TRUMP ‘WANTED HIM OUT OF THE UNITED STATES’
U.S. DEPORTS 95-YEAR-OLD EX-NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TO GERMANY
LUDWIGSBURG, GERMANY • Before Allied forces liberated the survivors of Adolf Hitler’s death camps more than 70 years ago, tens of thousands of Nazi criminals directly involved in the Holocaust disappeared.
Some escaped abroad. Others hid inside Germany. Few of them faced justice — until now, perhaps.
At least 23 alleged Nazi criminals who are believed to have worked in death camps were already facing charges in Germany and Austria by June, marking a dramatic increase compared with previous decades.
On Tuesday, that number increased further, as the White House announced it had deported Jakiw Palij, the last known alleged former Nazi guard living in the United States.
The resident of New York was arrested Monday and deported to Germany early Tuesday, according to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Palij was moved to a nursing home upon arrival in Düsseldorf.
Palij was born in what today constitutes Ukraine but was part of Poland at the time. After the end of the war, he left Europe for the United States, where he became a citizen in 1957 by hiding his Nazi past.
But in 2001, Palij admitted his involvement with the Nazi SS, Hitler’s feared paramilitary organization. Prosecutors argue that documents prove Palij’s knowledge and participation in the Holocaust.
Palij admitted to U.S. officials in 2001 that he was trained at the SS paramilitary camp in the town of Trawniki where units were specifically prepared to participate in the Holocaust. The now 95-yearold also worked at Trawniki’s labour camp the same year the Nazis massacred 6,000 Jews there. Palij has maintained that he did not participate in any killings.
Authorities took away Palij’s U.S. citizenship in 2003, and the former Nazi guard lost an appeals process two years later, but administrative challenges dragged on until now because it was unclear to which country Palij should be deported. All three countries involved — Germany, Ukraine and Poland — refused to accept Palij.
U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell indicated Tuesday that President Donald Trump had taken a personal interest in Palij’s case.
“I don’t know how he learned of the case, but it was very clear that he knew this individual as a Nazi guard and wanted him out of the United States,” Grenell said.
“(The Germans) saw this as a moral obligation that they had, not so much a legal obligation,” said Grenell, referring to Palij not being a German citizen.
Palij will be one of two dozen Nazi suspects whose cases are now under investigation by the Nazi crimes agency, based in Ludwigsburg, or have already been transferred to local prosecutors.
All the suspects are in their 90s, and some are likely to die ahead of any sentencing or could be declared unfit to stand trial. More than 70 years on, there is little time to be lost: It could be the last chance for Nazi criminals to face justice for crimes that continue to represent the worst of mankind.
How many more individuals will be charged largely depends on Jens Rommel, Germany’s sixth chief prosecutor for Nazi crimes. “All of my five predecessors assumed that they’d be the last person in this office,” said Jens Rommel.
“In recent years, though, we’ve made some remarkable progress,” said Rommel.
It’s a remarkable turnaround, given that there was little reason for such enthusiasm only a few years ago, after German prosecutors for decades faced hurdles that made it impossible to charge a wide range of suspects despite evidence of their Nazi past.
“By 1960, murder and abetting murder were the only Nazi-era crimes that prosecutors could charge,” Elizabeth Barry White, a senior historian with the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, explained last year. High-ranking Nazi officers were often only charged with lesser offences because their direct responsibility for the killing of one or more individuals could not be proved based on the narrow German jurisdiction. In many cases, lower-ranking guards or soldiers such as Palij were not prosecuted at all.
A new approach was needed, and it came after a court convicted former Nazi guard John Demjanjuk in 2011.
Before 2011, prosecutors needed to provide evidence that guards had themselves murdered Jews or other Nazi opponents. But the Demjanjuk verdict was based on a dramatically different approach: His mere presence at the Nazi death camp was sufficient to establish responsibility for the killing.
Demjanjuk later appealed the sentence but died before a court could evaluate his claims. The new legal framework’s viability was only proven two years ago when another former guard lost his appeal following a similar sentence.
Walking through his agency’s headquarters, surrounded by thousands of file cards with details on the Nazi criminals he and his predecessors hunted, Rommel acknowledged the job had taken a personal toll on the investigators, especially as time is now running out.
“I don’t take those papers home with me. I just wouldn’t be able to let it go,” he said.