If Trump wants credit for deporting Nazis, he should send some of those "very fine people" who marched in Charlottesville away. But he doesn't want to erode his base.
16
He is gone now and that is a good thing. Don't give Mr. Trump too much credit. He applied enough pressure on Germany to take him even though he was not from Germany. A bully's tactic worked this time. I think it's very sad Poland wouldn't take him back years ago. So many comments blame previous administrations for not deporting him. He was legally deported years ago. I hope he is the last one. The United States made many anti-Semitic mistakes during World War II. This is in "it's the least we can do" category.
13
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and forced 18 year old Palij into becoming an SS guard. The Nazis did not give their conquered youth a choice in what job they wanted. His choice was to take the job or be one of the 6 million Poles to die in WW II. It's hard to view him as a willing Nazi collaborator.
46
I'm not sure I would go that far. The SS did look for some political appreciation for the Party. That said, he was a pretty small cog in the machine.
The guys who were more culpable were a lot older. He was guilty. He was also an kid. And this is not the average immigrant issue. Sister Sarah says we're putting our priorities on real Nazis, but exactly how many are still alive?
3
Thank you for pointing this out. This isn't like deporting Joseph Mengele. He did what he had to in order to survive, as many others did or would have done. Now he's an old man with little time left, so what purpose does this serve? Much better to have him give a deep and thorough account of what he did, to whom, with whom, under whose orders, to at least serve history.
12
The Polish resistance, some far younger, became known as the first to smuggle wartime 4-rotor Enigma encoders to France, where the mechanical “Bombé” was able to break 4 of 6 randomly stacked rotors in a day.
Alan Turing (a victim of Churchill’s homophobia) and and Bletchley establishment built their electromechanical “Colossus” only when the Nazis expanded to 12-rotor machines, and traffic for the older Enigmas became too much for pure mechanical systems.
At the same time though, multi-generation anti-semites raised in the same church as Hitler, helped join in the taking of the Warsaw Ghetto, and, happily, unless one accepts Arndt’s “banality of evil” joined the operation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, the Nazi’s largest killing/slave labor factories.
There was plenty of evidence the guy was a murderer who entered the country illegally.
If one sets no statute of limitation of murder for anyone, he received justice after fighting for years, playing every last trick in the book to justify joining the evil men the newly bigoted Populist Polish government claims, following in the footsteps of leaders Putin and Trump, never existed.
If only as a symbol of how fat the once forward post-Soviet government Polish government has fallen (it initially appointed an old friend the nation’s Chief Rabbi), he had to go.
He delayed leaving the US,and, in his case, Justice delayed was justice denied his victims.
He’s 95, lets make the murderer a hero for avoiding prosecution so long!
3
To those who say he was only 18 and faced with a difficult choice, let me give 18-year-olds one piece of advice. Among competing choices, the right decision is the hardest one.
5
Right or wrong, I find it revolting to make a political point of this the way Trump and Huckabee Sanders are doing. Plain revolting.
14
So glad this guy is finally facing justice after having been tried and convicted by a jury of his peers....
Oh, wait, what? Never tried at all?
Accused, yes, and most likely guilty as charged, but tried and convicted? Guess I missed that part of the story.
And if he had to do it all over again, meaning serve at age 18 as a concentration camp guard, knowing what he knows now...that he'd live to be 95 and face being transferred from one nursing home to another-he'd do it all over again, I'm sure.
Seriously, what purpose does this "justice" serve?
10
My mother in law had 2 brothers . They lived in Russia.
When times were getting very bad and the future looked ominous, their parents sent them to relatives. One to Israel, one to the USA and one to South America. I was gifted with being able to be present when these 3 old people got to meet and touch and talk to each other again, so many years later .. I would feel like a little justice had been served, if one of the people/creatures at that time was never allowed to enter the United States of America. . . where a few people were able to not die in an oven but live in a free country. No .. justice is not finished being served to this thing. I won't call him a man ..
4
There is a right to a jury trial for denaturalization. Not sure he had a jury trial, he may have opted for a bench trial. The Supreme Court recently ruled on the materiality standard for these jury trials in Maslenjak v. United States.
America is profoundly ill. If you doubt it, read many of the comments here. Jakiw Palij has lived a very good life in the US because he lied about committing genocide when he arrived in 1949 at age 26. Statements that "He's really old now, and hasn't murdered anyone in a really long time" are inane, offensive, and give US white supremacists a warm feeling all over. There's no statute of limitations for murder, certainly none for genocide. Further, once found out Palij exploited all means to evade prosecution for a quarter of a century. Justice delayed is justice denied, but many writing here excuse someone who successfully evaded prosecution for nearly 70 years. Further, they employ the thoroughly discredited white supremacist lie that those like Palij had a "terrible choice." Many were conscripted into the German military, but no one was forced to work in an extermination camp, they chose to do it, just as those who lynched blacks in the US chose to do it. Some here pretend that if American murderers have evaded prosecution, no one can't prosecute a Nazi mass murderer. Others conflate every imaginable wrong, including true wartime casualties, with genocide. One of my first jobs as an attorney was working with an organization tracking Klan activity. It included tracking down white supremacists who had murdered blacks yet evaded prosecution. To read many comments here you'd think we were persecuting a bunch of nice old white guys. No wonder Trump calls them "very fine people."
24
I hope Americans don't feel too smug about this.
"The United States is not a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute), which founded the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 as a permanent international criminal court to "bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes ..."
8
Time meters out for us all. What is there physically left to punish that time and his failing health will not address? His deportation is perhaps the only measure left to extract justice. Sadly, the pledge of "never again " rings hollow when confronted with the facts of the geniuses which occurred in Kosovo, and went unabated by Western Europe.
1
The last time my Ukrainian grandmother saw my father he was being loaded on to a goods train by German soldiers at the end of a gun barrel. He was 17 and had barely survived Stalin's famine.
I do not know what my father was forced to do for the Germans, he would never talk about it. He ended up in a POW camp in England.
Up until the age of 24 his life was directed by Stalin and Hitler and he survived.
The blind pursuit of these men who were also victims of these despots is a shamsful and demeaning outrage.
18
So let me see if I understand this: Investigators first tracked him down in 1993, he was 70. So they were looking for him and found him. In 1993. Then it took another 10 years to discover he had lied on his visa application. Then in 2004 he was to be deported but no other Country would take him. So what did we do? LET HIM STAY HERE. No cage for Mr. Palij! Then fast-forward to 2018 and we finally deport him. Twenty-five years it took to deport one man for crimes he was a part of 70+ years ago. But Maria and her baby show up from El Salvador and WHAM! We are on her immediately. She could be a terrorist or rapist afterall. Not like Mr. Palij. ICE makes sure Maria is sent back to El Salvador in less than 2 weeks while her baby is held in a cage here. Yeah, the American Justice System is something to be proud of and admired around the World.
41
William Calley and the rest of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division got away with massacring an estimated 488 civilians in Vietnam, March 16, 1968.
Where can we send Calley and Charlie Company back to?
28
"Like other young men from Poland and Ukraine during the German occupation, Mr. Palij was trained by the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, as an 18-year-old."
I am not aware of any ethnic Poles receiving training from SS, and I would like to know the source of this information.
To put it in the right context: There was no Polish SS and no Polish military forces fighting for Germany. However there were: Ukrainian, Baltic, Russian an also French, Dutch and Norwegian military formations (Waffen-SS) fighting under German command.
6
@Boguslaw
Poles fought under the German flag. Not as separate formations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_the_Wehrmacht formations.
6
@Lawrence
Yes. Poles in areas incorporated to Germany were forced by the Nazi Government to serve in Wehrmacht (not SS, which was voluntary). Not sure how it relates to my comment, or to the discussed topic.
Re: Sarah Huckabee Sander's comment, that "the United States will not tolerate those who facilitated human rights abuses on American soil"--does that include those who separated children from their parents and who, through carelessness and incompetence, have failed to reunite them?
Surely that qualifies as a crime against humanity and should result in the expulsion of Trump, Sessions, Kirsten Nielsen, and presumably others. But where do we send them? What self-respecting country would take them?
32
@Joel Andrew Nagel
Perhaps Argentina. They've done this sort of thing before.
4
Michael Karkoc at 99 is still in the US and wanted by Poland.
12
Reading the story and the comments to learn something, but I don't know what to make of it.
I have a relative who was Polish living in France and was captured near the war's end and sent to Buchenwald. He did some of the work for the Nazis in order to survive, I'm not sure exactly what it was. He told me he had to sometimes choose who to give bread to and who to save their bread for. He had medical experiments conducted on him. But if he served as a guard to survive, he would never be charged because he wasn't German and hadn't signed up with Vichy in France before (I think he was captured trying to escape to England).
10
The U.S. has a long history of aiding and abetting Nazi Germany. The big banks financed Hitler's rise to power, American corporations equipped the German army. After the war, the U.S. recruited hundreds of Nazi scientists, doctors, psychologists, SS members, secret police, intelligence officers in Operation Paperclip to help the U.S. start the forerunner of the CIA, called the OSS, which included the controversial MK Ultra mind control programs. The rest is history. We can thank the Nazis for the creation of the CIA.
11
@Lee Goodwin,
"The U.S. has a long history of aiding and abetting Nazi Germany." - - - perhaps previously, but apparently not under this administration.
6
I have been reading these comments and I am disheartened to read so many, if not Anti Semetic .. then just plain old Ignorant comments.
A few people need to sit down and read a few history books
And pay attention to the Holocaust parts.
25
"Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil.”" Except for, ya know, all of the neo-Nazis that Trump described as "very fine people" and who - along with all stripes of human rights violators - make up a significant part of his base.
39
@anonymous: The Holocaust was a German operation in occupied territories. Occupied and terrorized citizens of many nationalities were then forced at gunpoint to serve the German Nazi-Fascists. They had no choice. I believe you would have done the same. I await your reasoned rebuttal.
2
I don't understand why should Germany take him back, afterall, he was / is not a German citizen. He served in the army of a regime that had long been obliterated and doesn't exist anymore. Throwing him out of the US, he is actually a stateless person. By deporting him back to today Democratic Germany we are indirectly telling the German that they are still related to the Nazi regime that they have been working so hard to leave behind.
Shouldn't Ukraine be the responsible country to take him back?
8
@Dan,
Here's why, from the Germans themselves, “We accept the moral obligation of Germany, in whose name terrible injustice was committed under the Nazis.”
I think you're missing a couple of major points on the whole moral responsibility/making amends thing that the Germans seem, much to their credit, fully aware of.
18
@Dan yes, Germany will be forever the direct descendant of the Third Reich, just as the USA will be forever the direct descendant of the colonies who murdered the First Peoples and transported African slaves in chains across the Atlantic. None of us can escape our roots, our heritage or our past.
24
My grand uncle lost a leg to frostbite at a “work camp” - he was one of the luckiest people there, and somehow made it out alive.
My family jokes that anyone who dies under 80 has “a mere child” writ on his tombstone- he didn’t make 70.
His wife, saved by a most righteous woman, who stood up to Nazis in Budapest, and told SS officers if they took her, there would be no one left in her tailor’s shop capable of repairing their uniforms - but not to worry because she was (mis)treated as “slave labor” lived only 5 years without him - the two shared equally whatever food there was to have; unfortunately, they lost track of each other after the war ended.
That generation refused to speak to my generation about their experiences at all - so I have no idea of the name of this saint who shut down the SS, playing to their vanity for freshly repaired, cleaned and pressed dress black was.
The location of her shop should be a monument.
20
It looks just fake to me , not worth wasting time reading about him because he doesn't have much left to live.Basically he's paying nothing for what he's done,if he did anything at all ( forced)
5
One of the lessons to take from the Holocaust is that humanity is capable of these horrors, particularly when people do not have the courage to put at risk their careers, their money, their friendships within their social circle, their families, in order to oppose horror, and to stand up for other people's human rights, civil liberties (without which there is no freedom, and no real chance to oppose abusive regimes) and human dignity. Valuing other people's humanity is vital - even if you don't like them or their opinions, and most especially if society is trying to degrade or dehumanize them - be they prostitutes, or homeless, or other people in trouble, or people seen as part of a reprehensible group - how much of America's disinclination to deal with the ongoing, decade-after-decade horror of prison rape comes from the long history of antecedents to the feminist 'toxic masculinity' smear-construct? The US doesn't just have a history of overthrowing foreign governments - we also have a history of enforcing groupthink by trashing people in a degrading way. This can be used to create an atmosphere in which people justify to themselves uglier horrors, as somehow 'necessary'. When the Clinton Administration signed the (anti-) Torture Convention, they limited US compliance with a 400-page list of exceptions. We could act, here, and now, to stop the unmentionable making of exceptions to human rights. We could ditch venality and stop dehumanization in our own country.
6
Way overdue. The laws are finally being enforced. I don't care how old he is.
14
Yes, I understand, he was found to be connected with, if not directly responsible, for crimes against humanity. But where is our humanity? Deporting a 95-year-old man on a stretcher to a foreign land may serve our sense of justice, but it is also cruel. What if he were 105? Would deporting him be OK still? When does the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Eighth Amendment come into play?
