Since his Nazi past was uncovered in 1993, the U.S. has been trying to dump former concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij back to Europe—but no country would take him… can you blame ‘em?
To be clear we’re not talking about the soup nazi or your boss—this guy was a bona fide armed SS Nazi guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in 1943 while 6,000 in the camps and tens of thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered.
According to the Justice Department, Palij lied to enter the U.S. after the war, living quietly in Queens for several decades until his name was spotted on an old Nazi roster and a fellow Nazi guard spilled the secret he was living “somewhere in America.”
Ten years later his citizenship was revoked, followed by deportation orders—but because Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries refused him, he lived in limbo in a little red brick home in Queens shared with his wife.
It wasn’t easy to get rid of him, but Germany finally concented after weeks of negotiations involving ”difficult conversations.” Palij isn’t German 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.”
A Justice Department complaint states 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.
