Feodor Fedorenko

Feodor Fedorenko
Feodor Fedorenko after his escape to the U.S.
Born	Fyodor Demyanovich Federenko (1907-09-17)September 17, 1907 Dzhankoy, Syvash, Crimea, Russian Empire
Died	July 28, 1987(1987-07-28) (aged 79) Crimea, Ukraine, Soviet Union
Cause of death	Execution by firing squad
Nationality	Soviet American (1970-1981)
Known for	Nazi war criminal

Feodor Fedorenko, or Fyodor Federenko (Ukrainian: Федір Федоренко; Fedir Fedorenko; Russian: Фёдор Демьянович Федоренко; 17 September 1907 – 28 July 1987) was a war criminal serving at Treblinka extermination camp in German occupied Poland during World War II. As a former Soviet citizen admitted to the United States under a DPA visa (1949), Fedorenko became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. He was discovered in 1977 and denaturalized in 1981. Subsequently, he was extradited to the USSR, sentenced there to death for treason against his nation and participation in the Holocaust, and was executed.^[1]

War record[]

Fedorenko was born in Dzhankoy in the Sivash region of the Crimea, in southern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). He was mobilized into the Soviet Army in June 1941,^[1] around the time of the Nazi German Operation Barbarossa. He was a truck driver, and had no previous military training. Within two or three weeks, his group was encircled twice by the German army. He escaped the first time, but he was captured three days later by the Germans and transported to Zhytomyr, then Rivne, and finally to Chełm, Poland.

At the Chełm prisoner-of-war camp, German officers from Operation Reinhard arrived one day and recruited 200 to 300 Ukrainians for military training as auxiliary police in the service of Nazi Germany within General Government.^[2] They were sent to the Trawniki concentration camp SS training division, and Fedorenko was among them. At Trawniki, he was trained as a Hiwi shooter and was posted to Treblinka extermination camp.^[3] Fedorenko became an NCO (Non Commissioned Officer) attaining the rank of Oberwacher and from September 1942 to August 1943,^[4] he led a 200-member Ukrainian detachment which shaved, stripped, beat and gassed prisoners brought to Treblinka.^[5]

Training as the Hiwi shooter[]

Fedorenko was one of approximately 5,000 Trawniki men trained as Holocaust executioners by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel from Operation Reinhard.^[6] The Hiwi shooters, known in German as the Trawnikimänner, were deployed to all major killing sites of the Final Solution, augmented by the SS and Schupo, as well as Ordnungspolizei formations. The German Order Police performed roundups inside the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland shooting everyone unable to move or attempting to flee, while the Trawnikis conducted large-scale civilian massacres in the same locations.^[2] It was their primary purpose of training.^[7] In the spring of 1942 Fedorenko was deployed from Trawniki to the Lublin Ghetto. It is known from historical record that between mid-March and mid-April 1942 over 30,000 Jews from Lublin Ghetto were transported to their deaths in cattle trucks at the Bełżec extermination camp and additional 4,000 at Majdanek.^[8][9] Fedorenko claimed in his postwar hearing that he was issued a rifle which was not fired. From Lublin, he was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto with his Sonderdienst battalion of 80 to 100 executioners. He was dispatched to Treblinka approximately in September 1942.^[3]

The report of the Soviet Interrogation of Defendant Aleksandr Ivanovich Yeger (born in 1918, Germany), includes the section devoted to Fedorenko's activities at the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland (excerpt).^[10]

FEDORENKO had the rank of an SS oberwachman. He was assistant to the commander of the first platoon of a guards company in the Treblinka "death camp". He came together with me from the city of Warsaw to the Treblinka "death camp". He took part in the shooting of citizens of Jewish nationality during the unloading of trains, in the undressing places to the gas chambers and to the "infirmary". At the end of 1943, he left for Danzig as part of a company of guards. I did not meet him again and do not know where he is now.— Yeger: Investigation Department of Ministry of State Security of the Ukraine. ^[10]

Escape to the United States[]

After the end of the war, Fedorenko abandoned his wife and two children, who remained in the Soviet Union, and spent four years living as a war refugee in West Germany, working for the British from 1945-1949. Fedorenko emigrated to the United States from Hamburg in 1949 and was granted permanent residency status under the Displaced Persons Act. He initially resided in Philadelphia but later settled in Waterbury, Connecticut where he found employment as a brass factory worker. Fedorenko would reside in Waterbury for the next two decades.

