Court Opinion

ID: 9473520
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:32:01.822018+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:33.169989
License: Public Domain

MANSFIELD, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur only because the government failed to sustain its heavy burden of establishing by clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence that Sprogis actively assisted in persecuting Jews and other civilians, Fe*124dorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490, 505 (1981), and because I cannot label clearly erroneous Judge Altimari’s discounting of the testimony of certain witnesses. However, I do not share the majority’s view that Sprogis’ conduct amounted to mere “passive accommodation of the Nazis” and that such persons had “virtually no alternative”.
This is not the case of a minor employee performing some insignificant or subordinate ministerial tasks without knowledge of Nazi oppression. It is the story of a person who volunteered to become a policeman and Assistant Precinct Chief of Gulbene, a town of about 2,900 people, after his country had been overrun by the Nazis. We can almost take judicial notice that at that time Nazi pogroms and persecution of the Jews was generally known, particularly to persons engaged in law enforcement and possessed of Sprogis’ education and background. Under these circumstances a volunteer must have reasonably anticipated that as a police official he would probably be relied upon by the Nazis for assistance in the performance of their unsavory tasks. Indeed, Sprogis conceded that the Gulbene police were under the control of the Nazis when he joined the force. Thereafter he performed so satisfactorily that within two months he became Assistant Chief of Police in a larger city, Madona, and eventually its Chief of Police.
Since I did not observe Sprogis when he testified I cannot change the district judge’s appraisal of his credibility. However, I am bothered by the fact that he initially denied any involvement in the arrest of the nine Jews, his making of payment to farmers for having transported them to his police station, his order that the Jews be guarded there for several hours until they were taken by a Nazi officer to the Nazi prison at the airport where, according to Sprogis, they would probably await their execution, and his confiscation of their property. It was only when he was confronted with telltale specific documents signed by him, reporting to the Nazis on his participation in these activities, that he changed his story and admitted his involvement but sought to minimize it.
Under ordinary circumstances such an impeachment of the defendant, particularly in view of his strong motive to lie about his involvement, would call for rejection of post-impeachment efforts to explain away his conduct as too ministerial to incriminate him. In my view the trial judge and the majority here are extraordinarily charitable in attributing Sprogis’ testimonial about-face to a lack of memory based on his present age and the passage of 40 years since these events occurred. However, if (as Sprogis states) this was the only occasion when he ever engaged in such conduct, one would reasonably expect it to have made a life-long impression on him, particularly since, in response to a Nazi investigation into disposition of confiscated property, he one year later rendered a personal report reviewing his involvement in a minute detail. Moreover, our “difficulties in judging events over forty years in the past” (Maj.Op. 120) are largely of Sprogis’ own making. If, in response to inquiries by immigration officials in 1950, when he successfully sought entry into the United States, he had recounted the events at issue, then less than 10 years old, he may well have had a clearer recollection. But of course he did not do so, for the obvious reason that disclosure would have barred his entry.
Thus I cannot agree with the majority’s view that the probative value of the facts admitted by Sprogis and assumed by immigration officials as the basis for their opinions is “slight.” (Maj.Op. 123). However, I am forced by the district judge’s assessment of credibility and the high proof standards required of the government by Fedorenko, supra, to concur in our holding that the judgment of the district court must be affirmed.