Friday, June 14, 2013

Jeff Wagner Calls Commanding SS-Led Unit "Bad Behavior"

Right-wing afternoon AM 620 WTMJ radio talker Jeff Wagner twice in his discussion of what to do with a former SS-led unit commander discovered illegally living in Minnesota framed the topic - - podcast beginning at 21:10 mark - - by asking "should there be a statute of limitations on bad behavior?"

Bad behavior?

"Bad behavior" better describes littering or gossiping or taking a cell phone call in a movie theater.

Here is how the AP describes it:
A top commander [Michael Karkoc, 94] of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States and has been living in Minnesota since shortly after World War II, according to evidence uncovered by The Associated Press...
Though records do not show that Karkoc had a direct hand in war crimes, statements from men in his unit and other documentation confirm the Ukrainian company he commanded massacred civilians, and suggest that Karkoc was at the scene of these atrocities as the company leader. Nazi SS files say he and his unit were also involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which the Nazis brutally suppressed a Polish rebellion against German occupation...
Members of his unit and other witnesses have told stories of brutal attacks on civilians.
One of Karkoc's men, Vasyl Malazhenski, told Soviet investigators that in 1944 the unit was directed to "liquidate all the residents" of the village of Chlaniow in a reprisal attack for the killing of a German SS officer, though he did not say who gave the order.

"It was all like a trance: setting the fires, the shooting, the destroying," Malazhenski recalled, according to the 1967 statement found by the AP in the archives of Warsaw's state-run Institute of National Remembrance, which investigates and prosecutes German and Soviet crimes on Poles during and after World War II.
Wagner also referred to the former unit commander as having been "involved with" or "associated with" the unit.

Which seems to minimize "a top commander," especially since the AP story also running in today's New York Times says Karkoc helped to create the unit in collaboration with the SS and later took direct orders from it:
However, in a Ukrainian-language memoir published in 1995, Karkoc states that he helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943 in collaboration with the Nazis' feared SS intelligence agency, the SD, to fight on the side of Germany — and served as a company commander in the unit, which received orders directly from the SS, through the end of the war.



3 comments:

  1. And Jeff Wagner is a former US Attorney??

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  2. He also chuckled a number of times while telling the story of a 4 year-old who brought a chamberd and loaded weapon to school.

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  3. ". . . . Which seems to minimize "a top commander," especially since the version of the AP story running in today's New York Times . . . . "

    I think you just answered your own question.

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