Two major Jewish organizations hailed the Supreme Court for its 702 decision yesterday to revoke the citizenship of Feodor Federenko, a former guard at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland during World War II, who concealed his past when he entered the United States in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act and applied for citizenship in 1970 in New Haven, Conn.
The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith termed the court’s decision “a significant step forward in bringing to justice suspected Nazi war criminals now living in the United States.” Seymour Reich, chairman of the ADL’s national civil rights committee, said the ruling “will facilitate the successful prosecution of pending denaturalization and deportation proceedings against persons who have covered up or lied about their past to gain entry to this country or to become American citizens.”
The American Jewish Congress, which had participated in the case with a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of itself and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council uring the revocation of Federenko’s citizenship, called on the Justice Department to act quickly to order the war criminal to leave this country. Phil Baum, associate executive director of the AJCongress, said the court’s decision achieved “not retribution by accountability.”
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DECISION
The majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, concluded that because Federenko would not have obtained a visa under the Displaced Persons Act if he had told the truth about his role as guard at Treblinka, he had no legal right to enter the U.S. and was thus ineligible for citizenship as a matter of law. “An individual’s service as a concentration camp armed guard– whether voluntary or involuntary–made him ineligible for a visa,” Marshall wrote.
Under the court’s ruling, the government will not have to prove specific crimes, a task made difficult with the passing of the years and with the death of eyewitnesses. The government will only have to prove that a concentration camp guard concealed his role when he entered the U.S.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
