War Crime Evidence and Cold War Games: The 1978 Miami Trial of a Soviet Treblinka Guard

The sudden emergence of the Holocaust in the consciousness of American citizens is generally associated with the ratings success of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, but also with the controversies it sparked. ¹ It is less well known that the Holocaust appeared in US federal courtrooms earlier, and that Soviet archival documentation on World War II did as well. This unexpected appearance resulted from the efforts of several congressmen and congresswomen, journalists and ordinary citizens who mobilised to act upon the presence of hidden war criminals in US society, to correct the mistakes of the immigration system of the post-war years. ² Their powerful advocacy established an improbable cooperation with their country's main Cold War foe, overcoming contemporary political disputes and propaganda wars. To take only two examples related to our argument, the Soviet Union had been raucously denouncing Western governments’ obliviousness to Nazi crimes and the consequent impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of those crimes since the late 1950s. ³ Meanwhile, Israel had managed to mobilise powerful US Jewish organisations, as well as human rights defenders, to obtain passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 that ‘linked’ the granting of the most-favoured-nation status to the Soviet Union to Moscow's release of those of its Jewish citizens eager to escape discrimination and emigrate to more egalitarian countries. ⁴ Cooperation among these three states on topics as thorny as the Holocaust and East European perpetrators was unlikely. Yet it eventually came to fruition, through the transfer of documents to the US courts.

In the immediate post-war years, several of the most compromised perpetrators had managed to exploit the refugee acts adopted in the context of reconstruction and the beginning of the Cold War. The US government reckoned that around 10,000 war criminals were admitted to US soil between 1948 and 1952. ⁵ To receive a visa, these criminals had to lie about either their identity or their activities during the war. Later, US courts could only prosecute these people through civil complaints, for immigration fraud, that is, making materially false statements under oath to an official at any stage of a person's immigration. Although a statute of limitations applied to criminal acts of fraud (for instance, lying to a government official), civil denaturalisation had no such time limits. Thus, whatever their crimes had been during the war, the Nazi perpetrators and their local collaborators could never face criminal charges for this dark past in a US court, ⁶ but they could be denaturalised, that is, stripped of their citizenship and ‘deported’ in another country that may decide to indict them on criminal charges – as ultimately happened to the central character of our story, in Crimea in 1986.

The story of Fëdor (pronounced Fyodor) Fedorenko belongs to the 108 cases successfully prosecuted by the government against ‘Nazi’ war criminals between 1973 and 2018, alongside that of Andrija Artuković, John Demjanjuk or Karl Linnas. ⁷ Archival documents held in the Eastern bloc often proved crucial as evidence in the cases under litigation, but oddly not in Fedorenko's case. The 1976–81 denaturalisation case of Fedorenko is an intriguing one, though not half as studied as his peer and fellow Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk, whose prosecution began at exactly the same time. ⁸ Both Red Army soldiers came from Soviet Ukraine and were captured in the first year of the German war against the USSR. Both were selected from POW camps and underwent training in the Trawniki SS Training Camp. ⁹ There they became SS guards, assigned to various genocidal tasks on occupied Polish territory as part of Aktion Reinhardt, ¹⁰ and both continued their guard service at concentration camps in Germany. Both their legal cases in the US courts focused on their service at Treblinka, one of the extermination centres of Aktion Reinhardt, where more than 900,000 Jews were murdered. Finally, both were ‘outed’ by the Soviet Union relatively late – in 1975, even though the Soviet authorities had been gathering evidence against these categories of traitors since the 1940s and lists of perpetrator-collaborators had been in circulation in the United States since the early-to-mid 1960s. ¹¹

The similarity ends here. Fedorenko did not receive any help from the Ukrainian diaspora, and his case did not get as much media exposure as Demjanjuk's. Yet it was Fedorenko's prosecution that set a decisive legal precedent through a Supreme Court decision in January 1981. The fact that it reached the highest judicial organ reflected the ignorance surrounding the Holocaust and levels of collaboration in the US society of that time. Indeed, when he was interrogated for the first time in 1976, Fedorenko did not deny his identity or his whereabouts and activities during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. He probably did not realise that there was no statute of limitations for immigration fraud. Or he might have thought no one cared anymore. Indeed, the first-instance court pronounced his acquittal in July 1978, Fedorenko kept his US citizenship, and it took a joint effort of the government and civil organisations to eventually bring the case up to the Justices. Ultimately, Fedorenko was the only US citizen ever to be denaturalised, deported to the Soviet Union and sentenced to death there.

Why and how did an apparently easy case end in acquittal in the first-instance court? Why did the KGB fail to help the US investigators, despite possessing crucial archival documents? Why did they apparently choose an indirect path to intervene, and how does this connect with the broader context of the Cold War? Indeed, Fedorenko's legal problems began in the USSR, not in the US: the KGB opened an investigation when Fedorenko was visiting his Soviet family in Crimea in September 1973. The KGB closed the inquiry in May 1976, but in the meantime, it had provided a list of alleged former Nazi collaborators residing in the US to the Ukrainian American communist, Michael Hanusiak. On the basis of Hanusiak's list, US federal immigration agents opened an investigation and identified witnesses ready to testify about his crimes in Treblinka. But the Florida district court judge who heard this evidence doubted these witnesses’ statements and acquitted him in July 1978. Only after several stages of appeals did the US Supreme Court strip him of his citizenship in January 1981.

