Page 2 Friday, August 24, 2018 Daily CourtReview Page 19 ......Jakiw Palij’s expulsion, at...
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LAW ENFORCEMENT US DEPORTS 95-YEAR-OLD EX-NAZI GUARD TO GERMANY By Michael R. Sisak, David Rising And Randy Herschaſt Associated Press A 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived quietly in New York City for decades was carried out of his home on a stretcher by federal agents and flown to Germany early Tuesday in what could prove to be the last U.S. deporta- tion of a World War II-era war-crimes suspect. Jakiw Palij’s expulsion, at President Donald Trump’s urging, came 25 years after investigators first accused Palij of lying about his wartime past to get into the U.S. But it was largely symbolic because officials in Germany have repeatedly said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute him. Trump “made it very clear” he wanted Palij out of the coun- try, and a new German government that took office in March brought “new energy” to expediting the matter, U.S. Ambas- sador Richard Grenell said. “He’s gone. He’s back in Germany,” Trump said at a cam- paign rally in West Virginia Tuesday night as he celebrated his role in the deportation. Eli Rosenbaum, the former head of the U.S. office inves- tigating accused Nazi war criminals, said Palij’s removal “is a landmark victory in the U.S. government’s decades-long quest to achieve a measure of justice and accountability on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity.” Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years, as a draftsman and then as a retiree, until nearly three decades ago when inves- tigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was “living somewhere in America.” Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizenship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.” A judge stripped Palij’s U.S. citizenship in 2003 for “partici- pation in acts against Jewish civilians” while he was an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and he 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 late wife, Maria. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish com- munity, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as, “Your neighbor is a Nazi!” According to the Justice Department, Palij served at Trawni- ki 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 acknowledged 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. “Good riddance to this war criminal,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat. The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotia- tions. Grenell told reporters there were “difficult conversations” because Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after los- ing his U.S. citizenship. But “the moral obligation” of taking in “someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted,” he said. Video footage from ABC News showed federal immigration agents carrying Palij out of his home Monday on a stretcher. 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?” Palij was flown on a specially chartered air ambulance from Teterboro, New Jersey, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany, at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Palij’s lawyer, Ivars Berzins, declined to comment. The local German 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 “there is no line under his- torical responsibility,” but added in a comment to the 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.” Jens Rommel, head of the German federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi war crimes, said Tuesday that the deporta- tion doesn’t change the likelihood that Palij will be prosecuted for war crimes. “A new investigation would only come into question if something changed in the legal evaluation or actual new evidence became known,” he said. However, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case now that Palij is in Germany. “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. “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,” he said. 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, as well as 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 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. The Justice Department’s special Nazi-hunting unit started piecing together Palij’s past after a fellow Trawniki guard identi- fied 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 remaining 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. But it could take years before the 99-year-old, who currently lives in Minneapolis, faces deportation. He was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by The Associated Press that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him. CONSTABLE ON PATROL WITNESS’ VIOLENT ROBBERY OF A FEMALE VICTIM, ONE SUSPECT IN CUSTODY Type of Offense: Aggravated Robbery w/ Deadly Weapon Penalty Class: 1st Degree Felony Case #: HC18-131969 Date: August 17, 2018 Location: 23240 US 290 (Northwest Freeway) Details: On August 17, 2018, a deputy with Constable Mark Herman’s Office was on patrol in the 23200 block of US 290 and observed several citizens struggling with a male suspect on the ground in a parking lot. The Constable Deputy quickly responded and apprehended the suspect. The suspect, later identified as Davis Mitchell attempted to rob a victim. Further investigation revealed the victim had just withdrew $75,000.00 from a local bank and was followed by a group of suspects to her location. Video surveillance indicated