The death of Paul Weyrich has gotten me on one of my research binges. There's all kinds of intersting material out there on the ties between the New Right and various ex-Nazi/neo-fascist/far-right groups and individuals out there. Whether it be through the World Anti-Communist League, Italian masonic lodges, or the Moonies; there's no limit to these connections. Anyways, from the Boston Globe, 15 September 1988:
An emigre network of Nazi sympathizers and collaborators has used anticommunist sentiment to become the backbone of a Republican National Committee ethnic unit, according to a research report to be released today.
"A combination of ignorance, amnesia and in some cases political sympathy has allowed both American and European abetters of the Third Reich to play a prominent and respectable role inside the Republican Party," said a report issued by Political Research Associates, a nonprofit research institute in Cambridge. "In many cases these fascists are unrepentant about their past as enemies of the United States and as supporters of Nazi genocide."
The report traces the evolution of the National Republican Heritage Groups Council, an umbrella-like ethnic outreach group of the Republican National Committee, from the 1952 presidential campaign to the present. The report charges that many members and leaders of this council are Eastern European emigres who were welcomed to the United States during the Cold War as enemies of communism, even though many had shared and supported the goals and techniques of Nazi Germany in their own countries during World War II.
This year some members of the council became leaders of the National Coalition of American Nationalities, a group established by the presidential campaign of Vice President George Bush to recruit support among ethnic voters.
[...]
According to the report, thousands of Nazi collaborators were allowed into the United States under the auspices of the Displaced Persons Commission after World War II because of their anticommunism. They gravitated toward the Republican Party during the 1952 presidential campaign when liberating the communist-dominated nations in Eastern Europe was becoming a major issue.
"Displaced fascists hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon 'liberation' policy were among those who signed on. This would become the embryo for the formation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969," the report said. An ethnic division was active during each subsequent presidential campaign. During the 1968 campaign, Richard M. Nixon promised to make the ethnic division a permanent council within the GOP if he won the election.
The council "appears to have consciously recruited some of its members, and even some of its leaders, from an Eastern European emigre network which includes anti-Semites, racists, authoritarians and fascists, including sympathizers and collaborators of Hitler's Third Reich, former Nazis and even possible war criminals," the report said.
Laszlo Pasztor, the first chairman of the council, who is described as an activist in various Hungarian rightist and Nazi-linked groups in his youth, did much of the recruitment and sought out like-minded emigres.
"The antidemocratic and racialist components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council use anticommunist sentiments as a cover for their views while they operate as a de facto emigre fascist network within the Republican Party," the report says.
The report charges that council members influenced foreign policy largely through the American Security Council, a conservative think tank that acts as a clearinghouse for promilitary, anticommunist activities.
Four of the seven council members who resigned from Bush's campaign are described in the report. They include: Pasztor, the founding chairman of the council, who the report says began his career in a Hungarian pro-Nazi party and served as an attache to Berlin at the end of World War II; Radi Slavoff, a one-time member of the Bulgarian National Front, a fascist group established after World War II by members of a pro-Hitler group; Florian Galdau, East Coast recruiter for the pro-Nazi Iron Guard in the United States and a defender and associate of Romanian Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who was prosecuted for concealing war crimes in Romania; and Philip Guarino, described as an honorary American member of the conspiratorial P-2 Lodge of Italy, which plotted to overthrow the Italian government.
Mr. Pasztor soon was forced to resign from Bush's campaign after a huge uproar, but soon became reaquinted with Paul Weyrich's organization, the Free Congress Foundation (Weyrich's death is what reminded me of him).
Now, here's an article from Alan Dershowitz in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) on 24 September 1988:
The founding chairman of the Republican Heritage Groups Council was Laszlo Pasztor, who has acknowledged to columnist Jack Anderson that during World War II he belonged to the Hungarian Arrowcross Party youth group, the Hungarian equivalent of the German Nazi Youth Movement.
Toward the end of the war, he served in Berlin as a Nazi diplomat.
The Arrowcross Embassy in Berlin, where he served, helped to arrange the deportation of 800,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camps.
That number would have been higher but for the heroic efforts of Raoul Wallenberg.
Although Pasztor denies any current anti-Semitic attitudes, he has welcomed several notorious racists and anti-Semites into the Republican Heritage Groups Council. These have included Ivan Docheff, founder of the pro-Nazi Bulgarian Legion, who published a newspaper with headlines such as "Long live the sacred struggle against the Jews."
In September 1984, while Docheff was being investigated for possible complicity as a Nazi war criminal, the executive director of the Republican Heritage Groups Council arranged for him to be invited to the White House.
Now, here's where it gets weird.
White House press release:
Guest List for the "Children of Glory" Screening and Dinner
October 29, 2006
THE PRESIDENT and MRS. BUSH
[...]
Mr. Laszlo Pasztor, National President Emeritus and Member of the Presidium of the National Federation of the American Hungarians, Inc., Honorary President; Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation
Well, seems that ol' Dubya should have asked his father why palling around with Nazis is a bad idea.