The few publications that mention Fedorenko's case are often flawed by inaccuracies, mainly because this subject was not their principal focus, and because they used only US prosecution materials, neglecting sources from the press and from civil society or other government agencies. ¹² To capture the full and rich picture of a story that unfolded as much outside as within the courtroom, this text exploits the archival collections of the World Jewish Committee and of three major US organisations: the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. I also analysed US and Israeli Anglophone press, while the Soviet case file on Fedorenko (22 volumes, 1973–1986) helped with the reconstruction of what the Crimean KGB knew about him as early as 1973. ¹³

The reintroduction of all the actors involved, and a reconstruction of the evidence-gathering, suggests a succession of individual mistakes, prejudices, institutional dysfunctionality, professional hesitation and even rivalry among all involved – the Soviet Union, the US, and Israel. If there ever was some grand strategy on the Soviet part – whatever the goal – it failed but produced some unexpected outcomes.

Reflecting on the evidence that was needed to charge and convict Fedorenko in a US court or a Soviet criminal court, I first look at the identification question, then turn to the stepwise emergence of KGB-held information on him. Eventually, I focus on the burgeoning legal cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West at the dawn of the 1970s, and venture hypotheses about the reasons why Moscow did not particularly push forward that case (among others). These legal questions will prove relevant from a historical perspective when recontextualised within US–Soviet relations, the Soviet Union's international position in the mid-1970s, the Soviet experience of prosecuting Nazi and collaborators’ crimes, and finally the United States’ rising preoccupation with the issue of ‘Nazi war criminals’ hiding in America.

1. Living unnoticed in the US

The first remarkable fact of Fedorenko's legal odyssey in the United States was that it began only in November 1975. ¹⁴ After he had received his US citizenship in 1970, the former collaborator-perpetrator felt secure enough to risk a visit home to Crimea. He made at least three trips between 1973 and 1976, remaining there for almost a year on his final visit. ¹⁵ Travelling under his real name with his US passport on Soviet visas, he came to see his first family, a wife and two sons, who had survived the war, contrary to the information he had received in 1945 while in a displaced Persons camp in Germany. ¹⁶ According to the KGB file, he was recognised while in Crimea by another former Trawniki man – already tried and sentenced for wartime crimes in a Soviet court – who informed the Crimean KGB directorate of the seeming incongruity of Fedorenko's reappearance.

This story presents flaws that cast some doubt on the origin of the investigation and the goal of the KGB. The author of the alleged denunciation, Grigorii S., made his statement only on 3 November 1973, almost two months after Fedorenko's arrival and the beginning of the KGB's preliminary investigation (19 September). Meanwhile, another former Trawniki guard interrogated in October stated that Grigorii S. had told him he had seen Fedorenko in Crimea a year earlier. ¹⁷ There may be a mistake in this latter statement, the witness meaning in fact one month earlier, when Grigorii S. saw Fedorenko in September 1973 (and not in 1972). It is also possible – but strange – that the Crimean KGB decided to formalise Grigorii S.'s initial statement only after taking various investigative steps that confirmed Fedorenko had indeed been an SS Wachmann. ¹⁸ Alternatively, Fedorenko may have triggered an alert when he passed through airport border control. Indeed, as we will see in more detail, the KGB had known his name since 1944. He appeared on at least two lists of collaborators-perpetrators. In that case, the story of Grigorii S. recognising him by chance in the street in Dzhankoi would be a fake. It is impossible to determine whether a random encounter with a former comrade-in-crime, or (more plausibly) a watch-list ‘hit’ at the airport, initially led to the KGB taking an interest in Fedorenko.

The fact remains that a KGB investigator opened a preliminary investigation, questioned Fedorenko, and began gathering evidence. The first two volumes of the case file contain the evidence collected in this initial stage of Fedorenko's Soviet investigation (1973–76): copies of trophy documents obtained from the Moscow central repository, interrogations of other ex-Trawniki guards who were prosecuted earlier, and excerpts from older case files mentioning Fedorenko. By December 1973, the Crimean KGB possessed proof that Fedorenko had served as an SS guard in Treblinka and received the rank of non-commissioned officer (NCO); nonetheless, they allowed him to return to the US at the end of his family visit. The investigation went on in his absence, as Fedorenko himself informed the police of his intent to return soon to visit his relatives. ‘Absenting any new leads’, the case was closed on 11 May 1976, the day after Fedorenko ended his last visit to Crimea. ¹⁹ However, in the meantime, a leak had revealed to US immigration authorities the Soviet suspicions about Fedorenko, and he was questioned again, this time by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on 25 and 27 May 1976. ²⁰

