https://archive.today/0GoPu]

President Gerald R. Ford's Remarks to Members of the National Republican Heritage Groups Council (1975-05-16) [http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/speeches/750262.htm] [https://archive.today/RF7E2]

President Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the Convention of the National Republican Heritage Groups Council (1985-05-17) [http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/51785a.htm] [https://archive.today/6WmTE]

"On Ultra Nationalists: When You Slow-Dance with the Devil, You Can't See His Face" (2014-03-30) [http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=177366] [https://archive.today/fFkUZ], [begin excerpt]: Since the 1970s, when they proved their importance by delivering five states in a US Presidential election, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN)and its affiliate Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America (UCCA)have been remaking the US government in their image. Now they make common cause with their sister Neo-Cons. They are the kingmakers in US federal elections, and both political parties now march to their tune.
At the end of WW2 the Nazi political ideologist Carl Schmidt was asked how such a brilliant man could justify the atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich. His answer: When you slow-dance with the Devil, you can't see his face.  With the unfolding events in Ukraine, it's time now to look in the Devil's face.
President Obama said it was outrageous to think that America would support Ultra Nationalists in Ukraine. Did he lie? You decide.
"For the same day your court in Donetsk ruled to strip [Ukrainian Ultra Nationalist hero Stepan] Bandera of his Hero title, God bestowed the best gift possible to our family: the birth of Stepan Bandera's fifth great-grandchild. The KGB succeeded in killing his great-grandfather. But try as you might, you will never stop the Banderas Coming soon to a gene pool near you! Signed, Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Her Children! In prostration, S.A. Bandera, Grandson of Hero of Ukraine." This was the third-generation Stepan Bandera's open letter to Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych in 2010.
Yes! Stepan Bandera is alive and well. He may well be invited to a mid-summer barbeque at the White House and down a few beers with President Barak Obama and Senator John McCain. The takeover of Ukraine by those who march to his ulra-nationalist drumming has allowed seventy years' worth of US foreign policy to pay off with bigger dividends than anyone could have imagined.
The first Bandera's grandson is a former editor and reporter for the Kiev Post, and you can read his own take on Ultra Nationalists like Oleh Tyanhybok here.
From a Kiev Post interview lunch with the grandson of national hero Stepan Bandera, by Paul Miazga, Kyiv Post Staff Writer, April 20, 2005: "Bandera, who currently writes for New York City's [Ukrainian] Diaspora newspaper The  National Tribune , never knew his grandfather, who was killed by a KGB agent in 1959. But he has an affinity with him.... "Our family has always been very tight, very Ukrainian.' Bandera's father--also a nationalist activist--died under mysterious circumstances back in 1984, just like his grandfather. "I came to Ukraine looking for a fight,' he says."
Aside from being a journalist supporting his family's claim to an Ultra Nationalist Ukraine, Mr. Bandera plays a much larger role behind the scenes. This second-generation homegrown Canadian Ukrainian Ultra Nationalist helped Americanize the ultra-nationalist movement in Ukraine through his influence in America's civil, political, and business circles.
The CUSUR (Center for US-Ukrainian Relations) was started as a result of the continuing support for a free Ukraine in three US presidential administrations. The "free" in "free Ukraine" refers to an ultra-nationalist Ukraine that Mr. Bandera's grandfather would be proud of.
First under President Bill Clinton, and then through two terms of GW Bush, both the US and Ukrainian governments, and businesses in the two countries, built extensive networks that culminated in the event-driving Maidan movement for Ukrainian integration with the West.
The CUSUR and the UCCA (Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America) are intertwined and so powerful in American politics that even a casual glance at their meeting notes or plans will give you the chills. Both groups are in fact OUN (b) (Ukrainian Ultra Nationalist) organizations that operate freely in the US, influencing National Security issues , Foreign Policy , and American National Politics.
Both Congressional Durbin brothers and Secretary of State John Kerry are enthusiastic supporters. Senator Durbin, a Lithuanian-American, has in fact stated during John Kerry's bid for the Presidency, "If John Kerry is elected, Kerry will work vigorously for Ukraine's continued independence and prosperity." That position, of course, supports the UCCA view .
Where does Mr. Bandera fit into all of this? For the last seventy years, the US has only recognized one Ukrainian government. According to CIA-released documents to which I provided links in previous articles, that one government is the Ukrainian government in Exile , led by the Stetskos. That government has now been brought back to Ukraine and cemented with the Maidan.[end excerpt]


"Nazi collaborator invited to White House in 2006" (2008-12-08) [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/18/674790/-Nazi-collaborator-invited-to-White-House-in-2006] [https://web.archive.org/web/20120118095756/http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/18/674790/-Nazi-collaborator-invited-to-White-House-in-2006]


