A 95-year-old former Nazi collaborator who served in the notorious SS as a labour camp guard in World War Two has arrived in Germany after a long deportation battle in the US.
Jakiw Palij has been stateless since a federal judge revoked his US citizenship in 2003. For years Germany refused to accept him as he never had German nationality. After arriving in Düsseldorf he was being taken to a care home for the elderly, German reports say.
The US ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, praised Germany’s new government for resolving the case.
Authorities believed he was the last Nazi collaborator still living in the US, and his residence in the Queens area of New York City attracted protests from residents.
Palij is said to have been born in an area of Poland that is now in Ukraine. In 1943 he went to the Trawniki SS training camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Trawniki was notorious because it trained thousands of civilians from the area who went on to become active as death camp guards at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec. Its most notorious camp guard was John Demjanjuk, who was convicted by a German court of being an accessory to 28,000 murders at Sobibor. He too was deported by the US, in 2009.
Jews were sent to the camps as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to murder more than two million Jews in occupied Poland.