US deports former Nazi guard to Germany

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Europe

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 US immigration authorities, US 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 November 3, 1943, in one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust.

Jakiw Palij, a former guard at a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, is pictured in a 1949 visa photo. /VCG Photo

The United States had been trying to get Palij out of the country since the issue of a 2004 deportation order.

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.

A senior home in Ahlen, Germany, where Jakiw Palij was taken to on August 21, 2018. /AP Photo

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 he had concealed his Nazi service and involvement in human rights abuses, saying he had spent time during World War Two working on a farm and in a factory, it added.

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 prisoners 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.

High school students from the Orthodox Jewish Rambam Mesivta school protest across the street from the home of Jakiw Palij in New York, November 9, 2017. /AP Photo

A federal judge revoked his US citizenship in 2003 and he was ordered to be deported in 2004. But no European country would accept him.

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.

(Cover: Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi guard, is carried on a stretcher from his home into an ambulance in the Queens borough of New York, August 20, 2018. /AP Photo)

Source(s): Reuters