17
The man is very old, his acts are known only to him. He lived as a law abiding citizen until he was discovered. His life has been one of waiting and having nowhere to go for about fourteen years. The acts for which he is being called to account occurred seventy five years ago.
Yet, there must be no forgetting, no forgiveness given by society. What he was a part of must never be forgotten or trivialized. The role of monsters and fiends in that crime was insignificant because nearly all who joined in were normal and law abiding citizens, the most trustworthy and conscientious people who clearly agreed to participate. Yet, they murdered nine million and tormented many more in cold blood.
There can never be enough punishment to make up for the crimes. But even worse only a small proportion of those who participated will every be held to account, most were never identified and arrested before they ended their natural lives. So it’s important not to let those found get off scot free.
7
Now it will only take 50 years to stop using American tax dollars to chase ghost.
2
Crime & Punishment, U.S. style:
Be a Nazi prison guard in Poland's Trawniki labor camp and then be punished with a free, first-class airplane ride back to your homeland where some people will greet you as a returning war hero - and just like we did in this country with some Confederate army enemy officers, put up a statue of you there in some park.
Not bad.
GeneGrossman.com
2
@Gene Grossman
Trawniki is not a Poland's labor camp, as Guantanamo is not a Cuban prison. same logic.
6
Ex Nazi guard in U.S now 95, Is deported to Germany. This man has been held accountable, for the acts thousands murder. Has lied to U.S immigration officials about his role in World War II. Which then managed to slipped into the U.S in 1949, saying he worked in a farm or factory during that time period. He then became a U.S citizen in 1957, afterward has been living in Queens New York City. I think the moral of the story is lying to all those people will eventually come hard on you in end. This gets to show you that people who had lied will sacrifice in the end.
3
Has everyone forgotten Trump’s anti-Semitic attacks against Jon Stewart already?
7
As for the contemporary Syrian refugees who have witnessed their families slaughtered by Assad's minions - your're just out of luck.l
8
I have a strange opinion on this.
Everyone is flogging a dead horse. The poor kid, at 16, in a war torn country, found a job as a guard. Incidentally, the prosecution did not (or could not) present any evidence that he actually participated in the killings.
On the other hand, let’s consider some of the great minds brought in under operation paperclip. Dr. Hubertus Strughold is considered the father of space medicine and an award is named after him. He learnt his trade by Nazi human experimentation. Or consider, Walter Dornberger - who ran a slave outfit in V-2 production actually saw two years of prison time. He then joined Wernher von Braun - the father of the Saturn rocket. The latter escaped scrutiny by saying that he could do nothing! [Could Jakiw Palij use the same logic?]
Justice, it seems, is only for the small guys.
32
@Deep Thought.....I have yet to read any stories of the Kapos being held to account for their crimes against their fellow Jews. When they start deporting them, justice will finally be served.
3
How many Palij's have lived among us and went to their graves as Nazi Jew killers because they "were good neighbors?" I remember Demjanjuk of Parma, Ohio who similarly fought extradition and who, even my own relative said of him, "well, it was a long time ago." NO!
10
@Frank Jasko
So, again, you seem to know the name of John Demanjuk, a man who joined as an extremely low level functionary at a very young age and, trapped betweeen Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany was shunted into a guard position. There was never any evidence presented of any particular crimes committed by Demanjuk. In fact, quite the contrary - we know that much of the evidence presented against him was falsified by the Soviet Union / KGB in an attempt to discredit ethnic minorities and nationalist movements that the USSR saw to be a threat at the time. We also know that essentially all of the witness testimony that claimed to have placed Demanjuk in specific events was entirely false (entire academic chapters have been written around this case and the unreliability of memory / witnesses). In short, Demanjuk was entirely a minor figure provably guilty of not much more than "being there." And yet you know his name and not the name of the willing Nazi officers who willingly signed up to the party and now still sign autographs at airshows throughout the US. Or for example the german engineers who happily and consciously as adults used slave labor en masse and who were then invited to cushy jobs in the US space program. Or the countless nazis who continue to live middle class lives in germany with comfortable pensions. No, we have to pick on low level guys like demanjuk who had to flee to the US to escape the USSR. Ridiculously unbalanced and unjust persecution.
9
Who does not want to be deported to a nursing home in Germany?!? Pork cutlets and spaetzle every day!
3
@Jjlasne
At 53 I can't wait to get into assisted living!
Trump gets rid of the ‘last surviving Nazi suspect’ in the U.S. and this represents some sort of vindication for the ‘witch hunt’ he’s continuing to pursue against would-be immigrants & asylum-seekers? Where’s the logic?
14
Sadly, many here appear not to have even read the article before commenting.
The federal government (under many varied administrations) has tried for decades to get another country to accept him, and to deport him there.
They had no other country willing to take him until now....should he get a pass for his deliberate and chosen actions, which allowed the Nazi death machine to function more easily and efficiently, because he is now very old?
5
Good luck bringing back 6,000,000 dead, Jewish or otherwise. No room for them now though. Ironic, isn’t it. Makes one really wonder about the sanctity of life, however.
2
Wish I knew where this 'sensational' report belongs - if anywhere. The age of the exportee creates a unamusing cartoon of his expulsion. To satisfy his critics, after beaucoup years, perhaps he should be vivisected and cell-blocks be at auctioned.
1
One can only hope that the caregiver spooning his gruel toward his face in Germany wears an emblem, badge, number or tattoo reminding him of the victims that he & other Nazis were responsible for torturing & killing.
Regretfully, he's philosophically pardoned himself long ago & would be unfazed.
2
“There are many fine people on both sides.”—Donald Trump.
6
Too bad for Mr. Palij that he wasn't as useful to America as Werner von Braun.
10
Talk about low-lying fruit! Why do you give credence to this craven and mendacious administration's claim that this in any way justifies or validates or whitewashes their inhumane immigration policy by parroting their usual demagogic tweaking of reality as though it were factual? Just report that, as we should all by now expect, the squatter in the White House took undeserved credit for processes begun before his time. What next: Will he and his obscene megaphone of a "press" person claim credit for sunrise and sunset?
7
ICE did not even exist when this Polish war criminal was found out in 1993.
Trump has some nerve crediting them for his removal.
9
@Peter Jakiw is not a Polish name. Mr Palij was born in pre-war Poland, but he is Ukrainian, not Polish. If he was or considered himself to be Polish, he would have used Polish version of his first name: Jakub. Calling him "Polish war criminal" is incorrect and misleading.
2
Good. Justice delayed is justice denied. That said, it sounds like this guy is on his last legs and one wonders whether he even remembers what happened half a century ago.
@Mike
My mother is the same age and her mind is sharp. She remembers some things I forget.
5
Mr. Palij has received a kind of punishment since he was told to leave the U.S., but it's not justice so much a an effort to not let the crimes of which he was a part are just forgotten.
Eastern Europe descended into hell after the World War II. Ethnic cleansing, guerrilla warfare, revenge, political and ethnic warfare right through the 1940's. The refugees were every where. People who had lived in places for generations were forced to leave.
A lot of former Nazis and collaborators from this region probably escaped and were never found, again. Those who have been discovered are being held responsible just to reduce the sense that the lot of them who did not die in the War got away scot free.
2
What strikes me is that the United States was unable to extradite the dozen or so former Nazis which they were able to identify. Yes, it takes a country willing to accept them and it seems more than the other countries complicit in the genocide, Germany, has done more to take some measure of State-related responsibility. Poland has been in denial for these many years and without another former Pole to try to extradite, that country will now slide into the long forgetfulness that is the usual posture of the day which Poland as well as similar nation states have taken. There was so much complicity in the tragedy that it makes one wonder if there is really any justice in the world at all. I am discouraged.
6
Only low level youth from 1945 are still alive now. The high to middle level guys for the most part transitioned to post-war jobs, no matter what they did in the war (which was a policy that had quite a few arguments speaking for it). I just recently noticed Adolf Heusinger, a very well respected figure who was the highest west German military officer 1957-61 and subsequently chair of the NATO military committee in DC. One of his WW2 jobs? Head of operations (‘Operationsabteilung’) in the
Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the 3rd ranking officer in that command. This is the German eastern front theatre command (due to some history). So there you are, it’s better to have useful skills.
6
@Stefan You don't specify if he was actually SS or SD, could he have been in the general military.
Like the head of operational planning for the theater doesn’t know about or support forces engaged in planned widespread systematic war crimes?
The guy is 95, he effectively got away with mass murder.
I guess this is marginally better than reaching 96 before facing consequences.
3
Can Germany refuse to accept him? What a statement that would be.
1
...so he can spend what little remains of his life in a German nursing home rather than his New York house. Yay? I guess?
It's cute that this is Trump's idea of a major victory.
12
I thought they were very fine people.
4
This is a smokescreen, nothing more. Ousting a single man whose crimes are now three quarters of a century past does not undo the untold damage that the ICE is doing right now.
12
I found this article on the homepage of the website and it stood out to me as it had an integining title that made me wonder a lot of things. After I read the article I was honestly shocked on how he got into the country in the first place. Anyways, I found this article very intriguing and interesting.
No mercy.
Yippee. We are the blood thirstiest of the blood thirsty.
There appear to be no crimes attached to this man's record, other than his being in the SS and being assigned to a labor camp. There seem to be no witnesses or record of his actually having committed atrocities. As Krugman says about current Republicans, an apparent "careerist," who as an 18 year old entered a pathway to survival and advancement in a highly distorted society.
But hey, who needs "evidence." This is the USofA. Maybe we should have tried waterboarding? Perhaps he doesn't know how lucky he is to be deported, given Trump's in the White House?
And you know what, let's spend more millions and destroy more lives in this never ending quest.
Any criminals from subsequent crimes against humanity? Who cares? They don't rank? Only that which happened 70+ years ago counts. Talk about the 100 year war!
The arrogance and inhumanity of our actions, defies comprehension, and again, helps explain why Trump is in the White House, and why Republicans are who they are, and still get elected again and again and currently control Congress.
Bloody revenge and destruction of lives is what we specialize in. Rendition him! Black ops, go do your thing. How unlike the SS you are.
15
Would Washington do for Berlin what Berlin has just done for Washington? Not a chance. This man is not a German citizen; he has in fact no legal right to live in Germany.
1
He was 95 though ....95....so did it really matter to do this ? I guess it’s ok since he was brought to a nursing home over there . in another article then a pregnant woman’s husband got deported and he was driving her to the hospital ... it just seems like trump and his gang could use more discernment about what to focus on since they are in charge
5
Germany didnt want him back, which is surprising.
So we wheel out a 95 year old man who has had to live with his misdeeds, however horrible, for seven decades because we could. Did that teach him or anyone else a lesson? WIll it prevent it from happening again? How much has this cost? Could that money have been put to better use?
23
It's not about teaching a lesson, it's about retributive justice. More than 6 million Jews died and he played a part in that. Crimes against humanity and mass murder have no statute of limitations. I feel bad that deportation is the worst thing we did to him.
22
@Citizen And what about the guards at Gitmo who tortured suspected terrorist inmates. Or those who merely worked there? 70 years later, we may judge what happened there in a very different light than we do today, and start holding even the most minor functionary responsible.
3
Following a wrong order is a crime in the US military at any level.
1
The moral high ground here may not be as high as the self-congratulators would like to believe. Yes, he made a terrible choice, perhaps to save himself. How many have done the same, on a grand scale or a scale of one? How would we feel if Iraq started kidnapping and executing our own US war criminals, as we have applauded allies for doing. When we come to our senses, would we be ok with having a president who says of torture "I would do worse than that..." (an undisputed war crime and crime against humanity) tried by the UN? I feel very fortunate to be an American, but this bit of news and back patting makes me feel hollow and troubled.
49
It wasn’t to save himself.
The fact that our government is equally evil doesn’t justify his actions.
If anything it shows how low we, and our new Axis of friends, have fallen.
When he was a young man he showed no mercy to young or old. So now he is old and expects the kind of sympathy he did not show the elderly under his watch. He will not live out his last days with his family. Sounds fair.
36
@Agnate You are in no position to judge whether this man showed mercy or not. The evidence suggests that he was a guard of bridges...etc. Many were forced to assist the Nazis in far more henious acts than guarding bridges. In fact many prisoners of all ethnicities were put to work in the camps as well, and like this man, they were likely faced with the choice between the work and being shot.
8
@Agnate You don't know what he did or didn't do, nor what mercy he may have shown when he had a chance. He did what he needed to survive, as most people do in a war. Who are you to judge him?
11
How about s msn who lost half of his family, while he came here, hid his crimes, and hot to live, comfortably, to a ripe old age?
Yes, I suppose Trump and his supporters should feel proud of ICE'S accomplishments of taking away children from their parents and deporting 95-year-old men who can barely walk. I feel the country becoming safer already.