"G.H.W. Bush used Nazi-Collaborators to get Elected"
August 2004 Issue # 54 Press for Conversion! pgs. 38 to 41
[coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/54/54_38-41.pdf] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140205231149/http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/54/54_38-41.pdf]:
Russ Bellant is an investigative journalist. In 1984, he contributed to an awardwinning NBC documentary on American fascist, Lyndon LaRouche. Bellant’s books include: The Religious Right in Michigan Politics (Silver Spring, MD: Americans for Religious Liberty, 1996) and Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism (St. Paul, MN: Consortium, 1992). The latter examines Coors family funding of unionbusting, homophobia, racism and covert operations of the extreme right. (Coors and Canada’s Molson merged in July 2004)
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Source: Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, Boston: South End Press, 1991.
The émigré fascist network within the Republican Party represents a small but significant element of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan into the White House. It is from this network that the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign assembled its ethnic outreach unit in 1988. When news of this emerged, Bush’s ethnic outreach unit saw eight resignations by persons charged with anti-semitism, racism, fascist leanings and Nazi collaboration.
(COAT Editor’s Note: George Bush, Jr., was responsible for spin control during his father’s 1988 campaign. When the Nazi-linked organizers within George Sr.’s Heritage Council were exposed, George Jr. urged the exposed European fascists to resign. However, four of the eight who did resign continued to hold top positions within the Republican Heritage Groups Council.)
During his 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush Sr. (like Nixon and others before him), used a Republican network lead by right-wing, East European emigres, including Nazi-collaborators. Bush is seen here at a July 20, 1988, banquet (co-sponsored by the pro-Nazi Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of nations) with Bohdan Fedorak, of the Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera) that organized military units to massacre Ukrainian Jews in WWII.
These right-wing émigrés are a small but vocal element within the broader ethnic communities they claim to represent. They utilize anti-communist sentiments, historical revisionism and lack of knowledge about Eastern and Central Europe as a shield to deflect inspection and criticism of their past actions and current views.
The émigré fascist network organizes support for its ideological agenda through national and international coalitions of like-minded constituencies that often work with other authoritarian and pro-fascist forces. This broader coalition ranges from Axis allies and their apologists to friends and allies of contemporary dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
The nature of the right-wing  émigré network that Reagan and Bush used to promoted their 1984 and 1988 campaigns can be illustrated by briefly reviewing the backgrounds of some of the past and current leaders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council.

The Republican Heritage Groups Council and its Nazi links
Ex-Nazis as well as fascist collaborators and sympathizers can be found at the highest levels of the Republican Heritage Group. Who are these people? Russ Bellant’s research provides much information.

Laszlo Pasztor -
Pasztor, the founding chair and a key figure in the Republican Heritage Group (and ipso facto, the Republican Party) helped form the Bulgarian National Front, headed by his friend, Ivan Docheff. As early as 1971, the GOP [“Grand Old Party,” i.e. the Republican Party] was warned that the Bulgarian National Front was “beyond the pale.” A Jack Anderson column quoted another Bulgarian-American organization, the conservative Bulgarian National Committee, which labeled Docheff’s Front as “fascist.” But the GOP took no action. Professor Spas T. Raikin, a former official of the National Front, says it grew out of a Bulgarian organization that in the 1930s and 1940s was “pro-Nazi and pro-fascist.” [Jack Anderson, “Nixon Appears a Little Soft on Nazis,” Washington Post, Nov. 10, 1971, p.B17.]

Radi Slavoff -
Slavoff, the Republican Heritage Group’s executive director, is a member of the Bulgarian GOP unit of the Group Council. [He was also the national co-chairman of Bulgarians for Bush.] Slavoff is active with the Nazi linked National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups (NCAEG), which becomes active about a year before presidential elections. NCAEG leaders have included Austin App and Josef Mikus (see below). NCAEG’s Executive Vice President, Michael Szaz, is an official of the Virginia Republican Heritage Groups Council. He is also an associate of prominent racist Roger Pearson [associated with the Nazi Northern League of northern Europe, the Heritage Foundation, the World Anti-Communist League and other fascist organizations.]

Austin App -
App, a pro-Nazi activist, and author of The Six Million Swindle, asserts that the Nazi extermination of the Jews didn’t happen. He is a founder of the NCAEG, a member of the German American National Congress and the Coalition for Peace Through Strength.
He has been particularly active in Willis Carto’s anti-Semitic Institute for Historical Review and worked with Roger Pearson on a Carto publication called Western Destiny. In 1946, App wrote that “the German armies [were] the most decent armies of the war.” In his 1974 pamphlet, “A Straight Look at the Third Reich and National Socialism, How Right? How Wrong,” App wrote: “The truth is that in WWII the Third Reich fought for justice, and the Allies fought to prevent justice.” [Foster and Epstein, p. 229, No Time for Silence: Pleas for a Just Peace Over Four Decades, 1987, p. 62; Austin
J. App, Ravishing the Conquered Women of Europe, as cited by John Roy Carlson in The Plotters, 1946, pp.160-61.]