Contrary to many other perpetrators, Fëdor Fedorenko had never altered his name when passing from the German POW camp to the Trawniki training centre, nor in the DP camp in Western Germany, nor, finally, when he began the emigration process to the USA. The consistent rendering of all his identification information appears in a copy of a German SS guard transfer roster (Übergabeverhandlung) dated 9 November 1943 (transferring him from Trawniki to concentration camp Sachsenhausen), in his International Refugee Organization refugee/displaced person registration documentation (1947–1949), and in his new US passport delivered in 1972. ²¹ The last document bore his true birth name; he re-entered the Soviet Union as such in 1973. What our protagonist had consistently concealed, since abandoning his SS uniform in spring 1945, was his actual wartime activity; he declared to the DP and visa officials in Germany that he had been born in a village in Poland, where he worked on his farm until 1942, when the occupiers ‘deported him to Germany and employed’ him ‘as a worker at a factory in Pelez near Stettin’. ²² How, then, did the US authorities come to associate him, in late 1975, with a still-obscure camp in Treblinka?

The question arises since the name Fëdor Fedorenko was absent from the Allies’ master war criminals listing ²³ and from the lists of ‘Nazi’ war criminals that circulated in the 1960s. The latter lists had been compiled by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, the first one in February 1961 ‘to assist the prosecution during the forthcoming trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel’. ²⁴ Mainly composed of German names, many of whom had been judged or had already died, it also comprised some names of alleged criminals of other nationalities, such as the Latvians Arajs and Cukurs, and the Croat Artuković. In 1965, the list was both purged of names outdated or irrelevant to the US and expanded on the basis of New York-based newspaper stories such as those found in the Morning Freiheit and Forward, in Warsaw's Folks-Sztyme, the Toronto Vochenblatt and booklets such as Chaim Suller's What Price Silence (New York 1964). ²⁵ It is not clear why the first compilers or later investigators from the Immigration and Naturalization Service did not exploit the book of freelance journalist Charles R. Allen, Jr. Nazi War Criminals Among Us (New York 1963), or, more generally, articles appearing in Jewish Currents (New York). This first list of 58 names was circulated among the main Jewish organisations; photocopies went to the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith (ADL), and the American Jewish Committee. ²⁶ Yet no apparent government enforcement action followed.

The unpunished Nazi criminals were a thorny issue, even in the eyes of the established Jewish organisations for whom current forms of antisemitism in the USA and the conflict between Israel and its neighbours appeared more topical and pressing. ²⁷ The sensitivity of the topic was aggravated by the ‘antifascist’ press campaigns that the Soviet Union and several of its East European satellites had been developing in the meantime. They claimed that capitalist countries, democracies as well as South American dictatorships, had massively welcomed Nazis or failed to denazify themselves after 1945. The KGB in particular was involved in producing propaganda for use abroad to discredit or divide anti-Soviet national diasporas. ²⁸ By the time Khrushchev was removed from power in late 1964, the so-called Great Patriotic War had emerged as a new myth of Soviet multinational identity. The high human and material cost of the 1941–1945 war found recognition only in the grandeur of its remembrance among citizens; to remind them of the true scope of indigenous collaboration, the state purged the last stains left by those who desecrated this sacralised memory, conveniently using that legal commitment to underscore the West's continuing cohabitation with those responsible for such carnage. The fight to uphold accountability for universally unacceptable crimes also helped balance, in foreign public spheres, the poor performance of the Soviet Union in all matters related to respect for human rights. This multifaceted propaganda discourse intersected with reality, as well as with the beliefs of a part of its audience. But its awkwardness and heavy-handedness often elicited doubts in the targeted countries.

The fact remained that Poland and the Soviet Union never stopped trying war perpetrators, and in the late 1950s, a rising share of these procedures were held in public courtrooms for domestic as well as international purposes, for propaganda as well as to abide by the recent reforms of the legal system. ²⁹ In contrast, as underscored by Martin Mendelsohn, one of the earliest prosecutors involved in US accountability efforts:

[…] very few prosecutions of Nazi collaborators took place in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. These prosecutions were either of notorious Nazis, such as the Rumanian Nicolae Malaxa and the Croat Andrija Artuković, or they were Jewish kapos, such as Jonas Lewy. For different reasons these failed. (…) Yet, even these cases were isolated examples of unofficial attempts to remove the Nazis from the United States. For the most part, the American people and their government were not interested in pursuing these cases. The war was over and they had other priorities. ³⁰