53
I don’t understand why Donald Trump made this a priority. I think this was more of a example to show that ICE can do more than separate families. This man has been affiliated with the murder of thousands, but he’s 95 they shouldn’t have deported him they should’ve just kept him where he was happy. He could’ve been able to live out his life in Queens. Keeping him in Queens would’ve been more of a punishment than sending him to a nursing home in Germany. If he wasn’t deported there would’ve been more riots at his house for as long as he lives. He’s 95 so he’s life, I assume, is going to end soon. If this man was deported sooner he would’ve had a worse punishment. He shouldn’t be in a nursing home he should be in jail because of his crime. He shouldn’t have been deported when he was found to have lied on his visa. This man as a “mass murderer” should’ve gotten the death penalty. I don’t know what the punishment of being a war criminal is, but I assume it is a heavy one. I don’t know why this man was allowed to be an immigrant, but I believe it was because when he got here the times were more trusting than they are today. However, what done is done and I can’t do anything about it so I will just leave this to rest. I went to read this because I love history tying in to what is happening now, but i wasn’t expecting to have this opinion.
2
And guess this dismisses the work of The a Pennsylvania grand jury digging up the crimes of old priests too.
They hypocrisy is not exactly mind boggling. His mendacious mouthpiece spouts Comrade Trumps self congratulatory verbiage over the removal of this man as he proclaims “ the United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil...”. But he has yet to speak up against white supremacists and Nazi flag flying protesters here, said there were some fine people in Charlottesville. Apparently, these people are okay as they support the hate, ignorance and bigotry he espouses so long as they support his destruction and division of this natio.
36
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement that “the United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil.”{....unless they are a politically powerful ally or a leader of foreign country from whom we seek favors...then we can tolerate... while we look the other way.}
Just more hypocrisy from the most hypocritic administration in history.
28
three million ethnic poles and another three million ethnic ukrainians were also exterminated in the camps. hitler's plan was to kill nearly every slav in eastern europe and keep the rest as slaves. if you find a jewish holocuast survivor who "collaborated" by guarding ethnic poles, will he be deported?
17
“Just because you’re a New Yorker doesn’t give you the right to be a Nazi.” Best quote of the day.
Of course, I would argue that by definition if you're a Nazi you can't be a true New Yorker. To be a New Yorker, you have to be willing to live and work alongside people from every nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion on the planet. Not kill them.
26
Those of you with long memories may know the New York Times was receiving reports in the late 1930s about atrocities in Europe against Jews.Few were published. So,while much has improved in how we look at that dark era,and there are new films on Eichman to remind us;let's not celebrate a final old Nazi guard's removal from America. Even Never Again lost some meaning when we learned of Serbs and Croatians or Hutus and Tutsis prejudice etc. in more recent decades.We stay vigilant because how else do we show the Holocaust skeptics or those with hate,that we are better and stronger.Oh and watch the next season of Babylon Berlin on Netflix to get a sense of what was going wrong in pre-war Germany.
10
President Trump pressed strongly for Mr. Palij's removal.
That was not out of some strong conviction related to Nazi war crimes. It was a purely political calculation. If you think otherwise, you haven't been paying attention, or you refuse to acknowledge reality that does not fit what you wish to hear.
13
oh great. another non-german functionary suffers ridiculous over-reach. let's put this in context:
1. even senior german nazi officers who ran the camps were mostly free by the mid 1950s with most much before.
2. virtually nobody at any level associted with the millions of deaths and repressions under stalin or mao have faced any recrimination whatsoever.
I'm not saying that this man is "innocent." but it's amazing how these "old nazis" who are brought up, including john demanjuk, are to a man all both non-german and extremely low on the totem pole. germans and those participating in any of the other 20th century atrocities inevitably get a pass.
22
@James
And - what about the companies that provided the killing chambers steel and the poisons? And financing?
6
This is an easy target: a much harder target is neo-Nazi white supremacists on American soil. Will Ms. Sanders and her boss come down as hard on them as they do on old ex-Nazis? Or will they continue to be part of "fine people on both sides"?
31
During the war many women in occupied countries became mistresses to German officers in order to protect their families and ensure they had food to eat. Should they also be hunted down and deported? After all didn't they facilitate Nazi crimes too?
13
Oh geeeez, he's 90 leave him alone. His maker will judge him.
9
Letters to the comments section are listing many examples of our hypocrisy including our protection for Nazi's like Wernher von Braun, our recent embrace of torture of prisoners, our alliances with atrocity-committing countries like Saudi Arabia, and our recent war efforts based on lies.
Despite the fact that there is hypocrisy, and this ex-Nazi was not a powerful leader, he still collaborated with a mass-killing machine, and lied about it. The point of justice in a post-Nuremberg world is to punish the guilty AND to show everyone else that their individual actions matter.
While it is wrong that he gets punished while bigger perpetrators of crimes against humanity do not, the solution is to be more vigilant and active in punishing all of the guilty, with punishments commensurate to their crimes.
11
@DLNYC when will we deport Cheney Rumsfeld Bush W et al for their war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
1
Punishment, per se, is no answer- restitution is a fairer idea of justice. He gave up his chance to give back any of what he took away.
He could have been deported a long time ago; say, on a military flight on the way to the Middle East somewhere over the Atlantic.
4
Trump is a hero. Every other President was a coward for allowing this criminal to stay here illegally. Trump is a champion of protecting American citizens and is the only President since Reagan who has a backbone about illegal mmigration. We should all be grateful.
7
@Patrick McCord
Almost every presodent we have had was a coward. Trump is no different. Eavh president has theirs ups and downs. Trump just has more downs than every other president ever.
1
@Patrick McCord There has been a legal process to deport him since at least 2004. Trump didn't just make an executive decision to have him deported that his predecessors refused to do; this deportation was no permitted because the legal process finally ran its course. Trump is no hero here; he's just President while this is happening. And if you think deporting a 95 YO Polish-born Nazi conscript makes anyone safer...
Look at the upside, at 95 he won't spend much time in prison, because everyday is a gift to him at 95, and he certainly won't face the horrors he perpetrated on others.
It obvious that he bears no guilt, no remorse, he hides behind the they were ordered, line. If he didn't want any part of it, he could have made that clear at the end of the war, the Allies, didn't prosecute the prison guards unless they participated in some aspect of the murdering that was happening inside concentration camps, But for people like this, they seek to distance themselves physically as time has distanced the memories of WWII, and his complicity in the wholesale murder of innocent people.
I had a history teacher in high school who was a survivor of the Nazi's. He witnessed his whole family murdered by the Nazi's he hid under the bodies of his neighbors, and family, he was later captured, and sent to a concentration camp, where he escaped. He told his story of survival and fighting the Germans, at 15 years old. He would circulate pictures of his family in class, he would tell of the atrocities, he would show his serial number tattooed on his forearm. I've never forgotten that.
When I lived in Europe as an adult, I went to concentration camps, to see the camps first hand, it's hard to imagine how a man like this, can lead a long life, and NOT be plagued by the ghosts of his past, of those, women, children, old, he helped send to to their deaths, hopefully he;ll get what he has coming.
26
@James Young such self righteousness! How many have gne US and NATO coalition killed in the Middle East in the last 17 years! The number is getting close
@James Young You don't know what guilt or remorse he bears. And don't be so sure the Allies would have gone easy on him at the end of the war if he had come clean. It was a chaotic time and things didn't always sort with great nuance.
The fact that your history teacher was a victim of the Nazis, tragic as it was, bears no relevance to this man's case.
4
The first trial in which I participated, in court on a daily basis, was as a law student (and summer clerk at the US Attorney's office in Miami). It was the case of the denaturalization of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian serving in the Soviet army who was recruited to be a Treblinka guard while he was a POW. The case went to the Supreme Court, setting important precedent. Fedorenko was denaturalized and deported to the Soviet Union, where he was promptly executed. I felt proud of that when I was young, but youth takes pride in different things than does maturity. Stalin starved the Ukrainian population, which helped explain why the invading Germans were welcomed as liberators in Ukraine, with gifts of bread and salt. Soviet prisoners fared very badly as German POWs--not as badly as victims of concentration camps, but: would I have been more noble than Fedorenko? If I were given the option of starving for Stalin or working (I don't believe he was told quite exactly how) for Hitler, would I have done better at the time? I would hope, but I can no longer be so sure. Denaturalization is a civil action with a civil burden of proof--the preponderance of evidence. But the result of our good work led to the execution of Federenko, even though he had not been given the standard of proof of a criminal case, which is proof beyond all reasonable doubt. I lost at great-grandfather at Dachau. But I am no longer proud of what we did with Fedorenko.
33
@Alan Behr.
1. How the murder of Polish Jews in Treblinka is related to the fact that Stalin starved Ukrainian population along with others like Russians, Kazakhs.
2. As we now from Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem most of the guards in Nazi concentration camps were from Ukraine.
3. In Ukraine itself 1.5 ml Jews were killed by bullets by Nazi collaborators.
4. In a new Ukraine Fedorenko and his likes are already pardoned.
.
3
Alan, thank you for sharing your very human introspection and self-doubt. You get older and you learn you’re not as smart as you thought … and with luck some empathy.
I would fear being judged by you. A man can be righteous against judgement from a zealot; but judgement from a fair person goes deep.
4
1950s TV fare included WWII footage and children watched the war, the concentration camps...no censorship for this history. Then the 1960s and the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann. A mild-mannered paper-pushing bureaucrat whose remorseless defense was "they made me do it." The execution was just and Hannah Arendt cemented the concept- "The Banality of Evil". No, time doesn't erase evil.
10
Too many things in this article ring false - because Jews didn't die, they were murdered - Palij didn't persecute Jews, he helped murder them - and we are exhorted by Trump's tweets to celebrate a toothless deportation that doesn't definitely involve jail time?
I never support Trump's braggadocio, and I don't support it here.
As for the GOP's denigration of Democrats who support the abolishment of ICE - who on earth supports an agency that separates families, but is so inept they can't figure out how to track them for reunification afterward? Several Democrats have proposed the abolishment of ICE and the creation of two agencies-one for dealing with drug dealers and violent criminals and the other for asylum and refugee issues, and that makes sense. Whatever is created, let's just make sure they have a real IT department.
21
That is a great injustice. In Germany he will be entitled to a prison cell unshared, with a TV, and daily access to shower. That is downright disgusting. He should be in prison in the US. Many inmates who commited much lesser crimes have no such privileges.
3
@Lala. He is going to a nursing home in Germany, not a prison. He's 95 and in frail health. Moving to a new place is hard on elderly people; I imagine he won't live much longer. Maybe he should have just told the truth to begin with, or even stayed in Europe.
1
He spent years living comfortably in the US fighting extradition. He finally lost his battle. Don’t give him a free pass because he hot old fighting justice.
2
This is a nobody, and if he qualifies for deportation after paying taxes for 60 years then we should deport every old German in the country, because they were all complicit. We shouldn't allow Mercedes to sell cars, or AIG to sell insurance.
Nothing is taught by this use of a Federal agency to score political points. If you want to dissuade people from doing evil then hand over somebody relevant, like the GW Bush cabal that lied us into Iraq, or put Henry Kissinger on trial.
24
@CK Your strokes are too broad to bear any truth; this isn't a matter of anyone's particular philosophy. And what does paying taxes have to do with anything? He knew that would keep him under the radar.
3
@CK........because they were all complicit.
Way to paint with that broad brush.
Moreover - as it appears to have escaped you - Palij isn't, nor ever was, a German.
But all this time I thought there were good people on both sides
6
So little, so late that this action is of no practical or moral significance. Simply stating that the alt-right agenda of ethnic cleansing is wrong would be a much more important act for Trump and his lapdog legislative protectors in Congress.
9
So Merkel should get the credit here for changing the German position. This announcement just seems like some military chaff to give Faux News something to talk about instead of corruption.
6
Certainly the right thing was done but it's a shame that it's Trump, a truth-twisting hypocrite on so many fronts, who will be boasting about this as a personal triumph. And then, of course, inevitably, you have the nonsensical, craven attack launched by the GOP "instant response squad" or whatever they call themselves. This is sure to be all over Fox News tonight, filling in for any coverage of Michael Cohen's apparent flipping.
7
Trump loves Putin who simply orders people dead because they oppose him. Assad kills and maims defenseless women and children indiscriminately with Russian backing and Trump does nothing. But wait! the Trump administration says they do not tolerate human rights violations and hold up one old man as an example who will soon die in a German nursing home. Yes he was a guard at a Trawniki and he lied on his immigration form but so did hundreds of thousands of others at that time (many adding "ski" to their last name and saying they were Polish) fleeing the end of the war but did he commit war crimes and are they documented? many people were press ganged into service by the Germans otherwise they would have been shot but ultimately were not collaborators.
This all seems so lopsided when one considers the large scale atrocities in Syria and how Trump is enamored by the man supporting them.
16
I'm glad Germany took him. Frail or not, I would like to see this man stand trial in Germany for his role in WWII. And if he dies prematurely, I'd like to see him posthumously sentenced to whatever he would have gotten at the Nuernberg Trials.
