Polish-born Jakiw Palij is facing deportation after federal investigators discovered he was a Nazi guard at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during 1943, when approximately 6,000 Jews were killed and buried in pits.  The Justice Department also claims that Palij worked at the nearby Trawniki training camps for secret service troops trained to carry out the extermination of Polish Jews.

In July, a federal immigration judge revoked Palij’s citizenship for falsely claiming on his 1949 immigration paperwork that he worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis.  Palij served with as a Nazi guard until the last weeks of the war in April 1945.  He emigrated here in 1949 at age 26 as a refugee of World War II.  Palij claimed that he did not enter the U.S. to save his life, but he came to America because he had nowhere else to go after spending five years in a refugee camp in Germany. 

Palij states that Nazis came to his town, Piadyki, when he was 18 years old to force him and other men to be guards, or else the men and their families would be killed.  He claims that he was responsible for patrolling roads and bridges at night, insisting that he never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war.  However, federal officials do not accuse him of taking part in these acts, but believe by that by cooperating as a Nazi guard he directly contributed to the eventual slaughter of Jews by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, was not persuaded by Palij’s arguments, stating that Nazis only took people they knew to be loyal and brutal.  Hier also noted that war criminals often state a common occupation when they were being trained to horrible things.

Since 1979, the Justice Department investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis’ being stripped of United States citizenship, while 59 former Nazis have been deported.