Washington (CNN) The U.S. government thinks Jakiw Palij was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, but the 92-year-old is quietly living out his last years not in prison -- confined by old age to a second-story apartment in a modest red-brick duplex in one of the most diverse sections of New York City. 
 
 Jackson Heights, Queens is an evolving, largely immigrant neighborhood a short 20 minute subway ride to midtown Manhattan. 
 
 Palij's life there represents the closing of an era: the only remaining active case from the Nazi era pursued by the Justice Department's Office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. 
 
 Despite more than a decade of deportation attempts by the Justice Department, Palij, who worked at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland, likely will die here. 
 
 A federal judge ordered Palij deported in 2004, but none of three European countries to which he could be sent will take him. 
 
 In court filings, he has denied wrongdoing, claiming that he and other young men in his Polish hometown were coerced into working for the Nazi occupiers. 
 
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 Eli Rosenbaum has dedicated a career to pursuing men like Palij. 
 
 Rosenbaum was an intern when he joined what was then the Office of Special Investigations in 1979, shortly after it was created. 
 
 Now director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy, Rosenbaum has become the Justice Department's best-known Nazi Hunter, helping the department pursue 137 cases, of which 107 were successful in stripping citizenship or deporting accused Nazis. 
 
 Among them: John Demjanjuk , who was convicted in Germany of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders for his work as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, after the Justice Department human rights unit pursued his deportation. 
 
 Michael Kolhnhofer was so incensed at the deportation efforts of the Justice Department that when reporters showed up at his home in Kansas City in 1996 to ask questions he started shooting out his front door. The former Nazi guard at the Buchenwald death camp died after a shootout with police. 
 
 For Rosenbaum, a career as Nazi hunter was accidental. 
 
 After his internship stint he envisioned a legal career, perhaps in finance. 
 
 Growing up, his family in Long Island, N.Y., didn't talk about the Holocaust. The term "Holocaust" wasn't even common parlance until a 1970s NBC broadcast of a teleplay based on the Nuremberg Trials. 
 
 Rosenbaum recalls a snowy drive in New York decades ago with his father, who began telling him of his wartime military service. His father described arriving at Dachau, Germany a day after it was liberated. Then he stopped speaking. Rosenbaum looked over at this father. He was holding back tears. 
 
 "That was a time when you just didn't see your dad cry," Rosenbaum recalls. 
 
 The human rights office got its start after congressional and public pressure prompted the Justice Department to try to track down former Nazis who had moved to the U.S. -- some of them with the help of U.S. spy and law enforcement agencies that recruited former Nazis with technical knowledge. In recent years, the office has also investigated cases related to atrocities in Bosnia and Guatemala. There remain a handful of ongoing World War II probes and Rosenbaum also oversees cases involving more recent war atrocities. 
 
 In the Nazi cases, a handful of attorneys, historians and researchers looked into as many as 70,000 names of possible Nazis. Their obstacles were many: they had to rely on a scant supply of documents, some held by authorities in the Soviet Union and countries behind the Iron Curtain. The suspects worked hard to hide their identities. Some snuck into the U.S. as refugees, and all denied any role in atrocities. Witnesses were few, particularly in cases like Trawniki, where Nazis wiped out entire populations. 
 
 "Our World War II cases are the ultimate cold cases. All of the crimes took place many decades ago on the other side of a vast ocean," Rosenbaum says. "It's very much a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack." 
 
 Now, there's also the race against time. People who would have been adults in the Nazi era are quickly dying off. 
 
 But Rosenbaum is resolute that pursuing every last Nazi is the least owed to the victims of the Holocaust. In the case of Palij, he says: "What Mr. Palij did prevented other people from reaching old age. He served at the Trawniki SS training and base camp -- really a school for mass murder -- and he trained on live Jews at the adjacent Trawniki Jewish Labor Camp. And, in the end, everyone who was held there was massacred." 
 
 The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has helped support the work of Rosenbaum by providing access to documents it had collected on war crimes. 
 
 Peter Black, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, worked with Rosenbaum at the Justice Department. 
 
 "For Eli, this became a mission," Black says. 
 
 That the human rights unit stuck by the work is remarkable because of the many frustrations that arose, Black says. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. courts didn't trust evidence that came from the Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence agencies also warned that some allegations that originated from the Soviets was intended to hurt exile communities from the Baltic countries and Ukraine, which were under Soviet control. 
 
 "You can't just decide that because someone gets away with [atrocities] for 40 years, that they are innocent," Black says. "You have to do what you can to achieve justice for the victims, as a statement about our response to these crimes." 
 
 Rosenbaum and other lawyers and researchers spent years poring over documents looking to connect suspected Nazis to specific crimes. 
 