While Fedorenko's life in the United States was quiet, he had been identified as a possible war criminal. Treblinka survivors identified him as a guard at the camp from a collection of photographs and documents that had been captured from the SS. In the mid-sixties his name and Waterbury, Connecticut address were included on a list of fifty-nine war criminals living in America. The list was compiled in Europe and Israel and forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the United States.^[11]

He was granted U.S. citizenship in 1970, however and later retired to Miami Beach, Florida in 1973. In the mid-70s, Congressional Representatives Joshua Eilberg and Elizabeth Holtzman initiated a set of hearings that led the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the handling of possible Nazi war criminal data. No mishandling was found, but as a result, a Special Litigation Unit for the investigation of Nazi war criminals was established in the INS. The information supplied in the sixties was now put to use. In 1977, the INS supplied information on Fedorenko to Justice Department prosecutors.^[12]

In 2005, a Russian documentary Secrets of the Century - Punishers: May 9th (Russian: "Тайны века - Каратели: Девятое Мая") reported that in 1974 Fedorenko visited Crimea as a tourist, where he was recognised and this raised the interest of the KGB. Afterwards, the Soviet government contacted the White House and requested that the case of Fedorenko be reviewed.^[13]

Denaturalization trial and extradition[]

Federenko was arrested and, in June 1978, brought for a denaturalization trial in district court at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He testified over three days, denying that he had actually entered the section of the camp where the gas chambers were located but admitted that he had once been posted on a guard tower overlooking this section of the camp. "I saw how they were loading up dead people, loading them on the stretchers. ...And they were loading them in a hole." Later in his testimony, he reconfirmed that this part of the camp "is where there was the workers that took the bodies and buried them or stacked them in the holes. This is where the gas chambers were." Concerning the unloading of Jews from the trains, he testified: "Some were picked for work and the others, they went to the gas chambers".^[14] Fedorenko argued that his service at Treblinka had been involuntary and, since he had worked only as a perimeter guard, he had virtually no contact with the prisoners. He had mistreated no one and, therefore, when he lied on his immigration forms about his birthplace and wartime service, it was not about any material fact that would have excluded him from entering the US. Six Treblinka survivors, however, testified that Fedorenko had in fact committed atrocities, namely beating and shooting Jewish prisoners.^[15]

Judge Norman C. Roettger did not believe the Treblinka witnesses. He ruled that the 71-year-old Fedorenko had himself been a "victim of Nazi aggression"^[16] and that the prosecutors had failed to prove Fedorenko had committed any atrocities while serving as a guard at the extermination camp. Further, after entering the US, Fedorenko had been a hard-working and responsible resident and citizen. He could keep his US citizenship.^[17]

Since this was a civil rather than a criminal case, the government could appeal the decision and did so.^[18] Allan Ryan then of the Solicitor General's Office presented the appeal before the Fifth Circuit Court on behalf of the INS. He argued that Fedorenko's deception when entering the US was a material fact that justified revocation of citizenship, that the district court had erred in judging the credibility of the survivor witnesses, and that it erred in its determination that Fedorenko's good conduct in the US after the war was relevant to the decision about revoking his citizenship. The appellate court agreed and, in August 1979, reversed the district court's decision.^[19][20] Fedorenko appealed to the Supreme Court which, in January of 1981, sustained the appellate court's decision.^[21][22] In December 1984 Fedorenko became the first Nazi war criminal to be deported to the Soviet Union.^[23]

A subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of the USSR was rejected.^[13] His execution by firing squad was announced in late July 1987.^[24]

See also[]

• John Demjanjuk
• Karl Linnas
• Algimantas Dailidė
• Anton Geiser
• Boļeslavs Maikovskis

References[]