Hunting the Nazi in Your Neighborhood

N E W  Y O R K, May 15, 2002 -- 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 Like John Demjanjuk, the retired Cleveland steelworker whose citizenship was revoked in February, Palij lived a quiet life of obscurity in the United States.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.

"The United States was looking for labor, and hundreds of thousands of people were allowed to come over in the years after the war," he said. "If someone presented themselves, said I spent the war in such and such a place, usually they had to take his word for it, because so many records were inaccessible and the Soviet Union was not cooperating."

Not all known Nazis were barred from the United States, either, Rosenbaum said. If they were "deemed to be of value," they were allowed to immigrate, he said, adding that the same was true in Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

But, he said, "Most came in the old-fashioned way, by lying."

A Quiet Man or a Nazi Death Squad Member?

Neighbors of the accused Queens Nazi told local reporters they were shocked by the allegations against the man who lived so quietly in their midst. Some said they could not believe such terrible things about a man who was always so polite.

He was not discovered by a former victim of Nazi oppression seeing him on the street and pointing a finger in horror, like in some Hollywood movie. Rosenbaum said that as in nearly all the cases, Palij's name was culled from World War II-era documents that were cross-checked against immigration lists.

There was no answer at the telephone listed in Palij's name, and his lawyer, Ivars Berzins, declined to comment on the case.

According to the complaint filed in federal court on Thursday, Palij trained and served as an armed guard at the SS Labor Camp Trawniki, a slave labor camp for Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland beginning in February 1943.

By March 1944, the complaint said, he was serving in the Deployment Company, which carried out atrocities against Polish civilians. By the end of the year, Palij had been promoted by the SS and was serving in the SS Streibel Battalion, which rounded up thousands of Polish civilians for forced labor at fortification and construction sites in south-central Poland, the complaint said.

The OSI is not seeking to prosecute Palij for what he might have done during the war, though, because the U.S. government has no jurisdiction over that. Instead, the government is simply seeking to deport him for allegedly lying on documents he filed in order to get into the United States and then to obtain citizenship.

Time No Cure for Crime

The United States has been the most active country in the world in its pursuit of Nazi war criminals trying to live out their lives in obscurity, Rosenbaum said, and noted that this was the only country that received an "A" on a recent report by the Simon Wiesenthal Conference that looked at what 41 nations were doing to track down former Nazis.

Though it has been 57 years since the Nazis were defeated, Rosenbaum said that is no reason to drop the issue.

"One can't say that the mere passage of time has lessened the gravity of what these people did in Europe," he said. "It would be a great disservice to the many Holocaust survivors who make their lives in this country if they had to share their land with these people. It would also be a disservice to the men who fought in Europe to defeat the Nazis."

The effort to find suspected former Nazis was given a boost by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decision of the Russian government to open up Soviet archives from the World War II era. U.S. investigators were allowed to pore through those records, which gave them names of new potential suspects.

To date, the OSI has sought to have 115 people denaturalized. Of those, 67 have had their citizenship revoked, 54 of whom have been deported, and three of whom stood trial overseas.

‘Ivan the Terrible’

Perhaps the most notorious case is that of Demjanjuk. A federal judge ruled in 1981 that the Ukranian-born man was the Treblinka death camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible," who operated the gas chamber.

Demjanjuk was finally extradited to Israel in 1986, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged.

But information gained from the Soviet archives led an Israeli court to overturn his conviction in 1993, and after a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that prosecutors had withheld information during his trial, he was allowed to return to Cleveland.

The action against him in February was the result on a complaint filed by OSI, accusing him of lying on his citizenship application.

"It would send the wrong message to perpetrators of crimes against humanity that if you succeeded in eluding justice — justice with a small 'j' — long enough, you'll be able to get away with the crime," Rosenbaum said. "That's a very dangerous message to send. We should be sending the opposite message, that the civilized world will pursue you, even if it takes 50 years."

What Makes a Hero?

The failure of other countries to pursue suspected Nazi war criminals with the same vigor frustrates Rosenbaum, especially since so many of them live in countries that fell victim to atrocities at the hands of the Third Reich.

"It reflects a major abdication of moral responsibility by the governments of Europe," he said.

"Every nation seems to have difficulty grappling with unpleasant aspects of its own past," he added. "That seems to be true of some countries of Europe. The United States has come not quite to grips with slavery."

It may also reflect a division of opinion regarding World War II and the subsequent expansion of Soviet power through Eastern and Central Europe, and the revival of Josef Stalin's terror in the Soviet Union itself after the war.

In some countries, such as Ukraine, partisans who fought either alongside the Nazis or with their support against the Soviet Red Army are seen by some people as patriots who battled to rid their homeland of the oppression of Stalinism, and there have been movements to remove memorials to the Soviet soldiers who fought in the war.