 The atrocities of the Trawniki camp, where Palij worked, aren't well known in part because the killing was thorough, historians say. One document researchers uncovered helped illustrate the extent of the killing. A soldier broke the butt of his rifle, which meant he was required to file a report so the German SS would issue him a new one. The report mentioned an operation that killed 4,000 people at Trawniki, mostly Jews. 
 
 The irony for lawyers and researchers working on the cases was that after stitching together evidence that someone was involved in atrocities, the most U.S. law would allow them to do is to deport former Nazis. Trying them for the actual crimes against humanity is something that was left for authorities in other countries. ||||| He and many other young men in his town, Piadyki, were forced by the Nazis to be guards, he said, noting they were kept on a troop base converted from a farm and made to work night tours patrolling roads and bridges. 
 
 ''They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.'' 
 
 Mr. Palij insists he never set foot in any camp and never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war. And indeed, federal officials do not accuse him of that. Rather, they say that he, by cooperating as a Nazi guard, ''directly contributed to their eventual slaughter'' by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping. 
 
 Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of a special investigation unit for the Justice Department, called Mr. Palij ''an essential component in the machinery of annihilation'' at the camps. 
 
 ''He took part in the persecution of Jewish inmates at Treblinka and ensured that they could not escape, and the end result was that as many as 7,000 people were individually massacred,'' Mr. Rosenbaum said. 
 
 ''He was very loyal and very capable and served until April 1945, the last weeks of the war, while other soldiers were deserting right and left,'' he said. 
 
 In 1949, Mr. Palij emigrated here at age 26 as a refugee of World War II. In 1957, he was granted United States citizenship. Mr. Palij, a retired draftsman with no children, lives in a rear rental apartment on 89th Street in Jackson Heights, a quiet Queens street lined with old brick row houses. He lives on Social Security checks. After two strokes, he is in frail health and takes care of Maria, 72, his wife of 43 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease. 
 
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 In recent months, however, he has gone from being seen by neighbors as a polite old chap who constantly tinkers with his 1980 Oldsmobile, to a man being portrayed as a Nazi death camp guard with blood on his hands. Jewish demonstrators marched outside his home, calling him a butcher. ''There were 200 Jewish kids out there,'' he said. ''I called the precinct, and the cop told me: 'Leave them alone, and they'll leave. Don't say anything, or you might get a rock through your window.' '' 
 
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 He has begun entering his home by the alley behind it. 
 
 ''We get phone calls, people yelling, 'You Nazi!' It scares the hell out of my wife,'' he said. 
 
 In July, a federal judge stripped Mr. Palij of his citizenship for falsely claiming in his immigration papers in 1949 that he worked on his father's farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis. Mr. Palij insists that he did this to enter the United States ''to save my life.'' 
 
 ''I spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany, and I had nowhere else to go but America,'' he said. 
 
 ''These Jewish groups want to hunt down all the living Nazis, and I don't blame them,'' he said, ''but they know I never worked in a camp. They have proof of that.'' 
 
 Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, dismissed Mr. Palij's denials. 
 
 ''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. ''To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates. 
 
 ''The most vicious guards at these camps, they all have this line that they were just the short-order cook or something, when they were actually trained to do nefarious and horrible things.'' 
 
 Justice Department officials say that since 1979, their investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis' being stripped of United States citizenship, with 59 of them deported. 
 
 But Mr. Palij said Wednesday, ''Let them come and get me.'' 
 
 ''I'm not running. What will they do? Shoot me? Put me in the electric chair? Where are they going to deport me to? What country is going to take an 80-year-old man in poor health?'' ||||| FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says that Palij, a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been deported to Germany, 14 years... (Associated Press) 
 
 BERLIN (AP) — The last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the U.S. was taken from his New York City home and spirited early Tuesday morning to Germany, the White House said. 
 
 The deportation of the 95-year-old former concentration camp guard, Jakiw Palij, came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his World War II past and he admitted lying to get into the U.S., claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker. 
 
 Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years, 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." 
 
 Palij 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 Palij's citizenship in 2003 for "participation in acts against Jewish civilians" while 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 two-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his wife, Maria, now 86. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish community, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as "your neighbor is a Nazi!" 
 
 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. Palij has admitted serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes. 
 
 Last September, all 29 members of New York's congressional delegation signed a letter urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation. 
 
 Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador who arrived in Germany earlier this year, said 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. 
 
 Grenell told reporters that there were "difficult conversations" because Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after losing his U.S. citizenship, but "the moral obligation" of taking in "someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted." 
 
