Vesti iz prošlosti

[Turnbull]

Englezi našli Ričarda III, a mi ne možemo Dražu!

[palikaris]

Ovo moze komotno da ide dole na doom in the uk :D Reko vam ja da je to srbija sa mnogo para.

[Аврам Гојић]

Meni je ovo najinteresantnija vest iz istorije koju sam u zivotu cuo.Ali to lice...tuzni tiranin grbavac, oklevetanog lica i hoda.

I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionable,That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them,—Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,Have no delight to pass away the time,Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

[Roger Sanchez]

Meni je ovo najinteresantnija vest iz istorije koju sam u zivotu cuo.Ali to lice...tuzni tiranin grbavac, oklevetanog lica i hoda.

I meni isto je zanimljive vrste, volim ovakve blast from the past izlete iz prošlosti u sadašnjost. Zgodno je da su prije dvije godine našli i točnu lokaciju bitke kod Boswortha, oko 2 km od predmnijevanog mjesta po tradiciji. Nađoše i ovo..žNjegov osobni amblem, koji je nosio on ili njegov bodyknight. Edited February 5, 2013 by Roger Sanchez

[hazard]

Meni je ovo najinteresantnija vest iz istorije koju sam u zivotu cuo.Ali to lice...tuzni tiranin grbavac, oklevetanog lica i hoda.

Neki kazu da su Tjudori i Sekspir malo preterali sa blacenjem...ima zapravo celo jedno udruzenje posveceno pravdi za Ricarda :Dhttp://www.richardiii.net/ Edited February 5, 2013 by hazard

[Roger Sanchez]

mjesto pogibije

[Prospero]

kad smo kod leševa Author: Cadaver dog discovered Black Dahlia death scene at Hollywood home

ByFrank C. Girardot, Staff Writertwitter.com/frankgirardotPosted: 02/01/2013 11:02:00 PM PST

LOS ANGELES -- A former LAPD detective, who believes his father killed the Black Dahlia, said Friday that a cadaver dog's search of a Hollywood home turned up the scent of death.

Steve Hodel, author of "Black Dahlia Avenger," teamed with retired police Sgt. Paul Dostie of Mammoth Lakes and Buster, a Labrador retriever trained to detect the unique smell of human composition.The Nov. 9 search of the historic Sowden House on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood was set up in conjunction with the TV show "Ghost Hunters." Although it was filmed, the segment with Buster never aired."It certainly seems like someone was murdered there," Dostie said. "Something happened."Hodel said it was clear the search wouldElizabeth Short's booking photo in Santa Barbara in 1943 for "Minor Possession". She was 19 and with some military men at a bar. Arrested and sent home to Medford, MA. Elizabeth Short was the Black Dahlia Murder victim. (HAND-IN)turn up something as soon as Buster was turned loose."Buster immediately took off ... and ran to a vent located at the southwest corner of the property where he alerted, indicating he had picked up the scent of human decomposition."Buster's unique sense of smell led Hodel and Dostie to a vent just outside the home's basement. Hodel said that portion of the Sowden House - designed by Lloyd Wright and built in 1926 - is largely unchanged and looks the same as it did in 1947, the year Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was slain.On Jan. 15, 1947, Short's bisected body was discovered in a vacant lot near the intersection of 39th Street and Norton Avenue in South Los Angeles.Newspapers in the region devotedAdvertisementpages and pages of coverage to the slaying. Several editors and LAPD officials received taunting notes believed to be from Short's killer.Hodel believes his father George Hill Hodel, a Los Angeles doctor who grew up in South Pasadena, killed the Dahlia and may have been responsible for several other "lone woman" murders in the 1940s.Hodel's research, which resulted in the book "Black Dahlia Avenger," convinced several officials - including Manson family co-prosecutor Stephen

George Hodel's October, 1949 booking photo for Incest and Child Molestation, the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder. (HAND-IN)

