| Fedorenko v. United States | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued October 15, 1980 Decided January 21, 1981 | |
| Full case name | Feodor Fedorenko v. United States |
| Citations | 449 U.S. 490 (more) 101 S. Ct. 737; 66 L. Ed. 2d 686 |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit |
| Holding | |
| As a person who had assisted the enemy in persecuting civilians, Fedorenko's visa was illegally procured and therefore his citizenship must be revoked under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Marshall, joined by Brennan, Stewart, Powell, Rehnquist |
| Concurrence | Burger |
| Concurrence | Blackmun |
| Dissent | White |
| Dissent | Stevens |
Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490 (1981), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States revolving around 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 decided that Fedorenko was ineligible as a matter of law for his visa as a result of his misrepresentation, and thus his citizenship was 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. In 1949, four years after the war ended he emigrated to the United States claiming refugee status under the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), which barred people who "assisted the enemy in persecuting civil populations". Fedorenko lied on his visa application to hide his time at Treblinka, and was admitted to the country. He lived a quiet life in the U.S., gaining citizenship in 1969, until the government initiated denaturalization proceedings against him in 1977. The District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled against the government, but the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision. The Supreme Court upheld the appeals court's judgment on modified reasoning, with Justice Thurgood Marshall writing for a 7–2 court. Justice Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger concurred, while Justices Byron White and John Paul Stevens dissented. As a result of Fedorenko's loss, he was deported to the Soviet Union and executed for treason and war crimes.
As a legal matter, Fedorenko concerned the issues of equity, materiality, and duress. Denaturalization proceedings are held in equity, and the district court ruled that as a matter of equitable discretion, it had the inherent authority to rule for Fedorenko owing to his positive life in the country. The appeals court and Supreme Court both disagreed, holding that once a determination is made that citizenship is unlawfully procured, a court must cancel that citizenship. As to the question of whether the citizenship was unlawfully procured, Fedorenko argued that the misrepresentations on his visa and citizenship applications were immaterial under the prevailing standard found in Chaunt v. United States (1960). The district court agreed over the objection of the government; the appeals court reversed that decision; and the Supreme Court vacated that reversal, sidestepping ambiguities in the Chaunt standard and the question of whether it applied to the case at hand. Instead, the Supreme Court determined that Fedorenko's citizenship was "illegally procured" as a matter of the plain language of the law. This was because the district court held that the government did not prove that Fedorenko committed any atrocities at Treblinka voluntarily, as opposed to under duress; the appeals court did not contest this holding; and the Supreme Court held that it did not matter, as it found no exemption for duress in the relevant language in the DPA.
Fedorenko arose out of a growing public consciousness of Nazis living quietly within the United States; investigations into the matter began at public urging in the early '70s, but proved to be slow-going and ineffective. The government was wholly unprepared when it filed suit, owing to the Immigration and Naturalization Service's unfamiliarity with the court system. At Fedorenko's district court trial, the government called six survivors of Treblinka to testify; the first failed to identify Fedorenko at the defense table, instead pointing at an elderly man who was there spectating. The six survivors otherwise testified that they had witnessed Fedorenko carry out atrocities such as beating and shooting prisoners. The government also called two expert witnesses, both of whom testified that had officials known of Fedorenko's time at Treblinka when processing his application, he would have been denied entry and citizenship. Fedorenko brought three character witnesses in his own defense and testified on his own behalf, denying that he had committed any atrocities and claiming that he had not served voluntarily. After Fedorenko's loss at the Supreme Court, he was deported to the Soviet Union in 1984, pled guilty to war crimes in 1986, and executed in 1987.
The Supreme Court's ruling – that Fedorenko was ineligible as a matter of law owing to being a Treblinka guard in the first place – assisted government officials in future cases against suspected Nazi collaborators, but the Court earned criticism for its failure to clarify the Chaunt standard and its applicability and for not allowing duress as a defense. Some commentators thought that if duress was not an exception, the act would bar Jewish kapos or even those forced to cut prisoners' hair from entry, while others found that argument unconvincing. In concurrence, Harry Blackmun argued that the Court should have applied Chaunt to the instant case; in dissent, John Paul Stevens argued against the Court's interpretation of duress in the DPA; and also in dissent, 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.
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