Schiano and his investigator, Anthony DeVito, obtained Braunsteiner-Ryan's denaturalisation and deportation to West Germany, where she was eventually tried for wartime crimes. ³⁴ But they encountered much obstruction in prosecuting this case and in 1973 alerted the chairman of the US House Immigration Subcommittee Joshua Eilberg and newly elected congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzmann. The latter initiated a congressional investigation into the handling by the INS of cases of alleged Nazi war criminals in the US and continued her close monitoring for the rest of the decade. ³⁵ Identifying unacceptable foot-dragging in those cases, they held hearings before the House Judiciary Committee (Subcommittee on Citizenship, Immigration and International Law), and eventually directed the Governmental Accounting Office in 1977 to undertake a thorough investigation of alleged collusion among INS, the CIA, the FBI and other governmental agencies to side-track the prosecution of these ‘old’ cases. Testifying at one such hearing in July 1978, chief trial attorney Schiano noted:

I could not believe and I could not abide by the thought that this Government would deprive itself of the right to thoroughly inquire into the role that any suspect played in Hitler's Germany, Hitler's SS or Hitler's Concentration camps. It is no longer necessary to prove the monstrous brutality that took place at that point in time. The success of the SS, the ruthless Nazis and the Concentration Camp system was not possible without dedicated and loyal followers, camp commandants or camp guards, etc. If they did not enjoy, then they acquiesced in those actions against human decency. This antithesis of humaneness demanded dedication to the practice of hell. In the final analysis, it is not only the right of the Government to inquire into this matter but the obligation to American law and justice and to history to examine the actions and conduct of the suspects during that period of time – the worse period in all of human history. ³⁶

Yet Fedorenko's name remained absent from the 1960s lists, as well as the reworked and revised 1973 list, soon baptised ‘List of Alleged Nazi War Criminals Residing in the United States’. ³⁹ Nothing would lead one to believe that anybody in the United States, whether individual Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal's representatives or the congressional members involved in the subject, knew about Fedorenko's dreadful past; his quiet life in Waterbury, Connecticut, raised no one's alarm or even interest. The link between the US retiree and the SS Rottenwachmann (Trawniki guard-corporal) Fëdor Fedorenko listed on the November 1943 transfer roster was apparently made only in September 1973 – thousands of kilometres away, in the Simferopol offices of the KGB in Crimea.

2. Late emergence of a long-filed name: Fëdor Fedorenko

The Soviet KGB had known about Fedorenko, his approximate age, his capture in 1941 and desertion, his German rank, service and crimes in Treblinka, since at least 1944. On 18 September 1944, the arrested suspect Ivan Sh. was interrogated by Red Army counterintelligence (Smersh) about the other Trawniki guards who served with him in Treblinka. The first name Sh. gave was Fedorenko's:

1. FEDORENKO, first name and patronym forgotten, 38-year-old, born and living in Ukraine, Ukrainian, Soviet citizen, ex-Red Army soldier, surrendered to the Germans in 1941, has the rank of Rottenwachmann. Average to tall stature, chestnut hair, round face, grey eyes, solid build, with gold crowns on his upper teeth. Served in the Treblinka ‘death camp’ from 1942 to July 1943. He commanded a group of Wachmänner who killed the Jewish population. He personally beat and shot Jews. ⁴⁰

By April 1949, the 4th Directorate of the Ministry of State Security possessed a certified translation of the 9 November 1943 order that transferred 199 men from Trawniki to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in Oranienburg – a ‘trophy document’ that was captured in 1944. ⁴¹ Fedorenko appears at number 13 with rank, name, surname, date and place of birth, and his Trawniki identification number (Erkennungsnummer) – 628. ⁴² Another perpetrator questioned by State Security during another investigation also identified Fedorenko during a late-night interrogation on 1 March 1950:

3. FEDORENKO Fëdor, unknown patronym, born around 1907–08, in Crimea, city of Dzhankoi. I served with him in the SS unit of the death camp in Treblinka. He had the rank of Oberwachmann [guard private first class]. He used to take part in the killing of Soviet and Polish citizens in gas chambers, and in the shooting of Polish Jews. In the autumn of 1943 he was sent, like me, to Danzig [now Gdańsk], and then to Germany, to the city of Hamburg, where we guarded prisoners. I do not know where he is now. Characteristics: tall, average build, hazel [hair]. ⁴³

But as the specialist in the Soviet prosecution of Trawniki guards, David A. Rich, has recently demonstrated, in the Stalin-era prosecutions, the investigators were not gathering evidence on the characteristics of the crimes against civilian people. Because the Trawniki guards were not charged with crimes against humanity or crimes committed against Soviet citizens on Soviet soil, but with treason, the investigators needed only to link a suspect to wartime betrayal of the motherland. Re-interrogated in 1973, Ananii K. confirmed that fact:

During my interrogations in 1950, I did not purposefully remain silent about the criminal actions of Wachmann Fedorenko in concentration camp Treblinka (…) I just named Fedorenko. However, I was not asked about his [concrete] criminal actions, which is why I did not make any statement about the crimes he committed in Treblinka. ⁴⁴