Kay - that the case had been solved. Additional research led Hodel to files maintained by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. The files indicated his dad was a person of interest in the Dahlia case.During an interview with producers of the "Ghost Hunters" show, Hodel explained his theory that Short suffered "several hours of extended torture, which included cigarette burns to her back and sexual assault.""Ghost Hunters" was filmed in conjunction with the anniversary of the gruesome discovery, but when it aired the footage of Buster was left on the cutting room floor.Dostie made national news in 2008 when he took Buster to the Manson Family's Barker Ranch in Death Valley to hunt for possible graveThe Sowden/Franklin House, 5121 Franklin Ave, Hollywood. 1945-1950 residence of Dr. George Hill Hodel, the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder. (HAND-IN)sites. Buster hit on five possible locations where human remains might have been located. He's also located the graves - and remains - of American soldiers buried hastily in Belgium battlefields during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.There is a science behind Buster's unique ability. He's able to detect soft tissue decomposition, human blood, human bone, cremation ashes and human bone decomposition if there's bone present and decomposing.Washington resident Marcia Koenig, who operatescadaverdogs.com, said training cadaver dogs requires tapping into a dog's instincts."All we are doing is modifying hunt behavior and changing it so they hunt for a certain scent or scents," she

Buster, a cadaver dog, and handler Paul Dostie searched the Sowden/Franklin House, 5121 Franklin Ave, Hollywood; the 1945-1950 residence of Dr. George Hill Hodel, prime suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder. (HAND-IN)

said. "When they find it, they get rewarded."There are pitfalls. Dogs can be influenced by their handler's body language and sometimes they can be wrong, Koenig said."Sometimes dogs just do things we just don't understand," she added.In an older case like the Dahlia homicide, Koenig said it would be good to have some corroborating evidence."If the dog says there something there, dig it up," she said.Hodel said soil samples from the basement of the home have been sent to a lab for analysis. But he believes Buster uncovered the first forensic evidence in the case since Short's killing."We have established as fact that the basement ... some 66 years after the murder, still holds the smell of death," Hodel said.Read more:http://www.sbsun.com/portal/news/ci_22502545/author-cadaver-dog-discovered-black-dahlia-death-scene?source=most_viewed&_loopback=1#ixzz2K9MB0S00

[Muwan]

Iskopana su Vrata Pakla

[Filipenko]

Kurir objavio još pre par dana.

[Roger Sanchez]

Associated Press / October 17, 2012SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chile’s Supreme Court has approved an extradition request for a former U.S. military officer wanted in the 1973 killings of two Americans, including one whose disappearance was the focus of the movie ‘‘Missing,’’ a lawyer said Wednesday.Former U.S. Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis was charged last year in the deaths of journalist Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi, who were killed during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.Attorney Sergio Corvalan, who represents Horman’s widow, told The Associated Press that the Supreme Court approved by a 4-1 vote a request by judge Jorge Zepeda to seek Davis’ extradition to face trial in Chile.A court official, who agreed to discuss the case only if not quoted by name, said the vote would be formally announced Thursday.After Davis was charged a year ago, the AP contacted his wife, Patricia Davis, at her home in Niceville, Florida. She said her husband previously denied any involvement in killings. She said he no longer talked because of Alzheimer’s disease and was in a nursing home that she declined to identify.Davis commanded the U.S. military mission in Chile at the time of the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Marxist President Salvador Allende.Corvalan said the ruling by the Supreme Court says Davis is ‘‘criminally responsible as author of the crimes of qualified homicide of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.’’ He added that a report by Supreme Court prosecutor Monica Maldonado says ‘‘a homicide was committed’’ that could have been prevented by Davis.Davis was investigating the Americans as part of a series of covert intelligence operations by the U.S. Embassy in Santiago targeting those considered subversives or radicals, Corvalan said.The Supreme Court considered the killings of the two Americans to be crimes against humanity, Corvalan said. A conviction on the charges against Davis carries a penalty of 10 years to life in prison.According to court papers, Horman, a freelance journalist and filmmaker, was arrested on Sept. 17, 1973, two weeks after the coup and taken to Santiago’s main soccer stadium, which had been turned into a detention camp for Pinochet’s suspected enemies. He was 31.A national truth commission formed after the dictatorship ended said Horman was executed the next day while in the custody of Chilean state security agents.The commission said Teruggi, then a 24-year-old university student, was executed on Sept. 22.The search for Horman by his wife and his father was the topic of the 1982 movie ‘‘Missing,’’ which starred Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon in the roles. The film won a best screenplay Oscar.The film suggested U.S. complicity in Horman’s death and at the time drew strong objections from U.S. State Department officials.The case remained practically ignored in Chile until 2000, when Joyce Horman went to Chile and filed a lawsuit against Pinochet. She said she was acting on behalf of all victims of the dictatorship.The truth commission has determined that 3,095 people were killed or ‘‘disappeared’’ by government agents.