 ABC News video showed federal agents carrying Palij out of his Queens apartment on a stretcher sometime during the day Monday. The bearded, white-haired Palij, wrapped in a sheet, was carried down the brick stairway in front of his home and is later seen sitting up and talking to the agents. 
 
 Palij landed in the western German city of Duesseldorf on Tuesday. The local government in Warendorf county, near Muenster, indicated that Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen. 
 
 Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that "there is no line under historical responsibility," adding in comment to German daily Bild 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 that there's enough evidence to charge Palij with wartime crimes. 
 
 Now that he is in Germany, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case. 
 
 "Trawniki was a camp where people were trained to round up and murder the Jews in Poland, so there's certainly a basis for some sort of prosecution," he said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice "deserves a lot of credit" for sticking with the case. 
 
 "The efforts invested by the United States in getting Palij deported are really noteworthy and I'm very happy to see that they finally met with success." 
 
 Palij's deportation is the first for a Nazi war crimes suspect since Germany agreed in 2009 to take John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was accused of serving as a Nazi guard. He was convicted in 2011 of being an accessory to more than 28,000 killings and died 10 months later, at age 91, with his appeal pending. 
 
 Palij, whose full name is pronounced Yah-keev PAH'-lee, entered the U.S. in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from post-war Europe. 
 
 He told immigration officials that he worked during the war in a woodshop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland; at another farm in Germany; and finally in a German upholstery factory. Palij said he never served in the military. 
 
 In reality, officials say, he played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Poland, as an armed guard at Trawniki. According to a Justice Department complaint, Palij served in a unit that "committed atrocities against Polish civilians and others" and then in the notorious SS Streibel Battalion, "a unit whose function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced laborers." 
 
 After the war, Palij maintained friendships with other Nazi guards who the government says came to the U.S. under similar false pretenses. And in an interesting coincidence, Palij and his wife purchased their home near LaGuardia Airport in 1966 from a Polish Jewish couple who had survived the Holocaust and were not aware of his past. 
 
 The Justice Department's special Nazi-hunting unit started piecing together Palij's past after a fellow Trawniki guard identified him to Canadian authorities in 1989. Investigators asked Russia and other countries for records on Palij beginning in 1990 and first confronted him in 1993. 
 
 It wasn't until after a second interview in 2001 that he signed a document acknowledging he had been a guard at Trawniki and a member of the Streibel Battalion. Palij suggested at one point during that interview that he was threatened with death if he refused to work as a guard, saying "if you don't show up, boom-boom." 
 
 Though the last Nazi suspect ordered deported, Palij is not the last in the U.S. 
 
 Since 2017, Poland has been seeking the extradition of Ukrainian-born Michael Karkoc, an ex-commander in an SS-led Nazi unit that burned Polish villages and killed civilians during the war. The 99-year-old who currently lives in Minneapolis was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by the AP that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him. 
 
 In addition to Karkoc, there are almost certainly others in the U.S. who have either not yet been identified or investigated by authorities. 
 
 The American public did not become fully aware until the 1970s that thousands of Nazi persecutors had gone to the U.S. after World War II. Some estimates say 10,000 may have made the U.S. their home after the war. 
 
 Since then, the Justice Department has initiated legal proceedings against 137 suspected Nazis, with about half, 67, being removed by deportation, extradition or voluntary departure. Of the rest, 28 died while their cases were pending and 9 were ordered deported but died in the U.S. because no other country was willing to take them. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Sisak and Herschaft reported from New York. Rising reported from Berlin. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin
– During some three decades with Justice Department, Eli Rosenbaum has earned a well-deserved reputation as a Nazi hunter. He has worked on 137 cases involving suspected Nazis, and in all but 30 of them, the accused lost citizenship or was deported. Now, CNN reports, just a single active case remains. But when it comes to Jakiw Palij, who lives in Queens, NY, deportation isn’t likely. In fact, a federal judge ordered the 92-year-old deported in 2004, but the European countries he could be sent to won't take him. Palij, CNN notes, will likely die here. "What Mr. Palij did prevented other people from reaching old age," says Rosenbaum, who now also oversees more recent war-related crimes as the DOJ's director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy. Palij is accused of being a guard at the Trawniki death camp in German-occupied Poland—"in the end," Rosenbaum says, "everyone who was held there was massacred." Palij, who, per the New York Times, came to the US in 1949 as a refugee using falsified immigration papers, has denied any wrongdoing. In 2003, he told the Times that the Nazis coerced him into service patrolling bridges and roads at night. "We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused," he says. "I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform." The founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center downplayed that line of argument: "To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates." In a 2013 interview with NPR, Rosenbaum described questioning the suspects about their alleged Nazi pasts as "surreal ... these people look close to harmless." (Joseph Goebbels' "love nest" is proving to be a tough sell for Berlin.)