A Radical Electronic Resource . Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.? . by Rus

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 A Radical Electronic Resource
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.              Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.?
.                           by Russell C. Bellant

. Source:    The New York Times, Op-Ed page, November 19, 1988

The campaign may be over, but George Bush still needs to say what he plans 
to do with the 20-year-old Republican Heritage Groups Council, the ethnic 
outreach arm of the Republican National Committee. There is substantial 
evidence to suggest that the council was founded and continues to be led by 
people and organizations that collaborated with the Nazi occupation of 
Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

The Bush campaign scored a major success in Sptember when it quickly 
discharged seven members of its ethnic coalition after a series of of news 
reports linked them to fascist, anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi organizations. But 
four of the seven discharged Bush ethnic leaders continue to hold leadership 
positions within the Heritage Groups Council.

Florian Galdau, for instance, still heads the Romanian-American Republic 
Clubs, one of the components of the Heritage Council. A retired priest, he 
was an ally of the late Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who was convicted by the 
United States for concealing his crimes against humanity committed in a 
Bucharest pogrom in 1941.

A leader of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, Archbishop Trifa recruited Mr. Galdau in
1955 to run a Manhattan church. Former Iron Guard members, Federal Bureau 
of Investigation reports and Romanian Orthodox priests have identified Mr. 
Galdau as a recruiter for the Iron Guard. Mr. Galdau has denied these charges.
But F.B.I. reports and Iron Guard publications from the 1980's link him to 
Iron Guard activities.

Another Republican ethnic activist ousted from the Bush campaign is Radi 
Slavoff, head of the Bulgarian section and also executive director of the 
Heritage Council. Mr. Slavoff is also the Washington representative of the 
Bulgarian National Front, an American-based group formed in a postwar 
merger of several wartime pro-Nazi and Fascist orgnaizations. Mr. Slavoff 
continues as executive director of the Heritage Council despite these 
associations.

Phil Guarino is a leader of the Italian section of the Heritage Council as 
well as a former vice-chairman of the council. Mr. Guarino, a Republican 
National Committee staffer, was removed from the Bush campaign after 
reports surfaced of his involvement in the P-2 Lodge of Italy.

P-2 was a group of influential people--high-ranking military and 
intelligence officers, industrialists and some political party leaders, among
others--tied in Italian press reports to the 1980 bombing of the Bologna 
train station, which killed 85 people. The goal of the group--which is now 
believed to be defunct--was to destabilize the Italian Government and, 
ultimately, to install a dictatorship.

The fourth ethnic leader expelled from the Bush campaign was Laszlo 
Pasztor, who founded the Heritage Groups Council in 1969 with the 
encouragement of Richard Nixon. It was Mr. Pasztor's job to select the 
groups and leaders that formed  the G.O.P.'s first permanent outreach to 
ethnic America.

Mr. Pasztor worked as an embassy aide in Berlin for the militantly pro-Nazi 
Arrow Cross government, which was installed in Hungary in 1944. (He has 
since said that he regrets his involvement.)

When he began selecting people for the Heritage Council, Mr. Pasztor 
frequently selected those with backgrounds like his. And when he helped 
form Mr. Nixon's ethinc campaign group for the 1972 election, he opened the 
doors to numerous people with a Nazi collaborationist past, including some 
accused of war crimes. One of them, Boleslavs Maikovskis, recently sought 
asylum in West Germany to avoid deportation to the Soviet Union. A United 
States court ordered him deported in 1984 for concealing his involvement in 
war crimes in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

Another of those recruited by Mr. Pasztor in 1969--and stillhoding a 
leadership slot in the council--is Nicolas Nazarenko, a squadron commander 
of a Cossack unit under German command in World War II. Mr. Nazarenko told 
me during a seven-hour interview that Jews were his "ideological enemy" 
and that he was active today with Nazi groups here.

The Slovak section of the council is run by sympathizers and at least one 
former official of the Slovak Nazi state created by Hitler in 1938. Although 
the Slovak state declared war on America one day after Hitler did, and 
deported many Slovak Jews to gas chambers, the leaders of the Heritage 
Council Slovak section still hold annula memorials of the 1938 founding of 
the puppet regime of Slovakia.

Mr. Bush defends Mr. Galdau, Mr. Pasztor, Mr. Guarino and Mr. Slavoff as 
innocent of all accusations of collaboration and insists they are all 
honorable men. But the historical record belies his assertions.

The G.O.P. for decades has misread ethnic America's concerns about crime, 
employment, anti-ethnic discrimination and the future of its youth. It has 
offered instead the fascism and ethnic prejudices of the Heritage Council, 
which focuses primarily on funding Radio Free Europe and stopping Justice 
Department prosecutions of war criminals who illegally entered the country.

As the chairman of the Republican National Committee in the early years of 
the council, and now as head of the Republican Party and President-elect, 
Mr. Bush owes Americans a complete explanation.


(Russell C. Bellant is author of a recent study of the role of right-wing 
emigres in the Republican Party and the Reagan Administration.)