The former Minister of Justice of the Nazi-controlled puppet state of Croatia during World War II – one Andrija Artukovic – is alive and living freely in Surfside, California. According to a secret file, under lock and key at the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Artukovic entered the United States under an assumed name in July 1948 – in flight to avoid the Nuremberg War Trials. This disclosure is reported in the Dec. issue of Reader’s Digest.
Witnesses and war crimes investigators, relates Nathan M. Adams in “Our Mounting Wave of Illegal Immigrants,” claim that he was instrumental in the systematic massacre of nearly one million Jews and Serbians.” And a wartime U.S. intelligence chief in the Balkans section further swears that Artukovic also approved orders that sent dozens of captured American pilots to their deaths.
Yet for years he managed to avoid deportation by a steady barrage of legal appeals to Congress, which took the form of so-called private bills introduced in his behalf by the late James R. Utt (R.Calif.). Each time it appeared Artukovic might be deported, a new bill was introduced, according to Adams. Then, in 1959, a court-appointed U.S. commissioner held that the crimes charged against Artukovic were “political” in nature. Accordingly, INS found that he was not extraditable to his native Yugoslavia, because he would be subject there to “persecution,” Adams reported.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