But the irony is not lost on me to see the outrage of people and the current president. These United States is a country that support(-s)/(-ed), excuse(-s)/(-ed) and employ(-s)/(-ed) the use of torture. As a country, the US has caused the murder (death by war machinery and foreign policy) of hundreds of thousands of individuals and has turn millions upon millions more homeless and refugees, causing daily suffering.
It should also not get lost that the president who was hot to trot to deport this man, is the president that is the enthused representative of those US citizens who are just like this man; he is the president who sees "good character" in people like Mr. Palij. It should also not be forgotten that the last president did not have the appetite - in fact did not see the necessity - to address the war crimes committed by this country, this country's government, by, with the support of and in the name of the American people. When you don't deal with your past and you are retroactively approving of those actions.
And so, the US has fallen a long way from who its stature as the prosecution at the Nuernberg Trials to having elected Mr. Trump as president and a bigot of another sort as their vice president.
7
I can't truly imagine how I would be able to go on if my family was gassed or put into ovens.......which all these years later is still hard to fathom. That said, a frail 95 year old man being deported by air ambulance seems like vengeance more than justice. What does it accomplish? If there is a hereafter, his reckoning can't be that far off.
12
@Ponderer
My mother in law was very old when she died and the one thing that she still spoke of and remembered clearly was the Soldiers coming and taking men away from homes and families.
She was smuggled out by her older brothers and sent alone to
America.
One brother went to Israel and the other to Argentina.
And I was there at a relatives house in New York when the 3 siblings met again...
There are no words for the joy and grief at that moment.
5
Guilt is never determined by the age of an individual, nor indeed whether that person is even still alive. Those who helped to perpetrate the Holocaust are forever guilty of crimes against humanity. This evil man received, and must be seen to receive, extradition back to the continent where he carried out these atrocities.
3
Deporting this 95 year old man, probably who had little discretion or authority, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, and should have constitutionally prohibited. On moral grounds a nation that delights in being cruel is bond to suffer over time. Deporting a 95 year old is shameful. Kindness counts
11
@Victor Ladslow
Kindness counts ?
Talk about misguided..
4
Why was he never prosecuted? Will he be now?
Very few people were prosecuted (in the West). The US executed about as many Americans in WW2 (or immediately afterwards) as Germans (mid 100s). Most criminal sentences were served for maybe five years and there were not that all that many of those. The US directly hired or commanded more than 10,000 of German personal (and not just the innocent), to do everything from being perimeter guards for US installations in the 50s and 60s (lots them from the East, Poland-Russia-Baltics) to the chair of the NATO military committee in the early 60s, where the later was the 3rd ranking officer in the German Eastern theater command (OKH) 1940-44. Lots more there, for instance the US hiring the full intel section (Fremde Heere Ost) of that same German Eastern theater command as a package deal, the foundation for the West German intelligence agency after the occupation ended. (BTW, Soviet prosecution was very inconsistent, but way harsher overall.)
3
This is a story with a horrible, tragic opening chapter and no good ending for any of its characters. No one should feel that justice has been served as the tragedy of the extermination of 6 million people overwhelms all of the subsequent chapters. It cannot be possible to excuse anyone's participation in or silent complicity in watching this or any other genocide occur. No one is redeemed or resurrected by subsequent attempts to find justice or impose punishment. I do not excuse anyone regardless of their role or subsequent life's circumstances. We all find our souls impoverished by the mass extermination of people. Let us try to remember the horror of this and every subsequent genocide and try to stop repeating the cycle of such horrors. I fear too often still these tragedies are repeated and we simply choose to turn away and ignore the true horror of such events. Let us remember that today there are so many people in so many places fleeing and dying from violence, the horrors of conflict, the tragic consequences of climate change, and economic oppression. Let us try to find solutions to these tragic circumstances in memory of all who have suffered so mightily.
10
and I just saw Steven Spielbeg's Schindler's List.(His masterpiece) Truly a modern day Moses story
3
One of the most everlasting and poignant outcomes of the Nuremberg trials was "I was only following orders" is not an acceptable defense. It didn't serve the Nazi leaders nor later the middle-level bureaucrat Eichmann. It's also worth remembering that the Nuremberg lesson lent moral rationale to the anti-war protests of the 1960s.
5
Funny how Trump hates Nazis when it’s convenient.
Why can’t he condemn the white nationalists (i.e., Nazis) who vote for him?
31
That old conundrum of satisfying Justice or Forgiveness. Round and round we go. Some times I have a "There but for the grace of God go I" attitude. (I try not to underestimate what I would do "under the circumstances" & so pray "lead us not into temptation".)
Other times: "Lock 'em up and throw away the key". I've worked in prisons and am not naive about what people are capable of or why punishment exists.
Given the constellation of forces acting on any person (temperament, parenting, role models, historical place and year of birth, state & religious teachings, models/sibling influences, economics, schooling, etc) I try to gauge the degree of awareness & ability to freely choose was a realistic option at the time. And "hurray" for moral courage!
Many are the trances people live. Many of us live our lives like rats in a maze, so fortunate that we're not young WASP men of draft age in Germany in the late 30s.
It goes without saying, the people who we are definitely most fortunate not to be are those that suffered horribly in the camps. Or were forced to send their children away. Or lived in terror of daily cruelties.
So yes, it's important to draw a red line. Yes, to Justice, but allow people to suffer their consequences, without having vengeance in our hearts. And dear God, prevent us from using "justice" like Trump, as a pawn in a cynical game of manipulating personal and ancestral pain & anger.
For his own "win".
May we, today, see clearly & choose bravely.
9
Yes, Mr. Palij may have lied on US papers, but determining what his role was, as a guard, is something entirely different, coming so far after the war ended. And the claim that whatever he did was to save his family cannot be discounted.
9
@Steve Brown
He made his choice at age 18 and we know nothing about why he chose as he did. MANY other Ukranians and Poles and others under the control of the Nazi's did not choose to work directly for them...
His actions allowed the Nazis to function more easily and efficiently.
For decades government officials under many administrations tried to find a country to accept this man, but could not.
This is not about Trump or people suddenly noticing this old man, but about finally finding a country willing to accept him.
Oddly enough, millions of others in his country did not need to work directly FOR the Nazi machine to save their families or themselves.
1
There is no statute of limitations on murder.
9
@CommonSense'18, but can we prove he killed or aided in killing people in the camp?
6
@JjlasneThe fact that he worked there is enough. All were collaborators in one form or another in the death process, sometimes quick, sometimes slow, and in some instances many years in the future.
1
@CommonSense'18 And what about all the American soldiers who worked at sites where we tortured (and in a few cases killed) suspected terrorists? We won't even hold responsible the people did the torturing. What about the soldiers there who did nothing but their daily humdrum jobs? This was an 18 YO kid who had a choice to be a guard in a camp, or likely to be killed. What you would have done? Easy to say you'd have resisted, but not so likely.
A purely symbolic act with no practical consequences at all. Trump is patting himself on his back for making his removal a "priority." I suspect that the truth is something different. This was probably a done deal which Trump could activate when he needed some distraction. What could possibly be going on now? Hmm, Michael Cohen pleads guilty in one hour.
61
@liberal nyc lawyer
Seriously, did you read the article?
For decades various administrations tried to have this man and other deported but no other countries would accept them.
He was well known and identified, and this isn't about Trump.
Finally a country agreed to accept him.
Should extreme old age negate the chosen actions of his earlier life which allowed the Nazi machine to function more easily and efficiently?
1
Getting deported to modern Germany, with great healthcare and strong human rights protections, doesn’t seem like much of a punishment.
84
@Lawyermom
Seriously, did you read the article?
For decades various administrations tried to have this man and other deported but no other countries would accept them.
He was well known and identified, and this isn't about Trump.
Finally a country agreed to accept him.
Should extreme old age negate the chosen actions of his earlier life which allowed the Nazi machine to function more easily and efficiently?
1
@RLiss
Your comment has nothing to do with my comment. I did not mention Trump, the length of time it took for the case to grind forward, and I certainly did not suggest that extreme old age negates his participation in genocide. I was merely pointing out that he is being inconvenienced rather than punished. I expect that Germany will determine he is too frail to stand trial and he will live out his days in relative comfort and receiving good medical care.
Seriously, did you read my comment?
@Lawyermom: Yes, but it makes good press for the White House.
Not of the same magnitude, but how many young people here are being indoctrinated in what could become the acceptance of destructive behavior by those on the fringe who doubtless sympathize with fascism?
How many kids now carried in arms to political rallies where people are told to leave and escorted out will accept the words of some leaders as gospel?
It is happening here and we better wake up to this fact.
46
@Ian MacFarlane Excellent point.
5
I can't help but wonder how much we focus on the guards and 'collaborators', when the whole world clearly knew what was happening in these "camps".
Heaping scorn upon these aged enfeebled murderers doesn't excuse the fact that the whole world collaborated through our inaction.
Bosnia in 1992 and Syria today, have suffered a similar conjunction of mass confusion, obfuscation and denial.
The leadership of countries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea bear the same moral vacancy today, they are not like us.
32
@Oh - Well in fact "the whole world" did not know any such thing as, "what was happening in those camps." It is you who obfuscate, and yes other countries are just like us. You might look into the racist/needless firebombing we performed in Japan, in particular LeMay's observation that "if we lose this war, we will go to jail for war crimes."
@Oh
Yes, a good deal of the world knew what was happening in the camps. Of course, there might be some that find a bit of a distinction between knowing, collaborating or actually murdering say, 6,000 men, women and children daily. But that is a moot point here. The man has been sent on his way because he lied about his involvement, not the level of involvement. Was the deportation politically motivated. The deportation of the Jews seemed to be as well. Of course, most never got to live past the first night they entered camp.
2
@Oh Your points about Bosnia and Syria are very well taken. However, I'd argue that "the whole world" was not collaborating through inaction during the Holocaust. Most of the world was busy fighting the Nazis and Japanese in order to hasten an end to the slaughter they brought about.
But apparently cries of "Never Again!" have a 50-odd year expiration date and by the time the Serbs were starving Bosnian Muslims in cages we, the West, didn't seem to care. By the time genocide came to Syria, if anybody thought innocent Arab civilians were going to get a fair shake should have had their head examined.
5
So much 'whataboutism' here. So much 'he had terrible choices to make' here. As the lessons of the first half of the 20th Century are forgotten and nationalism and racism return to the mainstream throughout much of the world, it's more important than it was 50 or 60 years ago to clarify the downside of making inhumane choices. We still look for justice for Emmett Till, despite the decades that have elapsed and despite the fact that his murderers were ensconced in a culture that supported their actions at the time. We don't say, "Forget about that murder, look over here at other terrible things other people did." If we decide that this guy's age, his time, the pressures he was under, the time that elapsed mitigate his complicity in mass murder, we forego the right to make moral judgements about anything ever.
41
@Jon Silberg
The fact is that we need to look at the rock in our eye but we look at the sand in someone's else's eye. In fact, we never look at our behavior at all. And it is frightening. But oh so convenient.
9
@Jon Silberg We seek justice for Emmett Till among people who were directly complicit in his murder or in covering it up. We're not going after people as removed from the action or involuntarily implicated as Mr. Palij was.
One must be impressed by the morally smug attitude taken by many below who think this is justice when it is vengeance imposed by the victors. What he did was morally wrong, but he was a nobody, a young man with no power. While we condemn him we sit in a country that has waged war on countless peoples, a country that harbors people from Donald Rumsfeld to Lt. Calley to individual veterans who could be convicted of war crimes. We live in a country that aids and finances war carried out by others, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, on civilians. We live in a country that carried out a policy of torture on captives. Perhaps we are quick to condemn Palij and see this as justice as a way to absolve us of responsibility for what we have done but ignore.
202
@dave
He certainly had power over the prisoners at Trawniki labor camp--it is naive to think he did not. One who is young still has a heart where a conscience resides, and still makes the choice to ignore that voice.
12
@dave
"A young man with no power"? He certainly had power over the innocent men, women and children that he prevented from escaping being murdered for being Jewish.
8
@dave
"... Perhaps we are quick to condemn Palij ..."
No, not too quick on Palij, but rather we are too slow to condemn:
"... people from Donald Rumsfeld to Lt. Calley ..."
4
If you're 18 and a big army comes to town and says join us or die, more people than who likely admit it would join them. Yes, they were bad, but what would you honestly do if they said you had to work for them, or you and your family would suffer the same fate? Not everyone is born to be a hero and is able to stand up to tyranny. Perhaps this man just did what he had to in order to survive.
48
Everyone didn't join the SS although many were forced into the German army. In 1943 the SS in the Ukraine was formed by volunteers, although later there was some conscription.
I was only following orders did not absolve the people at Nuremburg, nor should it have.
7
@AC To be a member of the SS was an elite position you had to apply and train for, and be accepted into. It was the purest zealots...not just some poor kid. His actions need ot be held to SOME account.
4
@AC he was a sadist. an animal. not just an 18 year old without the courage to resist. A torturer. Just a run of the mill anti-semite. Get real AC
3
The article on the ex-Nazi guard interested me most because I had been following this topic over the last year. I was surprised when I figured out the ex-Nazi had been living in the US since 2003 although being stripped of his American citizenship. I was
for the idea of Mr. Palij being deported because of his past as a Nazi guard.
