Reprieve

Though it huffed and puffed, the Government still could not budge a pert, German-born woman named Ellen Knauff last week. For 22 months she had been clinging precariously to her flimsy foothold in the U.S.

She had come to the U.S. to get her American citizenship after marrying a naturalized U.S. combat veteran in Germany after the war. She was stopped at Ellis Island by Justice's Immigration and Naturalization Service, which announced that she was a bad security risk, and stood on its legal right to give no details. Immigration prepared to send Mrs. Knauff back to Europe.

What's Up? Twice Ellen Knauff won reprieves from the courts, one by only a few hours. Then boos and hisses began to come from the gallery: the New York Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had taken up her case. The House Judiciary Committee heard Mrs. Knauff's story--she had served the British R.A.F. with distinction during the war, worked for the U.S. in Germany after the war, sworn that she had never been a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. What, then, was all the fuss about?

Her theory was that a jealous rival for her husband's affections had spread false rumors about her. The House Judiciary Committee fumed when the Justice Department refused to tell its side of the story. At the committee's angry urging, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill to let Ellen Knauff enter the country.

That didn't stop the Justice Department. It had legal justification for its position: wartime power to exclude any alien it considers dangerous to the U.S. without granting him a hearing. The only inkling anybody got of its case against 35-year-old Ellen Knauff turned up in a letter which was introduced into the court records. It was from former Attorney General Tom Clark to an unnamed friend; it said that the Justice Department was convinced that Ellen Knauff had been a paid agent for the pre-Communist government of Czechoslovakia while she worked for the U.S. Army.

What's the Hurry? Last week, U.S. attorneys overcame another of Ellen Knauff's court appeals and, without bothering to wait for final congressional action, bundled her bag & baggage to La Guardia Airport. Mrs. Knauff's attorney rushed an appeal to Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson in Washington. Jackson, one of the three justices who dissented when the Supreme Court tossed out Mrs. Knauff's first appeal, looked at the clock and dictated an eleventh-hour hairbreadth reprieve for the woman. "Bundling this woman onto an airplane to get her out of this country within hours after the decision of the Court of Appeals," Justice Jackson wrote, ". . . would defeat [the Supreme] Court's jurisdiction [and] . . . would circumvent any action by Congress . . . to cancel her exclusion." Word of his action was quickly flashed by telephone to immigration authorities at La Guardia field.

The 11 o'clock plane for Germany took off on schedule, with Ellen Knauff's baggage stowed in its luggage hold. But Ellen Knauff stayed behind, saved by 20 minutes for another chapter in her fight to stay in the U.S.

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