Josef Mikus -
Mikus asserts that a German victory would have been preferable to an allied one during the WWII. Mikus was an unrepentant supporter of Monsignor Josef Tiso, the Catholic priest and leader of the Slovakian Hlinka Guard during WWII. Lucy Dawidowicz, in her book War Against the Jews, estimated that the Hlinka Guard participated in the murder of 75,000 Slovak Jews. Jack Anderson named Mikus as an advisor to various national Republican Party figures [Jack Anderson, “Doleful Dole,” Washington Post, May 18, 1978, p. A25; Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Nazi Eulogy,” Washington Post, May 4, 1976, p.B15.]
Photo: Hlinka Guard


Nicolas Nazarenko
A former WWII officer in the German SS Cossack Division under General Helmuth von Pannwitz, Nazarenko headed a Cossack GOP unit of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. He is still active with pro-Nazi elements in the U.S. and continues to be consumed with his wartime hatred of Jews, having on more than one occasion declared that Jews remain his “ideological enemy.” He has been accused by other Cossack émigrés with hanging Jews in Odessa during the war. He used to organize the annual “Captive Nations” march in New York City. [Note: “Captive Nations” is the term used by these fascists to describe countries with communist governments.]
Photo: Gen. Helmuth von Pannwitz


Florian Galdau
An associate of Romanian Archbishop Valerian Trifa (see below), who emigrated to the U.S. after WWII and established an American network of Nazi expatriates. Trifa brought Galdau to the U.S. in 1955 to head a New York City Iron Guard unit. (The Iron Guard was the Romanian army that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII.) Galdau’s task was to recruit new Romanian immigrants into the Guard. According to FBI documents, however, Trifa lied to Immigration authorities about his Nazi background. He also hid the fact that he had participated in the murder of Jews in Bucharest, Romania in 1941. In 1984, Archbishop Trifa was brought to trial by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) on charges that he had filed false immigration papers. Trifa fled the country later that year to avoid prosecution, leaving behind Galdau to carry on his work. Before leaving, Trifa ordered the installation of Galdau as pastor of St. Dumitru, a Manhattan parish. It has been estimated that Galdau helped bring into the U.S. as many as 20,000 Romanian refugees – all Nazi collaborators. Over the years, Galdau has performed priestly functions at events that commemorated Iron Guard founder Corneliu Codreanu. Trifa himself once concurred in an interview that the Galdau church was “a center of fascists.”
In 1974, The United Israel Bulletin of New York headlined a story, "Florian Galdau, a Priest, Heads New York Iron Guard Cell." [Summer 1974, p.1.] Galdau is a founder of the Republican Heritage Groups Council and was listed as a member of the Host Committee for a reception honoring President Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., Chairman of the Republican National Committee, during the Council’s 1987 meeting in Washington, D.C. In 1988, he was named National Chair of Romanians for Bush.
Photo: This WW2-era Romanian stamp has the symbol of the Iron Guard


Valerian Trifa
Leader of the Romanian Iron Guard in Bucharest in 1941. The Guard was a pro-Nazi Romanian group linked to the SS by liaison officers such as Otto von Bolschwig of the German SS. In 1941, the Guard went on a rampage in Bucharest, seeking out Jews for gruesome deaths. Three days of chaos ensued. Witnesses charge that during those days, Trifa personally went into a jail and killed Jews. After the war, Trifa came to the U.S. and took over the Romanian Orthodox church by means of physical coercion. In 1952, Trifa became an Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church.


Walter Melianovich
The head of the Byelorussian GOP unit. The unit is closely associated with the Byelorussian-American Association (BAA), an émigré group made up, in part, of former collaborators of the Nazi occupation and its extermination campaign. An early BAA leader was Franz Kushel, an SS major general and commander of the Belarus Brigade, a Waffen SS unit. According to The Belarus Secret (1982) by John Loftus, a book about Byelorussian Nazi collaboration [and the post-WWII recruitment of Byelorussians by the U.S. government], Kushel’s men took 40,000 Jews to an execution ground in 1941. Another BAA leader, Stanislaw Stankievich, the editor of a Nazifunded newspaper, came from an upper- class family of Nazi collaborators. He became mayor of Borissow in 1941. After having a wall built around the Jewish section of the city, Stankievich conducted a series of financial extortions on the contained ghetto. His police then sadistically exterminated Borissow’s 7,000 Jews on October 20, 1941. As the Soviets advanced on German-occupied Byelorussia, a puppet Byelorussian Congress was formed to help mobilize support for the defense of Germany. The 1,039 delegates to this All-Byelorussian Second Congress were screened and approved by Germany. These delegates, many of them leaders of police units and a Byelorussian Waffen SS division, came to dominate the BAA. Melianovich has met with various U.S. agencies including the National Security Council staff in an effort to return fascists to power in Byelorussia. Melianovich has even provided U.S. government leaders with a map of Byelorussia complete with new “ethnogenetical borders.” Melianovich claims that the Republican Heritage Groups Council has “changed the image of the Republican Party under our pressure.” Charging the Democrats with only caring about “the Black and Jewish vote,” he says that “if anyone should be called nationalist, it is the GOP.” Melianovich became national chairman of Byelorussians for Bush in 1988.
Photo: This monument to Byelorussian veterans of WW2 at St. Euphrosynia's Orthodox Cemetary in South River, New Jersey, contains the dreaded symbol of the Belarus Nazi SS-Division


