US deports last Nazi war crimes suspect
Ex-concentration camp guard Palij, 95, says he lied to get US visa
THE last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the US was taken from his New York home early yesterday morning and spirited to Germany, the White House said. The deportation of the 95-year-old former concentration camp guard, Jakiw Palij, came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his World War II past and he admitted lying to get into the US, claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker.
A judge stripped Palij’s citizenship in 2003 and he was ordered deported a year later. Last September, all 29 members of New York’s congressional delegation signed a letter urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation.
Richard Grenell, the US ambassador who arrived in Germany earlier this year, said President Donald Trump – who is from New York – instructed him to make it a priority.
Palij landed in the western German city of Düsseldorf yesterday. US officials referred questions on the next move to German authorities.
The Foreign Ministry said the German government is “sending a clear signal of Germany’s moral responsibility by taking in Palij” but gave no details on where he would be taken in Germany or what exactly would happen to him.
German prosecutors have previously said it does not appear that there’s enough evidence to charge him with wartime crimes.
Local media reported Palij was being put in a long-term care facility near the city of Münster.
Now that he is in Germany, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case.
“Trawniki was a camp where people were trained to round up and murder the Jews in Poland, so there’s certainly a basis for some sort of prosecution,” he said from Jerusalem, adding that the US “deserves a lot of credit” for sticking with the case.
Palij’s deportation is the first for a Nazi war crimes suspect since Germany agreed in 2009 to take John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was accused of serving as a Nazi guard. He was convicted in 2011 of being an accessory to more than 28 000 killings and died 10 months later, at age 91, with his appeal pending.
Palij entered the US in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from post-war Europe.
He told immigration officials he worked during the war in a wood shop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland, at another farm in Germany and finally in a German upholstery factory.
Palij said he had never served in the military.
The Justice Department’s special Nazi-hunting unit started piecing together Palij’s past after a fellow Trawniki guard identified him to Canadian authorities in 1989.
Investigators asked Russia and other countries for records on Palij ,beginning in 1990, and first confronted him in 1993.
It wasn’t until after a second interview in 2001 that he signed a document acknowledging he had been a guard at Trawniki and a member of the Streibel Battalion.
Though the last Nazi suspect ordered deported, Palij is not the last in the US – AP