Michael K.~ Minnesota's SS Commander

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WARSAW — The Polish government will seek the extradition of a 98-year-old Ukrainian-American who prosecutors say carried out Nazi-led atrocities in 1944 that killed scores of civilians.

The family of the man, Michael Karkoc, who entered the United States in 1949 and now lives in a nursing home in Minneapolis, says he is innocent of the charges and that he has dementia and is not fit to stand trial.

In a June 2013 investigation, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Karkoc, then 94, had commanded the Nazi SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which carried out mass killings in villages in eastern Poland and helped suppress the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

Mr. Karkoc did not tell federal authorities in 1949 that he had worked for the legion and, later, for the SS Galician Division, both of which were on a list of organizations whose members were forbidden from entering the United States, The A.P. reported.

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In a subsequent article in November 2013, The A.P., citing files from the Ukrainian intelligence agency’s archive, reported that a private under Mr. Karkoc’s command testified in 1968 that Mr. Karkoc had ordered an assault on the village of Chlaniow as retribution for the killing of an SS major. The village was razed.

In a Ukrainian-language memoir published in 1995, Mr. Karkoc stated that he had helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943, in collaboration with Nazi officers, to fight on behalf of Nazi Germany and against the Soviet Union.

The A.P.’s articles led to investigations in both Germany and Poland. German prosecutors shelved their investigation in 2015, saying Mr. Karkoc was unfit to stand trial, but the Polish inquiry continued.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Robert Janicki, an official with the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, said there was “no doubt” that the man living in Minnesota was the same man “who carried out the pacification of the villages in the Lubelskie region in 1944,” referring to Chlaniow and the nearby village of Wladyslawin. More than 40 civilians, including children, were killed.

Mr. Janicki referred to the man as Michael K., citing Polish privacy laws.

“We have also discovered a signature of Michael K. on documents related to the unit from that time,” Mr. Janicki said. “Our forensic experts have determined that this is a signature of the man who lives in the States.”

The commission, which is part of the country’s Institute of National Remembrance, a body that has prosecutorial powers and is tasked with investigating Nazi- and Soviet-era crimes, filed a request on Monday to a regional court in Lublin for a temporary arrest warrant for the man. The warrant would be the first step toward requesting extradition, Mr. Janicki said.

The United States Justice Department declined to comment on the case.

The charges carry a potential term of life in prison. Mr. Janicki rejected the argument that prosecuting Mr. Karkoc would be pointless given his age and health.

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PRIVACY POLICY
“First of all, age is not a factor when it comes to bringing anyone to justice,” he said. “As for the state of his health, that will be for expert witnesses to determine.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, has criticized Poland for not doing more to track down those who committed atrocities during the Nazi era.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans killed 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during the war, along with at least three million Polish Jews.

Mr. Janicki acknowledged the criticisms, but said it took time to assemble evidence. “It’s incredibly difficult to gather the necessary evidence to put someone on trial today,” he said. “It requires international cooperation and it takes years to reconcile all the efforts. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing.”

“Some say that it’s too late to hunt the criminals down, but I don’t think it is,” he added. “The case of Michael K. proves that. Besides, try telling it’s too late to a woman who as a girl was hiding in a field, watching her parents being executed.”

Mr. Karkoc’s son and spokesman, Andriy Karkos, said in an interview on Tuesday that his father was not guilty.

“My father is an innocent 98-year-old man who never did anything wrong,” Mr. Karkos said, adding that his father was a victim of German reprisals against Ukrainian resistance fighters.

He said of the Polish assertions: “What gets me 75-odd years after the fact is that the words ‘Nazi commander’ are attached to my father in headlines all around the world. It cannot be expiated, what that word does to my soul.”

Mr. Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk on March 6, 1919, a time when the area was intensely contested. Claimed by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century, the area became part of Poland during the interwar period, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and was occupied by the Germans in 1941. Since 1945, it has been part of Ukraine.

After the war, Mr. Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu-Ulm, Germany. His wife died in 1948, a year before he and their sons — born in 1945 and 1946 — emigrated to the United States, where he built a life as a carpenter, remarried and had four more children.

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