Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Jakiw Palij in a 1949 visa photo.
Jakiw Palij in a 1949 visa photo. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
Jakiw Palij in a 1949 visa photo. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

'It finally happened': the long fight to expel America’s last known Nazi

This article is more than 5 years old

Jakiw Palij, 95, was finally deported to Germany, capping a decade-long fight led by New York officials and residents

On a quiet block in Queens, America’s last known second world war Nazi lived in a modest red-brick home alongside others in an outer borough of New York City– and didn’t make waves.

Neighbors described Jakiw Palij, 95, as an elderly man who kept to himself and would not have stood out – except for the protesters who often flocked to his front door to demand his expulsion from the country.

Palij was finally deported to Germany early on Tuesday morning – capping a more than decade-long fight led by New York officials and residents disgusted to learn they had a former Nazi concentration camp guard in their midst.

“It’s finally happened. This is the last Nazi. You can close the book on this chapter,” said state assemblyman Dov Hikind, who helped lead several protests outside Palij’s home, and visited on Tuesday morning for what he said would be the last time.

Palij was the last known surviving Nazi war crime suspect living in the United States.

The one-time concentration camp guard made his home in Jackson Heights, a highly diverse neighborhood of the city borough of Queens, with a large population of immigrants from Latin America, South Asia and elsewhere, as well as a sizeable LGBT community.

Palij is accused of having lied to gain entry to the US almost 70 years ago, claiming he was a Polish farmer. Almost 20 years ago the US authorities determined that he had been a member of the SS, the elite corps of the Nazi party, and had worked at the Trawniki concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The camp trained soldiers to round up Jews for extermination.

His US citizenship, which he had been granted in 1957, was revoked in 2003. In 2005 a judge ordered his expulsion.

Angel Naranjo, 49, who lives next door, said he would occasionally say hello to the neighbor whom he sometimes saw gardening outside his apartment, until a year ago when his health deteriorated.

Jakiw Palij in a video frame. Palij, 95, was deported from the US to Germany on Monday. Photograph: AP

The older man seemed nice enough, Naranjo said, but he believes it is right for Palij to pay for his crimes – though the deportation should have happened years ago.

“I know he did bad things,” he said. “Right now, it’s good – but 30 years ago is better.”

Palij was ordered deported in 2004, but his removal was delayed for years because no country was willing to take him.

His presence in the city angered New York politicians, who pressured the federal government to find a way to get him out of the country.

Students from Jewish high schools on nearby Long Island, the suburban ribbon of land that abuts the city at one end and stretches 120 miles to the Hamptons at the other, often marked Holocaust Remembrance Day by traveling to Queens to protest at his home.

The entire New York delegation to the US Congress signed a letter to the state department last year pushing for the deportation.

Jason Quijano, 43, who lived on the block, said Palij seemed “average”, though he remembered his strong handshake.

“I’m not somebody that wishes anybody any harm, but if he has to face justice now, I think it’s something that has to happen. You can’t hide from anything in this world. It will come back to you,” Quijano said.

“It’s funny – I never had any idea about what he represented in the past or anything. He seemed like he just wanted to mind his business and live his life. He seemed like a nice old man. He blended in pretty well.”

Another neighbor, Shari Brill, said she had written letters backing the deportation, though she had never laid eyes on the one-time Nazi who lived nearby with his wife.

“I couldn’t even walk on this side of the street. It just made me ill,” she said.

Hikind, the son of Holocaust survivors, said for the many survivors living in his Brooklyn district, the nextdoor borough to Queens, that it was “very painful” to know a war criminal was living just a few miles away .

It’s unclear whether Palij, who is in frail health, will ever face trial in Germany, but Hikind said deporting him was the most important thing: “To me it was always the first thing: get rid of him. Get him out of this country.”

David Weprin, a New York state assemblyman representing Queens, said it was a particular affront to have Palij living in “probably one of the most diverse communities in the United States”, referring to Jackson Heights.

“It was a terrible feeling,” he said outside the now-empty home. “It’s a relief to us, to Queens, to New York City, to the country that this Nazi is no longer living freely in Queens.”

Others in the neighborhood had no idea about their notorious neighbor until they saw news of his deportation on Tuesday, and stopped outside his recently vacated dwelling to snap photos or videos.

“The fact that he was deported, knowing that he was the last one, it might bring closure to a lot of people,” said Michael Mavashev, 37, who works around the corner. “A crime like that is not forgivable.”

Most viewed

Most viewed