Deport this Nazi to Germany
When President Trump meets with German Chancellor Angela Merkel Thursday in Hamburg ahead of the G-20 summit, he should tell her that Germany, in accepting responsibility for the Holocaust, must also accept Jakiw Palij, the last known Nazi war criminal still living in the United States.
Trump can make a stand for justice that his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama never did and right an historical wrong.
Nazi war criminals who covered Europe with the blood of millions of Jews should never debase this land of liberty.
Palij, an old man born in 1923, is still living in Jackson Heights — in Trump’s native Queens — despite the Justice Department and federal courts having stripped him of his ill-gotten U.S. citizenship and ordered him deported 13 years ago.
Palij arrived here in 1949 and obtained U.S. citizenship in 1957, lying about his loyal service to the German Reich as a death camp guard in Nazi-occupied Poland. He had volunteered for the SS and was a guard at Trawniki, which the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators like Palij used as a training camp for death camp guards. Thousands of Jews were murdered at Trawniki.
In 2004, an immigration judge ordered Palij deported to Germany, Ukraine or Poland. All three declined to take the stateless Palij — although it is Germany that is most responsible, having hired Palij, trained him and paid him. It was Germany that gave Palij his uniform, gun and bullets.
In 2014, Congress voted to bar all Nazi war criminals from Social Security, which Obama signed into law. That cuts out U.S. payments to Palij, but since Palij was on the German payroll right up to the end of the war and the collapse of the Reich, maybe Merkel can give him a pension.
Trump, who has talked tough with Merkel on NATO and trade and climate change, needs to get her to change her mind and accept Palij. This should be an easy one for Trump, who has made it a centerpiece of his administration to crack down on people who are not supposed to be in this country. Trump should put Palij first on the list of those to be deported.
Merkel has taken in more than a million refugees from the Mideast and elsewhere. There is room for one more. Should German prosecutors want to file charges against Palij, all the better.
But for Palij to die in Queens, in freedom, would be a defeat for justice and an affront to the millions of victims. Because Palij’s crimes against humanity were not committed in the United States, he cannot be prosecuted here. All the government can do is send him away — provided Germany will take him.
Trump, the dealmaker, should make this deal with Merkel. For history and for justice.