The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. deports ex-Nazi guard to Germany
BERLIN — The last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the U.S. was taken from his New York City home on a stretcher and spirited to Germany early Tuesday, following years of efforts to remove him from the United States.
The deportation of 95-yearold former Nazi concentra- tion camp guard Jakiw Palij came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his World War II past and he acknowledged lying to get into the U.S., claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker.
President Donald Trump “made it very clear” he wanted Palij out of the coun- try and a new German government, which took office in March, brought “new energy” to seeing the matter through, U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell said.
Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years as a draftsman and then as a retiree, until nearly three decades ago when inves- tigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was “living somewhere in America.”
Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizen- ship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”
A judge stripped Palij’s U.S. citizenship in 2003 for “participation in acts against Jewish civilians” while he was an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and was ordered deported a year later.
But because Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries refused to take him, he continued living in limbo in the home in Queens he shared with his late wife, Maria.
According to the Justice Department, Palij served at Trawniki in 1943, the same year 6,000 prisoners in the camps and tens of thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered.