I don’t need to tell you about the atrocities committed during World War II.

Everyone knows about the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews, Romani, Queer people, Communists and anti-fascists.

Many of the perpetrators of this violence escaped Germany at the end of the war, and not all of them were immediately apprehended.

They say, though, that your past will always catch up with you, and once again this proved to be true. A 95-year-old former Nazi, who had been living peacefully in New York, was deported back to Germany to answer for his crimes.

Here’s ABC News:

[He] carried out of his home on a stretcher by federal agents and flown to Germany early Tuesday in what could prove to be the last U.S. deportation of a World War II-era war-crimes suspect.

Jakiw Palij’s (above) expulsion, at President Donald Trump’s urging, came 25 years after investigators first accused Palij of lying about his wartime past to get into the U.S. But it was largely symbolic because officials in Germany have repeatedly said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute him.

Trump “made it very clear” he wanted Palij out of the country, and a new German government that took office in March brought “new energy” to expediting the matter, U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell said.

Trump took full credit for everything at a rally in West Virginia on Tuesday night. The irony here, of course, being that the Idiot-In-Chief hasn’t proven himself good at spotting or responding appropriately to Nazis in the past.

We haven’t forgotten the “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville. Back to the present:

Eli Rosenbaum, the former head of the U.S. office investigating accused Nazi war criminals, said Palij’s removal “is a landmark victory in the U.S. government’s decades-long quest to achieve a measure of justice and accountability on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity.”

Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years, as a draftsman and then as a retiree, until nearly three decades ago when investigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was “living somewhere in America.”

Palij (above), an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizenship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”

Back in 2003, a judge stripped Palij’s U.S. citizenship for “participation in acts against Jewish civilians” while he was working as an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. His deportation was ordered a year later.

Neither Germany nor Poland wanted to take Palij back, so he continued to live in New York with his wife, Maria.

His continued presence there outraged the Jewish community, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as, “Your neighbor is a Nazi!”

According to the Justice Department, Palij served at Trawniki in 1943, the same year 6,000 prisoners in the camps and tens of thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered. Palij has acknowledged serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes.

There is insufficient evidence to prosecute him for war crimes once he is back in Germany.

Jens Rommel, head of the German federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi war crimes, said Tuesday that the deportation doesn’t change the likelihood that Palij will be prosecuted for war crimes. “A new investigation would only come into question if something changed in the legal evaluation or actual new evidence became known,” he said.

However, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case now that Palij is in Germany.

“Trawniki was a camp where people were trained to round up and murder the Jews in Poland, so there’s certainly a basis for some sort of prosecution,” he said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.

Here’s a pic of Heinrich Himmler, centre left, shaking hands with new guard recruits at the Trawniki training camp in 1942.

Palij’s deportation is the first for Nazi War crimes since John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was accused of serving as a Nazi guard, was sent back to Germany in 2009.

Once there, he was tried and convicted for his role more than 28 000 killings and died 10 months later.

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. Palij suggested at one point during that interview that he was threatened with death if he refused to work as a guard, saying, “If you don’t show up, boom-boom.”

Although the most recent deportation, Palij is not the last Nazi in the US.

Since 2017, Poland has been seeking the extradition of Ukrainian-born Michael Karkoc, an ex-commander in an SS-led Nazi unit that burned Polish villages and killed civilians during the war. But it could take years before the 99-year-old, who currently lives in Minneapolis, faces deportation. He was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by The Associated Press that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him.

If we can get Trump to stay away from deporting immigrants and separating families, and stick to deporting Nazis, America might stand a chance.

[source:abcnews]