Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
SS Guards at the Trawniki Camp in German-Occupied Poland.
By Michael V. Cusenza
An admitted former Nazi labor camp guard living in Jackson Heights was finally removed this week by U.S. authorities to Germany, according to Department of Justice officials.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement put Jakiw Palij, 95, on a plane early Tuesday morning based on an order of removal obtained by the DOJ back in 2004.
“Those who are accomplices to the horrific crimes of the Holocaust will never be accepted in our free and civilized society. It was an affront to justice that Nazi prison guard Jakiw Palij was allowed to enter our country and live freely in the most diverse place in the United States,” said Assemblyman David Weprin (D-Fresh Meadows). “Our government has served this monster justice by permanently removing him from the country and deporting him to Germany to face charges for his transgressions at the Trawniki concentration camp. We must never stop pursing justice for the victims of the Holocaust. They will not be forgotten.”
According to federal investigators, Palij was born in a part of Poland that is situated in present-day Ukraine, immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. He originally concealed his Nazi service by telling immigration officials that he had spent the war years working until 1944 on his father’s farm in his hometown, which was previously a part of Poland and is now in Ukraine, and then in a German factory.
But in 2001, Palij finally copped to his service to the Third Reich. He told investigators that he was trained at the Schutzstaffel (SS) Training Camp in Trawniki, in German-occupied Poland, in the spring of 1943. Documents subsequently filed in court by the Justice Department showed that men who trained at Trawniki participated in implementing German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s plan to murder Jews in Poland, code-named “Operation Reinhard.” On Nov. 3, 1943, approximately 6,000 Jewish men, women, and children incarcerated at Trawniki were shot to death in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
According to DOJ officials, by helping to prevent the escape of prisoners during his service at Trawniki, Palij “played an indispensable role in ensuring that they later met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis.”
On May 9, 2002, federal prosecutors filed a four-count complaint in Brooklyn to revoke Palij’s citizenship. In August 2003, Palij’s U.S. citizenship was abrogated based on his wartime activities and postwar immigration fraud. In November 2003, the government placed Palij in immigration removal proceedings.
In decisions issued on June 10 and Aug. 23, 2004, a U.S. immigration judge ordered Palij’s deportation to Ukraine, Poland, or Germany, or any other country that would admit him. In December 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals denied Palij’s bid for reinstatement.
Palij’s removal had been stalled for so long because Ukraine, Poland, and Germany refused to accept him. Last October, every member of the bicameral New York delegation to Congress signed a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urging him to immediately deport Palij.
