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Former Nazi camp guard deported by US dies in Germany

Former Nazi labour camp guard Jakiw Palij who was stripped of his US citizenship and deported in August, has died in Germany aged 95, the US ambassador in Berlin has announced.

Published: 11 January 2019 08:32 CET
Former Nazi camp guard deported by US dies in Germany
This photo, provided by the US Department of Justice, shows the the visa of Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi prison guard. Photo: Uncredited/US Department of Justice/DPA

“Former Nazi prison guard Jakiw Palij has died in Germany,” the US ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted on Thursday.

“Removing the former Nazi prison guard from the US was something multiple Presidents just talked about – but President Trump made it happen,” he added.

Palij had been living in a retirement home in the northwestern German town of Ahlen, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.

In August Germany, citing its “moral duty”, took Palij in after he was stripped of his US citizenship.

Palij had concealed his Nazi past from immigration agents when he moved to the United States in 1949, the US Justice Department said. He became American in 1957.

Washington had tried for several years to expel Palij, who had lived in Queens, New York since 1949.

Palij admitted to US federal officials in 2001 that he was trained at the Trawniki forced-labour camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II in spring 1943.

In court documents, the US government said men who trained at Trawniki participated in implementing the Third Reich's plan to murder Jews in Poland, code-named “Operation Reinhard,” the statement said.

On November 3rd, 1943, more than 6,000 men, women and children incarcerated at Trawniki were shot to death in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust, the US Justice Department said.

By helping to prevent the escape of prisoners, Palij played “an indispensable role in ensuring that they met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis,” Eli Rosenbaum, then director of the Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations, said at the time.

Palij denied the allegations.

Berlin had long refused to accept him as he did not have German nationality.

The last alleged Nazi war criminal deported by the US to Germany before Palij was John Demjanjuk, who served as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland, in 2009.

A German court sentenced him to five years in prison in 2011. He died the next year.

German justice has been criticized for its treatment of Nazi war crimes, accused of handing out lenient sentence too late to perpetrators.

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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