How the Nazis Got to New York: Immigration Fraud

NEW YORK — The 95-year-old Nazi who was deported this week after living quietly in Queens for decades was not the only member of his squad to come to New York City.

Jakiw Palij, a former member of the Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS, arrived in Germany on Tuesday, 14 years after the federal government stripped him of citizenship.

But the story of how Palij arrived in the United States, acquired citizenship and built a life in Queens is not one of a lone Nazi thwarting immigration laws, but of a trio of Third Reich soldiers working together to find haven in America, one vouching for the other two on visa applications.

Palij worked at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where the SS executed an estimated 6,000 Jews in a single day — Nov. 3, 1943 — making it the “largest killing operation against Jews in the entire war,” according to Christopher Browning’s book “Ordinary Men.”

On June 27, 1949, Palij walked into the U.S. consular office in Schweinfurt, Germany, and applied for a visa under the Displaced Persons Act, which was meant for people left homeless by the war, said Peter Black, the former chief historian for a Department of Justice unit devoted to deporting former Nazis. Palij claimed he had worked as a laborer on his father’s farm in Piadyki, which was then part of Poland, and as a factory worker in Germany during the war.

With him was Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, who was from Palij’s village. Bilaniuk’s application claimed he worked as a self-employed woodworker in Piadyki and then as a farm laborer in Germany until the end of the war.

They had help from yet another member of their unit, Mykola Wasylyk, who had already gotten a visa and made it to the United States. Wasylyk signed both applications as a witness, vouching for the men’s truthfulness.

The applications were full of lies.

Records unearthed by Department of Justice investigators in Prague indicated that both Palij and Bilaniuk had volunteered to serve in the SS in February 1943. Their SS identification numbers were a single digit apart — 3504 and 3505 — suggesting they enlisted together with volunteers from the Galicia region of what is now Ukraine.

Palij was inducted and put through basic instruction at the Trawniki Training Camp in Poland, where the Nazis trained recruits for Operation Reinhard, the code name for the planned extermination of Poland’s population of 2 million Jews, according to court documents.

“We could see from the names and military identification numbers that these were men who were at the camp when the Germans abandoned the camp in 1944,” Black said.

From 1941 through 1945, roughly 1.7 million Jewish adults and children were killed in Poland.

Before arriving in the United States, the three men worked as guards in their unit, which was part of the Streibel Battalion, according to court records. All three guarded forced laborers who made uniforms and brushes, Black said. Their unit also conducted bloody reprisal campaigns against Polish partisans in the region around the town of Lublin, but Black said the Justice Department could not confirm whether the men took part in such operations.

When Palij and Bilaniuk arrived in the United States in summer of 1949, they ended up settling a dozen miles apart in Queens. Their colleague Wasylyk moved to the Ulster County village of Ellenville, where he ran a bungalow community that had mostly Jewish summer renters.

It wasn’t until early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that U.S. law-enforcement authorities figured out who they were after finding the cache of Nazi records in Czechoslovakia.

The Department of Justice accused all three of serving in the SS in Trawniki, and filed charges to take away their U.S. passports and order them deported. All told, the Justice Department successfully charged and denaturalized 16 former SS members who served at Trawniki.

Yet many of them remained in the country because no other nation was willing to take them. Wasylyk, who was stripped of his citizenship in 2001 and ordered deported in 2004, died in Florida in 2010. Bilaniuk, who lived in Douglaston, died in 2007 with the case against him still pending.

It appeared Palij might also finish his life in Queens: Germany, Poland and Ukraine had repeatedly refused to take him in. But the Trump administration spent months pressuring Germany to accept his return, White House officials said, and on Monday, federal agents wheeled him out of his house and put him on a chartered air-ambulance to Düsseldorf, Germany.

Walter Reich, the former director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said Palij’s deportation was an important moment in ensuring that the slaughter of millions of Jews would not fade from popular memory.

“The Holocaust’s memory is becoming more and more distant, and it’s really important that it not be allowed to just evaporate,” Reich said. “This is a man that participated in a massive crime.”