A brief history of suspected Nazi war criminals removed from the US

Ryan, a New York City housewife who hid her past as a ruthless concentration camp guard known as "The Stomping Mare," was the first suspected Nazi war criminal that the U.S. extradited for a war crimes prosecution.

The U.S. sent Ryan to West Germany in 1973, where she was convicted of multiple acts of murder while a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

She was also a guard at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.

Ryan's life sentence was shortened in 1996 because she was in failing health. She died three years later at age 79.

A court found Ryan was involved in the process of deciding whether inmates were sent to the gas chambers or were spared so they could perform forced labor.

Demjanjuk, a Cleveland, Ohio autoworker born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk in Ukraine, was deported to Germany in 2009. He was convicted there in 2011 on charges he aided the deaths of more than 28,000 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk, pronounced dehm-YAHN'-yook, steadfastly denied involvement in the Holocaust, maintaining he was a victim of mistaken identity.

He died in a Bavarian nursing home in 2012 at age 91 while appealing. His conviction was unprecedented in German law because it was solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence he was involved in a specific killing.

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death on charges he was "Ivan the Terrible," a guard who operated gas chambers at a camp where about 850,000 Jews were killed.

Israel's Supreme Court overturned that verdict, citing evidence "Ivan" was another man.

Fedorenko, the first suspected Nazi war criminal deported from the U.S. to the Soviet Union, was executed by firing squad in 1987 at age 79.

A Soviet court found the former Treblinka death camp guard guilty of treason, voluntarily joining the Nazis and participating in mass killings at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Fedorenko was deported in December 1984 after a seven-year battle to remain in the U.S., where he had worked in a Connecticut factory before retiring to Miami Beach.

The U.S. stripped his citizenship after finding he attained it by omitting references to his Nazi service.

Trial witnesses said they saw Fedorenko beating and shooting Jews.

Fedorenko did not deny he had worked at Treblinka, but said he did not participate in any killings, telling the court, "Jews were among my best friends."

Linnas, a concentration camp chief who settled on Long Island and worked as a land surveyor, was one of the highest-ranking Nazi collaborators expelled from the U.S.

Linnas was stripped of his citizenship in 1982 and sent to the Soviet Union in 1987, where he had been convicted in absentia three decades earlier on charges he had a hand in the deaths of 12,000 people at the Tartu concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Estonia.

Linnas died of heart failure at age 67 before he could face a firing squad.

Investigators said Linnas ordered guards to fire on prisoners as they kneeled along the edge of a ditch, causing them to fall directly into their graves.

Immigrating to the U.S. in 1951, Linnas claimed to be a person displaced by the war and failed to disclose his Nazi service. He gained citizenship in 1959.

Rudolph, one of the Germany's most prominent rocket scientists, was brought to the U.S. after World War II because of his technical skill.

NASA awarded him a Distinguished Service Medal for achievements that included his central role in the Apollo project that put a man on the moon.

Decades later he was accused of "working thousands of slave laborers to death" in the Nazi factory that built the V-2 rocket.

Rudolph signed a settlement agreement with the U.S. in 1983.

He traveled on his U.S. passport to West Germany in 1984. Then he went to the U.S. General Consulate in Hamburg and renounced his citizenship. The West German government protested, but Rudolph remained there.

He was eventually granted German citizenship and collected U.S. Social Security benefits until his death in 1996 at age 89.

Trifa, the former U.S. archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox church, relinquished his citizenship in 1980 and left for Portugal in 1984 after admitting he lied to immigration authorities to conceal pro-Nazi activities during World War II.

The U.S. government alleged Trifa had been an ardent Nazi supporter who wrote inflammatory newspaper articles and made anti-Jewish speeches as a member of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group.

One speech, in January 1941, touched off four days of rioting in Bucharest that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Trifa denied any role in the riots.

Trifa attained a U.S. visa through the post-war displaced persons program.

He was interned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps but investigators said he never told refugee officials about special treatment he received.

Trifa died in 1987 at age 72.

BERLIN (AP) — The last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the U.S. was taken from his New York City home and spirited early Tuesday morning to Germany, following years of efforts to remove him from the United States.

The deportation of the 95-year-old former Nazi camp guard, Jakiw Palij, came 25 years after investigators first confronted him about his World War II past and he admitted lying to get into the U.S., claiming he spent the war as a farmer and factory worker.

Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years, as a draftsman and then as a retiree, until nearly three decades ago when investigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was "living somewhere in America."

Palij told Justice Department investigators who showed up at his door in 1993: "I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied."

