Double sided drawing of expert witness at trial of suspected Ukrainian war criminal

Charles Rodger Hazard (Hap, 1947-2018) was born to Charles O. and Stella Dernoga Hazard in Baltimore, Maryland. His father served in the United States (US) Army during World War II (1939-1945). He worked as a topographical engineer for British Intelligence, mapping the French coastline in preparation for the D-Day landings, and was later transferred to the Pacific theater. After the war, he worked in the advertising art department for the Baltimore Sun. Charles’ mother, Stella, worked at the Sun during the war as the first female staff artist. Charles’ sister, Carla Tomaszewski, also worked as a professional artist.

After graduating from high school in 1965, Charles enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). However, due to the conflict in Vietnam, he enlisted in the US Army and was assigned to military intelligence because of his gift for languages. In 1968, prior to his deployment overseas, Charles married Miriam Deborah Wolfe. Upon his return in 1969, he began his work as a political illustrator for the Baltimore Sun newspapers. During a career that spanned more than 30 years, Charles created illustrations and court room drawings of memorable historical and political events for the newspaper. Charles and Miriam had four children. After retiring from the Sun, Charles worked as an editorial artist for the Washington Times newspaper. The National Park Service commissioned Charles to provide illustrations for numerous national landmarks. He came out of retirement to create fourteen illustrations of scenes from the Battle of Gettysburg for background murals on display at the Museum and Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park, which opened in 2008.

Jurij Teodorowytsch (later George Theodorovich) was born in 1923 in Szuparka, Poland, now part of Ukraine. He is presumed to have lived in Lvov from 1936-1944, joining the police force in May 1942. In 1942, he was a Ukrainian policeman in Lvov, during the German occupation of Poland, following its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. As an armed, uniformed policeman, he patrolled the streets, enforcing the German authorities anti-Jewish policies. According to wage records, he also served as a guard at a forced labor camp in 1944. Lvov was liberated by the Polish Home Guard and the Red Army in July 1944. The war ended in May 1945.

Theodorovich came to the US in 1948 as a postwar refugee, stating that he had been a student during World War II. He settled in Troy, NY and worked as a meat cutter. He became a naturalized citizen in 1960, repeating his statement of having been a student during the war. The US Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations (OSI) interviewed Theodorovich in 1982 about his activities in Lvov in 1942. They had police reports, obtained from Soviet archives, that Theodorovich had signed as a Ukrainian policeman, accounting for the number of bullets used to kill individual Jews. Theodorovich admitted that he was a policeman and that the handwriting looked like his, but denied the charges, stating: ‘It says I killed six Jews and left their bodies there. It's my handwriting, it looks like mine, but I never did that.” In August 1983, the OSI brought charges against him for the killing of unarmed Jews. He was also charged with rounding up Jews for concentration and forced labor camps, and confiscating their personal property. The same month, Theodorovich disappeared from his home in Troy, NY, and became the object of a federal manhunt. In January 1984, his citizenship was revoked by a federal judge Charles Richey, for withholding information about his background and lying about not taking part in atrocities from 1942-44. This was done at the request of the OSI after Theodorovich failed to appear in court as ordered to answer questions about his wartime activities. It was thought he was out of the county. But in April 1984, he was arrested by an immigration agent at his sister’s home in Philadelphia.

The US Immigration and Naturalization Service stripped Theodorovich of his US citizenship. OSI then initiated deportation proceedings against him, and Theodorovich stood trial in federal court in a non-jury trial in Baltimore in 1985. He was provided a translator by the court. The OSI was represented by attorney Bruce Solow. Theodorovich was charged with crimes of moral turpitude and for not disclosing his wartime activities when he entered the country in 1948. During the trial, the OSI submitted as evidence the papers that Theodorovich had signed in 1942 as a Ukrainian policeman, accounting for the use of the bullets and the killings of Jews during an action against Jews in Lvov. Theodorovich reported firing on two occasions, killing two Jews each time. The government’s opening witness at the trial was Raul Hilberg, a leading historian of the Holocaust. Hilberg testified that the Nazi-organized Ukrainian police were instrumental in the roundup of Jews in Lvov in 1941 and 1942, reducing a population of 130,000 Jews to about 1000, who survived by living in hiding. The OSI also presented multiple Jewish survivors of the Lvov ghetto to give testimony about the brutal actions of the Ukrainian police, although none testified about Theodorovich's role. Theodorovich first denied having been a policemen or witnessing Jewish roundups or killings, then admitted that he was in the Ukrainian police and did write the reports.

In 1987, Judge John F. Gossart, an immigration judge found Theodorovich guilty not of assisting in the persecution of Jews, but of being a persecutor. He was also found guilty of falsifying his record, and was deportable on all charges. Theodorovich asked to be deported to Argentina. The OSI requested that he be deported to the Soviet Union, his native land. The US had no extradition treaty with the USSR, but the Soviet government indicated that it would accept and try Theodorovich. Under US law, a deportee has the right to choose the country to which he will be deported, as long as that country will accept him or her. They are permanently banned from entering the US and placed on a watch list.

In December 1988, Theodorovich deported himself to Paraguay. He had obtained a safe-conduct pass from the Paraguayan consul general in New York City on December 6, signed by Felix Aguero. Another former Ukrainian policeman, Sergei Kowalchuk, found guilt of similar charges around this time, and also facing deportation to the Soviet Union, had previously gone to Paraguay. A third Ukrainian accused of being a Nazi war criminal, Feodor Fedorenko, a guard at Treblinka, had been deported to the Soviet Union in December 1984, and later executed.

Raul Hilberg was born on June 2, 1926, in Vienna, Austria, the only child of Jewish parents. His father Michael fought and was wounded in the First World War (1914-1918). In Vienna, he had a business selling household goods to people on installment plans. His parents attended synagogue occasionally. Raul was never religious, but he did attend a Zionist school. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria and soon passed legislation to strip Jews of their rights as citizens. The family was ordered out of their apartment by gunpoint. His father was arrested during Kristallnacht, September 9-10 1938, but was soon released because he was a World War I veteran.

The family left Austria and after stopovers in France and Cuba, reached Brooklyn, NY, on September 1, 1939. Michael worked in a factory and Hilberg attended Lincoln High School. He enrolled in Brooklyn College until enlisting in the Army in 1944. He was deployed to Germany in 1945 with the 45th infantry division. He served with an Oklahoma division that liberated Dachau, but was not with the unit at the time. He was with the first troops that entered Munich. He was later assigned to the Army documentation division, which needed staff fluent in German. The war ended in May 1945. Nearly all the members of Hilberg's family on both his mother's and father's side were murdered during the Holocaust. Postwar, Hilberg assisted in the search for German documents to aid the prosecution at the war crimes trials. His unit was housed in the Nazi Party’s former offices in Munich. Crates containing Hitler’s personal library were stored there and Hilberg was fascinated by the contents. After his discharge, he returned to Brooklyn College and changed his major from chemistry to history and political science, graduating in 1948. He then focused on political science and international law and completed a master’s in public law in 1950 at Columbia University. He taught at Hunter College and then obtained a federal job in the War Documentation Project in Alexandria, Va., cataloging documents released from German archives, copying by hand material necessary to his own research. He received his doctorate from Columbia in 1955. His dissertation was on the Holocaust, which was not then a topic of academic study. His adviser, Franz Neumann, warned him that the subject would be detrimental to his career.

In 1956, he took a position at the University of Vermont. In 1961, his book, “The Destruction of the European Jews” was published. It was the first comprehensive study of the Holocaust and established the field of Holocaust studies. It was a methodical, evidentiary work detailing the systematic, bureaucratic process that led to the mass murder of Jews as a matter of routine. Rejected by five publishers, it was accepted by the small Quadrangle Company after a patron, Frank Petschek, a wealthy businesman who had fled German occupied Czechoslovakia in fall 1938, agreed to subsidize the print run and purchase 1300 copies for libraries. In 1974, Hilberg offered the first college-level course on the Holocaust. He expanded his original work to three volumes and published five more books on the topic, as well as a memoir. He retired from the University of Vermont in 1991, after thirty-five years.

Hilberg was dedicated to expanding the public understanding of the Holocaust. He was a key figure in the development and establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, serving as an original member of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust (1978–79) and on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 through 1988. In 2006, he received the Knight Commander’s Order of Merit in Germany, the highest award given to non-German citizens. Hilberg married Christine Hemenway in the 1950s. They had two children, and eventually divorced. In 1980, he married Gwendolyn Montgomery. Hilberg, 81, died of lung cancer in Williston, Vt., on August 4, 2007.