Frank J. Fahrenkopf, jr.
Fahrenkopf, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, became particularly linked to Croatian Republicans. For example, he signed a 1984 Republican Heritage Groups Council booklet listing commemorative dates of significance to ethnic Americans. The entry for April 10 reads: “The Independent State of Croatia was declared by unanimous proclamation in 1941.... Lack of Western support and Axis occupation forced the new state into an unfortunate association with the Axis powers.” The statement is a fabrication. Croatia was pro-Nazi long before the German occupation. The Nazis had a long-standing relationship with the Croatian Ustashi beginning years before the WWII. Indeed, the Nazis conspired with the Vatican to help create the “independent state of Croatia” after the German attack on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941. Without Vatican and Nazi support, Croatia would never have gained its “independence.”
Soon thereafter, the Ustashi began systematically liquidating Orthodox Serbians, Jews and Gypsies. So frenzied did their effort eventually become that even the Nazis were taken aback by the barbarity of the Ustashi concentration camps and the liquidation of whole Serbian villages. Huge ovens at Jasenovac reportedly burned Serbs, Jews and Gypsies alive. An estimated 750,000 people, mostly Serbs, were killed by the Croatians. The “independent state of Croatia,” which Fahrenkopf suggests should be commemorated, ceased to exist after the fall of the Third Reich.
Croatia’s recent re-emergence under right-wing German, Austrian and Vatican pressure may very well foreshadow the kind of power structure which is currently re-surfacing in Croatia.

Method Balco
The head of the Slovak-American Republican Federation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council is a close friend of Josef Mikus and John Hvasta (see below). Like Balco, Mikus and Hvasta are members of the Slovak Republican delegation to the Republican Heritage Groups Council. All three work closely with the Toronto-based Slovak World Congress, a group set up and greatly influenced by former aides to Monsignor Josef Tiso. Tiso was the head of Slovakia, a Nazi puppet state during the war. Slovakia was created by Hitler after he split Czechoslovakia in 1939. When the U.S. declared war on Germany on Dec. 12, 1941, Tiso declared Slovakia at war with the U.S. Tiso created the Hlinka Guard, a unit allied with the German SS that slaughtered 75,000 Jews. Despite this Nazi history in Slovakia, Balco organized an annual commemoration of the Tiso rule in New York.
Photo: Josef Tiso


John Hvasta
A member of the Slovak Republican delegation to the Republican Heritage Groups Council. Hvasta also helped the 1988 Presidential Campaign of former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist, David Duke. Hvasta has also been linked to Joseph Kirschbaum, a principal of the Slovak World Congress. Kirschbaum was a top commander of the SS-like Hlinka Guard. Kirschbaum edited a number of speeches by Ferdinand Durcansky, Tiso’s former foreign minister. One speech which touched on the massacre of Jews in Slovakia ominously warned, “I hope we live to see the time when the Jews draw from these facts the necessary objective conclusions.”
Source: Excerpts from Russ Bellant’s Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party (Boston: South End Press, 1991). The article above, compiled by S.R. Shearer in 1996, quotes from and summarizes Bellant’s work. It is available online as: “Strange Bedfellows: The Religious Right and the Secular Right: Evangelicals are in Danger of being Defined by the Company they Keep.” <www.antipasministries.com/oldnews/bedfells.html>)

Bohdan Fedorak

 When Fedorak was the national vicechair of Ukrainians for Bush. He introduced vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at a July 20, 1988, campaign stop at the Ukrainian Cultural Center, Warren, Michigan. It was a banquet in solidarity with the socalled “Captive Nations.” This banquet was co-sponsored by the pro-Nazi, Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.

Fedorak was the top leader for external affairs in the U.S. for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists- Bandera (OUN-B). During the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, the OUNB organized military units that participated in terrible atrocities including pogroms in which Ukrainian Jews were massacred. Fedorak chaired the
Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) in the 1980s.
He joined the Presidium of its Executive Committee in 1984. The UCCA lobbied Congress to stop the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations from pursuing Nazilinked, Ukrainian war criminals in the U.S. The UCCA is heavily influenced but not totally controlled by the OUNB. For many years, Fedorak has been a delegate to conferences of the profascist, CIA-linked World Anti-Communist League.

Phil Guarino
Phil Guarino, vice-chair of the Republican Heritage Council and leader of its Italian section was a Republican National Committee staffer. He was removed from Bush Sr.’s 1988 campaign because of his involvement in Italy’s illegal P-2 Lodge. P-2 included top military and intelligence officers, corporate and political leaders. It was linked to the 1980 Bologna train station bombing, which killed 85. The P-2’s goal was to install a rightwing Italian dictatorship. Guarino’s ties to P-2 became known when Michele Sindona, the Vatican’s top banker, got 25 years in a U.S. prison for illegal banking. Investigations of Sindona led to Licio Gelli, the P-2 grandmaster. Sindona and Gelli were associates of Guarino. Gelli, an ardent Blackshirt in Mussolini’s Fascist Party was the P-2 leader who made violations of its oaths punishable by death. Italian police found that Guarino was corresponding with Gelli. Guarino also hosted Gelli at Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, introducing him to “members of the entourage.”
Guarino’s dealings with P-2 began no later than 1976, when Mafia- linked Sindona financed “Americans for a Democratic Italy,” cochaired by Guarino and Paul Rao, Jr. Rao is described in Luigi DiFonzo’s St. Peter’s Banker (1983) as “attorney for the head of the Gambino family.” Sindona and Gambino family members were indicted in 1982 for “operating a $600 million-a-year heroin trade between Sicily and America.”
Guarino was also involved in John Connally’s Committee for the Defense of the Mediterranean, which propagandized on the Italian Communist Party (PCI) threat to the West. Connally, a friend of Sindona, was Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury and a member of both Nixon and Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Boards.
Photo: Michele Sindona

Source: These summaries on Fedorak and Guarino was culled by Press for Conversion
editor, Richard Sanders, from Russ Bellant’s Old Nazis, the New Right & the Republican Party (1991).


"STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT & THE SECULAR RIGHT" [http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000049.htm] [https://archive.today/aEJG3], [begin excerpt]:
The National Republican Heritage Groups Council is an official organ of the Republican Party apparatus. It operates under the auspices of the Republican National Committee. It is not a "bit player," but carries considerable official clout within the party.
For example, on May 17, 1985, President Reagan attended a gala at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel hosted by the NRHGC. In 1987 the NRHGC hosted another gala affair in Washington at the Grand Hyatt. The featured speaker was former UN Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. Listed on the "Honorary Committee" for the gala were Senators William Armstrong, Alfonse D’Amato, Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Larry Pressler, Strom Thurmond, and Pete Wilson as well as Congresswoman Helen Bentley, and Congressmen William Broomfield, Philip Crane, Robert Dornan, John Duncan, Newt Gingrich, and Ernest Konnyu. These people are not "small fry." They are powerful and very influential members of the Republican Party.
Ex-Nazis, collaborationists and sympathizers can be found at the highest levels of the organization. Moreover, when such offices are held as a result of a popular vote of the membership, it’s not too much to assume that many of the political views of the popularly elected officials of the organization are held by the membership’s "rank and file" as well. Who then are these people? Bellant lists some. For example:

Laszlo Pasztor: The founding chair and a key figure in the Republican Heritage Group (and ipso facto, the Republican Party). Pasztor helped form the "Bulgarian National Front," a group headed by his friend, Ivan Docheff. As early as 1971, the GOP was warned that the Bulgarian National Front was "beyond the pale." A Jack Anderson column quoted another Bulgarian-American organization, the conservative "Bulgarian National Committee," which labeled Docheff’s National Front as "fascist." But the GOP took no action. Professor Spas T. Raikin, a former official of the National Front says that the "front" grew out of an organization in Bulgaria that in the 1930s and 40s was "pro-Nazi and pro fascist." [Jack Anderson, "Nixon Appears a Little Soft on Nazis," Washington Post, Nov. 10, 1971, p. B17.]

Radi Slavoff: The Republican Heritage Group’s executive director. He is a member of the Bulgarian GOP unit of the Group Council; at the same time, Bellant says that he is active with the Nazi-linked "National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups" (NCAEG). NCAEG leaders have included Austin App and Josef Mikus. Bellant says that the NCAEG is a group which becomes active about a year before presidential elections. Treasurer Richard Kolm says of the NCAEG "We don’t have contact with the Democratic Party. NCAEG has a reputation as Republican." Z. Michael Szaz is NCAEG’s Executive Vice President. Szaz is an official of the Virginia Republican Heritage Groups Council and is an associate of racialist Roger Pearson. And just who are Austin App and Josef Mikus?

Austin App: App, a pro-Nazi activist, is the author of the Six Million Swindle, which asserts that the Nazi extermination of the Jews didn’t happen. He is a founder of the NCAEG. He is also a member of the "German American National Congress" (also known by its German acronym "DANK") and the "Coalition for Peace Through Strength." He has been particularly active in Willis Carto’s anti-Semitic "Institute for Historical Review" and worked with Roger Pearson as a co-laborer on another Carto publication, Western Destiny. In 1946 App wrote that "... the German armies (were) the most decent armies of the war." Again, in his 1974 pamphlet, A Straight Look at the Third Reich and National Socialism, How Right? How Wrong," App wrote, "The truth is that in World War II the Third Reich fought for justice, and the Allies fought to prevent justice." [Foster and Epstein, p. 229, No Time for Silence: Pleas for a Just Peace Over Four Decades (Costa Mesa, California: Institute for Historical Review, 1987), p. 62; Austin J. App, Ravishing the Conquered Women of Europe, as cited by John Roy Carlson in The Plotters (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, pp. 160-61.]

Josef Mikus: Cut out of the same mold as App. He has been known to assert that a German victory would have been preferable to an allied one during the Second World War. Mikus was also an unrepentant supporter of Monsignor Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest and the leader of the Slovakian Hlinka Guard during World War II. Lucy Dawidowicz, in her book, War Against the Jews, estimated that the Hlinka Guard participated in the murder of some 75,000 Slovak Jews. Jack Anderson named Mikus as an advisor to various national Republican figures [Jack Anderson, "Doleful Dole," Washington Post, May 18, 1978, p. A25; Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, "Nazi Eulogy," Washington Post, May 4, 1976, p. B15.]