[Prospero]

u, zanimljivo, "missing" mi je iskakao na torrentu ali nikako da se nakanim da ga pogledam. saću ga turim.a evo i za gorepomenutog richarda iii linak o istraživanju smrti i grobnice.

[Prospero]

Amelia Earhart's plane found? Sonar images may have pinpointed wreckageBy Rossella LorenziPublished May 29, 2013Discovery News

• Is this the Electra? A grainy sonar image captured off an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati might represent the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane. (TIGHAR)
• A red dot square in the middle of the Pacific Ocean locates the island of Nikumaroro, where Amelia Earhart's plane is believed to have crash landed. (FoxNews.com / Google)
• Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island) looking southeastward at low tide. Note the broad, dry reef-flat which surrounds the atoll. The rusting remains of the steamer S.S. Norwich City can be seen on the reef edge at right center. This photo was taken in 1978. (TIGHAR / Geomarix)

Next Slide Previous Slide A grainy sonar image captured off an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati might represent the remains of the Electra, the two-engine aircraft legendary aviator Amelia Earhart was piloting when she vanished on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Released by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating Earhart's last, fateful flight, the images show an "anomaly" resting at the depth of about 600 feet in the waters off Nikumaroro island, some 350 miles southeast of Earhart's target destination, Howland Island. PHOTOS: Clues Pointing to Amelia Earhart's Plane According to TIGHAR researchers, the sonar image shows a strong return from a narrow object roughly 22 feet long oriented southwest/northeast on the slope near the base of an underwater cliff. Shadows indicate that the object is higher on the southwest (downhill side). A lesser return extends northeastward for about 131 feet.

'[it's] very promising, definitely not a rock, and it's in the correct location on the reef.'

