But Mr Palij denied participating in any killings, saying he merely guarded bridges and rivers. He claimed the SS forced him to work for them, threatening to kill him and his family.
In an interview with the New York Times in 2003, he stated: “I know what they say, but I was never a collaborator.”
On Tuesday, he was finally extradited, 25 years after he was first tracked down by investigators in 1993. The US Justice Department described him as the “last adjudicated Nazi criminal in the United States”.
He was stripped of his US citizenship ten years later and a deportation order was issued by a federal immigration judge in 2004, but for over a decade, no country would accept him.
Despite being an employee of the Nazi government, he was refused by Germany because he was born in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine.
But both Poland and Ukraine refused to take Mr Palij either, stating he was not their responsibility, leading Germany to change its mind.
“We accept the moral obligation of Germany, in whose name terrible injustice was committed under the Nazis,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday.
“We are taking responsibility vis-à-vis the victims of National Socialism and our international partners — even if that demands of us what are at times politically difficult considerations.”
Mr Palij, now 95 and frail, arrived at Düsseldorf Airport early on Tuesday and was taken by a Red Cross ambulance to a nursing home near Münster, in northwestern Germany. Until then, he was living in Queens with his wife, Maria, who is 86.
Jewish activists protested outside their home on multiple occasions and the case became a personal priority for President Donald Trump.
Officials said he frequently raised the issue with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the new US ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell.
Since 2005, the Justice Department has won deportation orders for 11 Nazi criminals, but only one was successfully sent abroad. The remaining nine people subjected to deportation orders all died in the United States before facing justice.