Nicolas Nazarenko: A former World War II officer in the German SS Cossack Division under German General Helmuth von Pannwitz, Nazarenko heads a Cossack GOP unit of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. He is still active with pro-Nazi elements in the United States and continues to be consumed with his wartime hatred of the Jews, having on more than one occasion declared that Jews remain his "ideological enemy." He has been charged by other Cossack émigrés as having hanged Jews in Odessa during the war. He used to organize the annual "Captive Nations" march in New York City every summer.

Florian Galdau: An associate of Romanian Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a leader of Romania’s Iron Guard who emigrated to America after the war. After reaching the United States, Trifa set about establishing a network of Nazi expatriates. Trifa brought Galdau to the United States in 1955 to help in his work. Galdau was brought in specifically to head a New York City Iron Guard unit. Galdau’s task was to recruit new Romanian immigrants into the Guard. According to FBI documents, however, Trifa lied to Immigration authorities concerning his Nazi background. He also hid the fact that he had participated in the murder of Jews in Bucharest, Romania in 1941. In 1984, Archbishop Trifa was brought to trial by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) on charges that he had filed false immigration papers. Trifa fled the country later that year to avoid prosecution, leaving behind Galdau to carry on his work. Before leaving, Trifa ordered the installation of Galdau as pastor of St. Dumitru, a Manhattan parish. It has been estimated that Galdau helped bring into the country as many as 20,000 Romanian refugees - all Nazi collaborators. Over the years, Galdau has performed priestly functions at events that commemorated Iron Guard founder Corneliu Godreanu. Trifa himself once concurred in an interview that the Galdau church was "a center of fascists." In 1974, The United Israel Bulletin of New York headlined a story, "Florian Galdau, a Priest, Heads New York Iron Guard Cell." [United Israel Bulletin, Summer 1974, p. 1.] Galdau is one of the founders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council and was listed as a member of the Host Committee for a reception honoring President Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr., Chairman of the Republican National Committee, during the Council’s 1987 meeting in Washington, D.C. In 1988 he was named National Chair of Romanians for Bush. And who exactly was Galdau’s mentor, Valerian Trifa?

Valerian Trifa: Leader of the Romanian Iron Guard in Bucharest in 1941. The Guard was a pro-Nazi Romanian group linked to the SS by liaison officers such as Otto von Bolschwig of the German SS. In 1941 the Guard went on a rampage in Bucharest, seeking out Jews for gruesome deaths. Three days of chaos ensued. During those three days, witnesses charge that Trifa personally went into a jail and killed Jews who had been put into a cell there. After the war, Trifa was able to come to the U.S. and take over the Romanian Orthodox church by means of physical coercion. In 1952, Trifa became an Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Walter Melianovich: The head of the Byelorussian GOP unit. The unit is closely associated with the Byelorussian-American Association (BAA), an émigré group made up, in part, of former collaborators of the Nazi occupation and its extermination campaign. An early BAA leader was Franz Kushel, an SS major general and commander of the Belarus Brigade, a Waffen SS unit. According to the Belarus Secret, a book about Byelorussian Nazi collaboration, Kushel’s men carried over 40,000 Jews to an execution ground in 1941. Another BAA leader, Stanislaw Stankievich, one-time editor of a Nazi-funded newspaper, came from an upper-class family of Nazi collaborators. He became a mayor of Borissow in 1941. After having a wall built around the Jewish section of the city, Stankievich conducted a series of financial extortions on the contained ghetto. His police than sadistically exterminated the seven thousand Jews of Borissow on October 20, 1941. As the Soviets advanced on German-occupied Byelorussia, a puppet Byelorussian Congress was formed to help mobilize support for the defense of Germany. The 1,039 delegates to this "All-Byelorussian Second Congress" were screened and approved by Germany. These delegates, many of them leaders of police units and a Byelorussian Waffen SS division, came to dominate the BAA. Melianovich has met with various U.S. agencies including the National Security Council staff in an effort to return fascists to power in Byelorussia. Melianovich has even provided U.S. government leaders with a map of Byelorussia complete with new "ethnogenetical borders." Melianovich claims that the Republican Heritage Groups Council has "changed the image of the Republican Party under our pressure." Charging the Democrats with only caring about "the Black and Jewish vote," he says that "if anyone should be called nationalist, it is the GOP." Melianovich was named National Chairman of Byelorussians for Bush in 1988.

Frank J. Fahrenkopf: for whatever reason, Fahrenkopf, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, has - over the years - become particularly linked to Croatian Republicans. For example, Fahrenkopf signed a 1984 Republican Heritage Groups Council booklet listing commemorative dates of significance to ethnic Americans. The entry for April 10th reads, "The Independent State of Croatia was declared by unanimous proclamation in 1941 ... Lack of Western support and Axis occupation forced the new state into an unfortunate association with the Axis powers." The statement is a fabrication. Croatia was pro-Nazi long before the German occupation. The Nazis had a long-standing relationship with the Croatian Ustashi beginning years before the Second World War; indeed, the Nazis conspired with the Vatican to help create the "independent state of Croatia" after the German attack on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941; and it is no doubt safe to say that without Vatican and Nazi support, Croatia would never have gained its "independence." Soon thereafter, the Ustashi began systematically liquidating Orthodox Serbians, Jews, and Gypsies. So frenzied did their effort eventually become that even the Nazis were taken aback by the barbarity of the Ustashi concentration camps and the liquidation of whole Serbian villages. Huge ovens at Jasenovac reportedly burned Serbs, Jews and Gypsies alive. An estimated 750,000 people, mostly Serbians, were killed by the Croatians. The "independent state of Croatia," which Fahrenkopf suggests should be commemorated, ceased to exist after the fall of the Third Reich. It’s re-emergence four years ago under right-wing German, Austrian and Vatican pressure may very well foreshadow the kind of power structure which is currently re-surfacing in Croatia.