- Wolfgang Burnside, who conducted the underwater search "What initially got our attention is that there is no other sonar return like it in the entire body of data collected," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. "It is truly an anomaly, and when you're looking for man-made objects against a natural background, anomalies are good," he added. A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR during 10 expeditions have suggested that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island's smooth, flat coral reef. Gillespie and his team believe the two became castaways and eventually died there. NEWS: Pieces of Amelia Earhart's Plane Located? In July 2012, Gillespie and his crew returned to Nikumaroro to carry out an underwater search for the plane with a torpedo-shaped Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). Multi-beam sonar mounted on the ship mapped the underwater terrain and the AUV collected a volume of side-scan data along roughly 1.3 nautical miles of shoreline off the west end of Nikumaroro, while the ROV, capable of reaching depths of 3,000 feet, produced hours upon hours of high-definition video. Plagued by a number of technical issues and a difficult environment, the hunt did not result in the immediate identification of pieces from Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft. As they returned from the data collection trip, TIGHAR researchers began reviewing and analyzing all of new material recovered from the underwater search. They identified a small debris field of objects at the depth of 200 feet, which TIGHAR forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman described as consisting of man-made objects. July 22, 2012: Underwater search for Earhart plane called off. June 1, 2012: Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals may have been transmissions from Earhart, study says. May 31, 2012: A small cosmetic jar offers more circumstantial evidence that Earhart died on uninhabited island. Mar 20, 2012: Enhanced analysis of photo taken months after Earhart's plane vanished leads salvagers back to the island. Dec. 17, 2010: Bone fragments and artifacts turn up on a deserted South Pacific island. Timeline Located distinctly apart from the debris field of the SS Norwich City, a British steamer which went aground on the island's reef in 1929, the site features objects which appear consistent with the interpretation made by Glickmann of a grainy photograph of Nikumaroro's western shoreline. The grainy photo was shot by British Colonial Service officer Eric R. Bevington in October 1937, just three months after Amelia's disappearance on July 2, 1937. It revealed an apparent man-made protruding object on the left side of the frame. Forensic imaging analyses of the picture found the mysterious object consistent with the shape and dimensions of the wreckage of landing gear from Earhart's plane. "The Bevington photo shows what appears to be four components of the plane: a strut, a wheel, a worm gear and a fender. In the debris field there appears to be the fender, possibly the wheel and possibly some portions of the strut," Glickman told Discovery News. A new twist in the search occurred last March when Richard Conroy, a member of TIGHAR’s on-line Amelia Earhart Search Forum, spotted an anomaly in a sonar map posted online. "The anomaly gives the impression of being an object that struck the slope at the base of the second cliff at a depth of 613 feet, then skidded in a southerly direction for about 131 feet before coming to rest," Gillespie said. In its underwater search, TIGHAR missed the place where the anomaly appears by only a few hundred feet. "If only we had continued just that little bit further," Wolfgang Burnside, president of Submersible Systems Inc and the inventor and pilot of ROV used to conduct the underwater search, said. VIDEO: Search for Amelia Earhart Continues He found the target "very promising, definitely not a rock, and it's in the correct location on the reef." "It also shows what I interpret as 'drag' markings on the reef above and to the north behind the target, as it obviously hasn't quite settled into its final resting place yet," Burnside said. Gillespie offers another explanation. “The apparent ground scar behind the object may also be a trail of internal components that spilled from the ripped-open fuselage.“ PHOTOS: Jars Hint at Amelia Earhart as Castaway The anomaly appears to be the right size and shape to match the Electra wreckage and lines up nicely with the Bevington Object and Jeff Glickman's debris field. According to Gillespie, the evidence found so far suggests a reasonable sequence of events: • Earhart makes a safe landing on the dry reef and sends radio distress calls for at least five days. • Before the seventh day when Navy search planes arrive, rising tides and surf knock the Electra off its landing gear and push it over the reef edge into the ocean, leaving a landing gear assembly (the Bevington Object) behind, jammed in the reef. Earhart and Noonan become castaways on the uninhabited, waterless atoll. • The landing gear assembly stays jammed in the reef at least until October when Bevington took the photo, but at some point it breaks free and sinks, ending up in the catchment area at 200 feet where Glickman spotted pieces of it in the video. • After going over the edge, the airplane is battered by the surf and sinks within a few minutes in the shallow water just past the reef edge. Subsequent storms cause pieces of wreckage to wash ashore where they are found and used by the island's later residents. • Eventually the fuselage goes over the cliff, hits the slope at the bottom of the cliff at 600 feet and skids for a ways before coming rest more or less on its side with the starboard-side wing stub sticking up The only way to be absolutely sure that the anomaly is indeed Amelia's plane is by sending another expedition to the island, but that will depend upon the ability of TIGHAR, a nonprofit institute that relies upon sponsorships and contributions from the public, to raise the needed funding. "We currently project that it will take nearly $3,000,000 to put together an expedition that can do what needs to be done. It's a lot of money, but it's a small price to pay for finding Amelia," Gillespie said.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/29/amelia-earhart-plane-found-sonar-images-may-have-pinpointed-wreck/?intcmp=features#ixzz2VW6rLup5

