Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca8-04-01728/USCOURTS-ca8-04-01728-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Adam Friedrich
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

1

The Honorable Carol E. Jackson, Chief Judge, United States District Court for

the Eastern District of Missouri.

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

___________

No. 04-1728

___________

United States of America, *

*

Appellee, *

* Appeal from the United States

v. * District Court for the

* Eastern District of Missouri.

Adam Friedrich, *

*

Appellant. *

___________

Submitted: February 17, 2005

Filed: March 31, 2005

___________

Before WOLLMAN, HANSEN, and BENTON, Circuit Judges.

___________

WOLLMAN, Circuit Judge.

Adam Friedrich appeals from the district court’s1

 order that he be denaturalized

pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1451. We affirm.

I.

Friedrich was born in Romania in 1921. In 1941, he attempted to join the

Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) but was denied entry because he was not a

German citizen. He instead volunteered for the Schutzstaffel (SS), and began active

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duty in October 1942. Following basic training, Friedrich was assigned to the

Death’s Head Battalion at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in German-occupied

Poland. Gross-Rosen had approximately 100,000 prisoners when Friedrich arrived

in January 1943. The prisoners were used as slave labor in a nearby stone quarry and

received inadequate food, clothing, and medical care. Nearly 1,500 died in the first

five months of 1943.

In August 1943, Friedrich and other guards marched approximately 200

prisoners from Gross-Rosen to the Dyhenfurth concentration camp. Friedrich

remained as a guard at Dyhenfurth until the camp was evacuated in January 1945. At

that time, Friedrich and other guards marched approximately 1,000 prisoners more

than thirty miles back to Gross-Rosen. The winter march took several days and the

prisoners slept without blankets in open fields. Gross-Rosen was evacuated the

following month, and Friedrich was among the guards who escorted approximately

1,000 prisoners to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. After walking for nearly a

day, the prisoners were loaded onto unheated cattle cars for a rail trip that lasted more

than a day. The prisoners were not provided with food or sanitation facilities during

the trip and many did not survive. Friedrich served as a guard upon his arrival at

Flossenbürg. When the camp was evacuated in April 1945, Friedrich accompanied

prisoners on a march to the Dachau concentration camp. During the march, American

soldiers overtook the group and Friedrich fled unnoticed. 

In 1948, the United States began admitting certain European refugees for

permanent residence, without regard to regular immigration quotas, under the

Displaced Persons Act (DPA), Pub. L. No. 80-774, 62 Stat. 1009 (1948). Persons

who had “assisted the enemy in persecuting civilians” were ineligible for visas under

the DPA. See Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490, 509-10 (1981). Two years

later, Congress amended the DPA to provide in relevant part that:

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No visas shall be issued under the provisions of this Act . . . to any

person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person

because of race, religion, or natural origin.

Pub. L. No. 81-555 § 13, 64 Stat. 219, 227 (1950). In 1953, Congress enacted a

successor law to the DPA, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 (RRA), Pub. L. No. 83-

203, 67 Stat. 400 (1953), amended by Pub. L. No. 83-751, 68 Stat. 1044 (1954). The

RRA provided that:

No visa shall be issued under this Act to any person who personally

advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person or group of

persons because of race, religion, or national origin. 

Pub. L. No. 83-203 at § 14(a), 67 Stat. at 406 (emphasis added).

In 1953, Friedrich applied for a visa under the RRA. He stated in his visa

application that he had been in the German Army from 1942 to 1945 but made no

mention of his service with the SS or his duty at the concentration camps. Friedrich

was granted a visa in 1955 and subsequently was naturalized in 1962. After learning

of Friedrich’s involvement with the SS, the United States sought to revoke his

citizenship under Section 340(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952,

codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The district court granted summary judgment to the

government and revoked Friedrich’s citizenship.

II.

We review de novo the district court’s grant of summary judgment. Mayer v.

Nextel West Corp., 318 F.3d 803, 806 (8th Cir. 2003). In ruling on a motion for

summary judgment, the court is required to view the facts in the light most favorable

to the non-moving party and must give that party the benefit of all reasonable

inferences to be drawn from the underlying facts. Id.

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The defendant in Lileikis had been the head of the Lithuanian internal security

service during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. United States v. Lileikis, 929

F.Supp. 31, 32 (D. Mass. 1996). The court observed that although it was “historically

plausible” that “inclusion of the word ‘personally’ in the RRA was intended by

Congress to extend immigration privileges to some war refugees who could not

qualify for admission under the DPA,” the defendant’s activities “so clearly

constitute[d] ‘personal participation’ in persecution that the semantical contours of

the word ‘personal’ as used in the RRA [were] irrelevant to his case.” Id.

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The government carries a heavy burden of proof in a denaturalization

proceeding and evidence justifying revocation of citizenship must be “clear,

unequivocal, and convincing.” Fedorenko, 449 U.S. at 505. Nonetheless, an illegally

procured naturalization may be set aside. Id. at 506. A naturalization is illegally

procured if an applicant fails to comply strictly with all of the congressionally

imposed prerequisites to the acquisition of citizenship Id. One of these statutory

prerequisites is that an applicant has been “lawfully admitted for permanent

residence.” United States v. Negele, 222 F.3d 443, 447 (8th Cir. 2000) (quoting 8

U.S.C. § 1427(a)). An individual is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence

if he entered the country without a valid immigration visa. Id.

