Ex-Nazi guard, 95, deported to Germany
Last known surviving Nazi war crimes suspect, in U.S. since 1949, fought departure for years
The Nazi guard lived a quiet life in a racially diverse section of New York City for decades, having lied on his U.S. immigration papers in 1949 about the type of work he did during World War II. But on Tuesday, he was deported to Germany, ending a 14-year battle to remove him from U.S. soil.
The expulsion of the former guard, Jakiw Palij, rids the United States of the last known surviving Nazi war crimes suspect in the United States, bringing to a close a long-vexed effort by the government to deport him. It also handed President Donald Trump, who had pressed strongly for Palij’s removal, a powerful talking point against critics of his immigration policies, highlighting the deportation of a man associated with the worst atrocities of the Holocaust instead of thousands of immigrants in the country illegally whose stories are far more sympathetic.
Palij, 95, was first tracked down by investigators in 1993, and stripped of his American citizenship 10 years later when a federal judge found that he had falsely claimed in his visa application that he had worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis at the Trawniki labor camp in occupied Poland.
In 2004, a federal immigration judge ordered that Palij be deported. But for years, U.S. officials failed to persuade any country to accept a man born in what was once Poland and is now Ukraine, and who had served a murderous German regime.
On Tuesday, in a triumphant predawn statement, the White House announced that Trump had secured Palij’s deportation, dispatching immigration authorities to apprehend him and wheel him on a stretcher from his home in New York City to be taken by specially chartered air ambulance to Düsseldorf. Palij, who is frail, arrived at Düsseldorf Airport early Tuesday and was taken by a Red Cross ambulance to a nursing home near Münster, in northwestern Germany.
The action sent a strong message, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s spokeswoman, that “the United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil.”
But it also came with an unmistakable political message at a time when Trump is under fire for separating thousands of migrant children from their parents and stepping up deportations across the country. Many of the deported immigrants face no criminal charges aside from their unauthorized status and have long resided with their families in the United States, where, until recently, immigration authorities paid them little notice. Many Democratic opponents of the president’s aggressive policies, including the zero tolerance approach that led to the family separations, have called for the overhaul or outright elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that carries out deportation orders, and Trump has sought to turn their argument to his advantage, portraying those critics as unpatriotic and dangerous.
The president used Palij’s deportation, which came one day after he saluted ICE officers and border agents in an elaborate ceremony at the White House, as an opportunity to praise the agency, implicitly challenging those who would denounce it. “President Trump commends his administration’s comprehensive actions, especially ICE’s actions, in removing this war criminal from United States soil,” Sanders said in her statement.
A few hours later, the Republican National Committee had transformed Palij’s removal into a political talking point, sending out a news release noting that he had resided in the congressional district where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star among Democrats who has called for the abolition of ICE, is seeking a House seat.
“Now that ICE has literally removed a Nazi from her backyard, where does Ocasio-Cortez stand?” wrote Michael Ahrens, the committee’s rapid response director.
Trump had made Palij’s deportation a top priority, administration officials said, frequently raising his case with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and asking Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany, to press the government in Berlin to accept him. Germany had long refused to do so because Palij is not a German citizen. Poland and Ukraine refused to take him, saying he was Germany’s responsibility.
“He made it very clear that he wanted this individual out of the U.S.,” Grenell said of Trump. Grenell said he had brought up the case at every meeting with German officials, beginning with his first conversation with Heiko Maas, the foreign minister.
At first, German officials did not appear to be aware of the case, Grenell said, but ultimately they were persuaded that taking Palij, though not legally required, was the right thing to do. He singled out Maas and Horst Seehofer, the interior minister, as particularly helpful.