The last known former Nazi camp guard living in the United States was deported to Germany, an action that the White House trumpeted Tuesday in an apparent effort to show its harsh immigration enforcement policies are not just aimed at migrants on the border. The Justice Department said that Jakiw Palij, 95, was an armed guard at a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II, and that he helped oversee the murder of thousands of prisoners during the Holocaust, including 6,000 Jews on a single day in 1943. Palij emigrated to New York in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1957 after lying about his role in Nazi atrocities, according to the Justice Department. In 2001, however, he admitted lying about his past and was stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported in 2004. Removal efforts stalled because he was effectively stateless and Germany, Poland and Ukraine refused to take him in. On Monday, TV cameras were on hand in Queens, N.Y., as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wheeled Palij, who was bearded and wearing a cap, out of his brick home on a gurney. He said nothing to reporters and later was put on a plane to Dusseldorf. Advertisement Palij, who was born in what is now Ukraine, is the 68th former Nazi to be stripped of U.S. citizenship and deported since the late 1970s, according to the Justice Department. Several of those identified could not be deported because no country would accept them, and several died while awaiting deportation. Eli Rosenbaum, a Justice Department official who oversees the U.S. hunt for former Nazis, said the Palij case “sends yet another message of deterrence” to war criminals. “The passage of time — even many decades — will never weaken our government’s resolve,” he said. He described Palij as “the last person in the U.S. who was under a court order of removal on the basis of his participation in Nazi acts.” People pass by the residence of Nazi war crimes suspect Jakiw Palij in the Queens borough of New York on Tuesday. (Craig Ruttle / Associated Press) Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted his approval for the deportation: “Nazi prison guards have no place in the USA. We must stand firmly against hate, anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its forms. Good riddance to this war criminal.” The case inevitably had political ramifications since Palij was arrested the same day that Trump hailed ICE agents as heroes at the White House, and celebrated their efforts to deport undocumented migrants from Latin America, as he also demonized Democrats. In its statement, the White House took credit for finally expediting Palij’s deportation, which came after weeks of negotiations between the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, and German officials. “Despite a court ordering his deportation in 2004, past administrations were unsuccessful in removing Palij. To protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families, President Trump prioritized the removal of Palij,” it said. Advertisement Jakiw Palij in 1957. (U.S. Department of Justice) Grennell, speaking on a conference call organized by the White House, also praised Germany, which was under no obligation to take Palij in. “They saw this as a moral obligation, not so much a legal obligation,” he said. U.S. officials did not demand that Germany commit to taking legal action against him, officials said. Palij was little known compared to John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Treblinka concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland whose case made headlines for years. Advertisement Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. but he returned after his 1988 conviction in Germany and Israel for crimes against humanity was overturned by an Israeli court. He was deported again in 2009 to be tried in Munich, where he was found guilty. He died in 2012 while his case was being appealed. Palij was an armed guard at Treblinka on Nov. 3, 1943, when 6,000 Jewish children, women and men were shot to death in one of the biggest single massacres of the war, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jewish laborers were brought in to burn and bury the corpses, after which they, too, were shot and incinerated. The latest from Washington » eli.stokols@latimes.com Advertisement @EliStokols UPDATES: 12:00 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with staff reporting. 7:40 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details about the deportation and about Jakiw Palij’s life. Advertisement This article was originally published at 1:25 a.m.<doc-sep>BERLIN — 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 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-story, red brick home in the New York City borough of 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 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. READ MORE: Chicago Weather: Swimming Prohibited At Most Beaches, Lakefront Trail Closed From Ohio To Oak Streets Due To High Waves 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.<doc-sep>Ben Knight Deutsche Welle The United States government has finally been allowed to deport former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiv Palij, thanks to a special German government dispensation. The 94-year-old Polish-born Palij arrived in a military airplane at Düsseldorf Airport on Tuesday morning. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper reported that he was taken by ambulance to a nursing home in the Münsterland region. The move comes a day after German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas visited the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Maas said Palij's deportation "sends a clear signal of Germany's moral responsibility," according to a Foreign Ministry statement sent to DW. The Palij case has been the subject of complex legal and diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and German governments for decades. Born in Poland in 1923, he was trained by the SS in the Trawniki concentration camp in southeastern Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941. So-called "Trawniki men" went on to participate in the Holocaust as guards in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka concentration camps. Trawniki men Palij, who was never a German citizen, emigrated to the U.S. as a war refugee in 1949 and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. But in 2003, a federal judge in New York stripped him of his citizenship on the grounds that he had concealed his service at an SS slave-labor camp. A deportation order was issued in 2004, but he was never deported, even though, according to the German Foreign Ministry, "The U.S. has constantly been urgently demanding Palij's return to Germany. US administrators, senators, congressmen, and representatives of the Jewish communities in the USA emphasize that people who served the criminal NS regime should not spend the twilight of their lives in the country of their choice, the USA." The U.S. Embassy credited Ambassador Richard Grenell with breaking the impasse, saying that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had asked him "to make Palij's removal from the US a top priority." "Ambassador Grenell's persistence in raising awareness about the case with every senior official he met sparked action by the new German government officials," the embassy said in a statement. "The decision to allow Palij to return to Germany was because of the political will and strong commitment of several members of the chancellor's team, as well as Ministers Maas and Seehofer. We are grateful to them for helping bring another step towards closure for the victims of the Holocaust and their families." Legal complications According to the FAZ, the German Interior Ministry issued a decree to allow Palij's entry based on a special dispensation of its residency law allowing a foreign national to enter the country "to preserve the political interests of the Federal Republic of Germany" or for "international legal reasons." But what happens to Palij now remains far from clear. Jens Rommel, the German state prosecutor who heads Germany's only "Nazi hunter" office – officially known as the Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes – said that the evidence against Palij was not strong, and no charges against him had been issued. Rommel said that the fact that Palij had been trained in Trawniki was not necessarily enough evidence to bring him to trial. He told DW that German prosecutors would need either evidence of direct participation in murder, or evidence that he had worked in a concentration camp, in which case he could be charged with accessory to murder. But the U.S. seems to have established Palij's role in 2003. A US Justice Department statement from that year noted that the New York judge said "that on November 3 and 4, 1943, 'in a brutal spate of killing,' other units 'slaughtered Trawniki's entire inmate population' of some 6,000 Jewish civilians.'" "Judge Ross also found that by March 1944 Palij was serving in the Deployment Company, a unit that perpetrated numerous atrocities against Polish civilians and others," the DOJ statement said. "When Palij applied for an immigration visa to the United States in 1949, the judge held, he falsely claimed that he worked on his father's farm and then in Germany during the period when he was actually in Nazi service." This article was originally published on DW.com. Its content is created separately from USA TODAY.<doc-sep>The US government has finally been allowed to deport former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiv Palij, thanks to a special German government dispensation. The 95-year-old Palij arrived in a military airplane at Düsseldorf Airport on Tuesday morning. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper reported that he was taken by ambulance to a nursing home in the Münsterland region. The move comes a day after German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas visited the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Maas said Palij's deportation "sends a clear signal of Germany's moral responsibility," according to a Foreign Ministry statement sent to DW. The Palij case has been the subject of complex legal and diplomatic negotiations between the US and German governments since at least 2004. Born in Poland in 1923, he was trained by the SS in the Trawniki concentration camp in southeastern Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941. So-called "Trawniki men" went on to participate in the Holocaust as guards in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka concentration camps. Read more: Auschwitz's bookkeeper loses on appeal Heinrich Himmler shakes hands with guard recruits in Trawniki in 1942 Trawniki men Palij, who was never a German citizen, emigrated to the US as a war refugee in 1949 and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. But in 2003, a federal judge in New York stripped him of his citizenship on the grounds that he had concealed his service at an SS slave-labor camp. A deportation order was issued in 2004, but he was never deported, even though, according to the German Foreign Ministry, "The US has constantly been urgently demanding Palij's return to Germany. US administrators, senators, congressmen, and representatives of the Jewish communities in the USA emphasize that people who served the criminal NS [Nazi] regime should not spend the twilight of their lives in the country of their choice, the USA." In an interview with DW, Deidre Berger, Berlin Director of the American Jewish Committee, said the deportation of 95-year-old Palij was essential to help young people in particular to understand that there can be no expiration date on the crimes of the Nazis. "It's of extreme importance today, for the younger generation in an era where Holocaust memory is being attacked from all sides, where Holocaust revisionism is becoming popular on the Internet where young people see this," Berger said. The US Embassy credited Ambassador Richard Grenell with breaking the impasse, saying that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had asked him "to make Palij's removal from the US a top priority." Grenell said the deportation had been the result of a concerted effort by Trump. "He (Trump) told me directly to make it a priority, to get the Nazi out," Grenell said. "I felt very strongly that the German government had a moral obligation and they accepted that," he said, adding that