A judge stripped Palij's citizenship in 2003 for "participation in acts against Jewish civilians" while an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and was ordered deported a year later.

But because Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries refused to take him, he continued living in limbo in the two-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his wife, Maria, now 86. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish community, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as "your neighbor is a Nazi!"

According to the Justice Department, Palij served at Trawniki in 1943, the same year 6,000 prisoners in the camps and tens of thousands of other prisoners held in occupied Poland were rounded up and slaughtered. Palij has admitted serving in Trawniki but denied any involvement in war crimes.

Last September, all 29 members of New York's congressional delegation signed a letter urging the State Department to follow through on his deportation.

Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador who arrived in Germany earlier this year, said President Donald Trump — who is from New York — instructed him to make it a priority. He said the new German government, which took office in March, brought "new energy" to the matter.

The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotiations.

Grenell told reporters that there were "difficult conversations" because Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after losing his U.S. citizenship, but "the moral obligation" of taking in "someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted."

Video footage from ABC News showed federal immigration agents carrying Palij out of his Queens apartment on a stretcher sometime during the day Monday.

Palij, with a fluffy white beard and a brown, newsboy-style cap atop his head, was wrapped in a sheet as the agents carried him down a brick stairway in front of his home and into a waiting ambulance. He ignored a reporter who shouted, "Are you a Nazi?" and "Do you have any regrets?"

His attorney, Ivars Berzins, did not immediately return telephone or email messages.

Palij landed in the western German city of Duesseldorf on Tuesday. The local government in Warendorf county, near Muenster, said Palij would be taken to a care facility in the town of Ahlen.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that "there is no line under historical responsibility," adding in comment to German daily Bild that doing justice to the memory of Nazi atrocities "means standing by our moral obligation to the victims and the subsequent generations."

German prosecutors have previously said it does not appear that there's enough evidence to charge Palij with wartime crimes.

Now that he is in Germany, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case.

"Trawniki was a camp where people were trained to round up and murder the Jews in Poland, so there's certainly a basis for some sort of prosecution," he said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice "deserves a lot of credit" for sticking with the case.

"The efforts invested by the United States in getting Palij deported are really noteworthy and I'm very happy to see that they finally met with success."

Palij's deportation is the first for a Nazi war crimes suspect since Germany agreed in 2009 to take John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was accused of serving as a Nazi guard. He was convicted in 2011 of being an accessory to more than 28,000 killings and died 10 months later, at age 91, with his appeal pending.

Palij, whose full name is pronounced Yah-keev PAH'-lee, entered the U.S. in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act, a law meant to help refugees from post-war Europe.

He told immigration officials that he worked during the war in a woodshop and farm in Nazi-occupied Poland; at another farm in Germany; and finally in a German upholstery factory. Palij said he never served in the military.

In reality, officials say, he played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Poland, as an armed guard at Trawniki. According to a Justice Department complaint, Palij served in a unit that "committed atrocities against Polish civilians and others" and then in the notorious SS Streibel Battalion, "a unit whose function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced laborers."

After the war, Palij maintained friendships with other Nazi guards who the government says came to the U.S. under similar false pretenses. And in an interesting coincidence, Palij and his wife purchased their home near LaGuardia Airport in 1966 from a Polish Jewish couple who had survived the Holocaust and were not aware of his past.

The Justice Department's special Nazi-hunting unit started piecing together Palij's past after a fellow Trawniki guard identified him to Canadian authorities in 1989. Investigators asked Russia and other countries for records on Palij beginning in 1990 and first confronted him in 1993.

It wasn't until after a second interview in 2001 that he signed a document acknowledging he had been a guard at Trawniki and a member of the Streibel Battalion. Palij suggested at one point during that interview that he was threatened with death if he refused to work as a guard, saying "if you don't show up, boom-boom."

Though the last Nazi suspect ordered deported, Palij is not the last in the U.S.

Since 2017, Poland has been seeking the extradition of Ukrainian-born Michael Karkoc, an ex-commander in an SS-led Nazi unit that burned Polish villages and killed civilians during the war. The 99-year-old who currently lives in Minneapolis was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by the AP that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him.

In addition to Karkoc, there are almost certainly others in the U.S. who have either not yet been identified or investigated by authorities.

The American public did not become fully aware until the 1970s that thousands of Nazi persecutors had gone to the U.S. after World War II. Some estimates say 10,000 may have made the U.S. their home after the war.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK, DAVID RISING and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press

Sisak and Herschaft reported from New York. Rising reported from Berlin. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin