Germany takes in deported Nazi guard, 95, over ‘moral obligations’

GERMANY’S FOREIGN minister has said the country has a “moral obligation” to seek justice for victims of the Holocaust, after 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, Jakiw Palij was deported from the US.

Heiko Maas said “there is no line under historical responsibility”, adding in a comment to German newspaper that doing justice to the memory of Nazi atrocities “means standing by our moral obligation to the victims and the subsequent generations”.

Palij landed in the western German city of Dusseldorf yesterday.

The local government in Warendorf county, near Munster, indicated that Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen.

German prosecutors have previously said it does not appear that there is enough evidence to charge Palij with wartime crimes.

Now that he is in Germany, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazihunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case.

Palij lived quietly in the US for years, as a draughtsman and then as a pensioner, until nearly three decades ago, when investigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was “living somewhere in America”.

Palij told Justice Department investigators who showed up at his door in 1993: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”

A US judge stripped Palij of his citizenship in 2003 and ordered that he be deported a year later, but he continued to live in the US because Germany, Poland, Ukraine and other countries refused to take him. Following protests, he was deported after weeks of diplomatic negotiations.