[Topola]

Odlicna prica. Podseti me na ovu: French find Saint-Exupery's planeA French underwater salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 60 years after he disappeared.The author of The Little Prince vanished on a wartime reconnaissance mission over southern France.Pieces of his aircraft were located in the Mediterranean sea off the coast of Marseille, the culture ministry said.St-Exupery is seen by some in France as a national hero, and there had been much speculation about his fate.A respected author and aviation pioneer, he came to international prominence after the publication of The Little Prince, which he also illustrated.The fantastical tale of a small boy's experiences as he travels through the universe was written in French in 1942-43, and published in English and French in 1943.It has since been translated into more than 100 languages.The author was 44 when he died in 1944.Unresolved mysteryThere had been clues to the whereabouts of his plane.In 1998, a fisherman found a bracelet engraved with the name of St-Exupery's wife, entwined with seaweed and a fragment of a flying suit, off the coast of Marseille.In 2000, a diver found the remains of a Lockheed Lighting P38 plane - the type of aircraft St-Exupery had been flying - in the same area.The pieces were brought to the surface by a salvage team last year.Researchers found the plane's serial number, which led them to confirm it was indeed the aircraft used by St-Exupery, although his body has not been found."I had tears in my eyes when I saw the number," Pierre Becker, head of one of the engineering firms involved, told AFP.However, the mystery persists as to why St-Exupery's plane came down on a clear day after he had taken off from his base on the island of Corsica.No bullet holes were found, nor was there evidence of a bent propeller, researchers said."We don't know why (it came down)," a spokesman for the culture ministry said."We probably never will."Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3606903.stm Published: 2004/04/0711:15:55 GMT© BBC 2013Jedna od najludjih stvari koju sam cuo pocetkom 1980-tih bila je prica da se za jedan neidentifikovani grob na Mirogoju veruje da cuva Egziperijeve posmrtne ostatke. Navodno je pao u Jadran, bio povredjen, zarobljen i umro u nemackom zarobljenistvu u Zagrebu. Interesantno da je to pricao Sime Ostric, jedan od boljih poznavalaca istorije avijacije sa ovih prostora. Prica je delovala cudovisno jos u to doba, jer se znalo da od Korzike do Jadrana i nije tako mali let za P38, ali opet, svasta se nagadjalo do ovog pronalska...

Edited June 7, 2013 by Topola

[Prospero]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/michael-karkoc-minnesota_n_3440629.html

Michael Karkoc, Minnesota Man, Was Top Commander Of Nazi SS-Led Unit: AP Report

By DAVID RISING, RANDY HERSCHAFT and MONIKA SCISLOWSKA 06/14/13 10:31 AM ET BERLIN --

 

 

A top commander 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.Michael Karkoc, 94, told American authorities in 1949 that he had performed no military service during World War II, concealing his work as an officer and founding member of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion and later as an officer in the SS Galician Division, according to records obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Galician Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organization he served in were both on a secret American government blacklist of organizations whose members were forbidden from entering the United States at the time.

 

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.

 

The U.S. Department of Justice has used lies about wartime service made in immigration papers to deport dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals. The evidence of Karkoc's wartime activities uncovered by AP has prompted German authorities to express interest in exploring whether there is enough to prosecute. In Germany, Nazis with "command responsibility" can be charged with war crimes even if their direct involvement in atrocities cannot be proven.Karkoc refused to discuss his wartime past at his home in Minneapolis, and repeated efforts to set up an interview, using his son as an intermediary, were unsuccessful.

 

Efraim Zuroff, the lead Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said that based on his decades of experience pursuing Nazi war criminals, he expects that the evidence showing Karkoc lied to American officials and that his unit carried out atrocities is strong enough for deportation and war-crimes prosecution in Germany or Poland."In America this is a relatively easy case: If he was the commander of a unit that carried out atrocities, that's a no brainer," Zuroff said. "Even in Germany ... if the guy was the commander of the unit, then even if they can't show he personally pulled the trigger, he bears responsibility.