9
@Raj Rana
not clear if I read your post right...this man had lived in the U.S. since the late 1940s and lied on his application to get in.
1
At 95 he is too old to serve a prison sentence. The reason Germany did not want him was exactly that. He will essentially be a burden on the state and cost the taxpayers money while he lives out his time in a nursing home.
There would be another solution and that is sending him to Israel, but Germany would never allow that, because he might be facing capital punishment in Israel.
There is no good outcome either way.
5
@Kara Ben Nemsi
did you read the article?
the fed. government has tried for decades to get another accept him, and to deport him there.
They had no other country willing to take him until now....should he get a pass for his deliberate and chosen actions because he is now very old?
1
@RLiss
Well, if our own Federal Government, and for sure with the help of the German authorities, could not prove that he actually committed a crime, then by the laws of this country (and of Germany, by the way), he is not guilty.
That is precisely why Germany did not want him, because they cannot nail a crime on him either. So that means that he is a free man in Germany. Problem is, he is frail and will spend the rest of his days in a nursing home. If he has no personal means, that means that the state will have to pay for him.
The US took the easy way out, by simply renouncing his citizenship. Germany took him, but only because of a gesture of good will.
So, do you still think he is going to be worse off in Germany? Not at all, he is infinitely better set there than he would have been in the US. To the tune of ~$3500 per month of cost for his care.
So, yes, he is getting a pass.
That's what I call no good outcome, either way.
@Kara Ben Nemsi The decision was not Germany's to make, but America's. Of course, Israel could've just kidnapped him, and the world would've been okay with that.
I couldn't live with myself for fifteen minutes if I had been complicit in the deaths of innocent people.
This guy is 95 and counting.
When he finally dies, no soul will leave the body.
17
@KJ So what did you do during the My Lai massacre, the indiscriminate bombing of Baghdad, so nicely televised for our entertainment, all the deaths the US is responsible for, in places like Syria, which the overwhelming majority of americans have no idea where it is geographically, or what we are doing there? And so many more... How did you at least try to intervene?
11
We are all complicit in the deaths of innocent people. Let the one without sin cast the first stone.
3
95 years old? Too little too late..
8
Can we have more details of what Mr. Palij is said
to have done ?
At age 95, what justice comes from transferring him to a
German Nursing Center ?
8
@John Brown Officially, he lied in order to gain United States citizenship. Unofficially, see note #134, and then go back and read this whole report: https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article/25/1/1/674673
1
@John Brown
He allowed the extermination of innocent men, women and children by working for the people devoted to their deaths. As a guard, he allowed the concentration camp to function.
Best book about the concentration camps, and most readable, is "Treblinka" by Jean-Francois Steiner, written in the 1960's when the memories of those who were adults at the time of WWII were still fresh...it explains HOW the Nazi's did what they did, and what life in the camps was like for most.
5
@RLiss You cannot be serious with "He allowed" nonsense - as you say twice.
what if had he stood up and said "I forbid"?
"“President Trump sees Palij’s removal as a strong message to the entire world that the United States stands firmly against anti-Semitism, war crimes and human rights violations,” Theodore Wold, a special assistant to the president for domestic policy, told reporters in a conference call."
Except when Gina Haspel's in charge?
13
Incredible.
Had the Trump administration opposed this deportation, the comments here would have numbered in the thousands, each more outraged than the next, and the headline would have decried the administration's alleged Nazi sympathies.
Because this deportation took place with the Trump administration's blessing, I am instead reading comments about how this deportation should never have been carried out, and that Mr. Palij should have been permitted to live the rest of his life in Queens. Disgusting. I am only waiting to see a comment about how this deportation is evidence of the Trump administration's xenophobia and hatred of immigrants.
The hyper-partisan stupidity demonstrated by "both sides" makes me think that this country deserved the president it elected.
34
You assume the truthfulness of this incorrigible, systemically lying Administration regarding its position on this deportation and whether it ever previously had one. It has been documented that the Fake President has lied more than 4,000 times since the Inauguration, and that lately his daily average of falsehoods has even risen. Under the circumstances, reasonable doubt is certainly in order with this band of well-practiced prevaricators, not naïveté.
3
@Middleman MD
some good points, but PLEASE keep in mind Trump did not "win" the election...HRC beat him by 3 million votes, he is "president" only due to the out dated Electoral College.
2
@Middleman MD No. First of all, if they had done nothing there'd likely have been no story and thus no reaction. And I for one would have said what I say now: No matter what he may have done, he's 95. Get him to give a full account of what he may have done in the war, and let him live out his life. You'd have seen so criticism from me.
I will never forget Trump's idiotic remark about the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville that "there are good people on both sides," part of his continuing attempt to play both sides against the middle. Neo-Nazis, meet your Grandpa, guess he wasn't one of the "good people."
17
@Jennene Colky
One of the many reasons he sickens me
2
My mother in law and her two brothers were Jewish kids in a world of Nazis and death camps. Their parents made the sacrifice of sending their children to distant relatives in various parts of the world. I was privileged to be present at the reunion of these "children" who were in their 70s when they found each other and met again .. These three small of stature but huge hearts and spirits held each other and cried and cried and laughed too. One lived in Israel, one in South America and one in the USA. And in their old age, they got to see and touch and talk to each other one more time ... in Yiddish :)
James Devlin, I think that as time goes by, people will forget and the monsters will run loose again, unless while we are here, and remember or have this knowledge, we should be sure it is Not Forgotten. Between 5 and 6 million Jews dead in the Holocaust ..
29
@CDF
a recent article said American young people believe no more than 2 million or so Jews were killed in the Holocaust...that number will undoubtedly decrease as time goes on and the few survivors now alive die.....
1
@RLiss
Schools should put some effort into including the Holocaust as part of History lessons ..
1
@CDF
Actually, schools should put some effort into learning about subjects that they plan to teach.
To every commentator defending Nazis- what is wrong with you? How can you possibly defend a Nazi? How can you defend someone who willingly helped murder people based solely on their religion? As a Jew, these comments terrify me. Should I flee this nation if so many people do not want to punish Nazis? I am scared for this nation if deporting a Nazi is controversial
26
@Fred
I think people want to know what evidence was used to refute his claim that he was conscripted and had only guarded the gate.
4
@Fred He was an 18 YO pressed into service by the Germans, made to work as a camp guard. You don't know that he murdered anyone, or how willingly he did anything. He did what he had to in order to survive. You can condemn him for that but a lot of Jews did what they had to do to survive, too; I'm sure you're familiar with the term "Kapo." I won't condemn them, and I won't condemn this man. Even if I did, at age 95 what's the point? He wasn't Himmler.
2
ich bin ein jude. and yet, the only issue i have with this is Germany's hypocrisy. Now they prosecute Slav clients of the German Nazis, when from 1945 to the present they prosecuted only a handful of German nazis, and even then, gave them slaps on the wrist. See: the Frankfurt Trial. I am not saying this is wrong, its ver to late, but i am saying...
9
Bush wouldn’t deport the Nazi, Obama wouldn’t deport the Nazi, but Donald will and left call him the Nazi. Go figure.
15
@Harif2 Facts are stubborn things. Note the date here: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2004/June/04_crm_401.htm
See also: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/former-nazi-labor-camp-guard-jakiw-pal...
"The case was investigated, litigated and supervised over the years by a host of attorneys and historians in OSI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, and HRSP, including Director Eli M. Rosenbaum, Senior Trial Attorney Susan L. Siegal and Chief Historian Dr. Jeffrey Richter, all of whom have served with HRSP since its 2010 creation."
But sure. It's all about Trump.
2
@harif2 Okay. I went and figured. About a year ago I figured out that Trump is a carrot & stick kind of guy with no moral compass.
He will play ANY issue or situation as if it is a a card in a game, so long as he personally wins the hand. He's he's made it clear it's all about winning (numerous folks close to him have attested to this). He could care less about Nazis or Jews. They're good people- or not. Whatever gives him most leverage.
2
@Harif2
Let's be honest. Bush's grand fathers were both NAZI collaborators and both help fund Hitler's rise to power until the U.S. government stopped them in1942. Same for Harriman who was their business partner. The sins of the father...
2
I wonder if Richard Spencer and his ilk
volunteered to take this kindred spirit under their extreme right wings.
6
@dave fucio Probably not, because there's no evidence he was a Nazi; just a poor 18 YO kid pressed into service by the Nazis to work in a camp. He'd fail their test.
The tone of a fair number of commentators is "revenge at all costs". I ask sarcastically of these commentators, why should we not just stone him to death in Times Square ? The war criminal Japanese POW guards, who in many instances made some of the Nazi's look like choir boys, were given pardons by the U.S. about eight years after the war or so.
So folks, what's the vote, revenge or forgiveness ?
P.S. I am half Polish and had a Jewish great great grandparent.
14
@Alpha Dog
You somehow totally miss the point
3
@Alpha Dog
did you read this article?
Various administrations for DECADES have tried to deport this man, but no other country would accept him.
Now there is one that will...it has little to do with his age or with Trump.
At age 18 this man CHOSE to work directly for the Nazis and notice that he was one of a few of his countrymen who apparently felt this need and they (and their families)survived not doing so.
His chosen actions allowed the Nazi's to more easily and efficiently kill innocents for no reason but their ethnicity.
1
Once again, a published (but not fact-checked) article relating to WWII and the role of ethnic groups in the prosecution of Jews in the occupied territories, with wrong facts coming either of willful ignorance or laziness, which throws all Eastern Europeans together.
"Like other young men from Poland and Ukraine during the German occupation, Mr. Palij was trained by the Nazi special police, the SS"
Ms Katrin Bennhold should issue a correction and an apology. There were no ethnic Polish groups in SS. Although the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front contained a sizable number of non-Germans, no Polish unit was ever formed. Other minorities from prewar Poland including Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians both served in the Wehrmacht and formed their own Waffen-SS brigades. But no Poles, who were also victims of the Nazis (3 million ethnic Poles died) and had the largest underground army in Europe (which issued death penalties for collaborators). There were Nazi collaborators in Poland, but no ethnic Poles in SS.
27
Saying "There were Nazi collaborators in Poland" is like saying "The Pacific Ocean is full of water."
The Poles, uniquely among the conquered, went about the business of slaughtering Jews, Gypsies, gays, the weak and sick with zeal, to the point where the Germans didn't even think it necessary to leave many supervisory soldiers to make sure the roundups were done properly. My parents and grandparents had horrific stories to tell, and tell them they did.
Poland was the only country where the slaughter continued even after the Russians and Allies drove the Germans totally out of the country. The Poles just kept emptying the camps and killing, perhaps in an effort to hide their complicity in the slaughter, or just because they liked it.
The current Polish government, filled with fascist thugs and led by one, is valiantly trying to whitewash the country's eager participation in the slaughter (went so far as to make it a crime to suggest it even happened).
But there are people like me, people who lost at least a dozen family members in the Polish run camps, that will not allow the whitewash to happen as long as we draw breath.
38
@Anna
The article doesn't say that he was in the SS. It only says that he was trained by the SS.
2
@Anna
"but no ethnic Poles in SS"
utter nonsense. there were plenty of ethnic poles in the SS. what there wasn't was an explicitly polish division. this is because, for various strategic reasons, nazi strategy was to destroy the idea of the polish state and in other places, such as in ukraine, nazi strategy to get more volunteers included giving them false hope of their own state against an invading russia.
again, there were plenty of poles in the SS. to pretend otherwise is simply nonsensical and to further couch this lie in some fable of universal polish national heroism is absurd and to be ignorant of the pretty straightforward strategies of the germans in this regard.
9
All tough guys. Pathetic how they break down like little girls when confronted with their past.
9
@Plennie Wingo
Like the little girls, little boys and the parents they murdered.
Why can’t we convict war criminals in the US.
Why was he not indicted and sentenced for lying about how he came to the USA.
How about the rest of the war criminals openly living in the USA bc no country will take them.
Why are they not indicted and sent to jail here in the USA for lying to immigration?
How is that not a news story?
Way to go NYT!
7
@Nycoolbreez
You ask: "How about the rest of the war criminals openly living in the USA bc no country will take them."
Read the article: "The expulsion of the former guard, Jakiw Palij, rid the United States of the last known surviving Nazi war crimes suspect still residing in the country...."
3
I believe the NYT provided fine coverage of Project Paperclip, the operation that imported “useful” Nazis like Werner von Braun’s V2 team, and recruited any ex-Nazis it could as “anti-Communist spies” regardless of the roles the played during the War - back when it was exposed and fresh news late last century.
The Times has also followed I believe every case about those deliberately allowed in, then stripped of citizenship over the years.
1
@Nycoolbreez Because the punishment for lying on your passport can be deportation. There is an investigation, after which there is a determination. It's not exactly a trial, but it's a judicial process.
He should have been hunted down, separated from his family and/or made to watch them die, had all his possessions taken, then put to years of hard labor while being beaten and starved.
For starters.
