“We could see from the names and military identification numbers that these were men who were at the camp when the Germans abandoned the camp in 1944,” Mr. Black said. 
 
 From 1941 through 1945, roughly 3 million Jewish adults and children were murdered in Poland, according to Walter Reich, the former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 
 
 Before arriving in the United States, the three men worked as guards in their unit, which was part of the Streibel Battalion, according to court records. All three guarded forced laborers who made uniforms and brushes, Mr. Black said. Their unit also conducted bloody reprisal campaigns against Polish partisans in the region around the town of Lublin, but Mr. Black said the Justice Department could not confirm whether the men took part in such operations. 
 
 Image Mr. Palij’s citizenship was revoked in 2003 after the Justice Department realized he had lied on his application. Credit National Archives at New York City, via Associated Press 
 
 When Mr. Palij and Mr. Bilaniuk arrived in the United States in summer of 1949, they ended up settling a dozen miles apart in Queens. Their colleague Mr. Wasylyk moved to the Ulster County village of Ellenville, where he ran a bungalow community that had mostly Jewish summer renters. 
 
 It was not until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that United States law-enforcement authorities figured out who they were after finding the cache of Nazi records in Czechoslovakia. 
 
 The Department of Justice accused all three of serving in the SS in Trawniki, and filed charges to take away their American passports and order them deported. All told, the Justice Department successfully charged and denaturalized 16 former SS members who served at Trawniki. ||||| FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says that Palij, a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been deported to Germany, 14 years... (Associated Press) 
 
 BERLIN (AP) — The last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the U.S. was taken from his New York City home and spirited early Tuesday morning to Germany, the White House said. 
 
 The deportation of the 95-year-old former concentration camp guard, Jakiw Palij, came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his World War II past and he admitted lying to get into the U.S., claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker. 
 
 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 told Justice Department investigators who showed up at his door in 1993: "I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied." 
 
 A judge stripped Palij's citizenship in 2003 for "participation in acts against Jewish civilians" while an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and was ordered deported a year later. 
 
 But because Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries refused to take him, he continued living in limbo in the two-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his wife, Maria, now 86. 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 admitted serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes. 
 
 Last September, all 29 members of New York's congressional delegation signed a letter urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation. 
 
 Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador who arrived in Germany earlier this year, said President Donald Trump — who is from New York — instructed him to make it a priority. He said the new German government, which took office in March, brought "new energy" to the matter. 
 
 The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotiations. 
 
 Grenell told reporters that there were "difficult conversations" because Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after losing his U.S. citizenship, but "the moral obligation" of taking in "someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted." 
 
 ABC News video showed federal agents carrying Palij out of his Queens apartment on a stretcher sometime during the day Monday. The bearded, white-haired Palij, wrapped in a sheet, was carried down the brick stairway in front of his home and is later seen sitting up and talking to the agents. 
 
 Palij landed in the western German city of Duesseldorf on Tuesday. The local government in Warendorf county, near Muenster, indicated that Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen. 
 
 Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that "there is no line under historical responsibility," adding in comment to German daily Bild that doing justice to the memory of Nazi atrocities "means standing by our moral obligation to the victims and the subsequent generations." 
 
 German prosecutors have previously said it does not appear that there's enough evidence to charge Palij with wartime crimes. 
 
 Now that he is in Germany, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case. 
 
 "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, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice "deserves a lot of credit" for sticking with the case. 
 
 "The efforts invested by the United States in getting Palij deported are really noteworthy and I'm very happy to see that they finally met with success." 
 
 Palij's deportation is the first for a Nazi war crimes suspect since Germany agreed in 2009 to take John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was accused of serving as a Nazi guard. He was convicted in 2011 of being an accessory to more than 28,000 killings and died 10 months later, at age 91, with his appeal pending. 
 
 Palij, whose full name is pronounced Yah-keev PAH'-lee, entered the U.S. in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from post-war Europe. 
 
 He told immigration officials that he worked during the war in a woodshop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland; at another farm in Germany; and finally in a German upholstery factory. Palij said he never served in the military. 
 
 In reality, officials say, he played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Poland, as an armed guard at Trawniki. According to a Justice Department complaint, Palij served in a unit that "committed atrocities against Polish civilians and others" and then in the notorious SS Streibel Battalion, "a unit whose function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced laborers." 
 
 After the war, Palij maintained friendships with other Nazi guards who the government says came to the U.S. under similar false pretenses. And in an interesting coincidence, Palij and his wife purchased their home near LaGuardia Airport in 1966 from a Polish Jewish couple who had survived the Holocaust and were not aware of his past. 
 
 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." 
 
 Though the last Nazi suspect ordered deported, Palij is not the last in the U.S. 
 
 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. The 99-year-old who currently lives in Minneapolis was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by the AP that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him. 
 
 In addition to Karkoc, there are almost certainly others in the U.S. who have either not yet been identified or investigated by authorities. 
 
 The American public did not become fully aware until the 1970s that thousands of Nazi persecutors had gone to the U.S. after World War II. Some estimates say 10,000 may have made the U.S. their home after the war. 
 
