WASHINGTON/BERLIN (Reuters) - A 95-year old New York City man believed to be a former guard at a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland has arrived in Germany after being arrested and deported by U.S. immigration authorities, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. 
 
 The White House said Jakiw Palij had served as a guard at the Trawniki Labor Camp, where about 6,000 Jewish men, women and children were shot dead on Nov. 3, 1943, in one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust. 
 
 The United States had been trying to get Palij out of the country since the issue of a 2004 deportation order, but after talks with top members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government Germany agreed to take him in. 
 
 Palij was taken to a home for the elderly in the western town of Ahlen, some 130 kilometers northeast of Dusseldorf. 
 
 Born in what was then Poland but is now Ukraine, Palij emigrated to the United States in 1949, becoming a United States citizen eight years later, the White House said. 
 
 But, it added, he had concealed his Nazi service and involvement in human rights abuses, saying he had spent World War Two working on a farm and in a factory. 
 
 In 2001, Palij told Department of Justice officials that he had trained at the Nazi SS Training Camp in Trawniki, in German-occupied Poland, in 1943, the White House said. 
 
 “By serving as an armed guard ... and preventing the escape of Jewish prisoner during his Nazi service, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring the Trawniki Jewish victims met their horrific fate at the hands of the Nazis,” the White House said. 
 
 A federal judge revoked his U.S. citizenship in 2003 and he was ordered to be deported in 2004. But no European country would accept him, CNN and New York magazine reported. 
 
 Given his age and questions over his health and also a possible lack of proof, it is unclear whether German authorities will attempt to prosecute the stateless pensioner. 
 
 “In Germany, being a member of a criminal organization like the (Nazi) SS is not enough to be prosecuted. Even being trained at a camp is not sufficient,” said Jens Rommel, Germany’s top Nazi hunter. “The participation in or facilitation of a murder must be proven.” 
 
 MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 The U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, said the deportation was the result of a concerted effort by U.S. President Donald Trump. 
 
 “He (Trump) told me directly to make it a priority, to get the Nazi out,” Grenell told reporters. “I felt very strongly that the German government had a moral obligation and they accepted that,” he added, making clear it was up to Germany to decide whether to prosecute him. 
 
 Germany has a mixed record on convicting Nazi war criminals. Critics say it let many high-ranking Nazis and SS members escaped justice only for their juniors, small cogs in the Nazi death machine, to be put on trial decades later. 
 
 Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who on Monday visited the Auschwitz camp, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: 
 
 “Germany, in whose name the worst injustice was perpetrated under the Nazis, is confronting its moral obligations.” 
 
 After an international military tribunal put some top Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, on trial soon after World War Two in the Nuremburg Trials, little action was taken by the West German judiciary in the 1950s and 1960s. 
 
 Between 1945 and 2005, West German courts convicted 6,656 Nazi criminals out of more than 36,000 investigations into more than 170,000 suspects, a study showed in 2008. 
 
 Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg is still investigating individuals after the 2011 conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk gave it a new impetus. It was the first time involvement in a camp was sufficient to be found culpable even without proof of a specific crime. 
 
 “There are currently no preliminary proceedings in Germany and there is no arrest warrant,” said Rommel, who heads the office. “We therefore have to wait (to see) whether there will be a new evaluation or whether new evidence appears to underpin the suspicion ... In the case of Palij we are unable to prove where, when and which unit he was in after his training.” 
 
 Jakiw Palij, a 95-year old New York City man believed to be a former guard at a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, is pictured in his 1949 visa photo. U.S. Department of Justice/via REUTERS ||||| “We could see from the names and military identification numbers that these were men who were at the camp when the Germans abandoned the camp in 1944,” Mr. Black said. 
 
 From 1941 through 1945, roughly 3 million Jewish adults and children were murdered in Poland, according to Walter Reich, the former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 
 
 Before arriving in the United States, the three men worked as guards in their unit, which was part of the Streibel Battalion, according to court records. All three guarded forced laborers who made uniforms and brushes, Mr. Black said. Their unit also conducted bloody reprisal campaigns against Polish partisans in the region around the town of Lublin, but Mr. Black said the Justice Department could not confirm whether the men took part in such operations. 
 
 Image Mr. Palij’s citizenship was revoked in 2003 after the Justice Department realized he had lied on his application. Credit National Archives at New York City, via Associated Press 
 
 When Mr. Palij and Mr. Bilaniuk arrived in the United States in summer of 1949, they ended up settling a dozen miles apart in Queens. Their colleague Mr. Wasylyk moved to the Ulster County village of Ellenville, where he ran a bungalow community that had mostly Jewish summer renters. 
 
 It was not until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that United States law-enforcement authorities figured out who they were after finding the cache of Nazi records in Czechoslovakia. 
 
 The Department of Justice accused all three of serving in the SS in Trawniki, and filed charges to take away their American passports and order them deported. All told, the Justice Department successfully charged and denaturalized 16 former SS members who served at Trawniki.
– Now that former Nazi prison guard Jakiw Palij is out of the US, the New York Times explores how he got in, and it wasn't through his efforts alone. As Nazi records of his SS membership weren't uncovered until the 1990s, Palij successfully applied for a visa under the Displaced Persons Act at the American consular office in Schweinfurt, Germany, in June 1949 alongside Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, whose SS identification number turned out to be only one digit away from Palij's, says Peter Black, a former Justice Department historian who worked on Nazi deportation cases. Both claimed to have worked in Germany during the war—Palij as a factory worker, Bilaniuk as a farmhand. Mykola Wasylyk, who also served with the men at the Trawniki labor camp and who'd already arrived in the US after securing a visa, vouched for both. The records suggest Palij and Bilaniuk weren't coerced into joining the SS as Palij later claimed, but volunteered together in February 1943. Together with Wasylyk, they guarded prisoners who made uniforms and brushes at Trawniki, says Black, a camp known for having executed 6,000 Jews in a single day in November 1943. Upon their arrival in the US, Palij and Bilaniuk settled 100 miles from Wasylyk in Queens, NY. Bilaniuk and Wasylyk would each die in the US, even after officials uncovered their true past. Deported to Germany this week at President Trump's direction, per Reuters, Palij is unlikely to face charges.