This country's sympathy for the Nazis has always been beyond disgusting. Even recently, letting this animal and more like him walk around free while 'justice' was being contemplated was spitting in the eyes of those millions whose lives these feral animals destroyed.
To bad for him he wasn't a Nazi scientist like Von Braun. America welcomed those war criminals who helped kill millions with open arms after the war - "Well, yes, he was a Nazi. But now he's our Nazi."
And it seems under the current administration, they're making a valiant attempt at a comeback.
Land of the free, home of the brave, indeed.
5
Made watch his family die? Who would carry that execution? For what reason, collective punishment? You are no different than him if you think that way. This country is better than that and just because he committed an atrocity it doesn’t mean that we should do the same. Jail or execute him but punish his family for it?
14
Von Braun’s team worked slave laborers to death by the hundreds, not the millions.
We wouldn’t have needed to, except we did all we could to damage the efforts of American Robert Goddard to perfect the liquid-fuel rocket engine he invented here, first.
As for the rest, we were in the grip of Cold War hysteria crested by Joe McCarthy and his cult, rather like our “isolationist” excuse for letting Germany re-arm, thanks to Charles Lidberg, and his Nazi friends, and our current obscene International policy of again blessing dictators and cursing their victims led by Donald Trump, President, though rejected by about 3 million more of us than voted for him.
2
@DD You'd rather von Braun et al would have been taken by the Soviets?
3
"Do not bestow on others what you do not desire others do to you."
"If you killed his father, he would kill your father; if you killed his elder brother, he would kill your elder brother. This being the case, though you may not have killed your father and elder brother with your own hands, it is but one step removed."
When you cannot forgive, you can still try freeing the self from you by striving to forget.
7
That is the irrational line that is leading Polish bigots to claim there were never any Polish Nazis, or death camps on Polish soil, run by a good many Polish Nazis, and the restoration ofPolish and Hungarian, just to name two, “populist” parties out to stop anyone from emigrating to their lands so they can Make Poland/Hungary Great Again, by helping kill more minority community members.
2
As a jewish person, I am appalled by his behavior. And, he was 18 years old at the time. He apparently lived in the US for over 50 years without any crimes.
If he oversaw a camp or planned executions I'd support this. He was an 18 year old boy at the time.
13
@Doug Graiver
His "work" and his chosen actions allowed the Nazi death machine to function more easily....to kill without difficulties.
He was 18 yrs old and made his choice.
The government has tried to deport him for decades, but found no country to accept him until now. Its not like Trump just suddenly waved a magic wand and deported him.
No, he didn't plan executions, he allowed them to be carried out more easily.
@RLiss And every soldier at Gitmo alllowed interrogations and torture to be carried out more easily. Will we be prosecuting them one day when we decide that was bad stuff?
I reside a few blocks from where he lived. Every year there would be a protest in front of his house. According to some of my neighbors most days he would leave his house and take the bus to the senior center in Ridgewood and Glendale to play cards and socialize, ironic since in the 30’s and 40’s those neighborhoods were hotbeds of German Bund activity yet none were rounded up and interned like Japanese-Americans and some Italian-Americans.
Thank the career professionals at the Justice Department Office of Special investigations which was created in the 70’s to deal with Nazi war criminals by congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and was under frequent attack by the likes of old Nixon and Reagan hand Pat Buchanan and others.
58
@Merrill R. Frank German-Americans s from NYC were interred on Ellis Island:
http://www.fox5ny.com/news/new-york-city-during-world-war-ii
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
3
@Merrill R. Frank
Pat Buchanan is better understood in his original German.
1
I do thank them...the delays in prosecution and return of the monsters should not let us forget what they are and what they deserve. From some of the comments, some very ignorant, I suppose they would believe the serial killers should be released from prison when old. Why aren’t these captured Nazis ever asking for forgiveness, instead of excusing their acts, after living in disguise: their arrogance remains despicable! Some acts are unforgivable and it is a mockery to victims who can no longer speak to suggest otherwise. See, their victims are dead, or, still live with the memories of monsters, who gleefully threw babies in the air and shot them. They liked what they did, and people who extend to them their pity, are apologists.
4
Let this be a warning to other 95 year olds throughout the country: Old, old crimes may be eventually, much, much later and before they reach antique status will be punished.
2
Most of the research shows that even today, if a regime decides on a course of genocide of any group, there will be no shortage of able citizens to implement it.
11
At 95, it’s a bit much to deport him to a country he never lived in. For what? He’s not exactly mobile and it seems like an extreme waste of taxpayer money in order to placate the revenge seekers. I see nothing gained here except a “win” for Trump.
19
@Reader
the fed. government has tried for decades to get another accept him, and to deport him there.
They had no other country willing to take him until now....should he get a pass for his deliberate and chosen actions because he is now very old?
1
Prosecuting war criminals is very important work and should be carried out in full, showing the criminals no quarter.
However, an earlier version of this article today mentioned he lived with is elderly wife but now that is redacted.
Is this because it wasn't true or... so we don't feel sympathy for her? Loss of a spouse at that age is very difficult on the one surviving. I feel for her.
11
@Citizen
forest/ trees....
1
Time flies. He's 94 now which means that he would have been 21 in 1945 and the liberation of the camps. Of course our congressional delegation courageously signed a unanimous resolution to deport him, many of whom can't remember being twenty one. Try to get that same delegation to unanimously demand federal money for our subway. They have their priorities.
3
While Assad of Syria gets a pass for killing untold thousands of his own citizens from the U.N. thanks to the outdated UN rule of one country,Russia in this case, gets veto power to stop conflicts.
4
@charlie kendall
The UN may be giving Syria a pass,but the UN is a joke and a very sick one at that.
Fact finding is not possible when all the witnesses are deceased. Rather than punish this last soul living who was part of the events that occurred, he should be given clemency, such freedom be conditional on his charing his memories, whether they were fear of punishment for defying the Nazis or enthusiasm for their goals.
We are long past any value in imposing personal guilt, and to waste his few years by not gaining his personal experience of something that, in a different form, could reoccur would be a waste.
8
@Call Me Al
did you read this article?
Various administrations for DECADES have tried to deport this man, but no other country would accept him.
Now there is one that will...it has little to do with his age or with Trump.
At age 18 this man CHOSE to work directly for the Nazis and notice that he was one of a few of his countrymen who apparently felt this need and they (and their families)survived not doing so.
His chosen actions allowed the Nazi's to more easily and efficiently kill innocents for no reason but their ethnicity.
I just hate the fact potentially millions of dollars were spent to deport this now harmless criminal. There are Americans who need help desperately. The federal money spent to remove him from the U.S. could have gone a long way to relieve the suffering of decent citizens. Ultimately, this is a hollow victory.
29
@Dwight.in.DC
Actually, I don't think it is a hollow victory--it is symbolic; symbols are important.
7
@Dwight.in.DC
Sorry, this is not a hollow victory. It is a moral victory. Yes, this should not have cost so much, but if the guy participated in the killing of Jews, he needs to face justice.
If you think what happened to the Jews won't happen again, that is misguided. Look at what Trump is doing to our "illegal immigrants" - separating children from their parents, without due process - sounds very much like the Third Reich.
4
Maybe you would feel differently if your grandparents’ relatives were killed by Nazis because they were Jewish and born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyone who cooperated with the Nazis, no matter how old or frail, deserves to be here. Not when the descendants of their victims live here.
8
Trump: He didn't work for me, but he was someone I read about--wait, I didn't read about him (LOL), but I saw on the television that he's been here for a long time and I know him to be a very good and decent man.
8
Sad all over.
I'm sure all of the old frail men who got sent to his camp were hoping for mercy much as this old frail man has been asking for it.
At 95, with the best part of it lived in America, I'd say he got the bigger portion of it.
31
The US authorities should have put him in jail while they sorted out transporting him back to Europe. It is disgusting that he was allowed to remain free on US soil for all this time.
55
@Lauren G For what crime? He is only being deported for providing false information on his immigration application. That's a civil action; we don't jail people for that in America.
Conceivably he could have been indicted here for working as a camp guard in Poland. Presumably there was no evidence to support such a prosecution.
@Lauren G: Guys that age and in that condition do not go to jail, in the usual sense. They go to nursing homes or hospitals at the expense of taxpayers. We call it jail.
Don't mistake this with some sudden turn to justice by Trump. He just likes deporting people.
67
@E.B.
If Trump did something you don't like, he is evil. If he did something you like, he is not good, he is just evil in another way that somehow get this one right.
Truly an objective and balanced observation.
2
@AmateurHistorian No, if the term "evil" means anything at all, Trump simply IS evil. That doesn't fluctuate; it pertains to his fundamental nature. How can this be perceived as a contradiction? How can it be difficult to grasp?
In one respect, I'm glad that these murderous men become fewer and that we shan't hear about them for much longer. But then I wonder, if they are no longer here, will people forget more easily the misery they caused to the world. Alive, they are a reminder that they might not look like monsters, but monsters they are. And as we are slowly seeing in this country, a country that once fought so hard against oppression and tyranny, people need a perpetual reminder.
17
The passage of time does not erase or mitigate the guilt in a crime such as the Holocaust.
He should have been executed altogether decades ago, but this very small measure of justice is still better than no justice.
32
@Jerrold Executed for what? Do you have evidence of a crime? Do we execute every person who worked as a guard at a German death camp?
1
As an American doing Holocaust research here this is just revolting to me.
“He was not a bad person. He was a good neighbor.”
Yeah. Weren't they all. Merely guarding bridges and rivers--like THEY needed guards. Mr. Palij is an old man who has survived as a free man decades longer than those murdered. How lovely for him!
88
Not only is he an old man but he was also a young man a middle aged man and a man who unlike all he dehumanize lived a long life. May the rest of his days in custody be long, hard and dehumanizing. May he on his dying bed admit the truth of his heinous past and ask for forgiveness. May those upon whose ears his pleas fall deny his request.
7
And you think your comments erudite and persuasive? These people were investigated by the Justice Department.
To me, this seems a silly and stupid gesture done much more for publicity and face value than any real value. The guy is doing nothing wrong now and has not for 75 years, is an ancient man, and they still want to punish him for crimes done so long ago as a message to others that all Nazi WWII wrongs will be punished no matter what? Ridiculous.
With all the many recent brutal crimes in the world and in America that go unpunished and uncared about, this absurdity is what we are spending our time and resources on?
60
@Mark Shyres
As I wrote, there is no good outcome to this. Do something or do nothing, either way leaves behind a bad taste.
And he is too old to go to prison in Germany. He will be cared for in a nursing home at taxpayers' expense. That's why Germany did not want him.
There is no concrete crime they can charge him with. If they could pin a single murder upon him, things would be different. But just being drafted as a guard with no direct role in murdering someone... Besides, at some point in time, our ICE agents may be facing similar persecution. Perhaps not for murder, but for other cruelties committed.
On 3 November 1943 the entire labour force of 12000 men at Trawniki Camp were murdered. These men had already suffered unimaginably inhumane working conditions at the Camp. On the same day, in similar camps, over 30000 men were murdered. The whole slaughter was called Operation Harvest Festival, and it was the single largest mass murder of Jews in the entire War. Is it "ridiculous" to insist that this man, who participated in such an abominable crime against humanity, should not be permitted, however old he may now be, to live out his days quietly and peacefully enjoying the protection of a country whose deepest values, for which it valiantly fought in that War, represent the very antithesis of those in whose name he acted many years ago?
8
@richard conner I'm guessing you've never had a close relative that was murdered. Trust me, there is no closure. Just because he "doing nothing wrong now" doesn't forgive the very many wrongs he committed in the past.
9
It appears this guy just worked for the Nazis during the 40's. I believe him when he says that Nazis would've killed him and his family if he didn't join them. Nevertheless, US government has every right to deport him due to his past behavior. He is sent to Germany and he's not even German. It should bother this guy more that no country wants him than if he's being tried as a Nazi. What this guy did in the 40's is similar to what a guy might do in prison to survive. It's little bit sad that he's being deported but also redeeming that he got what was coming to him. I just hope he wasn't unfairly targeted as a Nazi.
3
You actually wrote “this guy just worked for the Nazis”. How do you not see anything wrong with that?
7
Again investigated.
@Luckycharms
the fed. government has tried for decades to get another accept him, and to deport him there.
They had no other country willing to take him until now....should he get a pass for his deliberate and chosen actions because he is now very old?
2
Clearly there are a few decent people lurking quietly in the backrooms of the White House who discretely worked to bring this about - most likely without his knowledge. No doubt he'd be moved to rescind this deportation if he read about it, 'cause he's probably of the opinion that there were 'lots of really good people' in the Nazi ranks. But I jest, he doesn't read.
Now, let's hope that Fox doesn't pick up this news story....
3
It’s a strange thing. How simple to denounce him for his lack of truthfulness, and hope that in Germany he faces charges for serving as a guard at a death camp. For enabling the final solution.
But then contrast his case with Werner Von Braun. Decorated American citizen and accomplished scientist. But also personally responsible for weapons of mass destruction raining down on London.
Who is worse?
