Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490 (1981), is a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on the citizenship status of Feodor Fedorenko, a naturalized citizen who had lied about his past as a guard at a Nazi death camp on his visa and citizenship applications. The court held that because Fedorenko lied on his visa application, his visa and citizenship were invalid. Fedorenko was a Ukrainian-born soldier who fought in World War II, was captured, and served as a guard at Treblinka extermination camp for over a year. He emigrated to the United States in 1949, lying on his visa application to cover up his time at Treblinka. He lived a quiet life in the U.S. for decades, but when the government became aware of his past, they initiated denaturalization proceedings against him in 1977, looking to revoke his citizenship. As a result of Fedorenko's eventual loss, he was deported to the Soviet Union and executed for treason and war crimes.
Fedorenko was one of many Nazi collaborators living quietly in the United States after World War II; at the public's urging, the government started investigating in the early '70s, but they were slow and ineffective, and when they filed suit to denaturalize Fedorenko, they did not properly prepare for trial. The District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled for Fedorenko, but the government – by then under better management – won at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered Fedorenko's citizenship to be revoked. Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for a 7–2 Supreme Court majority, upheld the appeals court's judgment, but did not endorse all of its reasoning.
The government argued that Fedorenko's citizenship should be revoked because it was gained "by concealment of a material fact"; the immigration law that Fedorenko used to enter the U.S. did not allow people who "assisted the enemy in persecuting civil populations", so if Fedorenko had not lied about his past as a guard, he could have been denied entry. Fedorenko offered three defenses, based on duress, materiality, and equity. First, Fedorenko argued that the immigration law did not exclude him because he only served as a guard under duress; the district court accepted this argument, but the Supreme Court held that the law had no exception for duress. Second, Fedorenko argued that because he was forced to be a guard, his lie was immaterial under the court's ruling in Chaunt v. United States (1960); he would have been let in either way. The government argued that Chaunt should be interpreted differently – an issue lower courts had disagreed on in the past – but the Supreme Court avoided answering the Chaunt question, holding that because Fedorenko helped persecute civilians, he was ineligible, so his lie was material. Third, the district court held that under the rules of equity, it had the power to rule for Fedorenko anyway because of his record of a quiet life in the U.S.; the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that if citizenship is gained illegally, the court has no power to stop denaturalization.
The Supreme Court's holding in this case helped the government in its other cases against suspected Nazi collaborators. However, the court was criticized for sidestepping the ambiguity of Chaunt rather than clarifying it. Scholars split on the issue of duress; some pointed to the district court's holding that if duress was not an exception, the act would bar Jewish kapos from entry, while others agreed with the Supreme Court in finding that argument unconvincing. Justice Harry Blackmun concurred with the decision, but argued that the court should have applied Chaunt to the case. Two justices dissented; Justice John Paul Stevens argued against the court's interpretation of duress, while Justice Byron White argued that the court should have clarified Chaunt and remanded the case back to the appeals court to review the district court's findings. After Fedorenko's loss at the Supreme Court, he was deported to the Soviet Union in 1984; there, he pled guilty to war crimes in 1986 and was executed in 1987.
Background
Case
The aftermath of World War II saw many attempts by the United States and other Allied countries to resettle a large number of people who were displaced or made refugees by the war. In 1948, the United States government passed the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), which allowed a large number of war refugees to enter without counting towards their country's immigration quota.. While the act made it easier for most refugees to enter, it did not cover all refugees; borrowing language from constitution of the International Refugee Organization, the act gave no help to:
War criminals, quislings, and traitors. Any other persons who can be shown: (a) to have assisted the enemy in persecuting civil populations of countries, Members of the United Nations; or (b) to have voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the second world war in their operations against the United Nations.. Quoting .
One person who came to the United States through the DPA was Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian-born citizen of the Soviet Union. Fedorenko was drafted into the Red Army after Nazi Germany invaded the country in June 1941; within a month of being mobilized, he was captured by the Nazis. After moving through several prisoner of war (PoW) camps, Fedorenko was trained in early 1942 to be a guard. He was transferred to work at the Treblinka extermination camp in September 1942 and did so until an uprising closed the camp in August 1943. He then served as a guard at a PoW camp in Pölitz, and then as a warehouse guard in Hamburg. Before the British entered Hamburg in 1945, Fedorenko left the service of the Nazis and did civilian labor work until 1949.
