A man who authorities believe is the last known Nazi collaborator living in the U.S. has been arrested and deported to Germany. 
 
 ABC News 
 
 At the order of President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents removed 95-year-old Jakiw Palij from his Queens, New York, home on Monday. 
 
 Justice Department officials say Palij served as an armed guard at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and later lied to American immigration officials about his role in those atrocities when he entered the U.S. after the war. 
 
 U.S. Department of Justice 
 
 ABC News was there when Palij was removed by wheelchair from his home on Monday, but he did not answer any questions. Looking frail with missing front teeth visible through his white beard, the only noise he made was a pained howl as agents hoisted him from his wheelchair onto the ambulance stretcher. 
 
 Representatives for Palij didn't respond to ABC News request for comment. 
 
 The administration released a statement after Palij landed in Germany early Tuesday: 
 
 "President Trump commends his Administration’s comprehensive actions, especially ICE’s actions, in removing this war criminal from United States soil," the statement read. "Despite a court ordering his deportation in 2004, past administrations were unsuccessful in removing Palij. To protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families, President Trump prioritized the removal of Palij. Through extensive negotiations, President Trump and his team secured Palij’s deportation to Germany and advanced the United States’ collaborative efforts with a key European ally." 
 
 Palij's deportation has been a long time coming. 
 
 He'd been accused of working at the Treblinka death camp -- including on an infamous day in November 1943 in which 6,000 prisoners were killed, according to the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that SS police unit shot all 6,000 prisoners. An attachment of Jewish laborers was brought in to burn and bury the corpses. "After completing this dreadful work, the Jewish laborers were shot and their bodies burned," the website reads. 
 
 Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo 
 
 After falsely telling authorities he spent the war at his hometown in Germany, Palij gained entry into the U.S. in 1949. He was eventually granted U.S. citizenship in 1957. 
 
 It wasn't until 2003 that he was tracked down by federal authorities and exposed. A New York immigration judge revoked Palij's U.S. citizenship and ordered him to be deported in 2005. 
 
 At the time, Palij denied that he was a collaborator, telling The New York Times, he was conscripted at 18 when the Nazis took over his farm. 
 
 "I know what they say, but I was never a collaborator," Palij told the paper at the time. 
 
 The U.S. said in the statement about his deportation that he lied about not being involved. 
 
 "Palij had lied about being a Nazi and remained in the United States for decades," the statement said. "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." 
 
 AP 
 
 The Department of Justice also lauded the deportation in an early morning email. 
 
 "Jakiw Palij lied about his Nazi past to immigrate to this country and then fraudulently become an American citizen," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in the statement. "He had no right to citizenship or to even be in this country. Today, the Justice Department -- led by Eli Rosenbaum and our fabulous team in the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, formerly the Office of Special Investigations -- successfully helped remove him from the United States, as we have done with 67 other Nazis in the past." 
 
 U.S. officials say his deportation had long been stymied by Germany's reluctance to take him in. 
 
 According to a source familiar with the matter, Trump told U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell to make Palij's deportation his number one priority when he got to Berlin. 
 
 In May, U.S. diplomats acknowledged Grenell's efforts. 
 
 In meetings with senior officials this week, Ambassador @RichardGrenell continued the 12-year U.S. government push for Germany to accept Nazi collaborator Jakiw Palij. — US-Botschaft Berlin (@usbotschaft) May 18, 2018 
 
 It's unclear if Palij will face prosecution in Germany, which had previously maintained that they were not in a position to accept him because he's not a German citizen. 
 
 Palij, who is Ukranian-born, had been living in the Jackson Heights, Queens neighborhood for 13 years. Protesters have regularly gathered outside of Palij's house and the push for his deportation has garnered bipartisan support. In 2017, every congressional member of the New York delegation wrote a letter to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urging him to deport Palij before he dies. 
 
 The president made no mention of Palij's deportation during an event Monday honoring ICE employees. 
 
 Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who was among those calling for Pal's deportation told ABC News the U.S. is "no place for a war criminal." 
 
 "I’m glad this man is finally being sent back. He’s a war criminal and did not deserve to live in the US. He doesn’t deserve to die in the U.S., a place of freedom and equality where we respect each other’s differences." ||||| FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This Nov. 9, 2017 file photo shows the home, left, of former Nazi concentration camp guard Jakiw Palij, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. The White House says that Palij, a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been deported to Germany, 14 years... (Associated Press) 
 
 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, the White House said. 
 
 The deportation of the 95-year-old former concentration 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." 
 
 ABC News video showed federal agents carrying Palij out of his Queens apartment on a stretcher sometime during the day Monday. The bearded, white-haired Palij, wrapped in a sheet, was carried down the brick stairway in front of his home and is later seen sitting up and talking to the agents. 
 
