Jakiw Palij managed to live for years in the New York neighborhood of Queens without attracting much attention. In an investigation about the horrors of the Nazi regime, his name and true identity emerged three decades ago, revealed by a former comrade living in the United States who worked with him as a guard in a concentration camp. However, it has not been until Monday when the White House has given the order for his arrest and immediate deportation to Germany, on charges of war crimes.
Palij, 95, landed on a military plane at the Düsseldorf airport on Tuesday morning. The German media reported that Palij would be transferred from the airfield to a residence for the elderly, also in the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. The digital editions showed images of Palij with a white beard, a visor and prostrate on a stretcher.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp this week, assured the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that “Germany, in whose name the worst injustices were committed under the Nazi regime, is facing its moral obligations” .
US President Donald Trump has taken this case personally. The deportation, according to the announcement made by the White House on Monday, was possible “thanks to extensive diplomatic negotiations” led by the president himself and the “collaborative effort” of Germany.
Richard Grenell, the US ambassador in Berlin, Trump’s trusted man in Europe, made clear the importance that Trump gives to this issue. “The precise instructions and leadership of President Donald Trump have been key to deporting a former Nazi guard from the United States.” For years, Berlin and Washington have been negotiating about the Palij case, but according to Grenell, the final decision has been made thanks to the new German Executive.
The question now is to know if Palij will be judged in Germany as requested on Tuesday by the highest representative of the Jewish community in the country, Josef Schuster. “The competent authorities must now examine all possibilities to bring him to justice,” Schuster told Bild. “He is one of the thousands of Nazi perpetrators who, despite their crimes, have been able after the war to live their lives quietly. For the survivors of the shoah, this is an unbearable fact. ”
Palij has never been a German citizen. He was born in a small town that was then Poland and today is part of Ukraine. Neither of these two countries has accepted the entry of Palij, who emigrated to the United States in 1949. His advanced age and state of health also complicate the possibility of a legal process in Germany.
The deportee admitted in the past to have deceived the immigration authorities of the United States to enter the country. For this he said that he worked as a farmer and in a factory during the years of the Second World War. “I would never have received the visa if I had told the truth,” he argued when Justice Department officials showed up at his residence in 1993. “Everybody cheated,” he said. A judge withdrew his nationality ten years later.
The guard of the Trawniki Forced Labor Camp, in occupied Poland, was then accused of “participating in acts against Jewish civilians.” But despite the fact that a year later his deportation was ordered, he managed to remain in the US protected by a kind of legal limbo. Germany, Poland and Ukraine refused to accept it. The Jewish community in Queens, meanwhile, mobilized with protests to the cry of ‘your neighbor is a Nazi’.
Immigration police officers arrested Palij on Monday night. He left the residence in a wheelchair before being transported in an ambulance. He did not comment. In the past, he denied having been a Nazi collaborator and explained that he was forced to serve the regime when, at 18 years of age, they took his family’s farm.
The last deportation of a war crimes suspect during the Nazi regime was that of John Demjanjuk, in 2009. He lived in Ohio. He died 10 months later, at 91 years of age. In his case he was formally accused of participating in the death of 28,000 civilians.
Palij migrated to the US using a program that assisted European refugees, under the Displaced Persons Act. The Justice Department considers that it played a crucial role in the Jewish extermination machine during the occupation of Poland by serving for a unit that committed atrocities against civilians. He also mentions the Streibel battalion of the SS, which guarded the Poles subjected to forced labor.
Akik Palij lived in a house near the airport of La Guardia, which bought with his wife, a Jew of Polish origin who survived the Holocaust. Extradition is also pending at the request of the Polish authorities of the Ukrainian Michael Karkoc, a former commander of the SS. He is 99 years old and lives in Minneapolis (State of Minnesota). The Justice Department initiated legal proceedings against 137 suspects, of whom half were deported.
New York Senator Chuck Schumer applauded the order. “America is not a place for war criminals,” he said, “he does not deserve to be in this country, he does not deserve to die in the US, a place of freedom and equality where we respect the differences of others.” Last year, the delegation of New York congressmen asked the secretary of state to accelerate the deportation.