Michael Hanusiak was a Ukrainian American (as he called himself), a name shared with the English-language version of the newspaper he published in New York in the 1970s. The FBI had tracked his communist leanings from 1941 onwards but seemed to have completely missed his frequent travels to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1970s. Nor did they seem aware of his KGB-sourced book Lest We Forget. It exposed principally Ukrainian collaborators-perpetrators who had fled to the West. ⁴⁸ The two printings of this book coincided almost exactly with Fedorenko's visits to the USSR: October 1973 and May 1975 (Fedorenko had ventured again to Crimea in June 1975). The second edition ‘had been corrected and greatly enlarged by inclusion of personal interviews, photos and illustrations of documents from archives’, explained one cover blurb. During Fedorenko's first trial in 1978, The Miami Herald claimed that Hanusiak was the first to give “Fedorenko's name to government investigators in 1973 (…) Hanusiak said that, when he originally gathered information about Fedorenko during a 1973 trip to the Ukraine region of the USSR, ‘I didn't have much to go on. I had no real documents. The name was one of many names’”. ⁴⁹

It is perfectly plausible, though not verifiable, that the KGB hastily fed Fedorenko's name to Hanusiak after the publication of the first edition of Lest We Forget, and that this KGB conduit transmitted the name to the US government or published it in his newspaper. Hanusiak himself later boasted of his role in the development of such ‘big’ cases as Fedorenko's and Demjanjuk's:

Our English edition was among the first in the United States to expose the fact that Nazi war criminal Fëdor Fedorenko, who was a Ukrainian guard at the Treblinka death camp during World War II, fraudulently entered this country under the Displaced Persons Act which the Congress passed in 1948. He was also able to become an American citizen. ⁵⁰

How the list was compiled remains a mystery. If compared to the documents that the central authorities had stored in Moscow since 1944–49, or that the Crimean KGB had gathered in September-November 1973, some errors are inexplicable. The Hanusiak list presented Fedorenko with his correct first name, patronym, and date and place of birth. But it asserted that ‘as of 1961 [he] was reported living in the USA at: 3410 Kildare Avenue, Chicago, Ill. 60641’. This assertion was erroneous. It also claimed that Fedorenko ‘served in the SS forces [correct, to an extent] and in the Security Police [which could be alleged only tenuously]’. It stated that he was trained by the SS, at the Trawniki camp in Poland [correct] ‘with the rank of ‘oberwachmenn’ [sic] of the SS’ [incomplete, since the totality of the surviving documentation showed his promotion was to Rottenwachmann], and:

[…] he personally participated in the execution of Jews. From the spring of 1942 to August 1942 he served as a guard in the concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. After that was transferred to the death camp Treblinka. He personally participated in the mass shooting of Jews. As of 1964 was reported living under the name of Serduk, Vladimir, in the USA at: 23 Elizabeth Street, Waterbury, Conn. 06704. ⁵³

The first two volumes of Fedorenko's KGB case file already quoted here do not show the same address as the Hanusiak list nor the address in Lest We Forget: ‘23 Elizabeth Street, Waterbury, Conn., in the U.S.’ That address, as well as the assertion that he changed his name to Volodymir Serdiuk, comes from information retrieved from correspondence Fedorenko had with people in Ukraine in the 1950s, when he first sought information on his former family. He would have used the pseudonym to shield himself from the police's gaze only a few years after the war. ⁵⁵

Why did the Soviet authorities decide – and at which level – to seed the information on Fedorenko through Hanusiak to US government agencies and the American public? Perhaps even more importantly: why so little information? By the summer of 1974, the KGB in Crimea had at its disposal a copy of the November 1943 roster by which SS Rottenwachman Feodor Fedorenko, Trawniki identification number 628, was transferred from Trawniki to a concentration camp in Germany. They had interrogated not only the other former Trawniki guard (Grigorii S.) who had allegedly met him on the street in Dzhankoi and denounced him, but also several others, who confirmed his presence in places of extermination and his direct participation in the killings. They had gathered archival information from various sources, as well as statements of Polish railroad employees and survivors’ testimonies recorded and preserved over many years: Jankel Vernik, Evgenii Turovskii (Eugen Turowski), Genrikh Raikhman, Samuel’ Rejiman, Leon Fonkelshtein. ⁵⁶ The KGB had made a first broad search in its archived case files created from 1944 to the 1960s that involved other Wachmänner who might have mentioned Fedorenko. In those files, they found a 1961 Ukrainian KGB document that listed 162 names of ‘unlocated’ suspected guard-perpetrators, which it then distributed among oblast KGB directorates for research into the missing perpetrators, and further prosecution. ⁵⁷ A certain Fedorenko (first name was unknown) appeared at number 42.

