American Passage (48 page)

As Truman predicted, the strict interpretation of the Internal Security Act made the law look foolish, but it was the price he was willing to pay to embarrass Congress into at least tightening the law. And it worked. By late March 1951, Congress amended the Internal Security Act to exempt those who may have been members of a totalitarian organization, but who were under the age of sixteen at the time, were “involuntary members” of the organization, or had joined the group “for purposes of obtaining employment, food rations, or other essentials of living.”

George Voskovec’s detention at Ellis Island would end shortly after Congress revised the Internal Security Act. After ten months and seventeen days at Ellis Island, he was a free man. Only one witness had come forward to accuse him of being a Communist. On the other side, a number of prominent Czechs and Americans vouched for his character, including the playwright Thornton Wilder.

Upon his release, Voskovec noted that none of the inmates at Ellis Island had been mistreated. However, that did not ease the frustration at his imprisonment. Speaking of his situation, he told a reporter that a detainee “isn’t told the particulars of his offense, his accusers are nameless, and the weeks and months pass, as if human beings were no more to be considered than ciphers in a manila folder.” Even more bluntly, Voskovec said of Ellis Island: “I want to go on record that it’s a disgusting place—a prison.”

Voskovec would later dramatize his imprisonment at Ellis Island in a made-for-television play.
I Was Accused
aired in November 1955, the same year he gained his U.S. citizenship. Voskovec’s career would later take him to Hollywood, where he made a living as a character actor in movies and television, most famously starring as one of the sweaty and stressed-out jurors in the classic film
12 Angry Men.

When Friedrich Gulda was taken to Ellis Island in October 1950, he found nearly two hundred people held there, including George Voskovec and a European war bride. Most likely Gulda was referring to Ellen Knauff, already on her second stay at Ellis Island. Her first detention began when she arrived in New York in August 1948.

She was born Ellen Raphael in 1915 in Germany. In the 1930s, she moved to Prague and married a Czech man named Boxhorn. Being Jewish, Ellen escaped from Prague—and the marriage—after the Nazi invasion and made her way to England, avoiding the fate that befell much of her family in Nazi concentration camps. During the war, she worked as a Red Cross nurse and then served in the Royal Air Force. After the war, she made her way back to Germany, where she landed a job as a civilian with the U.S. military government, first working for the Civil Censorship Division and then as a secretary in the Signal Corps.

In February 1948, Ellen married Kurt Knauff, a naturalized U.S. citizen and an honorably discharged army veteran working as a civilian for the military occupation. After the war, the U.S. government passed the War Brides Act, which allowed U.S. servicemen to bring back foreignborn brides without regard to either the strict mental and physical requirements required of immigrants or the national origins quotas.

When Ellen arrived in New York in August 1948, however, she was not greeted with any celebrations. Instead, she was ordered detained at Ellis Island. No explanation was given. When a government official told her, “I am sending you to a place where they will look after you,” Ellen broke down in tears. She had lost family members in the Holocaust and the detention order caused her to fear that she too was heading to some kind of concentration camp. Ellen was not allowed a hearing, nor was she informed of the charges against her. Therefore, she was stuck at Ellis Island with no apparent way to prove her innocence and gain entrance to America.

The government’s case against Ellen was as follows: When she was employed by the army’s Civil Censorship Division in Germany, she furnished Czech agents with secret information, including copies of telephone conversations that her department was monitoring. She was also accused of warning the chief of the Czech Liaison Section in Frankfurt against using telephones since they were being tapped by the Americans. She was also alleged to have described to Czech agents the type of decoding machines used by American intelligence.

All of this took place before the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, so the charges were not that Ellen was a Communist, although later witnesses would testify that they saw Ellen enter Communist Party headquarters in Frankfurt. The major source of the charges against Ellen was an unnamed “former highly placed Czech official” who had defected and was now assisting the American military. Two other Czechs also provided testimony against Knauff.