it was up to Germany to decide whether to prosecute him. "He's going to die soon and we wanted to make sure he didn't die in peace and comfort at home," Grenell told DW. "Ambassador Grenell's persistence in raising awareness about the case with every senior official he met sparked action by the new German government officials," the embassy said in a statement. "The decision to allow Palij to return to Germany was because of the political will and strong commitment of several members of the chancellor's team, as well as Ministers Maas and [Horst] Seehofer. We are grateful to them for helping bring another step towards closure for the victims of the Holocaust and their families." Read more: Nazi trial against Auschwitz medic suspended Legal complications The German Interior Ministry said that it had issued an order allowing Palij's entry based on a special dispensation of residency laws which give permission for a foreign national to live in the country "to preserve the political interests of the Federal Republic of Germany." The ministry also confirmed to DW that the federal government would carry the costs of his residency. But what happens to Palij now remains far from clear. Jens Rommel, the state prosecutor who heads Germany's "Nazi hunter" office — officially known as the Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes — told DW that the case against Palij was not strong. There is no evidence that Palij had served anywhere other than Trawniki, and it is, according to Rommel, impossible to establish a case against him without fresh evidence. The German state's own investigations into Palij were halted in 2016 for lack of evidence. "We need a connection between the service and the actions of the individual in question, and murder itself," Rommel said. "If we knew that he was in a certain company which had rounded up prisoners or shot prisoners, that would be enough — but we don't have that evidence." He pointed out that the "hurdle for evidence for accessory to murder" under the German criminal code was much higher than for stripping someone of citizenship. Palij lived in this house in Queens, New York Late justice The US federal court described Palij's role in a 2003 ruling. A US Justice Department (DOJ) statement from that year noted that the New York judge said "that on November 3 and 4, 1943, 'in a brutal spate of killing,' other units 'slaughtered Trawniki's entire inmate population' of some 6,000 Jewish civilians.'" "Judge Ross also found that by March 1944 Palij was serving in the Deployment Company, a unit that perpetrated numerous atrocities against Polish civilians and others," the DOJ statement said. "When Palij applied for an immigration visa to the United States in 1949, the judge held, he falsely claimed that he worked on his father's farm and then in Germany during the period when he was actually in Nazi service." The German judiciary has been infamously reluctant to prosecute Holocaust perpetrators. A turning point came in 2011 with the conviction of another "Trawniki man," Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, on charges of accessory to murder in 28,060 cases.<doc-sep>
By Michael R. Sisak, David Rising and Randy Herschaft Associated Press BERLIN – A 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived quietly in New York City for decades was carried out of his home on a stretcher by federal agents and flown to Germany early Tuesday in what could prove to be the last U.S. deportation of a World War II-era war-crimes suspect. Jakiw Palij’s expulsion, at President Donald Trump’s urging, came 25 years after investigators first accused Palij of lying about his wartime past to get into the U.S. But it was largely symbolic because officials in Germany have repeatedly said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute him. Trump “made it very clear” he wanted Palij out of the country, and a new German government that took office in March brought “new energy” to expediting the matter, U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell said. “He’s gone. He’s back in Germany,” Trump said at a campaign rally in West Virginia Tuesday night as he celebrated his role in the deportation. Eli Rosenbaum, the former head of the U.S. office investigating accused Nazi war criminals, said Palij’s removal “is a landmark victory in the U.S. government’s decades-long quest to achieve a measure of justice and accountability on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity.” 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, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizenship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.” A judge stripped Palij’s U.S. citizenship in 2003 for “participation in acts against Jewish civilians” while he was an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and 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-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his late wife, Maria. 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 acknowledged 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. “Good riddance to this war criminal,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat. The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotiations. Grenell told reporters 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,” he said. Video footage from ABC News showed federal immigration agents carrying Palij out of his home Monday on a stretcher. Palij, with a fluffy white beard and a brown, newsboy-style cap atop his head, 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?” Palij was flown on a specially chartered air ambulance from Teterboro, New Jersey, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany, at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Palij’s lawyer, Ivars Berzins, declined to comment. The local German government in Warendorf county, near Muenster, said Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said “there is no line under historical responsibility,” but added in a comment to the 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.” Jens Rommel, head of the German federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi war crimes, said Tuesday that the deportation doesn’t change the likelihood that Palij will be prosecuted for war crimes.