BERLIN—The last known Nazi collaborator living in the U.S. was deported to Germany following a personal intervention by President Trump, U.S. officials said, ending years of legal and diplomatic wrangling between Washington and Berlin.

Jakiw Palij, a former member of the SS in German-occupied Poland and a postwar resident of Queens, N.Y., arrived in Germany on Tuesday morning on a U.S. government flight. He was the last of nine Nazi collaborators under deportation orders in the U.S., eight of whom have died in the last decade.

Berlin had long resisted receiving Mr. Palij, now 95 years old, because he wasn’t a German citizen and hadn’t been charged with any crime in Germany. Even now, experts said it was highly unlikely that he would face prosecution.

U.S. ambassador Richard A. Grenell took up the issue after his appointment this year during meetings with officials and key advisers to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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“The president told me directly to make it a priority to get the Nazi out,” Mr. Grenell said, adding that Mr. Trump, himself a native of Queens, had known about the case because of its prominence in the local press. Mr. Grenell later told reporters he had “made it a point” to raise the matter in every meeting he took with German officials.


Eli Rosenbaum, the director of human rights enforcement strategy and policy at the Justice Department’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, told reporters that Mr. Palij’s deportation would serve “as a warning to the would-be perpetrators of future human rights crimes that the civilized world will never cease pursuing them.”

A Polish national born in a region that is now part of Ukraine, Mr. Palij was trained by the SS at the age of 18 at its Trawniki camp in occupied Poland. The U.S. government alleges that he served as an armed guard in the adjacent slave labor camp, where inmates were worked to death and sometimes shot. He has acknowledged being a guard but denies being involved in anyone’s murder.

Mr. Palij entered the U.S. in 1949 as a refugee and was naturalized in 1957. In 2003 he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after authorities established he had lied about his Nazi past in his original application and failed to mention his SS training.

A 2004 court order to deport Mr. Palij couldn’t be executed after Germany, Poland and Ukraine all refused to receive him.


The German government, Mr. Grenell said, had recognized that while it had no legal obligation to host Mr. Palij, it had a moral obligation to do so.

In the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens where Mr. Palij lived, Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn came to the 89th Street home on Tuesday morning. Mr. Hikind has hosted protests outside the house for 10 years, even bringing Holocaust survivors.

“This is a guy who participated in the Final Solution. A Nazi. Everybody knew,” he said. “Why was Palij enjoying what America has to offer? Why was he able to walk the streets of Jackson Heights, Queens, and able to go and get a cup of coffee, get ice cream, and enjoy what he deprived so many people of?”

Mr. Hikind, a Democrat, praised the Trump administration for following through and finally getting Mr. Palij out of the country. “What a powerful message all over the world—that you will not get away,” he said.

“ The guilt of those who have committed the worst crimes in the name of Germany does not elapse. ” — German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas

Angel Naranjo, 49, who has lived next door to Mr. Palij for four years, said Mr. Palij used to garden around the house but fell about a year ago, and hasn’t been out since. He usually said hi, but didn’t talk beyond that.


“Why do they take action at the last minute? He lived many years here,” he said. “Right now he’s in the end of his life.”

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the Bild daily, the first to report on Mr. Palij’s arrival, that his government had accepted its “moral duty” toward the victims of Nazi atrocities. “The guilt of those who have committed the worst crimes in the name of Germany does not elapse,” Mr. Maas told local media.

Mr. Palij was transferred to a nursing home in Warendorf, near the western city of Münster, according to Mr. Grenell. Efforts to locate Mr. Palij for comment were unsuccessful.

Jens Rommel, the German prosecutor who conducted a preliminary investigation into Mr. Palij’s case in 2015, said the proceedings were stopped for lack of evidence.


The statute of limitations had expired on the offenses Mr. Palij had admitted to—his SS training and work as a camp guard—and there was no proof that he had engaged in or facilitated murder as alleged by U.S. authorities, Mr. Rommel said.

“The bar is higher in this case than with the procedure to revoke his U.S. citizenship, for which the fact that he lied was enough,” Mr. Rommel said. “Guarding a forced labor camp is not in itself assisted murder as long as there is no evidence that this was a death camp where people were systematically murdered.”

U.S. authorities have argued that none of the Trawniki inmates survived the harsh conditions, and that therefore armed guards who imprisoned people who were worked to death had themselves participated in murder.

The agreement reached between the U.S. and German governments didn’t involve any demands to prosecute Mr. Palij, Mr. Grenell said.

—Katie Honan contributed to this article.

Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com