The US side of the story reveals that Representatives Eilberg and Holtzman had made an approach for assistance to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. According to the congresswoman:

[…] in a meeting with me and other members of the Immigration Subcommittee in May 1975 a ranking Soviet prosecutor had indicated that his government would respond favorably to requests for judicial assistance if approached through the State Department. Unfortunately, delays were again encountered before the State Department would act on the Immigration Service's request that the Soviets be contacted. ⁵⁸

Another obscure decision was leaking Fedorenko's name to Simon Wiesenthal's organisation in Vienna, together with the alias Volodymyr Serdiuk, and with a mistake: according to Wiesenthal's information the perpetrator was suspected of being a member of a ‘Ukrainian SS-Division’. Wiesenthal transmitted the information to the director of INS investigations, Central Office (New York), Maurice Kiley, in late February 1976. His letter claimed that several Ukrainians were ‘living in USA, partly under false names’ and would:

[…] have committed a number of crimes during the war when they served with the Germans. These crimes consisted mainly in exterminating Jews. We are trying to get testimonies against these persons. But in the meantime, we beg you to check whether the information we got are true. (…) 2) Volodymir Serdiuk, 23 Elizabeth Street, Waterbury, Conn. His former name was Fedor Fedorenko and he was a member of the Ukrainian SS-Division. ⁶⁰

One year later, Wiesenthal's Bulletin of Information returned to the topic of Ukrainian perpetrators living in Waterbury, yet without mentioning either Fedorenko or Serdiuk:

15. Nazi Crimes in the Ukraine

US authorities received new names in 1975, and they immediately launched investigations, in stark contrast to the preceding ten years. The Hanusiak list was indeed delivered to the Immigration and Naturalization Service no later than 28 October 1975, and by 3 November the preliminary investigation of Fedorenko had been launched, tagged by the INS Central Office as ‘high priority’. ⁶² The coordinated efforts of the journalist Ralph Blumenthal and Representatives Eilberg and Holtzmann had overcome the INS leadership's reluctance to check the names or open investigations. In parallel, leading Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League began to pay serious attention to the issue, one which they had ignored until then, for various reasons. ⁶³ The Yom Kippur War also played a role in bringing attention to Nazi war criminals enjoying impunity, as it fostered a new discourse on the Holocaust. ⁶⁴ In January 1976, the State Department forwarded the names of twenty cases to the Soviet Foreign Ministry with a request for legal assistance. ⁶⁵ If Fedorenko's name was among them, it apparently did not trigger a reaction from the Ukrainian KGB. In two October 1976 reports to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the KGB did not mention Fedorenko's name, even as it confirmed having sent to Moscow, for onward transmittal to Washington, information on several alleged war criminals under investigation in the US: the former chiefs of auxiliary police of Rava-Ruska (L’viv oblast), Lyubolm (Volyn oblast), and Lypovets’ (Vinnytsya oblast), and a former auxiliary policeman of Ivano-Frankivs’k oblast. ⁶⁶

Thus, the Crimean KGB opened a case on Fedorenko but did not energetically pursue it, and did not communicate any useful evidence to the US INS investigation that, in the meantime, had been tipped off by an informal intermediary, Hanusiak. Let us now turn to possible explanations for these initial investigative failures in such a promising case.

3. Cold war games or legal-diplomatic considerations?

The KGB case file on Fedorenko does not contain any documentation suggesting political oversight. There is no doubt, however, that the Crimean KGB consulted its superiors in Kyiv and Moscow on the matter of a Soviet traitor who was also a US citizen. It continued to casually gather evidence on the suspect between his two visits in 1973 and 1975 but discovered no significant new fact. The crimes established and witnesses identified by November 1973 were clearly sufficient to prosecute Fedorenko, if compared to those used in analogous trials of other former Trawniki guards held just over the preceding decade or so. ⁶⁷ Thus, there can be no doubt that the political and diplomatic context played a central role in the suspension and closure of the case. Still, the situation in December 1973, when Fedorenko returned to the US following his first visit, and May 1976, when the investigation was officially closed, require different explanations.

The Soviet Union was not completely new to international cooperation on Nazi war crimes cases. Jasmin Söhner has analysed the extent and limitations of West German–Soviet collaboration in the second half of the 1960s. The Soviet Union transmitted an important volume of evidence (copies of documents), without charge, to the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg, and let their delegations go through hundreds of volumes of trophy documents, as well as Soviet investigative and judicial files. ⁶⁸ But two issues severely impeded the efficiency of this cooperation: the lack of knowledge and disinterest of the Soviet side regarding German law, and the absence of an independent investigative unit specialising in Nazi and war crimes. Although a unit was finally created by 1968 in the KGB's central Investigative Department in Moscow, ‘it was not until the spring of 1969 that the necessary steps were taken to organise the work systematically and share information vertically – to ‘professionalise’ the work on Nazi-era investigations’. ⁶⁹ The situation was no better at the republic level in Ukraine, where no such unit existed. This complex, sensitive work was delegated to the relevant oblast KGB. Furthermore, Moscow had centralised all trophy documents and only in 1969 did the KGB initiate reciprocal transmissions of information, in the form of lists and index cards, between Moscow and Kyiv. That April, the Moscow KGB organised a one-day training meeting in the Kyiv KGB headquarters where investigators could share best practices. According to Söhner:

