US deports ex-nazi camp guard 25 years on from his discovery
● War crimes suspect taken from his home to be flown to Germany
final Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the US was taken from his New York City home and spirited early yesterday morning to Germany following years of efforts to remove him from America.
The deportation of 95-yearold former Nazi camp guard Jakiw Palij came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his Second World War past.
He had admitted lying to get into the US, claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker.
Mr Palij lived quietly in the US for years working as a draftsman and then as a retiree, 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”.
The ex-camp guard 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 judge stripped Mr Palij of his citizenship in 2003 for “participation in acts against Jewish civilians” while an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He 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 two-storey, red brick home in Queens he shared with wife Maria, now 86. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish community, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as “your neighbour is a Nazi”.
According to the justice department, Mr 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 roundthe
0 Palij was an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Poland
ed up and slaughtered. Mr Palij has admitted serving in Trawniki, but denied any involvement in war crimes.
All 29 members of New York’s congressional delegation signed a letter in September last year urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation.
Richard Grenell, the US ambassador who arrived in Germany earlier this year, said US president Donald Trump, who is from New York, instructed him to make it a priority. He said the new German
government, which took office in March, brought “new energy” to the matter.
The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotiations.
Mr Grenell said there were “difficult conversations” because Mr Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after losing his US citizenship, but “the moral obligation” of taking in “someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted”.
Video footage from ABC News showed federal immigration agents carrying Mr Palij out of his Queens apartment on a stretcher on Monday.
Mr Palij was wrapped in a sheet as the agents carried him down a brick stairway in front of his home and into a waiting ambulance. He ignored a reporter who shouted, “Are you a Nazi?” and “Do you have any regrets?”
His attorney, Ivars Berzins, did not immediately return telephone or email messages.
Mr Palij landed in the western German city of Dusseldorf yesterday. The local government in Warendorf county, near Münster, said Mr Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen.
Foreign minister heiko ma as said “there is no line under historical responsibility”, adding that doing justice to the memory of Nazi atrocities “means standing by our moral obligation to the victims and the subsequent generations”.
German prosecutors have previously said it does not appear there is enough evidence to charge Mr Palij with wartime crimes.