the victim exited her vehicle and a black male suspect attempted to steal her purse. The victim fought hard and refused to give up her purse containing the money. The victim’s husband observed the struggle and physically engaged the suspect. During the robbery, a black Chrysler 300 drove up to the location and a black male suspect exited the vehicle and began to assault the victims. The second suspect then fled the location in his vehicle after running over the victims. The female victim was transported to a local hospital in critical condition. The investigation to identify the second suspect continues. “Davis Mitchell was arrested and booked into the Harris County Jail, charges for Aggravated Robbery with a Deadly Weapon are currently being filed. If you have any information regarding the unidentified suspect in this case, you are urged to contact our dispatch or your local law enforcement.” -Constable Mark Herman Name: Davis Dowell Mitchell Date of Birth: 11/25/1986 Charge: Aggravated Robbery Status: In Jail Name: Unknown Date of Birth: Unknown Charges: Aggravated Robbery Status: Wanted ***All persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law**** A weekly section, keeping you informed LAW ENFORCEMENT continued on the next to last page DAILY COURT REVIEW LAW ENFORCEMENT available at: Harris County Constable Pct. 1 Constable Alan Rosen 1302 Preston, Suite 301, Houston, TX 77002 713-755-5200 Harris County Constable Pct. 2 Constable Christopher E. Diaz 101 S Richey St, Suite C, Pasadena, TX 77506 713-477-2766 Harris County Constable Pct. 3 Constable Sherman Eagleton 14350 Wallisville Rd., Houston, TX 77049 701 Baker Road, Baytown, TX 77521 281-427-4792 Harris County Constable Pct. 4 Constable Mark Herman 6831 Cypresswood Drive, Spring, TX 77379 281-376-3472 Harris County Constable Pct. 5 Constable Ted Heap 17423 Katy Freeway, Houston, Texas 77094 281-463-6666 Harris County Constable Pct. 6 Constable Silvia Trevino 5900 Canal Street, Houston, TX 77011 713-923-9156 Harris County Constable Pct. 7 Constable May Walker 5290 Griggs Road, Houston TX, 77021 713-643-6118 Harris County Constable Pct. 8 Constable Phil Sandlin 7330 Spencer Highway Ste #107 Pasadena, Texas 77505 281-479-2525 LAW ENFORCEMENT Art Director: Zack Zwicky Submit original articles, images, and commentary for publication to: [email protected] LAW ENFORCEMENT Daily Court Review Friday, August 24, 2018 Page 19 Page 2 Daily Court Review Friday, August 24, 2018
Transcript of Page 2 Friday, August 24, 2018 Daily CourtReview Page 19 ......Jakiw Palij’s expulsion, at...
L AW E N F O R C E M E N T
US DEPORTS 95-YEAR-OLD EX-NAZI GUARD TO GERMANY By Michael R. Sisak, David Rising And Randy Herschaft Associated Press
A 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived quietly in New York City for decades was carried out of his home on a stretcher by federal agents and flown to Germany early Tuesday in what could prove to be the last U.S. deporta-tion of a World War II-era war-crimes suspect.
Jakiw Palij’s expulsion, at President Donald Trump’s urging, came 25 years after investigators first accused Palij of lying about his wartime past to get into the U.S. But it was largely symbolic because officials in Germany have repeatedly said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute him.
Trump “made it very clear” he wanted Palij out of the coun-try, and a new German government that took office in March brought “new energy” to expediting the matter, U.S. Ambas-sador Richard Grenell said.
“He’s gone. He’s back in Germany,” Trump said at a cam-paign rally in West Virginia Tuesday night as he celebrated his role in the deportation.
Eli Rosenbaum, the former head of the U.S. office inves-tigating accused Nazi war criminals, said Palij’s removal “is a landmark victory in the U.S. government’s decades-long quest to achieve a measure of justice and accountability on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity.”
Palij lived quietly in the U.S. for years, as a draftsman and then as a retiree, until nearly three decades ago when inves-tigators found his name on an old Nazi roster and a fellow former guard spilled the secret that he was “living somewhere in America.”
Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizenship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”
A judge stripped Palij’s U.S. citizenship in 2003 for “partici-pation in acts against Jewish civilians” while he was an armed guard at the Trawniki camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and he 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 late wife, Maria. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish com-munity, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as, “Your neighbor is a Nazi!”
According to the Justice Department, Palij served at Trawni-ki 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 acknowledged 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.
“Good riddance to this war criminal,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat.
The deportation came after weeks of diplomatic negotia-tions.
Grenell told reporters there were “difficult conversations” because Palij is not a German citizen and was stateless after los-ing his U.S. citizenship. But “the moral obligation” of taking in “someone who served in the name of the German government was accepted,” he said.
Video footage from ABC News showed federal immigration agents carrying Palij out of his home Monday on a stretcher. 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?”
Palij was flown on a specially chartered air ambulance from Teterboro, New Jersey, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany, at 8 a.m. Tuesday.
Palij’s lawyer, Ivars Berzins, declined to comment.The local German 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 “there is no line under his-torical responsibility,” but added in a comment to the 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.”
Jens Rommel, head of the German federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi war crimes, said Tuesday that the deporta-tion doesn’t change the likelihood that Palij will be prosecuted for war crimes. “A new investigation would only come into question if something changed in the legal evaluation or actual new evidence became known,” he said.
However, Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he hoped prosecutors would revisit the case now that Palij is in Germany.
“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.
“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,” he said.
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, as well as 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 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.
The Justice Department’s special Nazi-hunting unit started piecing together Palij’s past after a fellow Trawniki guard identi-fied 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 remaining 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. But it could take years before the 99-year-old, who currently lives in Minneapolis, faces deportation. He was the subject of a series of 2013 reports by The Associated Press that led Polish prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for him.
CONSTABLE ON PATROL WITNESS’ VIOLENT ROBBERY OF A FEMALE VICTIM, ONE SUSPECT IN CUSTODYType of Offense: Aggravated Robbery w/ Deadly Weapon
Penalty Class: 1st Degree FelonyCase #: HC18-131969Date: August 17, 2018Location: 23240 US 290 (Northwest Freeway) Details: On August 17, 2018, a deputy with Constable Mark
Herman’s Office was on patrol in the 23200 block of US 290 and observed several citizens struggling with a male suspect on the ground in a parking lot. The Constable Deputy quickly responded and apprehended the suspect. The suspect, later identified as Davis Mitchell attempted to rob a victim.
Further investigation revealed the victim had just withdrew $75,000.00 from a local bank and was followed by a group of suspects to her location. Video surveillance indicated the victim exited her vehicle and a black male suspect attempted to steal her purse. The victim fought hard and refused to give up her purse containing the money. The victim’s husband observed the struggle and physically engaged the suspect.
During the robbery, a black Chrysler 300 drove up to the location and a black male suspect exited the vehicle and began to assault the victims.
The second suspect then fled the location in his vehicle after running over the victims. The female victim was transported to a local hospital in critical condition.
The investigation to identify the second suspect continues. “Davis Mitchell was arrested and booked into the Harris
County Jail, charges for Aggravated Robbery with a Deadly Weapon are currently being filed. If you have any information regarding the unidentified suspect in this case, you are urged to contact our dispatch or your local law enforcement.”
-Constable Mark Herman
Name: Davis Dowell MitchellDate of Birth: 11/25/1986Charge: Aggravated Robbery Status: In Jail
Name: UnknownDate of Birth: UnknownCharges: Aggravated Robbery Status: Wanted
***All persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law****
A weekly section, keeping you informed
L AW E N F O R C E M E N T continued on the next to last page
DAILY COURT REVIEW LAW ENFORCEMENT available at:
Harris County Constable Pct. 1Constable Alan Rosen1302 Preston, Suite 301, Houston, TX 77002 713-755-5200
Harris County Constable Pct. 2Constable Christopher E. Diaz101 S Richey St, Suite C, Pasadena, TX 77506 713-477-2766
Harris County Constable Pct. 3Constable Sherman Eagleton14350 Wallisville Rd., Houston, TX 77049 701 Baker Road, Baytown, TX 77521 281-427-4792
Harris County Constable Pct. 4Constable Mark Herman6831 Cypresswood Drive, Spring, TX 77379281-376-3472
Harris County Constable Pct. 5Constable Ted Heap17423 Katy Freeway, Houston, Texas 77094 281-463-6666
Harris County Constable Pct. 6Constable Silvia Trevino5900 Canal Street, Houston, TX 77011 713-923-9156
Harris County Constable Pct. 7Constable May Walker5290 Griggs Road, Houston TX, 77021 713-643-6118
Harris County Constable Pct. 8Constable Phil Sandlin7330 Spencer Highway Ste #107Pasadena, Texas 77505 281-479-2525
LAW ENFORCEMENTArt Director: Zack Zwicky
Submit original articles, images, and commentary for publication to: [email protected]
L AW E N F O R C E M E N TDaily Court Review
Friday, August 24, 2018 Page 19 Page 2Daily Court Review
Friday, August 24, 2018