[…] this meeting was an important turning point in the professionalisation of the KGB's Nazi-era investigations (…) Specific questions were discussed and resolved (whether legal, substantive, or technical) and participants discussed errors made by oblast directorates in their transmission of materials intended for handover to the West German judicial authorities. ⁷⁰

In the contradictory context of the Brezhnev doctrine and the search for renewed détente with the West, the issue of Nazi criminals still at large was not a clear-cut one. In 1968, the Soviet Union arrested Yermak Lukianoff, a former member of the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps (Kalmücken-Kavallerie-Korps), one of the Wehrmacht's foreign legions, who had naturalised in Belgium in the 1960s but had taken the considerable risk of returning to the USSR. He was incarcerated in a psychiatric facility at the end of his second visit, and eventually sentenced to death for treason and war crimes in July 1983. ⁷² A Canadian citizen of Soviet (Georgian) origin, Georgii Tsinaridze, was likewise arrested during a stay in Batumi while visiting under an alias. He was sentenced in Krasnodar in September 1974, in the presence of the consul of Canada, according to Izvestiia:

The Canadian consul Dered Freizer was sitting in one of the first rows of the public during the trial against Tsinaridze. After the verdict was announced, he had a meeting with the defendant. This was, to use his own terms, a strictly private conversation, not for the press. The trial placed special emphasis on the fact that the defendant was not the Canadian citizen David Geldiashvili, but the war criminal Georgii Tsinaridze who was hidden under this name. Tsinaridze was a Soviet citizen by birth (…) at the trial in Krasnodar the names of Tsinaridze's comrades-in-crime, also former members of the ‘Caucasian Company’ who had escaped accountability, were spoken. ⁷³

Another possible explanation relates to the dynamics within the KGB. The investigator in charge of the case in 1973 had undertaken numerous initiatives to substantiate the charges against Fedorenko. But the case had not been a top priority for the KGB in those years (at the all-Union, the republican or the oblast levels), all the more as such an investigation promised to be cumbersome and extraordinarily complex, including from the diplomatic perspective. Besides, the Crimean KGB had been pursuing another line of prosecutions concerning Nazi war crimes. In May-June 1972, November 1974 and June-July 1977, open trials involving former members of the Schutzmannschaft-Bataillon 152 (Krim-Tataren) unfolded in Simferopol. ⁷⁶

A final explanation that might account for Fedorenko's release in the 1970s lies at the boundary between legal jurisdiction and local propaganda. Officially, the case had been closed because the investigators thought Fedorenko's actions fell under the umbrella of the 1955 amnesty for collaborators. ⁷⁷ One analysis of the hesitations of Soviet authorities about undertaking trials, especially public trials, against the Trawniki men had pointed to the remote location of the crimes (outside Soviet borders), the foreignness of most victims (Polish Jews), the near-absence of survivors to testify, and the embarrassment of a Red Army man's defection (as all early Wachmänner recruits had). Recently, this researcher underlined another issue for Soviet courts: the articles of the 1955 amnesty law that excluded from amnesty the special category of karateli (blood perpetrators) not only demanded that a case prove the personal and direct participation of the defendant in such crimes but also limited the jurisdiction of Soviet tribunals to crimes committed against Soviet citizens. Thus, the Polish Jews were of no concern to Soviet military tribunals that examined these crimes. ⁷⁸ Fedorenko was deployed in the framework of Aktion Reinhardt, which explicitly targeted the Jews in pre-war Poland for extermination (through liquidation of the General Government's ghettos, and murder of those Jews in camps in Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka). Moreover, Fedorenko had acquired US citizenship; arresting him on such a fragile basis might have seemed too risky. It was easier to throw the problem back in the face of US authorities by leaking his name and letting them deal with the embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Holtzman and Eilberg had secured Soviet cooperation in a number of investigations into alleged Lithuanian, Estonian, Ukrainian and Latvian perpetrators. ⁷⁹ They also obtained the cooperation of the Israeli police, who presented names and photographs to Holocaust survivors for identification and returned the resulting affidavits to the INS. ⁸⁰ By 20 February 1976, Fedorenko's name figured among the nine transmitted to the Israeli counterpart, Major Lengsfelder, at Israel Police Headquarters, Tel Aviv-Jaffa. ⁸¹

INS Hartford office had launched several checks on Fedorenko's current circumstances in the US, on his relationship with US agencies (notably the CIA), and on his alleged past at Treblinka. A lookout was set up to spot him upon his return from the Soviet Union; his entry occurred on 5 May 1976. Twenty days later, Fedorenko was making a sworn statement in front of David D. Pecevich, the immigration investigator in charge of the case at the Hartford office. Fedorenko then admitted to some of his former lies, stating that he once had served in the German army. Besides seeking the assistance of Jean François Steiner, author of a book on Treblinka published several years earlier, Pecevich solicited the help of the World Jewish Congress, which provided a list of Treblinka survivors. ⁸² By November 1976, six Israeli witnesses had recognised young Fedorenko in a photo spread and had given incriminating statements against him. The Control Unit of the INS special project on War Crimes recommended prosecution, and in February 1977 Fedorenko's investigation file was transferred to the Florida INS office, into the jurisdiction of which he had moved after retirement, and upon his return from his last trip to Crimea.