Us. For allowing war to continue when we know how evil it is. We smugly take satisfaction in the persecution of a single nazi, while American troops are abroad, fighting illegally in our name, and American defense companies are profiting off the death of innocent people in counties we aren’t at war with.
Who’s the war criminal here?
151
@Dan
Werner was also responsible for the death of 20,000 slave laborers. He personally selected them, then denied he had anything to do with it...until he was proven a liar as well as a NAZI SS Major and war criminal. That does not even get to the Brits his V Weapons killed in the Blitz. He wrote a book, "I Reach for the Stars" and the Brits subtitled it, "But most often I hit London."
4
@Dan
Von Braun is long dead.
Yes, you make a valid point but we can no longer punish, in any way, Van Braun and the other scientists like him.
The US may have been involved in some misguided wars for various reasons but to compare us to a country which knowingly and systematically attempted and almost succeeded in exterminating an entire religion and anyone else that did not meet their definition of Arian, has got to be the most disgusting false equivalency ever; not to mention, disparaging to our service members, the majority of whom struggle to do the right thing everyday under very difficult circumstances, and not harm innocents. Yes, it is clear who the real war criminals are in this dichotomy and they are not us.
2
The United States government quite infamously saved the lives of a number of Nazi officials when it carried out ‘Operation Paperclip’, some of whom had been scheduled for execution at Nuremberg.
One of those Nazis went on to head NASA, because beating the Russians into space was obviously more important than accountability.
Why target these geriatric potential war criminals now? Aren’t there some a bit closer to home that we should be concerned with?
29
I agree- why target an elderly man who at best was a lowly prison guard over 70 years ago and who has not committed any crimes since? In fact, German authorities will most likely not press charges due to a lack of evidence. Purely politically motivated move.
16
@Jan
I believe it was also "purely political motivation" responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews.
1
@Jan
Various administrations for DECADES have tried to deport this man, but no other country would accept him.
Now, one has.
If another nation had agreed to accept him decades ago, this would not be a conversation, but they did not. The government (under many different administrations) TRIED to have him deported, but could not.
It is not about his current age or about Trump.
He CHOSE at age 18 to work directly for the Nazis (which most of his countrymen did not choose to do, and they and their families survived that decision). His chosen actions expedited the Nazi death machine and the extermination of innocents for no other reason than their ethnicity.
SHOULD it be made to seem OK now?
Take a look at the Golden State Killer, decades after his crimes he is being prosecuted.
1
"The 'last adjudicated Nazi criminal living in the United States.'" Let's hope he is the last Nazi living in the U.S. Until those who worked for Nazi Germany are all dead, the "adjudicated" modifier may be the best we can do within our system of justice. To all those who continue to work to bring all living war criminals to justice, bless you. To those who eluded justice on earth, let us hope another form of justice awaits. Regardless, let us all never forget.
60
@Chris I've got news for you, your country is rank with Nazis, and they are encouraged daily by your president, the GOP and Fox news.
They are marching brazenly with swastikas in your country now Chris. And nobody is stopping them.
2
@Chris There are Nazis living here, unfortunately. And they are bold. I saw it on the news. One ran for office. I don't remember if he won.
2
It seems that for foreigners applying for visas or green card the question is taking lightly. Possibly thousands of Germans coming to the U.S. lied when answering this question.
4
He should have put on a DC-3 (no plug door) 20 years ago, a parachute strapped to his back, and kicked out over Poland.
7
While I think he should have been held accountable I also believe that during such political atrocities most ordinary people are faced with extremely difficult decisions. Either join the invading armies or die and have your families killed as well. We in the US have never faced such a situation in the past several generations and we are lucky.
But I am of the opinion that our current administration is involved in various other crimes against humanity, specifically the kidnapping and trafficking of refugee children and those Border Agents and ICE officials are equally complicit in these atrocities. When the stories of sexual abuse or violence start being exposed will Americans hold this administration criminally responsible and will they prosecute the lower ranking officials who carried out the orders?
47
@Maria
Don't get partisan. Democrat and Republican presidents alike have started started illegal wars and carried out secret and not so secret war crimes. By only focusing on one you are doing exactly the thing that allows people to conveniently forget the past.
10
@Maria
so you buy his "I was made to do it" defense?
Even though the majority of his countrymen did not see the need to work directly for the Nazis to survive? Or to allow their families to survive?
I bet it was about good pay and benefits. Why would the Nazis want guards they had to coerce?
In seventy years, ICE, who deported this man, will be remembered as perpetrators of a crime against humanity—ripping children from their parents— perpetrated by the US government. Unless we learn from history, we will continue to repeat atrocities. The irony here is quite something.
65
He is so old now that the whole thing is pointless if it really matters to Germany they would have taken him years ago and if he has been a good citizen all of these years maybe he was forced into it to save his family, I mean wouldn't you do anything to protect your family I know I would.
16
That's what they all said..... "Just doing it to save myself, just following orders.....".
9
It is not pointless to send a message that if you willingly participate in atrocities against humanity, you will never be forgiven.
8
@Exiled NYC resident They were all caught in Eastern Europe. Between Hitler and Stalin, that was their choice!
As a German citizen, I find it utterly humiliating that my country is to serve as a dumping ground for former nazi guards who aren't even German and who are no longer wanted in the United States.
He spent a short term of "service" as a foreign mercenary for a former German regime which is the antithesis of everything Germany stands for today. Then he moved to the US, built up his life there, and obtained citizenship. Decades later, his past was discovered, and his US citizenship removed.
What, exactly, is the argument for German responsibility for that guy? Should we take care of him as a gesture of gratitude for his former service?
I don't think so.
Do we do something good for the advancement of our diverse, pluralistic society by letting such people in? Does it help the struggle against racism, anti-semitism, and other forms of hatred?
Hardly.
It is really nothing else than a merely symbolic, but very undignified gesture of submissiveness towards our American allies turned bullies. The country that recently voted for Trump, the country of the crowds who cheered for making Mexico pay for the wall, that country urgently needs to get rid of some former nazi? And needs our help for this? Give me a break.
On the German side, to justify accepting Palij with a notion of historical and moral responsibility is a travesty of these terms, a sign of moral confusion on the part of the German government, and an insult to all who take our national responsibilities seriously.
30
This man’s predicament was created without any doubt by Germany. Should I name all things that make up the predicament? No, I think it’s obvious.
You think it’s a humiliation for Germany today, never mind the millions of people who would gladly take this humiliation for their lives back. Somehow I don’t get the feeling this person is actually German. Just someone who thinks their comment will get more consideration, even though the content deserves none.
10
@Andreas - Yes, Germany should take responsibility for this individual that committed atrocities in the name of Germany. His whole direction during those years was to follow the commands of the German and the German doctrine to kill all Jews. Thus, he is and should be Germany's problem, no matter how many years have passed.
9
@Andreas
It shows German are not petty like American, Poles and Ukrainian and actually have compassion. The people that carried out this injustice and the people that stood by and didn't speak up are the type that allowed Nazi to succeed.
2
I hope that Mr. Palij has learned from his mistakes and glimpsed from his perch of privilege in this great country what true suffering is. What the survivors of the Holocaust endured—not even to mention the 6 million who didn’t survive—would never have happened without collaborators like him, even if they were indeed bullied to join the ranks and given false promises. We should all memorialize these mistakes and remember those who used the horrors of this time to inspire us to be better as the survivor of the Boston Holocaust memorial writes in his memoir From Broken Glass.
1
Coincidentally, I saw yesterday Louis Malle's "Lacombe, Lucien" (1974), a movie on how regular teens looking for their place in the world became nazi collaborators. Palij was 18 when recruited, while the Lucien -- the character from the movie -- 17; farmers, poor, uneducated, they share many characteristics. Though this context cannot be an excuse for their behavior, of which at the end they must face the consequences, it's better for everybody to understand the role alienation plays in losing our young ones to extremism. Engage those kids in your life; do not reject the chance to become a mentor -- if it arises. Who knows, you may even learn one or two things yourself.
22
@Aguillon-Mata: the French had a choice. No reprisals if they did not actively collaborate. The choice for Ukrainians and other East Europeans was this: a bullet in the head or collaboration. Which would you choose, O great social justice warrior?
1
Let's work hard to make sure this dark history is never repeated. Down with dictatorship!
15
@Doddy
The move revenge seeking like this and "never again" action in the Middle East the most likely something like the Holocaust will happen in the future. There is balance to everything and if you go to the extreme there will be pushbacks.
1
Unless he has been convicted of actually killing someone, a subject which the article does not touch, I felt that his 69 years in this country and his advanced age were indicating a bit of overkill in his deportation. And then the article states that Trump and his henchmen have taken a special interest in Palij's case.
So now the rush to deport him makes sense -- if you're a Republican follower of Trump or a twelve-year-old with the intellect of a mushroom.
If the man had been punished back in 1945, as he should have been, he'd have gotten a 10 or 20 year sentence and would have been freed long ago, like Albert Speer, the infamous Nazi who worked to death countless thousands of slave laborers.
I know the revenge seekers are out there by the millions. But just as humanity rightly sought a measure of justice for the millions murdered in Nazi concentration camps, it also can ask that a 95 year old -- far less culpable than Speer -- should have been left in his home to die.
34
@Edsan
And what age does the suspect need reach before we suspend seeking justice? Does justice morph into revenge after a person hits 80?
7
@Edsan
" I felt that his 69 years in this country and his advanced age were indicating a bit of overkill.."
But you don't feel that murdering 6,000 men, women and chldren a day is "overkill"?
12
@Edsan He LIED on his application when he came here in 1949!
I wonder if you would have felt the same if it was YOUR family who was slaughtered in the holocaust? Or if he was living in Boston instead of NYC?
I DESPISE Trump. I've done so since the 80s. But I am glad that his administration could do one thing that was right.
Why don't you go talk with some of your Jewish friends who lost part or all of their families during the holocaust? You might find some non-Trumpers with intellects much greater than you think who agree with this!
10
Sometimes justice is too long delayed but when it is finally served up it is oh so sweet.
7
@Bruce Northwood
‘Schadenfreude’ is totally German, after all.
5
Am curiouos toknow what happens to people like this when returned to Germany -- actually, am also curious to know what happens when people already in Germany are discovered to have been prison guards. Do they do anything to them, or just let them be? Do they have a special nursing home or homes where they keep the old ones, which I assume would be all of them nowadays?
4
Is it just me, or does this prosecution and high level political involvement feel like an overkill? I don’t mean to undermine the tragic extent of the holocaust, however these men were merely carrying out orders, as opposed to those in power who planned and ordered them. Similar (in nature, not extend and cruelty) crimes are committed daily by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, etc. Shouldn’t the political efforts be focused on these present day crimes.
19
@Andy S, I cannot believe that this needs to be said, but evidently it does: If it wasn't for the masses who were "merely carrying out orders", there would have been no Holocaust. In fact, many of the worst atrocities in history would not have happened, were it not for the little Eichmanns "merely carrying out orders".
And that is why this is so essential, and why it needs to be done. Too many "ordinary people" take very little moral responsibility in the face of rising fascism around the world. They are perfectly happy to coast through the moral universe and, when faced with extreme suffering inflicted by their own societies, only point fingers at "those in power".
Every one of us has moral responsibility. Abdicating that responsibility is a moral decision itself, one that must be severely condemned.
24
Deporting 95 years old sounds more like revenge than justice
34
@Tumiwisi
It's both...and both rather late, but well deserved.
6
@Tumiwisi
did you read this article?
Various administrations for DECADES have tried to deport this man, but no other country would accept him.
The fact that he is now aged 95 is irrelevant to the case...he would have been deported decades ago, other a different administration, if there had been a country willing to take him.
At age 18 he CHOSE to work directly for the Nazis, which, sorry, most of his countrymen did not feel they had to do to save their own lives of those of their families.
He CHOSE to expedite and help the Nazi machine as it exterminated innocent people due to nothing but their ethnicity.
2
If I'm not mistaken there where over 40,000,000 killed during W.W. 2, not just 6,000,000 or some arbitrary figure.
13
@Walter McCarthy
Quite a bit over 40,000,000 but most are Chinese and Russian, you know, "lesser people"
9
Arbitrary figure??? Whose side did you fight for? It's been long since proven.
4
@Walter McCarthy
Roughly 6,000,000 Jews and roughly 6,000,000 Roma were each killed by the Third Reich.
The Russians suffered the highest national casualty rate during the war, in no small part because Allied Command preferred to let Russians die if it meant not intervening.
Josef Stalin is thought to be responsible for the deaths of over 40,000,000 Russians, many of whom were shipped to the gulags never to be seen again.
12
The U.S. orchestrated the slaughter of over three million Vietnamese for a 'good cause'. Napalm can incinerate just as effectively as a crematorium. And then there were the deliberate killing of tens thousands in the Middle East and other parts of the world.
Are Henry Kissinger, or Dick Cheney, or other 'distinguished' civil servants ever going to be held accountable? Never. After all, they were "just following orders" from the president, a phrase we know well already.