 Since then, the Justice Department has initiated legal proceedings against 137 suspected Nazis, with about half, 67, being removed by deportation, extradition or voluntary departure. Of the rest, 28 died while their cases were pending and 9 were ordered deported but died in the U.S. because no other country was willing to take them. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Sisak and Herschaft reported from New York. Rising reported from Berlin. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin ||||| WASHINGTON/BERLIN (Reuters) - A 95-year old New York City man believed to be a former guard at a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland has arrived in Germany after being arrested and deported by U.S. immigration authorities, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. 
 
 The White House said Jakiw Palij had served as a guard at the Trawniki Labor Camp, where about 6,000 Jewish men, women and children were shot dead on Nov. 3, 1943, in one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust. 
 
 The United States had been trying to get Palij out of the country since the issue of a 2004 deportation order, but after talks with top members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government Germany agreed to take him in. 
 
 Palij was taken to a home for the elderly in the western town of Ahlen, some 130 kilometers northeast of Dusseldorf. 
 
 Born in what was then Poland but is now Ukraine, Palij emigrated to the United States in 1949, becoming a United States citizen eight years later, the White House said. 
 
 But, it added, he had concealed his Nazi service and involvement in human rights abuses, saying he had spent World War Two working on a farm and in a factory. 
 
 In 2001, Palij told Department of Justice officials that he had trained at the Nazi SS Training Camp in Trawniki, in German-occupied Poland, in 1943, the White House said. 
 
 “By serving as an armed guard ... and preventing the escape of Jewish prisoner during his Nazi service, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring the Trawniki Jewish victims met their horrific fate at the hands of the Nazis,” the White House said. 
 
 A federal judge revoked his U.S. citizenship in 2003 and he was ordered to be deported in 2004. But no European country would accept him, CNN and New York magazine reported. 
 
 Given his age and questions over his health and also a possible lack of proof, it is unclear whether German authorities will attempt to prosecute the stateless pensioner. 
 
 “In Germany, being a member of a criminal organization like the (Nazi) SS is not enough to be prosecuted. Even being trained at a camp is not sufficient,” said Jens Rommel, Germany’s top Nazi hunter. “The participation in or facilitation of a murder must be proven.” 
 
 MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 The U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, said the deportation was the result of a concerted effort by U.S. President Donald Trump. 
 
 “He (Trump) told me directly to make it a priority, to get the Nazi out,” Grenell told reporters. “I felt very strongly that the German government had a moral obligation and they accepted that,” he added, making clear it was up to Germany to decide whether to prosecute him. 
 
 Germany has a mixed record on convicting Nazi war criminals. Critics say it let many high-ranking Nazis and SS members escaped justice only for their juniors, small cogs in the Nazi death machine, to be put on trial decades later. 
 
 Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who on Monday visited the Auschwitz camp, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: 
 
 “Germany, in whose name the worst injustice was perpetrated under the Nazis, is confronting its moral obligations.” 
 
 After an international military tribunal put some top Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, on trial soon after World War Two in the Nuremburg Trials, little action was taken by the West German judiciary in the 1950s and 1960s. 
 
 Between 1945 and 2005, West German courts convicted 6,656 Nazi criminals out of more than 36,000 investigations into more than 170,000 suspects, a study showed in 2008. 
 
 Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg is still investigating individuals after the 2011 conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk gave it a new impetus. It was the first time involvement in a camp was sufficient to be found culpable even without proof of a specific crime. 
 
 “There are currently no preliminary proceedings in Germany and there is no arrest warrant,” said Rommel, who heads the office. “We therefore have to wait (to see) whether there will be a new evaluation or whether new evidence appears to underpin the suspicion ... In the case of Palij we are unable to prove where, when and which unit he was in after his training.” 
 
 Jakiw Palij, a 95-year old New York City man believed to be a former guard at a labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, is pictured in his 1949 visa photo. U.S. Department of Justice/via REUTERS
– Now that former Nazi prison guard Jakiw Palij is out of the US, the New York Times explores how he got in, and it wasn't through his efforts alone. As Nazi records of his SS membership weren't uncovered until the 1990s, Palij successfully applied for a visa under the Displaced Persons Act at the American consular office in Schweinfurt, Germany, in June 1949 alongside Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, whose SS identification number turned out to be only one digit away from Palij's, says Peter Black, a former Justice Department historian who worked on Nazi deportation cases. Both claimed to have worked in Germany during the war—Palij as a factory worker, Bilaniuk as a farmhand. Mykola Wasylyk, who also served with the men at the Trawniki labor camp and who'd already arrived in the US after securing a visa, vouched for both. The records suggest Palij and Bilaniuk weren't coerced into joining the SS as Palij later claimed, but volunteered together in February 1943. Together with Wasylyk, they guarded prisoners who made uniforms and brushes at Trawniki, says Black, a camp known for having executed 6,000 Jews in a single day in November 1943. Upon their arrival in the US, Palij and Bilaniuk settled 100 miles from Wasylyk in Queens, NY. Bilaniuk and Wasylyk would each die in the US, even after officials uncovered their true past. Deported to Germany this week at President Trump's direction, per Reuters, Palij is unlikely to face charges.