Ex-Nazi camp guard, deported by U.S., dies
• Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived an unassuming life in New York City for decades until his past was revealed and he was deported to Germany last year, has died, German media reported Thursday. He was 95.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Westfaelische Nachrichten newspapers independently quoted German officials saying Palij died Wednesday in a care home in the town of Ahlen.
U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, who lobbied for Germany to take Palij, said he’d been informed of the death.
“It would have been upsetting to many Americans if he had died in the U.S in what many viewed as a comfort- able escape,” Grenell told The Associated Press.
Palij was the last Nazi facing deportation from the United States when he was taken from his Queens home on a stretcher and put on a plane to Germany.
From the time American investigators first accused him of lying about his Nazi past, it took 25 years for his removal despite political pressure and frequent protests outside his home. He was not prosecuted in Germany and spent his last months in the nursing home.
Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, entered the U.S. in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from postwar Europe.
He told immigration officials he worked during the war in a woodshop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland, as well as at another farm in Germany and finally in a German upholstery factory.
Palij said he never served in the military. In reality, the U.S. Justice Department said he played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Jews as a guard at the Trawniki training camp in German-occupied Poland.
Palij served at Trawniki in 1943, the same year 6,000 prisoners in the camps and thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered.
Palij eventually acknowledged serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes.