Archive/File: people/b/brentar.jerome brentar.002
Last-Modified: 1995/02/14
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sat. Sept. 10, 1988 

Fired Bush backer one of several with possible Nazi link

By David Lee Preston
Inquirer Staff Writer

Jerome A. Brentar, the Cleveland travel agent who was dismissed
Thursday as co-chairman in George Bush's presidential campaign, is one
of several volunteers in the Bush campaign who may be connected with
anti-Semitic or fascist organizations.

Brentar said in an interview yesterday that he had helped hundreds of
Nazis to emigrate to the United States after World War II. As a
postwar officer in the International Refugee Organization working in
refugee camps in Schweinfurt and Hanau, Germany, Brantar said, he
"helped everyone who applied, whether he was in the Waffen SS or in
the Wehrmacht... I would permit them to be considered."

"I just took it as a matter of my duties. I never went into any kind
of hullabaloo or any detail...," Brentar, 66, said in a telephone
interview.

Brentar's removal from the Bush campaign, after allegations of his
anti-Semitic activity appeared in a Washington Jewish newspaper, also
has called attention to other volunteer leaders of the Bush campaign.

They include:

* The national chairman of Romainians for Bush, Florian Galdau. Galdau
was a close associate and defender of Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who
was accused by the Justice Department of inciting pogroms by the
pro-Nazi Romainian Iron Guard in January 1941 in Bucharest. Galdau, of
Mount Vernon, N.Y., is listed by the Bush campaign as chairman of the
Romainian-American Republican Club.

* The national co-chairman of Bulgarians for Bush, Radi Slavoff.
Slavoff heads the Bulgarian National Front, formed by members of the
Nazi-alligned Bulgarian Legion after the war. In 1983, Slavoff
arranged an event in Washington, D.C., that honored Austin App, a
former La Salled University professor who wrote several texts denying
the existence of the Holocaust. Slavoff, of Bethesda, Md., is the
full-time executive director of the National Republican Heritage
Groups Council in Washington, D.C., according to the Bush campaign.

* The national vice-chairman of Italian-Americans for Bush, Philip
Guarino. He is an honorary American member of P-2 Lodge, a group
outlawed in Italy since it plotted throughout the 1970s to overthrow
the Italian government and install a dictatorship. Guarino, a former
priest who lives in Washington, D.C., is adviser on senior-citizens
affairs to the Republican National Committee. The Bush campaign lists
him as chairman of the Italian-American National Republican
Federation.

* Bohdan Fedorak, national ethnic vice-chairman of Ukrainians for
Bush. He is currenly head of external affairs in the United States for
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists/Bandera, said by historians
to be a Nazi-collaborationist organization linked to anti-Polish and
anti-Jewish wartime pogroms. Fedorak is a leader of an organized
campaign to dismantle the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting arm,
the... [balance of article unreadable. knm]

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