Jakiw Palij is dead. The SS former helper died in a retirement home in Ahlen at the age of 95. This is reported by the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" and the "Westfälische Nachrichten" in unison.
Palij had been delivered from the US to Germany only in August 2018. US President Donald Trump had himself celebrated for it, but it soon turned out that Palij should stay unpunished. He was according to "FAZ" as the last still living in the United States SS-Scherge.
The public prosecutor's office Würzburg had opened in Palijs absence a procedure against him and set 2016 again. After entering Germany, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and others demanded that this decision be corrected. This was rejected by the prosecutor last autumn.
The German occupiers had recruited the then 19-year-old Palij in 1943. The farmer's son came to the "Trawniki", a group consisting mainly of Ukrainians and ethnic Germans, which helped the SS in the Holocaust. Palij became SS-Oberwachmann. He claimed he had only patrolled roads and bridges at night. This version could only be shaken in a nutshell.
DPA / US Department of Justice
Jakiw Palij on an undated photo
The American authorities, however, were convinced that Palij had been one of the cogs without which the extermination machinery of the National Socialists in occupied Poland and Ukraine would not have worked. In 2003, a US court had deprived him of US citizenship after 46 years; since then the man was stateless. Already in 2004, the US authorities issued an expulsion order against Palij.