Feodor Fedorenko

War record

Fedorenko was born 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, 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, the 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. They were sent to the Trawniki concentration camp SS training division, and Fedorenko was among them. At Trawniki, he was trained as the Hiwi shooter and with time, posted to Treblinka extermination camp as a guard (Wachmann) in approximately September 1942.

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. 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. It was their primary purpose of training. 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. 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.

Report of the Soviet Interrogation of Defendant Aleksandr Ivanovich Yeger born in 1918, German, includes the section devoted to Fedorenko's activities at the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland (excerpt).

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.

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. 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. He was granted U.S. citizenship in 1970 and later retired to Miami Beach, Florida in 1973.

Denaturalization trial and extradition

In 1978, he was arrested and brought for a denaturalization trial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

At his subsequent denaturalization hearing in June 1978, Fedorenko testified over three days in greater detail. He denied 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".

Judge Norman C. Roettger said that the 71-year-old had himself been a “victim of Nazi aggression.” He ruled that the prosecutors had failed to prove that Fedorenko committed any atrocities while at the camp, and that he could keep his United States citizenship.

However, on January 21, 1981, the United States Supreme Court overturned this verdict and Fedorenko became the first Nazi war criminal to be deported to the Soviet Union in December 1984. A Crimean court in June 1986 found him guilty of treason and taking part in mass executions. He was sentenced to death and his execution by shooting was announced in July 1987.