Fedorenko applied to enter U.S. through the DPA in 1949, falsely claiming that he was from Poland and that he had spent the war working as a farmer there, and then as a factory worker in Pölitz. He claimed that he served in a "labor battalion"; the DPA would have required an investigation to determine whether or not he was a voluntary collaborator with the Nazis, but there is no evidence that such an investigation occurred. After six weeks, Fedorenko's application was granted. He lived a quiet life in the U.S. for the next 28 years, staying briefly in Philadelphia before moving to Waterbury, Connecticut to work in a factory. In 1969, he applied for U.S. citizenship, again hiding his time at Treblinka extermination camp; the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) recommended Fedorenko be naturalized, and he received U.S. citizenship in 1970. He retired to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1976.; . In all of his time in the United States before being discovered, his only brush with the law was a parking ticket.
Meanwhile, the American public was slowly becoming aware that Nazis and collaborators were hiding in the United States, with high-profile cases such as Hermine Braunsteiner coming to light in the 1960s and '70s. Two members of Congress, Joshua Eilberg and Elizabeth Holtzman, started drawing attention to the issue, pressing the government to root out domestic war criminals.; . As early as 1964, Fedorenko's name was on a list of 59 suspected war criminals compiled by a man named Otto Karbach. In 1973, he gave the list to the INS; this, as well as pressure from Eilberg and Holtzman, led the INS to create an "office" to investigate the charges. The office consisted of exactly one man, Sam Zutty, a career INS investigator.; . He worked with Israeli police to find survivors who could identify the people in question; this led to mixed results. One 76-year-old survivor named Eugun Turkowski insisted that one man in a spread of photographs was Fedorenko when it was actually John Demjanjuk. Zutty's office proved on the whole to be largely ineffective, filing no cases for the first three years of the task force. In response to a January 1977 letter from Holtzman's subcommittee, the Government Accountability Office found that while there was no conspiracy to protect Nazis from investigation, the INS had proved incompetent to investigate the allegations before it.
Finally, looking to alleviate pressure, the government brought denaturalization proceedings against Fedorenko and nine other suspected war criminals from late 1976 through 1977, filing Fedorenko's in 1977. The government, however, proved to be wholly unprepared for trial; it had located no domestic witnesses, had not prepared the witnesses it did have for trial, did not interview its elderly witnesses (instead hoping that they would survive long enough to take the stand in court), and was not familiar with court standards for photographic identification. Days before the commissioner of the INS was set to testify before Eilberg's subcommittee in July 1977, Zutty's office was dissolved and replaced with a special litigation unit. The special litigation unit brought no new cases, but the government proceeded with five of these cases post-reorganization, and Fedorenko's case went to trial.
Denaturalization and materiality In Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is given the power "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization".. Quoting U.S. Constitution, article I, section 8, clause 4. Using this power, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed the government to revoke a person's citizenship, a process called denaturalization, in cases of fraud or where the citizenship was "illegally procured"., explicitly refers to the act as the "Immigration and Nationality Act of 1906", but no act exists by that title and the language used by Binder matches the text of the Naturalization Act of 1906. Quoting . The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that law as a part of its ruling in Johannessen v. United States (1912). In 1952, Congress replaced the law, instead allowing denaturalization in cases where citizenship is taken "by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation"; the "illegal procurement" language was restored in 1961.. Quoting .
Lower courts, however, could not make a uniform standard for materiality, often disagreeing on whether certain facts in a case should be considered material or not. The Supreme Court ruled in Johannssen that a fact is material if the government would not have granted citizenship had they known that fact, but lower courts ruled differently on less obvious cases. Some courts held that hiding something solely to avoid an investigation should be enough to revoke citizenship if that investigation could have turned up more relevant evidence. Often, courts would lump various denaturalization criteria together or reference them vaguely.
The Supreme Court tried to clarify the standard of materiality in Chaunt v. United States (1960) by creating a two-pronged test; under the test, a fact is material if it meets the requirements of either prong. The first prong matched Johannssen standard that a fact is material if it would have been disqualifying, while the second prong covered facts where "disclosure might have been useful in an investigation possibly leading to the discovery of other facts warranting denial of citizenship". This second prong seemingly struck a balance between the lower courts; hiding something to avoid the possibility of an investigation could be grounds for denaturalization, but not always.. Quoting , 364 U.S. at 355.