WASHINGTON, November 18 (RIA Novosti) – A retired carpenter living in Minnesota who was identified earlier this year as the head of a Ukrainian Nazi military unit personally ordered an attack on a Polish village in 1944, The Associated Press reported Monday, citing newly discovered eyewitness testimony.
Michael Karkoc, 94, was identified in June by an AP investigation as a top commander and founding member of the Nazi SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which carried out massacres during World War II, and an officer in the SS Galician division.
The investigation found that Karkoc had concealed his Nazi past to gain entry to the United States in 1949 and was in the vicinity of massacres carried out in Poland, although the investigation did not link him directly to the atrocities.
However a further investigation – the results of which were published Monday – uncovered a document in the archives of the Ukrainian intelligence agency in which Ivan Sharko, a private under Karkoc’s command, testified that Karkoc ordered the attack on the village of Chlaniow in response to the killing of an SS major.
“The commander of our company, Wolf … gave the command to cordon off the village and check all the houses, and to find and punish the partisans,” Sharko told investigators in 1968, according to the AP.
Karkoc used the name “Wolf” during the war and also in a 1995 Ukrainian-language memoir. The German roster of Sharko’s unit confirms that the private served under Karkoc’s command, the AP reported.
More than 40 men, women and children were killed during the attack on Chlaniow, according to accounts from villagers and members of Sharko’s unit.
Contacted by the AP, Karkoc’s son Andriy Karkos refused to comment, describing the investigation as “defamatory and slanderous.”
Since the initial report was published in June, German and Polish prosecutors have opened investigations into whether to charge Karkoc with war crimes.
On Monday, Thomas Will, the deputy head of Germany’s special prosecutor’s office, told the AP that he had decided to recommend that state prosecutors pursue murder charges, even before seeing the latest evidence.
Polish prosecutors said that an investigation was ongoing, the AP reported.
