The 95-year-old is unlikely to face trial, according to Germany's leading Nazi hunter.
A 95-year-old former concentration camp guard has been deported from New York to Germany, where it is unlikely he will face a trial, according to the country's top Nazi hunter.
“Right now there is no investigation into him in Germany, which means there is no arrest warrant, and as a result, it is not very likely that he will ever be convicted,” Jens Rommel, who heads the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, told broadcaster Deutsche Welle on Wednesday.
Jakiw Palij was removed from his Queens home on a stretcher on Monday and flown to Dusseldorf, where an ambulance took him to a retirement home, the Guardian reported.
He is accused by the U.S. of participating in the deaths of 6,000 Jews at the Trawniki concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941.
After World War II, Palij, who is Polish, was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. after lying on his paperwork and saying he was a farmer and a factory worker during the conflict. He received citizenship in 1957, which was revoked in 2003, after American investigators discovered he had served in a prison camp.
His deportation followed years of diplomatic wrangling between the U.S. and Germany.
Palij has denied wrongdoing in court papers, saying he and other young Polish men were forced to work at the camps.
He was ordered deported in 2003, but no European country would take him.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a statement issued Tuesday, praised the work of the Justice Department's Nazi hunter, Eli Rosenbaum, in persuading Germany to take the 68th Nazi expelled by the United States.
Palij's case was the final Nazi case being pursued by the Justice Department.
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