Hunting the Nazi in Your Neighborhood

N E W  Y O R K, May 15 -- Like the demonstrators gathered outside Jakiw Palij's home, one office of the U.S. government has vowed not to rest until all the suspected former Nazis who hid their past to get into this country are off American soil.

The crowd gathered outside Palij's home in the New York City borough of Queens a day after the Justice Department filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, asking that the naturalized U.S. citizen have his citizenship revoked and be deported. Protesters said no Nazi should be allowed to live in the United States and vowed to picket the house every week until Palij is gone.

Palij is accused of hiding a Nazi past that included time as a guard at a forced labor camp and as a member of an SS unit when he sought entrance to the United States and then applied for U.S. citizenship in 1957.

The 78-year-old retired draftsman is just the most recent in a surge of suspected former Nazis who have been targeted by the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department, and according to OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum, he won't be the last. Federal authorities have deported or revoked the citizenships of more than 60 people, and are investigating more than 160 others suspected of concealing their Nazi pasts.

"There will be more in the next few weeks," Rosenbaum said, though he declined to give any more details about the upcoming cases.

Palij's case is fairly typical of those pursued by the OSI, which has been in operation since 1979. Like John Demjanjuk, the retired Cleveland steelworker whose citizenship was revoked in February, Palij lived a quiet life of obscurity in the United States.

Though it might seem strange that former Nazis and Nazi collaborators would seek haven in the United States after the war, Rosenbaum said it was natural. Jobs were scarce in war-torn Europe and plentiful in America, and while Germany and Austria were eager to be rid of any non-Germans or non-Austrians living there, the collaborators' own countries would likely not have welcomed them home.