1982: a look back: Denaturalization and Soviet evidence (12/26/82)

1982: a look back

Denaturalization and Soviet evidence

Although 1982 saw no new cases brought by the Justice Department against Ukrainians suspected of collaborating with the Germans during World War II, several on-going cases resulted in defendants being stripped of their U.S. citizenship.

On February 4, Michael Derkacz, a 73-year-old retired window-washer from New York, had his citizenship revoked after a federal judge ruled that he had withheld information about his service in a German-controlled police unit.

The following month, on March 30, Bohdan Koziy, 59, was stripped of his naturalized citizenship. On October 22, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which is charged with locating and bringing to trial suspected war criminals and collaborators, moved to have the Florida hotel-keeper deported.

Deportation proceedings were also initiated against Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk, 62, who lost his citizenship in March 1981 after a federal court ruled that he had not disclosed his service as a guard at the Treblinka concentration camp when applying to enter the United States under the Displaced Persons Act.

At the heart of the Ukrainian community's opposition to the denaturalization proceedings is the Justice Department's continued use of Soviet-supplied witnesses and material evidence in most of the cases. Several Ukrainian groups, most notably the Ukrainian American Bar Association, had a busy year meeting with officials from the Justice Department and Congress in an effort to ensure that the defendants receive a fair trial and full protection of their rights under the law.

For their part, officials of the Office of Special Investigations, particularly its director, Allan A. Ryan Jr., made themselves available to explain the OSI's position and to try and allay the fears of the Ukrainian community. On January 3, Mr. Ryan and Lowell Jensen, assistant attorney general, met with representatives of six East European groups, including the UABA.

In the spring, East European community leaders and lawyers met with several congressmen, presenting them with a 10-point list of recommendations and grievances which included a demand that the government review the OSI's use of Soviet information.

It must be said that Mr. Ryan showed a particular sensitivity to the concerns of this country's East European communities, which have been especially affected by the denaturalization proceedings, because many of the defendants come from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

On October 30 Mr. Ryan spent nearly three hours answering questions posed by Ukrainian lawyers at a meeting of the Ukrainian American Bar Association. He defended the OSI's methods, noting that he was satisfied that the defendant's rights were being safeguarded by the American legal system. He also said that, to date, the OSI has yet to prosecute anyone merely for being a member of any proscribed group - such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - unless it was convinced that individual acts of persecution could be verified.

In addition to meeting with Ukrainian lawyers and community representatives, Mr. Ryan has also made himself accessible to the Ukrainian press.

But his commendable actions notwithstanding, several issues remain murky. Why, for example, in the Fedorenko case, did Mr. Ryan reverse his earlier assessment, made while he was with the solicitor general's office, that the government not appeal the case because, in his view, Mr. Fedorenko "may be the unfortunate victim of innocently mistaken identification, or indeed, he may be the target of a group of Treblinka survivors who are determined to bring vengeance on any Treblinka guard, guilty or not."

During the UABA meeting, Mr. Ryan said that he had rescinded his memo after reading the transcript of the case and concluding that the trial judge did not accurately convey the evidence in the case.

But several lawyers at the UABA meeting said privately that it seemed implausible for Mr. Ryan to ask the government not to appeal the first-ever denaturalization case, which was argued by the attorney general himself, without having a thorough knowledge of the facts.

They also found it interesting that in his memo recommending that the government not appeal the case, Mr. Ryan implied that the government had failed to prove individual persecution. However, during his meeting with the UABA, Mr. Ryan, in an apparent shift, said that, by definition, all concentration camp guards were guilty of persecution simply because of their jobs, and that even though Mr. Fedorenko was cleared of committing individual acts of atrocity, he was still culpable.

Moreover, despite the entreaties of several Ukrainian organizations, Mr. Ryan and the OSI still seem reluctant to accept the notion that the Soviets have a stake in discrediting the Ukrainian community and, therefore, Soviet evidence should be inadmissible. Realizing why the Ukrainian community hates the Soviets is not the same thing as understanding why the Soviets hate the emigre community.

But the OSI and its investigations were not the only source of concern in this area. In November, The Washington Post ran a story about a new book by former OSI staffer John Loftus in which the author accuses the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of active collaboration with the Germans. Although the book, "The Belarus Secret," makes only a few references to the OUN, the bulk of the Post's article dealt with the nationalist group.

As the year draws to a close the miasma of collaboration still hangs over the Ukrainian community, and remains a source of frustration and concern. Unfortunately, with the community divided, coordinated action in this urgent matter has been made more difficult.

| Home Page |