Method Balco: The head of the Slovak-American Republican Federation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. He is a close friend of Josef Mikus (see above) and John Hvasta. Like Balco, Mikus and Hvasta are members of the Slovak Republican delegation to the Republican Heritage Groups Council. All three work closely with the Toronto-based Slovak World Congress, a group set up and greatly influenced by former aides to Monsignor Josef Tiso. Tiso was head of Slovakia, a Nazi puppet state, during the war. Slovakia was created by Hitler after he split Czechoslovakia in 1939. When the U.S. declared war on Germany on December 12, 1941, Tiso declared Slovakia at war with the U.S. Tiso created the Hlinka Guard, a unit allied with the German SS, which was responsible for the slaughter of some 75,000 Jews. Despite the Nazi history in Slovakia, Balco still organizes an annual commemoration of the Tiso rule in New York.

John Hvasta: A member of the Slovak Republican delegation to the Republican Heritage Groups Council. Hvasta also helped the 1988 Presidential Campaign of former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist David Duke. Hvasta has also been linked to Joseph Kirschbaum, a principal of the Slovak World Congress. Kirschbaum was a top commander of the SS-like Hlinka Guard. Kirschbaum is responsible for editing a number of speeches by Ferdinand Durcansky, Tiso’s former foreign minister. One speech which touched on the massacre of Jews in Slovakia ominously warned, "... I hope we live to see the time when the Jews draw from these facts the necessary objective conclusions ..."

These people are Nazi collaborationists and sympathizers pure and simple. There is no other way that one can describe them. How does one explain away the participation of these men in groups which are so clearly Nazi oriented as the Arrow Cross, the Iron Guard, the Belarus Brigade, the Hlinka Guard, etc?
"In a sense ... the foundation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council ... (lies) in Hitler’s networks ... (in) East Europe before World War II. In each of those Eastern European countries, the German SS set up or funded political action organizations that helped form SS militias during the war.
"In Hungary the Arrow Cross was the Hungarian SS affiliate; in Romania, the Iron Guard; the Bulgarian Legion, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Latvian Legion, and the Byelorussian (White Russian) Belarus Brigade were all SS-linked. In each of their respective countries, they were expected to serve the interests of the German Nazi Party before and during the war.
"Many of these groups formed SS divisions: the Ukrainian Nationalists formed the 14th Galician Division, Waffen SS; the Latvians formed the 15th and 19th Divisions, Waffen SS; etc. These units and related German-controlled police units had several functions. The Ukrainian division unsuccessfully tried to impede the advance of the Soviet army against the Nazis. Others hunted down those fellow countrymen who opposed the German occupation of Eastern Europe during World War II.
"More sadistically, many units rounded up hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, and others and conducted mass murders on the spot, sometimes decimating whole villages. They perfected ‘mobile killing teams’ as efficient means of mass executions. Little is known about these units compared to the concentration camps, gas chambers, and ovens, but they were an integrated component of the ‘Final Solution’. Approximately one-third of the victims of the Holocaust, perhaps as many as two million, died at the hands of these units ... .
"It is a historical fact that (very large numbers) ... from virtually every Eastern European nationality tied their ... goals to the rising star of fascism and Hitler’s racialist Nazism" - something which East European apologists today have successfully attempted to obscure. [Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South End Press, Boston, 1991) pgs. 4-5.]
It is, incidentally, out of these East European émigré communities, communities which "set up shop" here after the fall of Nazi Germany, that PAUL WEYRICH - perhaps the most powerful man in today’s Religious Right / Secular Right Nexus - is attempting to "reconstruct democracy" in the break-away member states of the Old Soviet Empire - countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Balarus, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, etc. Members of these communities (many of whom are the unrepentant sons and daughters of former SS officers and collaborators) are now streaming back - with Weyrich’s assistance - to these former satellite countries and have to a very large extent already seized the reigns of power in their former homelands. God help these countries - they’re jumping from the frying pan into the fire in accepting Weyrich’s help.