In Fedorenko, the Supreme Court concluded that under the plain language of

the DPA, “an individual’s service as a concentration camp armed guard—whether

voluntary or involuntary—made him ineligible for a visa.” 449 U.S. at 512. As

Friedrich points out, however, Fedorenko and nearly all other cases involving

revocation of citizenship actions against former members or supporters of the Nazi

regime arose under the DPA, not the RRA. The only case to address the RRA in this

context is United States v. Lileikis, 929 F.Supp. 31 (D. Mass. 1996). Friedrich’s

primary legal argument is the same raised by the defendant in Lileikis: that the RRA’s

addition of the modifier “personally” to the DPA’s prohibition against advocating or

assisting in persecution decreased the class of individuals ineligible for permanent

residence. Id. at 38-39.2

 

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The only other plausible statutory construction is that the modifier

“personally” refers only to “advocated” and leaves “assisted” unmodified, an

interpretation that is even less helpful to Friedrich.

4

Unless exceptional circumstances dictate otherwise, when the terms of a

statute are unambiguous, judicial inquiry is complete. United States v. Vig, 167 F.3d

443, 448 (8th Cir. 1999).

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Friedrich contends that “in light of the need to impart some meaning to the

word ‘personally,’” we should interpret it to require that an applicant must have had

a subjective mental intent to engage in persecution. A fundamental canon of statutory

construction is that, unless otherwise defined, words will be interpreted as having

their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning. United States v. Fountain, 83 F.3d

946, 952 (8th Cir. 1996). We agree with the district court that nothing in the ordinary

meaning of the word “personally” suggests that it connotes “having a subjective

mental intent about.” 

Friedrich also asserts that there is no evidence that he “engaged in individual

acts of a persecutory nature such as whipping [or] beating.” This argument

misconstrues the statutory language. Qualifying words or clauses refer to the next

preceding antecedent except when evident sense and meaning require a different

construction. Mandina v. United States, 472 F.2d 1110, 1112 (8th Cir. 1973) (citing

KARL LLEWELLYN, THE COMMON LAW TRADITION 527 (1960)). Accordingly, the

modifier “personally” refers to “advocated” and “assisted” (which are connected by

the disjunctive “or”).3

 The pertinent question is therefore whether Friedrich

“personally assisted” in persecution, not whether he engaged in direct persecution.4

We accept as true for purposes of our review Friedrich’s contentions that he

never saw a prisoner escape, never harmed a prisoner, never discharged his weapon

while guarding prisoners, and never saw any prisoners die during the forced

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evacuation marches. Friedrich admitted, however, that he served as a Death’s Head

guard at the concentration camps and during forced marches, that he was armed

during these duties, and that he had strict orders to shoot prisoners attempting to

escape. 

We have recently observed in a slightly different context that an armed Death’s

Head concentration camp guard, “by impeding prisoners’ escape through his

presence,” was “actively and personally involved in persecution.” Negele v.

Ashcroft, 368 F.3d 981, 983 (8th Cir. 2004) (involving removal under the Holtzman

Amendment, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(E)). We see no reason to reach a different

conclusion here. History provides us with a description of the conditions at

Flossenbürg, one of the camps at which Friedrich’s armed presence impeded the

escape of prisoners:

Flossenbürg concentration camp can best be described as a factory

dealing in death. Although this camp had in view the primary object of

putting to work the mass slave labour, another of its primary objects was

the elimination of human lives by the methods employed in handling the

prisoners. Hunger and starvation rations, sadism, inadequate clothing,

medical neglect, disease, beatings, hangings, freezing, forced suicides,

shooting, etc., all played a major role in obtaining their object. Prisoners

were murdered at random; spite killings against Jews were common,

injections of poison and shooting in the neck were everyday

occurrences; epidemics of typhus and spotted fever were permitted to

run rampant as a means of eliminating prisoners; life in this camp meant

nothing. Killing became a common thing, so common that a quick death

was welcomed by the unfortunate ones.

The Nürnberg Trial, 6 F.R.D. 69, 118 (1946) (quoting June 21, 1945, report of the

War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate’s Section of the 3d U.S. Army). By

guarding the perimeters of the Gross-Rosen, Dyhenfurth, and Flossenbürg

concentration camps to ensure that prisoners did not escape from these unspeakable

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Friedrich suggests that we must provide Chevron deference to the 1955 State

Department decision to grant him a visa. See Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural

Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984). Under Chevron, we must first

consider whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. Id.

at 842. Because we have concluded that Congress intended the RRA to prohibit the

State Department from granting a visa to an armed Death’s Head concentration camp

guard, the ultra vires agency decision to grant Friedrich a visa is due no deference.

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conditions, Friedrich personally assisted in the persecution that occurred in those

camps, within the meaning of the RRA. Because Friedrich’s actions rendered him

ineligible for a visa under the RRA, the issuance of his visa in 1955 was void ab

initio.

5

 Accordingly, he was not lawfully admitted for permanent residence, and his

subsequent naturalization was illegally procured.

The judgment is affirmed.

______________________________

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