 Palij landed in the western German city of Duesseldorf on Tuesday. The local government in Warendorf county, near Muenster, indicated that 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. 
 
 Since then, the Justice Department has initiated legal proceedings against 137 suspected Nazis, with about half, 67, being removed by deportation, extradition or voluntary departure. Of the rest, 28 died while their cases were pending and 9 were ordered deported but died in the U.S. because no other country was willing to take them. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Sisak and Herschaft reported from New York. Rising reported from Berlin. Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin ||||| He and many other young men in his town, Piadyki, were forced by the Nazis to be guards, he said, noting they were kept on a troop base converted from a farm and made to work night tours patrolling roads and bridges. 
 
 ''They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.'' 
 
 Mr. Palij insists he never set foot in any camp and never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war. And indeed, federal officials do not accuse him of that. Rather, they say that he, by cooperating as a Nazi guard, ''directly contributed to their eventual slaughter'' by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping. 
 
 Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of a special investigation unit for the Justice Department, called Mr. Palij ''an essential component in the machinery of annihilation'' at the camps. 
 
 ''He took part in the persecution of Jewish inmates at Treblinka and ensured that they could not escape, and the end result was that as many as 7,000 people were individually massacred,'' Mr. Rosenbaum said. 
 
 ''He was very loyal and very capable and served until April 1945, the last weeks of the war, while other soldiers were deserting right and left,'' he said. 
 
 In 1949, Mr. Palij emigrated here at age 26 as a refugee of World War II. In 1957, he was granted United States citizenship. Mr. Palij, a retired draftsman with no children, lives in a rear rental apartment on 89th Street in Jackson Heights, a quiet Queens street lined with old brick row houses. He lives on Social Security checks. After two strokes, he is in frail health and takes care of Maria, 72, his wife of 43 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease. 
 
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 In recent months, however, he has gone from being seen by neighbors as a polite old chap who constantly tinkers with his 1980 Oldsmobile, to a man being portrayed as a Nazi death camp guard with blood on his hands. Jewish demonstrators marched outside his home, calling him a butcher. ''There were 200 Jewish kids out there,'' he said. ''I called the precinct, and the cop told me: 'Leave them alone, and they'll leave. Don't say anything, or you might get a rock through your window.' '' 
 
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 He has begun entering his home by the alley behind it. 
 
 ''We get phone calls, people yelling, 'You Nazi!' It scares the hell out of my wife,'' he said. 
 
 In July, a federal judge stripped Mr. Palij of his citizenship for falsely claiming in his immigration papers in 1949 that he worked on his father's farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis. Mr. Palij insists that he did this to enter the United States ''to save my life.'' 
 
 ''I spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany, and I had nowhere else to go but America,'' he said. 
 
 ''These Jewish groups want to hunt down all the living Nazis, and I don't blame them,'' he said, ''but they know I never worked in a camp. They have proof of that.'' 
 
 Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, dismissed Mr. Palij's denials. 
 
 ''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. ''To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates. 
 
 ''The most vicious guards at these camps, they all have this line that they were just the short-order cook or something, when they were actually trained to do nefarious and horrible things.'' 
 
 Justice Department officials say that since 1979, their investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis' being stripped of United States citizenship, with 59 of them deported. 
 
 But Mr. Palij said Wednesday, ''Let them come and get me.'' 
 
 ''I'm not running. What will they do? Shoot me? Put me in the electric chair? Where are they going to deport me to? What country is going to take an 80-year-old man in poor health?''
– In 1966, a man named Jakiw Palij and his wife bought a home near LaGuardia Airport from a Polish Jewish couple who had survived the Holocaust, reports the AP. It's likely they never would have sold had they known Palij's past—he served as a Nazi prison guard at a death-camp in Poland, then lied about that in order to enter the US after the war, say Justice Department officials. On Monday, immigration officials rousted the 95-year-old from his Queens residence and shipped him to Germany to face possible war crimes charges, reports ABC News. Palij is believed to be the last Nazi war crimes suspect in the US who had been facing deportation. He is now in a German nursing home as prosecutors there try to figure out if they have enough evidence to convict, reports the Washington Post. Palij's Nazi history has been long known. A fellow guard at the Trawniki camp tipped off authorities back in 1989, per the AP, and investigators first confronted him a few years later. In 2001, he finally admitted he worked as a guard, but said he did so because he feared he'd be killed otherwise. "I know what they say, but I was never a collaborator," Palij told the New York Times back in 2003, the year his US citizenship was revoked. The US tried to deport him then, but Germany, Poland, Ukraine all refused to take him. The US says Monday's deportation took place after "extensive negotiations" with 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," said Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.