PAUL WEYRICH & THE CONNECTION OF ALL THIS TO THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT
All these men - and many more besides - now rub sholders on a regular basis with evangelicals as a result of the alliance evangelicals have struck with the Republican Party - and to a large extent, it's Paul Weyrich who has made all this possible. The story goes something like this: in 1976, Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich began looking for a political vehicle through which they could facilitate a rightward drift of the American electorate. Eventually they hit upon forcing the Republican Party to move to the Right by using Jerry Falwell and other "born-again" evangelical leaders to mobilize conservative "born-again" Christians. The specifics of the story are as follows: in May of 1979 Robert Billings of the National Christian Action Coalition invited Jerry Falwell to a meeting with Phillips, Viguerie, Weyrich and Ed McAteer.
The four told Falwell of their shared opposition to legalized abortion and pornography, and their intention to influence the 1980 GOP platform. Weyrich proposed that if the Republican Party could be persuaded to take a firm stance against abortion, that would split the hitherto strong Catholic voting bloc within the Democratic Party.
The New Right leaders wanted Falwell to spearhead a visible Christian organization that would apply pressure to the GOP. Weyrich proposed that the name have something to do with a moral majority. The rest is history. Joining Falwell’s plunge into "Christian politics" as members of the Moral Majority’s Board of Directors were Charles Stanley of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Greg Dixon of Indianapolis’ Baptist Temple, Rev. Tim LaHaye from San Diego, California and James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida. Ronald Godwin was hired as vice president and Robert Billings became executive director.
While the Moral Majority has since passed from the scene, all of these men remain committed, in one way or another, to "returning America to Christ and the Church" - and, as time has worn on - many of them have become increasingly willing to make compromises in order to further their political agenda - for example, Kennedy’s relationship with Moon in the Coalition for Religious Freedom. [See Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare, pg. 69.]
The entrance of the Moral Majority into the political fray has enticed millions of hitherto apolitical Protestant evangelicals into the electoral process, many for the first time; it has succeeded in splitting off Catholics from the Democratic Coalition; and it has acted as a catalyst for a political rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants. The forces the Moral Majority helped to set in motion continue today in such newer organizations as the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition, etc.

THE ATTEMPTED TAKEOVER OF THE AMERICAN INDEPENDENT PARTY
What is not so well known, however, is Weyrich’s, Phillips’, and Viguerie’s initial effort to take over the American Independent Party (AIP). It was only after this effort failed that they turned to their "Republican Party Strategy" and Jerry Falwell.
The AIP had been originally formed as a vehicle for the George Wallace campaign of 1968, and was a coalition which included elements of the Ku Klux Klan, John Birchers and the Liberty Lobby. All three - Weyrich, Phillips, and Viguerie - attended the AIP convention of 1976 where the convention’s keynote speaker - to the sound of thunderous applause - pontificated on various elements of the Illuminati Myth and labeled Zionism "as the most insidious, far-reaching, murderous force the world has ever known."
None of the three seemed particularly turned off by the verbiage. They eventually gave up on the AIP only because the party turned to Lestor Maddox, a white supremacist, to head the ticket rather than Viguerie.
The magazine, Human Events, a conservative weekly, seemed to confirm this analysis. It reported that the long-range plan of Viguerie, Weyrich, and Phillips at the time was to use the AIP to form the backbone for a new party in the 1980 elections. Rather than rejecting the segregationist AIP, they had sought to incorporate the AIP - with its racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-fascist elements - into their plans to shape the future political course of the United States. [Please see Human Events, September 11, 1976, pgs. 3-4.]


Leaders of Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) rally in Chicago, Illinois November 1, 1985 sponsored by CMA of Illinois. From left to right, Art Jones, neo-Nazi leader of the reconstituted America First Committee, Guy A. Hoch, rally coordinator and acting secretary for CMA of Illinois, and Tom Posey, national director of CMA. (Photo 1986 Paul L Merideth / PRA)

Art Jones, in full Nazi regalia, enters Chicago's Gage Park Fieldhouse with his followers for a 1979 rally against integration. While Jones no longer wears a swastika in public, his speeches and writings continue to reflect a neo-Nazi agenda with virulent anti-Jewish and anti-Black pronouncements. (Photo 1986 Chip Berlet / PRA)



"GOP heritage groups up and running" (2004) [http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2004/190417.shtml] [https://archive.today/gpUto]:
During the Reagan administration, various Ukrainian American leaders met with the president to voice their support for his "evil empire" posture towards the Soviet Union. Jaroslaw Stetsko, chairman of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, was also invited to the White House.
As ethnic influence in the Republican Party and the White House increased, individuals influenced by the Sovietophile left in American politics began a vicious villification campaign against ethnic groups associated with the Captive Nations lobby.
The most egregrious charge appeared in a left-wing publication titled "Old Nazis, the New Right and the Reagan Administration" by Russ Ballant. Published by Political Research Associates (described as "an independent research institute which collects and disseminates information on right-wing political groups and trends"), this particular perversion argued that "old Nazis" and "fascists" were influencing American foreign policy and prolonging the Cold War. As long as anti-Soviet ethnics were allowed into the White House, Mr. Ballant argued, a true peace with the Soviets would never be achieved. A similar piece authored by the notorious Joe Conason appeared in The Village Voice.
It was as if Department D of the KGB Second Chief Directorate was calling the shots.
Although there was absolutely no proof that any of the charges were valid, the RNC apparently decided that the Heritage Groups Council was not worth the trouble. Slowly, and painfully for some of us, the RNC nationalities division was allowed to wither on the vine. Relying on erroneous information regarding Ukraine - I suspect then National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft was the source - President George Bush visited Kyiv following a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and urged Ukrainians to remain loyal to Moscow. All Ukrainians were mortified by what has come to be known as Mr. Bush's "Chicken Kiev" speech.