During all those developments, the USSR kept silent. It did not transmit any of the evidence collected by the Crimean KGB between September 1973 and May 1976. Yet in a late December 1976 article on the war criminals living in the USA, journalist S. Timofeeva reproduced the acerbic comment of the Pravda correspondent in Washington:

Judicial prosecutions of elusive Nazi criminals have not actually begun. They were only charged with the violation of certain formalities at their entry into the USA. The shuttle of a case between one judicial instance and another can take a very long time. All the more so since someone is now trying to protect the criminals, presenting them as ‘harmless old men’. ⁸³

4. Conclusion

The reconstruction of the steps taken by the Soviet and US investigators to identify Fedorenko and to document his activities during the war reveals many inconsistencies. It raises the question of the commitment of various US government agencies to take a principled stand on the question of the perpetration of genocide three decades after the facts. But in the USSR too, the investigators in charge of these cumbersome cases did not seem to consider them a priority, at least not as much as in the late 1950s, when the mass return of released Gulag detainees elicited many fears in KGB offices in the USSR's western oblasts. ⁸⁴ Several variables at times impeded the discovery or investigations of the alleged criminal, and at other times accelerated the course of action. These variables were the constant Cold War rivalry, despite the climate of détente; the behaviour and choices of individuals such as Fedorenko himself, the Soviet KGB officers in charge of the first investigation against him in 1973–76, agents of transnational circulation such as Simon Wiesenthal or the Ukrainian-American Michael Hanusiak; and the development in the US of a scandal around the impunity enjoyed by war criminals who entered the country in the 1940s as refugees from Communism in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, despite – or maybe because of – the Cold War and its propaganda games, Fëdor Fedorenko was eventually recognised as a significant collaborator-perpetrator from the SS unit most uncontroversially implicated in the genocide.

Fëdor Fedorenko's legal odyssey in the US can be read in two opposed ways. Without doubt, it remains a riveting Cold War story that unfolded against the background of a decade-long Soviet campaign to cast North America as a safe haven for former Nazi war criminals. The case involved documents that were re-read, survivors’ testimonies that were re-evaluated, and kompromat that leaked from beyond the Curtain. Enigmatic intermediaries offered detailed information only to denounce US injustice years later. Justice crusaders in the guise of members of Congress launched transcontinental investigations. A quiet, law-abiding seventy-year-old publicly revealed his monstrous past as an SS guard in an extermination centre. Holocaust survivors and an angry public besieged the Florida courtroom, some carrying banners claiming ‘We want Fedorenko. We want him dead’. ⁸⁵

A closer look reveals a different picture of the entanglement among the Cold War, accountability for war crimes, the use of Soviet documentation, and the interplay of various levels of action. The micro-history of the politics of evidence against Fedorenko delivers valuable insights. First, it raises questions about the commitment of governments to their official agenda on accountability, highlighting instead the crucial role of non-state actors. Second, it shows how Cold War disputes or rivalries could ultimately result in unexpected cooperation and successes. Third, it reveals that serendipity, rather than Cold War grand schemes, is probably what ultimately accounted for the outcome of this story. And the outcome, as Christoph Schiessl maintains, was: ‘probably the most significant for the work of the OSI [Office of Special Investigations, the unit created following the failure of Fedorenko′s 1978 trial]. Not only did this [Supreme Court] decision denaturalise (and later also help to deport) an individual perpetrator, but it legitimised the existence of the OSI as well. It stopped one line of arguments defendants often used. It did not matter in a legal sense that a long period of time had passed since the alleged crimes had happened and the accused had led blameless lives in the US for decades. Without Fedorenko, OSI would have had a very short docket. ⁸⁶

Instead, the Office survived to this day, and prosecuted many other Nazi cases, even if it was repeatedly accused of being the fool of KGB deception. ⁸⁷ But this is a whole other story to be told. However detailed this microstudy was, it leaves a few blind spots. I could not establish why the Soviet side did not share with its US counterparts the evidence that would have helped the Americans more quickly reach a denaturalisation verdict in the first-instance trial. While Judge Roettger in Miami did not tolerate the emotional tension created in his courtroom by the statements of Holocaust survivors, and doubted their memory so many years after the facts, he might have conceded that the historical documentary evidence – the 1943 SS deployment order – was dispositive to the allegations. The synthesis of testimonies prepared immediately after the camp's liberation, and the multiple highly convergent statements of other Wachmänner sentenced by Khrushchev and Brezhnev's courts, might also have vanquished his stubborn confidence that old Mr. Fedorenko's spotless record in the USA was all that mattered. But those are conjectures that can never be checked. In any case, Fedorenko's story appears eminently ironic if only in the discrepancy between the little attention the Soviet authorities gave it and its colossal importance for the entire programme of denaturalisation of Nazi-era criminals by the US courts.