BERLIN — The U.S. deported a New York man who served as a guard at a Nazi labor camp to Germany late Monday, resolving a more than decade-long dispute between Washington and Berlin over who should take responsibility for the suspected war criminal.

U.S. immigration authorities flew Jakiw Palij, who turned 95 last week, on a government jet from a New Jersey airport to Düsseldorf, where he arrived early Tuesday before being transferred by ambulance to a care facility near Münster.

Though the case received little attention in Germany over the years, it was often front page news in New York, where protestors regularly gathered in front of Palij's home demanding he be deported. President Donald Trump, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, where Palij has lived for nearly seven decades, instructed Richard Grenell, his ambassador to Germany, to make resolving the case a priority.

"I felt very strongly that the German government had a moral obligation and they accepted that," Grenell said at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on Tuesday.

In recent years the U.S. failed to deport another eight suspected Nazi collaborators before they died because Germany refused to accept them, insisting it had no legal basis to do so.

The deportation comes at a time of deep tension between Berlin and Washington over a range of issues.

Pictures taken of Palij being removed from his New York home showed him on a stretcher, but details of his health weren't made clear. Both U.S. and German officials determined he was well enough to make the trip, however.

The deportation comes at a time of deep tension between Berlin and Washington over a range of issues, from trade to defense spending to Germany's support for Russia's Nord Stream pipeline project. That Angela Merkel's government agreed to take Palij despite its longstanding reservations is in part a reflection of Berlin's eagerness to improve relations with its most important strategic ally.

The U.S. stripped Palij of his citizenship in 2003 for not disclosing his affiliation with the SS when he first entered the country in 1949, but was unable to try him for war crimes because the alleged acts occurred outside U.S. territory. In 2004, the U.S. issued a deportation order for Palij, but the German government refused to take him on the grounds that he was never a German citizen.

An ethnic Ukrainian, Palij was born in what was once Poland and is now Ukraine. Both of those countries said they aren’t responsible for him.

As a young man during the war, Palij joined a force of about 5,000 local recruits known as the Trawniki Men, established by the SS in occupied Poland to help operate a network of concentration camps that included Treblinka and Sobibór.

John Demjanjuk, another ethnic Ukrainian who belonged to the Trawniki group and emigrated to the U.S., was convicted in Germany in 2011 for his role in the mass murder of Jews at Treblinka. He died shortly after the conviction.

Palij has denied working in the camps or taking part in any atrocities, saying he merely patrolled roads and bridges. He told the New York Times in 2003 that he and other young men in his town were forced to join the Nazis.

“They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.''

In addition to citing Palij's lack of German citizenship, Berlin voiced doubts about his culpability for war crimes. Though there is documentation showing that the SS trained Palij at the infamous Trawniki camp, which served as both a training facility and as a labor camp, there is no hard evidence he killed anyone. On November 3, 1943, around the time Palij was training at Trawniki, 6,000 Jews were massacred at the camp in one of the worst atrocities of the war.

"By serving as an armed guard at the Trawniki Labor Camp and preventing the escape of Jewish prisoners during his Nazi service, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that the Trawniki Jewish victims met their horrific fate at the hands of the Nazis," the White House said in a statement Tuesday.

Without direct evidence of Palij's participation in murder, he is unlikely to ever be tried in Germany. Jens Rommel, the German prosecutor who oversees cases involving former Nazis, said earlier this year that after a deep investigation into Palij, officials found nothing to substantiate that he either killed anyone or was an accessory to murder.

"The Trawniki Men were dispatched in a number of different phases with a variety of functions," Rommel told Deutsche Welle television in an interview. "Simply guarding a building or prisoners is not enough (for a prosecution), if a connection to the murder of people can't be proved."

Too old for jail?

Though Germany continues to try suspected war criminals, including a recent case involving a former SS man whose job it was to count Jews' money once they arrived at the camp, many of the perpetrators prove too old to incarcerate. Considering Palij's age, frail health and prosecutors' doubts about the prospects for a conviction, he will most likely live out his days in an assisted-care facility.

Nonetheless, the deportation carries high symbolic importance at a time when Germany has seen a surge in anti-Semitic violence.

The final agreement is the fruit of months of talks between U.S. officials and Germany's interior and foreign ministers, Horst Seehofer and Heiko Maas, both of whom took office earlier this year.

"We knew we needed some sort of new energy and we found that new energy with the new players in the government," said Grenell, who arrived in Germany in May.

The breakthrough came after the U.S. stopped trying to argue on legal grounds and instead appealed to Germany's moral duty.

Maas, a former justice minister who says he went into politics because of Auschwitz, has been especially vocal in insisting Germany not shirk its historical responsibilities.

Maas visited Auschwitz on Monday, before news of Palij's deportation broke, writing in the guestbook: "Germany's duty to stand up everywhere and every day for the unassailable dignity of man grows out of the legacy of the victims. This responsibility is never-ending."