Nazi Ya Later
The long road to labor-camp guard’s removal
THE removal to Germany last week of Jakiw Palij, a longtime Queens resident and former Nazi SS labor-camp guard, is a triumph of justice and accountability for the victims of Nazi atrocities. And it’s an example of what persistent diplomacy can achieve.
Palij stood as an armed guard over some 6,000 soon-to-be-executed Jews in Trawniki, in German-occupied Poland during World War II. After the war, he unlawfully and fraudulently immigrated to the United States. A US immigration judge ordered him removed in 2004. The fact that it took more than 14 years to carry out that removal order showed that Nazi criminals have been able to evade justice even within our own borders.
What took so long? The answer begins with a painful history, but ends, at long last, with last week’s triumph of justice.
In the spring of 1945, as World War II entered its closing weeks in Europe, America’s brave fighting forces encountered gruesome sights — unimaginable, even amid the horrors of war. As they liberated the Dachau and Nordhausen concentration camps and other now-infamous sites of Nazi persecution, US soldiers gave life-saving aid to Jewish and other survivors of these camps and apprehended the perpetrators who could be found. The United States, its allies and the governments of the liberated countries prosecuted and punished thousands of Nazi war criminals.
But many eluded capture. Some of the most heavily implicated Nazi criminals became subjects of international manhunts, such as Adolf Eichmann, who was apprehended in Argentina in 1960 by Israeli agents, then tried, convicted and put to death. Other lesserknown offenders, however, masqueraded as victims of the Nazis and fraudulently immigrated to the United States and other countries.
In the 1970s, media exposés and congressional hearings made Americans aware that Nazi perpetrators were living in this country. In 1979, the Justice Department launched a vigorous effort to identify them and bring them to justice.
These investigations were among the most challenging ever undertaken by law enforcement. Evidentiary trails had long since grown cold. Witnesses had perished at the hands of the Nazis or died since the war’s end. The Nazis had destroyed many incriminating documents, and others were inadvertently destroyed.
Despite these obstacles, the program has been a tremendous success. Although the ex post facto clause of the US Constitution prohibited the exercise of criminal jurisdiction in these cases, the US government can bring denaturalization and removal cases to revoke ill-procured US citizenship. Between 1990 and 2010, the United States won more cases against Nazi criminals than did all of the governments of the rest of the world combined.
But, despite this extraordinary success, some European countries refused to readmit Nazi persecutors ordered deported by American courts. When this administration came into office, Palij was the only such Nazi persecutor still alive in this country. No European country would take him, and he was already in his 90s. The odds of being able to carry out his removal seemed slim.
The Trump administration ignored those odds and commenced intense discussions with the German government to secure Palij’s readmission. When Ambassador Richard Grenell arrived in Berlin, he came with a mission — directly from the president — to get Palij out of the United States.
Grenell raised it in every meeting he had with German interlocutors, making the argument that it was Germany’s historical moral responsibility to take Palij since he had worked for the then-German Nazi regime — which, eventually, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas agreed with. It was through the renewed energy in the chancellor’s new cabinet, specifically with Maas and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, and the direct involvement of Grenell that Germany agreed to accept him.
On Aug. 21, ICE agents escorted Palij back to Germany aboard a chartered plane. Palij’s removal demonstrates the necessity of safeguarding the benefit of American citizenship from fraudulent cases, and makes clear that participants in Nazi crimes — and other humanrights violators, whether in the Balkans, Central America or elsewhere around the world — will find no safe haven on American soil, even in their old age.