 

"Former German army officer Josef Scheungraber – a lieutenant like Karkoc – was convicted in Germany in 2009 on charges of murder based on circumstantial evidence that put him on the scene of a Nazi wartime massacre in Italy as the ranking officer.German prosecutors are obligated to open an investigation if there is enough "initial suspicion" of possible involvement in war crimes, said Thomas Walther, a former prosecutor with the special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes.The current deputy head of that office, Thomas Will, said there is no indication that Karkoc had ever been investigated by Germany. Based on the AP's evidence, he said he is now interested in gathering information that could possibly result in prosecution.

 

Prosecution in Poland may also be a possibility because most of the unit's alleged crimes were against Poles on Polish territory. But Karkoc would be unlikely to be tried in his native Ukraine, where such men are today largely seen as national heroes who fought for the country against the Soviet Union.Karkoc now lives in a modest house in northeast Minneapolis in an area with a significant Ukrainian population. Even at his advanced age, he came to the door without help of a cane or a walker. He would not comment on his wartime service for Nazi Germany."I don't think I can explain," he said.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."Later, when we were passing in file through the destroyed village," Malazhenski said, "I could see the dead bodies of the killed residents: men, women, children."In a background check by U.S. officials on April 14, 1949, Karkoc said he had never performed any military service, telling investigators that he "worked for father until 1944. Worked in labor camp from 1944 until 1945."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.It was not clear why Karkoc felt safe publishing his memoir, which is available at the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library and which the AP located online in an electronic Ukrainian library.

 

Karkoc's name surfaced when a retired clinical pharmacologist who took up Nazi war crimes research in his free time came across it while looking into members of the SS Galician Division who emigrated to Britain. He tipped off AP when an Internet search showed an address for Karkoc in Minnesota."Here was a chance to publicly confront a man who commanded a company alleged to be involved in the cruel murder of innocent people," said Stephen Ankier, who is based in London.The AP located Karkoc's U.S. Army intelligence file, and got it declassified by the National Archives in Maryland through a FOIA request. The Army was responsible for processing visa applications after the war under the Displaced Persons Act.The intelligence file said standard background checks with seven different agencies found no red flags that would disqualify him from entering the United States. But it also noted that it lacked key information from the Soviet side: "Verification of identity and complete establishment of applicant's reliability is not possible due to the inaccessibility of records and geographic area of applicant's former residence."Wartime documents located by the AP also confirm Karkoc's membership in the Self Defense Legion. They include a Nazi payroll sheet found in Polish archives, signed by an SS officer on Jan. 8, 1945 – only four months before the war's end – confirming that Karkoc was present in Krakow, Poland, to collect his salary as a member of the Self Defense Legion. Karkoc signed the document using Cyrillic letters.

 

Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk in 1919, according to details he provided American officials. At the time, the area was being fought over by Ukraine, Poland and others; it ended up part of Poland until World War II. Several wartime Nazi documents note the same birth date, but say he was born in Horodok, a town in the same region.He joined the regular German army after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and fought on the Eastern Front in Ukraine and Russia, according to his memoirs, which say he was awarded an Iron Cross, a Nazi award for bravery.He was also a member of the Ukrainian nationalist organization OUN; in 1943, he helped negotiate with the Nazis to have men drawn from its membership form the Self Defense Legion, according to his account. Initially small, it eventually numbered some 600 soldiers. The legion was dissolved and folded into the SS Galician Division in 1945; Karkoc wrote that he remained with it until the end of the war.

 

Policy at the time of Karkoc's immigration application – according to a declassified secret U.S. government document obtained by the AP from the National Archives – was to deny a visa to anyone who had served in either the SS Galician Division or the OUN. The U.S. does not typically have jurisdiction to prosecute Nazi war crimes but has won more than 100 "denaturalization and removal actions" against people suspected of them.Department of Justice spokesman Michael Passman would not comment on whether Karkoc had ever come to the department's attention, citing a policy not to confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

 

Though Karkoc talks in his memoirs about fighting anti-Nazi Polish resistance fighters, he makes no mention of attacks on civilians. He does indicate he was with his company in the summer of 1944 when the Self Defense Legion's commander – Siegfried Assmuss, whose SS rank was equivalent to major – was killed."We lost an irreplaceable commander, Assmuss," he wrote about the partisan attack near Chlaniow.He did not mention the retaliatory massacre that followed, which was described in detail by Malazhenski in his 1967 statement used to help convict platoon leader Teodozy Dak of war crimes in Poland in 1972. An SS administrative list obtained by AP shows that Karkoc commanded both Malazhenski and Dak, who died in prison in 1974.Malazhenski said the Ukrainian unit was ordered to liquidate Chlaniow in reprisal for Assmuss' death, and moved in the next day, machine-gunning people and torching homes. More than 40 people died."The village was on fire," Malazhenski said.Villagers offered chilling testimony about the brutality of the attack.In 1948, Chlaniow villager Stanislawa Lipska told a communist-era commission that she heard shots at about 7 a.m., then saw "the Ukrainian SS force" entering the town, calling out in Ukrainian and Polish for people to come out of their homes."The Ukrainians were setting fire to the buildings," Lipska said in a statement, also used in the Dak trial. "You could hear machine-gun shots and grenade explosions. Shots could be heard inside the village and on the outskirts. They were making sure no one escaped."Witness statements and other documentation also link the unit circumstantially to a 1943 massacre in Pidhaitsi, on the outskirts of Lutsk _today part of Ukraine – where the Self Defense Legion was once based. A total of 21 villagers, mostly women and children, were slaughtered.Karkoc says in his memoir that his unit was founded and headquartered there in 1943 and later mentions that Pidhaitsi was still the unit's base in January 1944.Another legion member, Kost Hirniak, said in his own 1977 memoir that the unit, while away on a mission, was suddenly ordered back to Pidhaitsi after a German soldier was killed in the area; it arrived on Dec. 2, 1943.The next day, though Hirniak does not mention it, nearly two dozen civilians, primarily women and children, were slaughtered in Pidhaitsi. There is no indication any other units were in the area at the time.Heorhiy Syvyi was a 9-year-old boy when troops swarmed into town on Dec. 3 and managed to flee with his father and hide in a shelter covered with branches. His mother and 4-year-old brother were killed."When we came out we saw the smoldering ashes of the burned house and our neighbors searching for the dead. My mother had my brother clasped to her chest. This is how she was found – black and burned," said Syvyi, 78, sitting on a bench outside his home.Villagers today blame the attack generically on "the Nazis" – something that experts say is not unusual in Ukraine because of the exalted status former Ukrainian nationalist troops enjoy.However, Pidhaitsi schoolteacher Galyna Sydorchuk told the AP that "there is a version" of the story in the village that the Ukrainian troops were involved in the December massacre."There were many in Pidhaitsi who were involved in the Self Defense Legion," she said. "But they obviously keep it secret."Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian political scientist who has done extensive research on the Self Defense Legion, said its members have been careful to cultivate the myth that their service to Nazi Germany was solely a fight against Soviet communism. But he said its actions – fighting partisans and reprisal attacks on civilians – tell a different story."Under the pretext of anti-partisan action they acted as a kind of police unit to suppress and kill or punish the local populations. This became their main mission," said Katchanovski, who went to high school in Pidhaitsi and now teaches at the University of Ottawa in Canada. "There is evidence of clashes with Polish partisans, but most of their clashes were small, and their most visible actions were mass killings of civilians."There is evidence that the unit took part in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, fighting the nationalist Polish Home Army as it sought to rid the city of its Nazi occupiers and take control of the city ahead of the advancing Soviet Army.

 

The uprising, which started in August 1944, was put down by the Nazis by the beginning of October in a house-to-house fight characterized by its ferocity.The Self Defense Legion's exact role is not known, but Nazi documents indicate that Karkoc and his unit were there.An SS payroll document, dated Oct. 12, 1944, says 10 members of the Self Defense Legion "fell while deployed to Warsaw" and more than 30 others were injured. Karkoc is listed as the highest-ranking commander of 2 Company – a lieutenant – on a pay sheet that also lists Dak as one of his officers.Another Nazi accounting document uncovered by the AP in the Polish National Archives in Krakow lists Karkoc by name – including his rank, birthdate and hometown – as one of 219 "members of the S.M.d.S.-Batl 31 who were in Warsaw," using the German abbreviation for the Self Defense Legion.In early 1945, the Self Defense Legion was integrated into the SS Galicia Division, and Karkoc said in his memoirs that he served as a deputy company commander until the end of the war.

 

Following the war, Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu Ulm, Germany, according to documents obtained from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The documents indicate that his wife died in 1948, a year before he and their two young boys – born in 1945 and 1946 – emigrated to the U.S.After he arrived in Minneapolis, he remarried and had four more children, the last born in 1966.Karkoc told American officials he was a carpenter, and records indicate he worked for a nationwide construction company that has an office in Minneapolis.A longtime member of the Ukrainian National Association, Karkoc has been closely involved in community affairs over the past decades and was identified in a 2002 article in a Ukrainian-American publication as a "longtime UNA activist."The lights were on at Karkoc's home Friday morning, but nobody answered a knock from an AP reporter seeking reaction to this story.Karkoc's next-door neighbor said has known the Ukrainian immigrant for many years, and was stunned to learn about the Nazi past of a man he has shared laughs with and known as a churchgoer."For me, this is a shock," said Gordon Gnasdoskey, 79. "To come to this country and take advantage of its freedoms all of these years, it blows my mind."

 

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Herschaft reported from New York and Scislowska from Warsaw; Doug Glass, Pat Condon and Amy Forliti in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Maria Danilova in Kiev, Ukraine; Efrem Lukatsky in Pidhaitsi, and Svetlana Fedas in Lviv, Ukraine, contributed to this story.

[Prospero]

hmm:
 

HUNGARY: ARCHEOLOGISTS DISCOVER TOMB OF ATTILA THE HUN



Budapest| Construction workers building the foundations of a new bridge over the Danube River in the Hungarian capitol, have unearthed a spectacular 6th century sepulchre. The analysis of the monument revealed that it was the burial chamber of a great hunnic leader, most likely  that of King Attila himself.

“This site is absolutely incredible!” explains Albrecht Rümschtein, an historian from the Lorand Eötvös University in Budapest and member of the team of specialists investigating the tomb. “We found many horse skeletons, as well as various weapons and other artefacts, all traditionally associated with Huns. These objects include a large sword made of meteoric iron, which could certainly be Attila’s legendary “Holy War Sword of the Scythians”, allegedly given to him by the god Mars himself. In fact, this definitely seems to be the resting place of the almighty Attila, but further analysis needs to be done to confirm it.”

Nicknamed “the scourge of God” by roman historians, Attila was the ruler of the Huns, a nomadic people originating possibly from Central Asia. He ruled from 434 A.D., until his death in 453 after a feast celebrating his latest marriage to a beautiful and young gothic princess named Ildico. He led many military raids on both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires provoquing what has become knowned as the Barbarian Invasions or the Great Migration, a large movement of germanic populations that greatly accelerated the fall of Rome and the advent of the Middle Ages in Europe. He his considered by most Hungarians, as the founder of the country.

The discovery of this funerary site could bring many clarifications concerning the origins and identity of the hunnic people and of Attila himself, which have both been sources of debate for centuries. The analysis of pieces of pottery and jewelry found on the site, should bring a new light on their cultural origins and trade networks, and help scientists better understand this badly documented people.