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The ABN was dominated by Ukrainian nationalist veterans of the OUN/UPA, and it included a half dozen open Nazi collaborators on its executive board. Its newspaper,
ABN Correspondence
, published praises of wartime genocidalists such as Ustachi Führer Ante Pavelic and Slovakian quisling Premier Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Alfreds Berzins, whom the U.S. government once termed a “fanatic Nazi” responsible for sending innocent people to concentration camps, was the president of the ABN “Peoples Council.” (Berzins was simultaneously a Latvian leader in the ACEN.) His vice-president at the ABN was the Belorussian quisling Radislaw Ostrowsky.
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The ABN nevertheless enjoyed substantial support among radical rightists on Capitol Hill. The powerful China Lobby, together with congressmen such as Senators McCarthy and Jenner, gave open support to the group and sometimes provided a national platform for it to air its views. These congressmen established several highly publicized investigating committees, including the House select Committee on Communist Aggression and Representative Charles Kersten's inquiry into the Soviet role in the Katyn Forest massacre, at which the ABN both set the agenda and provided most of the witnesses.
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The single most important American ABN activist was the National Security Council's Dr. Edward M. O'Connor. O'Connor, it will be recalled, had been the U.S. displaced persons commissioner who had spearheaded the legal revisions that permitted Waffen SS veterans from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to enter the United States freely, beginning back in 1951. O'Connor moved that year to a post in the directorship of the NSC's Psychological Strategy Board and spent most of the remainder of the 1950s in a variety of NSC assignments concerned with the administration of clandestine operations in Eastern Europe. He was a specialist in the national security aspects of immigration policy and made no secret of his political affinity for the exiled anti-Communist groups of the ABN. He eventually served as chairman of the private support group American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and as a founder of the National Captive Nations Committee.
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The government-financed ACEN and its partially interlocked ally, ABN, gradually coalesced into a faction of the far right wing of the Republican and, to a lesser degree, Democratic parties. By 1960 this Captive Nations movement had used the support it enjoyed in the media and in conservative circles to garner a measure of real power. Its annual parade committee in New York that year was endorsed by eighty-four senators and congressmen. Conservative heavyweights such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Sidney Hook, and Fred Schlafly openly promoted the event. Scores of ethnic leaders, including a number of Jewish notables, mobilized for the march. The political tone, of course, was thoroughly patriotic, pro-American, and anti-Communist. Nevertheless, side by side with the careful politicians on the rostrum were open apologists for Nazi genocide.
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One of the key organizers of the 1960 event, for example, was Austin App, a cheerful American of German descent whose books
History's Most Terrifying Peace
and, later,
The Six Million Swindle
are considered the foundation of the “Holocaust never happened” school of historical revisionism.
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Captive Nations activists became dedicated foot soldiers in just about every right-wing crusade undertaken in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. They turned out hundreds of demonstrators to pelt Soviet diplomats with eggs and garbage during the official celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the 1917 revolution, for example; picketed department stores that carried goods made in Eastern Europe; and disrupted local school board meetings with charges that small-town principals and the PTA had gone Communist. Captive Nations activists succeeded in purging libraries in some jurisdictions of books they considered insufficiently hostile to the USSR.

Equally important, Captive Nations lobbyists on Capitol Hill began to play a small but real role in American foreign affairs. They could not, of course, write U.S. policy. But working together with corporate-financed lobbies such as the proarmament American Security Council, Captive Nations leaders have acted as influential spoilers capable of obstructing important East-West peace initiatives undertaken by both Republican and Democratic administrations. They continue, in fact, to play that role today.

“It is a common and long standing phenomenon of American political life,” George Kennan wrote some years later of his experience with Captive Nations activists, “… that ethnic groups of this nature, representing compact voting groups in large cities, are often able to bring to bear on individual legislators, and through them on the United States government, an influence far greater than an equivalent group of native citizens would be able to exert.”
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As early as July 1959 the U.S. Congress unanimously adopted a resolution calling for an annual Captive Nations Week. The CIA-funded ACEN “strongly promoted” the resolution on Capitol Hill, according to Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (The use of CIA funds to lobby Congress, it should be noted, is a specific violation of law.) The openly pro-Axis ABN also backed the bill and succeeded in introducing language into the text of the resolution calling for freedom for such “nations” as Cossackia and Idel-Ural, both of which are fictitious entities created as a propaganda ploy by Hitler's racial theoretician Alfred Rosenberg during World War II. The congressional pronouncement also called for, in effect, the dismemberment of the USSR through “freeing” the Ukraine, Georgia, and Belorussia from Soviet captivity. The resolution was
“churned out” of Congress, according to a columnist of the day, “along with casual holiday proclamations, such as National Hot Dog Month.”
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Yet the timing of the proclamation was significant, and it constituted a major victory for hard-line Captive Nations organizers. Vice President Richard Nixon—hardly a liberal on the question of communism—was then in Moscow on a major Republican effort to improve East-West communication and stabilize the nuclear arms race. Soviet Premier Khrushchev took exception to the unanimously passed congressional statement calling for the disintegration of his country and used the incident to raise questions about American sincerity in the negotiations. Nixon was forced to explain and, in effect, apologize for the U.S. Congress, pointing out that even President Eisenhower did not control the timing of congressional acts. “Neither the President nor I would have deliberately chosen to have a resolution of this type passed,” Nixon said soothingly, “just before we were to visit the USSR.”
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The damage, however, had already been done.

According to Senator Mathias, the Captive Nations movement also succeeded in placing obstructions in the path of Kennedy's and Johnson's policy of “building bridges” to Eastern Europe, which those presidents hoped to use as a means of gradually winning some measure of influence in the region. Captive Nations organizers spearheaded appeals to broad cold war constituencies in the United States to force the cancellation of major trade contracts with Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland that had been approved by Washington. George Kennan, who had returned to government in 1961 as U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia under President Kennedy, remembers how this same ethnic coalition succeeded in pressuring Congress to stop the extension of most favored nation trading status to Yugoslavia and then in halting the shipment of obsolete jet fighter parts—for which the Yugoslavs had already paid—to that country altogether. The CIA-funded ACEN's role in banning the export of the fighter parts is ironic because the agency had itself helped arrange the sale of the previous-generation jets to the independent-minded Yugoslavs in the first place as a means of splitting that country away from Moscow.
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After the Americans' promises for spare parts had collapsed, Marshal Josip Tito of Yugoslavia went back to the USSR for his first reconciliation with the Soviets in almost fifteen years. He was met at Moscow's airport with roses and marching bands.

The Assembly of Captive European Nations, in short, began as what must have appeared to be a clever propaganda project, an appropriate counterpart to the Crusade for Freedom. In the end, however, it became a political force to be reckoned with on the American far right. And the radical right, in turn, remains a very real force in Washington, D.C.

These exiled leaders have by no means disappeared, and some such groups have won the open support of the Reagan administration. The Captive Nations activists have been particularly strong in the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council, led by conservative activist Frank D. Stella.
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This national GOP organization embraces several score of conservative ethnic organizations and state coalitions that tend to identify with the far right wing of the party. While the large majority of the organizations in the Republican Nationalities Council are thoroughly respectable, it is nonetheless true that the council has become fertile ground for political organizing by certain former Nazi collaborators still active in immigrant communities in this country.

Perhaps part of the reason for this is that the director of the council during the early 1970s was Laszlo Pasztor, a naturalized American of Hungarian descent who served during the war as a junior envoy in Berlin for the genocidal Hungarian Arrow Cross regime of Ferenc Szalasi. Pasztor, in an interview with reporter Les Whitten, insisted that he did not participate in anti-Semitic activities during the war.
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Furthermore, he says, he has attempted to weed out extreme-right-wing groups from among the GOP's ethnics.

But the record of Pasztor's “housecleaning” leaves much to be desired. The GOP nationalities council has provided an entry into the White House for several self-styled immigrant leaders with records as pro-Nazi extremists. Bulgarian-American Republican party notable Ivan Docheff, for example, who has served as an officer of the Republican party's ethnic council for years, has acknowledged that he was once a leader in the National Legion of Bulgaria, a group that the more moderate Bulgarian National Committee in the United States has described as “Fascist.” He also spent twelve years as chair of the influential New York City Captive Nations Committee as well as president of the Bulgarian National Front, an extreme rightist émigré organization long active in the openly pro-Axis Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Docheff, who describes himself as “100 percent anti-Communist, not a
Nazi,” was once invited to the White House to share a Captive Nations
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prayer breakfast with President Richard Nixon.

A half dozen other somewhat similar cases among Republican ethnics may be readily identified. The official Latvian-American organization in the GOP's nationalities council is the Latvian-American Republican National Federation, which was led for years by Davmants Hazners (president) and Ivars Berzins (secretary). During the 1970s the group shared the same office and telephone number in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with the Committee for a Free Latvia. The latter group, it will be recalled, was led for most of the last decade by the by-now familiar Vilis Hazners (president) and Alfreds Berzins (treasurer and secretary) despite accusations aired by
60 Minutes
and other media that both had been responsible for serious crimes during the war. Their associate Ivars Berzins is most recently noted as a leading proponent of the campaign to halt prosecutions of fugitive Nazi war criminals in the United States.
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There is no indication, it should be stressed, that Ivars Berzins or the other leaders of the Latvian-American Republican party group engaged in any sort of disreputable activity. Even so, the intimate ties between these two organizations and their leaderships raise legitimate questions concerning what the political agenda of the Republican organization may actually be.

Perhaps most disturbing, the GOP ethnic council has passed resolutions on racial and religious questions sponsored by an openly pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic activist in that organization on at least three occasions in recent years. The author of those resolutions is worthy of note, if only as an indication of the degree of racial extremism that the Republican organization has been willing to tolerate in its ranks. His name is Nicholas Nazarenko, and he is the self-styled leader of the World Federation of Cossack National Liberation Movement of Cossackia and the Cossack American Republican National Federation, which is a full organizational member of the Republicans' ethnic council. The Republican party's Cossack organization describes itself as a “division” of the world federation and shares the same leadership, letterhead, and post office box address in Blauwelt, New York, as the world federation group. Nazarenko has admitted in an interview with the author that he spent much of World War II as an interrogator of POWs for the SS in Romania.
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Nazarenko's speech at the 1984 Captive Nations ceremonial dinner in New York left little to the imagination about his own point of view or that of his audience. He spoke of what was, in his mind,
the heroism of the Eastern European collaborators in the German legions during the war, and he spoke of why, in his mind, the Nazis lost the war. “There is a certain ethnic group that today makes its home in Israel,” Nazarenko told the gathering. “This ethnic group works with the Communists all the time. They were the Fifth Column in Germany and in all the Captive Nations.… They would spy, sabotage and do any act in the interest of Moscow,” he claimed. “Of course there had to be the creation of a natural self defense against this Fifth Column,” he said, referring to the Nazi concentration camps. “They had to be isolated. Security was needing [
sic
]. [So] the Fifth Column was arrested and imprisoned.