NEW YORK – The World Jewish Congress, United States (WJC US) on Tuesday welcomed Germany’s decision to admit the last known accused Nazi collaborator living on American soil.
Jakiw Palij, 95, served during World War II as an armed guard at the Trawinki death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. After a 14 year battle over his extradition, Palij was deported today from the United States to Germany.
Rabbi Joel H. Meyers, Chairman of WJC US, said, “Both Germany and the United States have taken a critical step toward allowing justice to be served. Jakiw Palij is a convicted criminal who stood guard as more than 6,000 Jews were brutally murdered. The Justice Department has called Palij an essential component in the evil machinery of annihilation, and yet, until today, he had been allowed to live peacefully and freely in the United States. We thank the United States for urging this deportation, and welcome Germany’s just decision to accept his extradition after so many years of inconclusiveness.”
US federal courts concluded that Palij entered the United States illegally in 1949 after failing to disclose that he had worked at the Trawniki training camps for secret service troops who would carry out the extermination of Polish Jews. His deportation was ordered in 2004 after a federal court stripped Palij of his US citizenship in 2003 due to his wartime activities and postwar immigration fraud but none of the three European countries to which he could be sent - Germany, Poland, and Ukraine - agreed then to take him. The change of heart came with the advent of the new German cabinet earlier this year, as Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that Germnay had a “moral duty” to “come to terms with and face up to crimes of the Nazi reign of terror.”