A 95-year-old former Nazi guard who served at a labour camp where more than 6,000 people were killed has arrived in Germany, after being stripped of his US citizenship.
The German foreign ministry said it had agreed to accept the former Ukraine national Jakiw Palij after his expulsion from the United States on Monday, citing Berlin's "moral duty" in light of the Nazis' crimes.
"The United States had repeatedly pressed for Germany to take in Palij," the ministry said.
Germany had refused to take him in for years, arguing that he was not a German citizen.
"The US administration, senators, members of Congress and representatives of the Jewish community in the United States stress that people who served the rogue Nazi regime should not be able to live out their twilight years in peace in their country of choice, the United States," the ministry added.
Palij illegally concealed his Nazi past from US immigration agents when he moved to the United States in 1949, the US Justice Department said. He became an American in 1957.
No US 'safe haven'
Washington had tried to expel him for nearly two decades after he admitted to federal officials in 2001 that he had been trained as a Nazi guard in 1943.
A federal judge revoked his US citizenship in August 2003 and a year later, a US immigration judge ordered his deportation to Ukraine for working at the Trawniki forced-labour camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The White House said in a statement that President Donald Trump had "prioritised" the removal of Palij "to protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families".
"Palij's removal sends a strong message: The United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil," it said.
German media reports said Palij arrived early Tuesday at Duesseldorf airport and was to be taken to an elder care home.
The Bild newspaper reported that German prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation against Palij in 2015 but closed the case for lack of evidence.
The US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell said a change of heart came with the advent of Chancellor Angela Merkel's new cabinet earlier this year.
Although Germany has put several aged former Nazi guards on trial in recent years for crimes committed during the Holocaust, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said it was unlikely Palij would be prosecuted.
In court documents, the US government said men who trained at Trawniki participated in implementing the Third Reich's plan to murder Jews in Poland, code-named "Operation Reinhard".
More than 6,000 men, women and children imprisoned at Trawniki were shot to death on November 3, 1943, in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
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