Though still flush with wartime victory, Americans were growing increasingly insecure and vulnerable regarding national security threats at home. Ellen Knauff was ordered detained just nine days after Alger Hiss appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to deny falsely that he had been a Communist spy.

It would be more than two more years before Ellen would hear these details, since they were kept classified to protect confidential intelligence sources. She would remain in detention at Ellis Island for the next nine months while her lawyers submitted a habeas corpus petition. In her letters to her husband, who was still working in Germany, Ellen told of her “bitter disappointment in the Ellis Island version of American freedom.” She called it “a concentration camp with steam heat and running water” and said the food there was only “fit for pigs—if you were not particular about what your pigs ate.” For all of her anger, Ellen had nothing but good things to say about the men and women who worked at Ellis Island.

Eventually, her case reached the Supreme Court. While the Court was deciding the case, it allowed Ellen to be released on bond. The Court reached a decision in January 1950. By a vote of 4 to 3, it rejected Knauff ’s request. Two justices did not take part in the case, including newly appointed Justice Tom Clark, who had been attorney general and was technically the authority who had detained Knauff in 1948.

The Court relied on the plenary power doctrine that had long given the executive branch tremendous latitude in its treatment of aliens. In familiar language, the Court reiterated that “an alien who seeks admission to this country may not do so under any claim of right. Admission of aliens to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign United States Government.”

The War Brides Act of 1945 may have superseded some aspects of immigrant law, but it did not override national security concerns. Though the plenary power doctrine was well-trod legal ground, the Court also outlined the little-known history of recent presidential proclamations and regulations that led to Knauff ’s exclusion. The paper trail began with FDR’s May 1941 declaration of an “unlimited national emergency” in dealing with the threat posed by the European war, even if America still technically remained on the sidelines.

Congress then allowed the president to impose additional restrictions upon those entering the country during times of national emergency. This was followed by Presidential Proclamation 2533 in November 1941, which ordered that no alien should be allowed to enter the country if his presence was “prejudicial to the interest of the United States.” This was followed by a Justice Department regulation that allowed the attorney general to deny a hearing to an excluded alien if the evidence was confidential.

Justice Robert Jackson, who had served as chief prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials, delivered the dissenting opinion. He called Ellen’s exclusion without a hearing “abrupt and brutal.” The Court, Jackson wrote, basically told Kurt Knauff, an American citizen and army veteran, that “he cannot bring his wife to the United States, but he will not be told why. He must abandon his bride to live in his own country or forsake his country to live with his bride.”

While much of the majority decision followed precedent on immigration law, it showed how much Roosevelt’s administration had expanded executive power, both before and during wartime. No one, though, seemed to comment on the oddity that the authority for the denial of a hearing to Ellen Knauff and other aliens was based on the unlimited national emergency declared by FDR in 1941. Was the government implying that this emergency was still in effect nine years later during peacetime?

Having lost in the Supreme Court, Ellen Knauff now headed back to Ellis Island to await deportation. Twice in the spring of 1950, she had her deportation stayed by the courts. The second time, Justice Jackson stayed her deportation just twenty minutes before Knauff ’s flight back to Germany was set to take off from Idlewild Airport. Yet the reprieve did not mean freedom. Knauff was returned to detention at Ellis Island.

In the meantime, her case had aroused such interest among the public that Knauff was not out of options. A young woman in her thirties, Knauff made a convincing and sympathetic victim. After all, Ellen was the war bride of an American GI, a woman who had lost family members in the Holocaust, and someone who worked for the U.S. military as a civilian in occupied Germany. Newspapers like the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
took up her case.

Congress also took notice. Her cause was taken up by Senator Langer, who had previously fought for the rights of German enemy aliens, and Congressman Francis Walter, an anti-Communist Democrat who would later chair the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both introduced bills in Congress to free Knauff.