The image of the goddess of Justice wears a blindfold. Maybe she should take off the blindfold of 'impartiality' and take a look around. It's long overdue.
137
Please stop comparing one nation's / people's atrocities. It weakens your argument and missed the point by a long shot.
8
Extradition is appropriate. Exile is not. This man is evil, and deserves to be punished for his crimes. Denaturalization and deportation, however, is just the United States attempt to punish someone for crimes without due process. Yes, he lied. That should be a crime. The punishment should be jail, not deportation which is always a human rights violation.
1
How about putting him in a city jail, in population?
@Edward Allen This man is not necessarily evil. The tragedy of war is that it makes even perfectly decent people do horrible things. You had leading Nazis who did horrible things in the war and then led spotless lives afterward. And even Americans do horrible things in war. (not that I'm equating the two).
As for jail, no crime has been proven. He is being deported because he lied on his immigration application, which is a civil offense, not a criminal one.
1
@Edward Allen
Can you please provide any evidence that “deportation is always a human rights violation “? I know of no international agreement that takes that position. As long as proceedings are conducted fairly, most countries maintain the right to expel those who entered under false pretenses, and certainly those who are reasonably believed to have committed serious crimes.
1
Interesting that as the generation that both witnessed and committed the atrocities of WWII are dwindling we have a resurgence of racist nostalgia in this country. Are we truly doomed to repeat history?
The killing of 6000 people in a single day--the mind reels and we distance ourselves. Instead, think of one parent and their beautiful young child herded, brutalized--confused and despairing until the end trying to comfort each other and save each other. Now magnify that by 20, 50, 100, 200........
We can never forget, we should never forgive and we should never tolerate those who begin this cycle in the small ways that erode society. It's fragile and needs to be defended!.
40
@ricodechef
The notion that “history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes” is basically nonsense. It repeats. Over and over again. All because it takes too much effort to care.
Helter Skelter!
3
Does this mean we get to deport Double Agent "Dirty Don" Trump at some point?
14
Just goes to show you. Be careful of who you join up with when you're 18 years old. It will come back to haunt you. Remember,, there are always people out there who will never let things go.
Aside from that I would really appreciate it if the Times would find out specifically of what crimes Palij committed and then publish them so we can have a better idea of just how evil a person he is.
11
@Alex Vine
To certain people, being German or European or Human is enough to be hold responsible for Nazi because "why didn't they have the power of hindsight and stopped Nazi earlier". Revisionist history is strong in the US.
5
@Alex Vine
He was obligated to quit his position as a "security guard" when he saw tens of thousands being murdered.
3
@Alex Vine
try reading the article....
He CHOSE to join the Nazi's as a guard, he was assigned to guard rivers, bridges etc. BUT what is important is that his chosen actions helped expedite the Nazi war machine and exterminate people who were being killed solely because of their ethnicity.
Hard to believe in that time and place he didn't know what he was working for, or what his actions were accomplishing. It was no secret to the other workers! Couldn't realistically be kept secret.
Unlike most of his countrymen he worked for the Nazi's directly, and surprisingly (sarcasm) those who didn't do so survived as did their families. He CHOSE to get better pay and benefits by working for the Nazi's.
1
Tump advocated for his removal - now there is a shock for sure! One good and decent thing he has done. Punishment does not go away in the case of murder/contributing to murder. Thank you DT.
7
@kw, nurse this fellow had a trial and evidence was brought against him, and his citizenship revoked. the immigrants trying to come here and get asylum aren't even being given a hearing... seems like trump's administration is taking a playbook out of WWII.
1
@kw, nurse
sorry, but you read the article? Administrations for decades have known this man's identity and WWII role....but without a country willing to accept him, there was nothing to be done.
Trump was just "there" when Germany finally agreed to accept this man. He is not the big hero of the event.
It’s never too late to punish these criminals. It’s small comfort but at least I know that for the last 73 years they went to sleep each night wondering when there would be knock on their door. Way too many conspirators were never punished.
As to those who are sympathetic you clearly need to read up on the holocaust. There is no statute of limitations for all those involved in the starvation, torture and murders of millions and millions of people.
143
@ann
If you think for one second that someone could have kept to himself for so many years without already paying an enormous psychological toll for whatever he may have done, I would urge you to watch the movie ‘Apt Pupil’.
4
Good..I hope he suffered everyday.
6
It should be noted that although he was born on prewar Polish territory, Jakiw Palij was an ethnic Ukrainian, not Polish. In fact, the Germans did not recruit ethnic Poles as concentration or death camp guards. None of the so-called "Trawniki men" were classified as ethnic Poles.
19
@Charles Chotkowski
How interesting, and sad, it is Mr. Chotkowski, you are unwilling to recognize and accept that there were many ethnic Poles who willingly cooperated in turning in and murdering Jews. I know this, not just through history books, but conversations with the 95 year old father of my closest friend, who survived the Nazis by hiding for the entire war in his native Poland, sometimes being assisted by sympathetic Gentile neighbors, but sometimes being betrayed by anti-Semitic Poles, who were more than willing to assist the Nazis.
31
@Charles Chotkowski, that's not true. A very large part of the population of Ukraine - the western half that has Poland as its immediate neighbor - identifies as Polish.
Millions of Europeans, of various ethnicities, nowadays live (and have for many decades) within borders of countries other than those of their ethnic and cultural origin. That's just the basic history of Europe and its wars and migrations. The fact has caused many terrible conflicts, too.
6
@Kayemtee
I think it would be helpful if you read a little history so that you could put things into context and get a correct idea about the scale of Polish-Jewish violence - it occurred but not on the scale trumpeted by some. The following position is worthwhile reading. It is in Polish but as it was originally a PhD dissertation at Columbia so I am sure it is available in English somewhere: Żydzi i Polacy 1918-1955: Współistnienie, Zagłada, Komunizm [Jews and Poles 1918-1955: Coexistence, Holocaust, Communism], pub. Fronda, 2000 ISBN 83-912541-8-6 (in Polish) and this: After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Relations in the Wake of World War II, East European Monographs, pub. 2003, ISBN 0-88033-511-4. Both by Marek Jan Chodakiwecz.
This is the story of the one of the faceless thousands who make genocides possible. They did the monsters’ work, the herding, the torture, the killing and made a good living out of it. When liberators appeared, they stripped off uniforms and vanished, eventually turning up in America, to live the American Dream. Themselves lawless people, they used the law to live a long and safe life here. Now old and frail, this ex-guard is forced to leave, but is still not punished. No wonder the phrase, “Never Again” is not a statement, but a plea.
147
@DO5: We might include among the faceless thousands involved in this genocide the many French and Dutch police who carried out the round up of Jews who were sent to perish of execution and diseases (such as typhus) in those foul concentration camps.
3
Very upsetting, on many counts. He's 95 and lived a long life. I remember my grandmother always saying that many of us think we would not take up arms and fight Hitler's war, but that is a hindsight opinion. He was 18 when he was acculturated into the Nazi cause and yes, he was on the wrong side of the war. Just very sad.
120
@RCJCHC
He was a lot further over than just "the wrong side".
10
@RCJCHC indeed there are many in USA at the moment turning a blind eye to Nazis and supporting them. Your president for one, his fine people on all sides comment?
How ironic today America deported an old Nazi when there are many new young Nazis acting with impunity being supported in their vile supremacist endeavours by the GOP and Fox news.
When will someone have the guts to stop today's 18 year olds being accultured into the Nazi cause?
7
@RCJCHC
He's not being deported because he was a former Nazi. He's being deported because HE IS ACCUSED OF COMMITTING WAR CRIMES--ATROCITIES AGAINST HUMANITY.
The dead are entitled to justice, however late. There's nothing sad about a war criminal being tried and convicted.
What's sad is people think there is moral ambiguity because he is old.
5
Now this is a deportation that I can get behind.
150
This result isn't close to justice.
89
@Grunt
Yes, but what Justice can be achieved when prosecuting those who participated in the deliberate killings of
12 Million human beings??
6
@ubique
This case has NOTHING to do with Palestinians. You prove the equivalence of anti-semitism and much anti-Zionism
2
Often, like here, I read that people died in the concentration camps! They were MURDERED in those camps.
242
Welcome to WOKE! You cannot fathom the depths of depravity that the Nazis committed. It must NEVER happen again, ever, anywhere.
Unfortunately we have seen (at least I have) similar atrocities in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Serbia, Russia and many other countries. You would do well to read REAL history and to understand and teach this to others.
If we do not soon regain control of THIS country, the possibility exists that it CAN happen here. Trump is a despot and, should he gain enough power, is perfectly capable of similar atrocities to save his hide and maintain power.
Read about the rise of Nazi Germany and draw similarities to our present political outrage. That should scare you beyond belief. VOTE!
10
Oh, come on he probably can't remember what happen yesterday.
I think its a disgrace done by vindictive people.
24
@Walter McCarthy
Vindictive people? Really? I'm curious what you may think of the deportation of people, including children, who never hurt anyone but found themselves victims of violence in their home country.
3
@Walter McCarthy Vindictive? This is not about revenge. This is about justice. Or does justice only apply to the young and able? Does it matter whether he can recall what happened yesterday? He will still get to live out his life, in relative comfort, unlike the murdered Jews who died in fearful and appalling conditions. BTW, not Jewish, just opposed to genocide in any form.
15
@Walter McCarthy - thanks for your thoughtful and considered comments! It's more likely that this murderer can't *forget* 'what happen (sic) yesterday'. Let me tell you a story about a man I was asked to attend on, about 20 years ago, who wanted to kill himself because the ghosts of the children he tortured in the concentration camp where he was a guard were coming back to him, and tormenting him. He was old, and dementing (that's SHORT-TERM memory-loss, not long-term), and he could no longer forget (a short-term memory process) to 'forget' his deeds. I referred him to another physician. I guess the ghosts hadn't forgiven him for his atrocities, the only ones who have the option to forgive him. As for the rest of us, it's our job to not forget...(see G. Santayana)
3
"On one day that year, more than 6,000 Jewish men, women and children died in the camp."
It's been quite a while since I've seen a more shocking use of the passive tense in a sentence. How do 6,000 people spontaneously "die" all at once on the same day? I think you meant "were murdered."
343
I agree with your statement, but must point out that the verb “died” is in the active past tense, not in the passive voice. “To die” has no passive voice; one must use the passive “to be killed/murdered” instead, which is what you propose.
2
@Jim Thanks! (Understand me, please: I'm not being sarcastic. I really do think you've made an important and relevant point.)
"Die" is not a passive verb
He should have been returned to Germany 15 years ago. You'd think Germany would be eager to accept these war criminals and finally bring them to justice.
19
@RP Smith
I think you might have Germany confused with The Hague.
5
Mr. Palij should be asked difficult questions. There was more than being forced to do the jobs; what really motivated him? Few really understand the deep-seated, irrational hatred of Jews that permeated Europe before, and during, the Holocaust. What role did his religion play in this?
At his age he won't last in jail for too long. But trying to obtain honest answers, however ugly, would serve to be educational, for the long run.
19
@Rosalie Lieberman
Not being killed or in prison is a great motivator. That's how most GI showed up in Vietnam.
4
@Rosalie Lieberman
Lots of Muslims could claim the same today: That they are being persecuted because of deep-seated, irrational hatred. After all, they are all judged by the deeds of a few fanatics. We Americans face the same prejudice in some other cultures.
Nothing is black and white, but if you had grown up in Germany during the third Reich, you would have been brainwashed just the same. And that it is effective, look no further than Trump's base.
3
@Kara Ben Nemsi
You cannot conflate prejudice against Jews with prejudice against Muslims. Jews weren't terrorists; they were hated for being 1. the Christ killer-thanks for that collective punishment! 2. collective communists 3. collective capitalists 4. controlling the banks, the press, even getting a Rosenfeld into the White House.
And no, I wouldn't have been brainwashed, I would have been sent to the camps and exterminated for being Jewish. BTW, unfortunately many Muslims deny the Holocaust, or call us fake Jews, with no connection to the Holy Land. Don't blame Trump for that
1
Never Forget!
38
Germany refused to take this former Nazi back for 13 years under Merkel. What a disgrace to all officials, german and American, that no one sought justice for this war criminal until now.
49
@SW
I think German prosecutors have been looking into this case, but unlike other cases of former SS guards, the concrete evidence against him personally was not enough for a criminal case. Tedious as it is, Germany and the US are two countries where criminal cases need to be reviewed individually, and we can't just hang em all. Even if we would like to.
17
@SW: he's a Nazi (or former Nazi), but that doesn't mean he was or is German. He was born in what is now Ukraine and was then Poland. He's not a German citizen, never has been as far as I can tell and was stripped of his American citizenship in the 2000's because they found out that he was a war criminal. Ukraine and Poland obviously don't want him, and he wasn't clearly Germany's problem either, so I can see why it took so long to deport him. I think Germany ended up taking him as a statement of moral responsibility more than anything else. I don't think he should have been living free all these years since the US identified him as a war criminal, though.
1
@SW: He was born and raised in his native region which is now part of the Ukraine. That also is where he joined the SS. Why did they not take him?