In the spring of 1950, Ellen was invited to Washington to testify before a congressional committee investigating her case. “That whole day was a true American fairy tale,” Ellen later wrote. “A prisoner on Ellis Island woke up one fine morning to be flown to Washington, D.C., to be heard before a congressional subcommittee in an effort to make truth prevail.” The Justice Department was invited to present its evidence against Knauff, but refused to cooperate on the grounds that it would compromise confidential sources. Despite her treatment as the guest of Congress, by day’s end Ellen would find herself on a plane, headed back to confinement at Ellis Island. Following the hearings, the House unanimously passed a bill to allow Knauff to remain in the country, although a similar bill stalled in the Senate.

The press attention in Harry Truman’s home-state newspaper helped bring Ellen Knauff’s case to the president’s attention. In midJune 1950, Edward Harris of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
argued to Truman that Ellen was the only war bride ever to receive such treatment, and that she was entitled to a hearing at least, “in view of her own war record and her husband’s valorous combat service.” Harris correctly noted that it was within the power of the president or the attorney general to change the regulations so that every alien was entitled to receive a hearing except in time of “actual warfare.” Within days, Truman personally asked his aide, Steve Spingarn, to look into Ellen’s case “and see if anything can be done to straighten it out.”

The Justice Department stalled in releasing the Knauff file, but finally relented. In September 1950, Spingarn detailed his findings to the deputy attorney general. He was deeply unimpressed by the case against Knauff. “It seems to me most meager despite the seriousness of the allegations,” he wrote. “Indeed it all boils down to a few paragraphs in an Army Intelligence report repeated several times in Immigration Service and FBI reports.” He recommended that the Justice Department grant Knauff a hearing in camera, which would allow her to answer the charges but would preserve the confidentiality of the intelligence sources.

However, the Justice Department ignored Spingarn’s suggestion and Truman, preoccupied with the war in Korea, seemed disinclined to interfere. The Justice Department also ignored congressional calls for her release. Instead, it pushed ahead with her deportation. Edward Shaughnessy, the district director of immigration in New York, summed up the rationale for debarring Knauff. The attorney general, he said, “decided she is not the type of person wanted in this country and that is all there is to it. It was felt prejudicial to the best interests of the country to let her stay here.” Understandably, Ellen did not want to return to postwar Germany. Instead, she told her lawyer: “I am ready to stay on Ellis Island till doomsday.”

In January 1951, almost a year into Ellen’s second stint at Ellis Island, Kurt Knauff received a leave from his job in Germany, where he worked as an assistant chief of supply at an American army base, and arrived in New York. The Justice Department granted Ellen temporary parole into her husband’s custody and she was free again, but her troubles were far from over.

In March 1951, more than two and a half years since she was first detained at Ellis Island, Ellen Knauff received her first hearing in front of immigration officials. The government was under no obligation to hold such a hearing, but the publicity forced the issue. Ellen finally was able to see the evidence against her. She vigorously denied all of the charges, stating that she never gave away secrets and went to the Czech mission only to get an extension on her passport.

It took the board members only an hour to deliberate the case. Ellen Knauff was to be barred from entry into the United States because her presence was deemed “prejudicial to the national security.” Ellen’s parole was revoked and she was once again sent to Ellis Island to await the results of her appeal to Washington. If it failed, she would again face deportation.

By the end of August 1951, a board of immigration appeals made its ruling. By a two-to-one vote, the board overturned the decision to exclude Ellen Knauff and recommended that she be allowed to enter the country. “There is no charge that Mrs. Knauff is or has been a Communist,” the majority concluded. “There is not the faintest thread of traditional party line thinking or Marxist philosophy apparent in her background.” In fact, they determined that Knauff ’s politics were conservative. She was a supporter of Churchill and an opponent of England’s Socialist Party and believed that Soviet Russia was as evil as Nazi Germany. The dissenting member of the board continued to argue that the testimony against Knauff was sufficient to exclude her from the country.