US to deport ex-Nazi camp guard

Millions of Jews were systematically slain under Nazi rule

An 80-year-old New Yorker who worked as a guard at a Nazi-run labour camp is to be deported to his native Ukraine.

A judge ruled that Jakiw Palij must leave the country for his part in the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews in what was then occupied Poland.

Palij denies any role in the atrocities at Trawniki camp where some 6,000 prisoners were killed in one night - one of the Holocaust's worst massacres.

Palij has already been stripped of the US citizenship he has held since 1957.

A court in 2003 found him guilty of taking part in the planned murder of Jews in the camp and of lying about his Nazi past when he moved to the US in 1947.

'Coerced'

"During a single nightmarish day in November 1943, more than 6,000 prisoners of the Nazi camp that Jakiw Palij had guarded were systematically butchered," Eli Rosenbaum, a justice department official, told the Associated Press agency.

He said Palij played an "indispensable role" for the Nazis by helping to prevent the prisoners from escaping.

Palij has not commented on the deportation order but maintained, in an earlier interview, that he was coerced into working for the Nazis.

"We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused," he told the New York Times newspaper last year.

Palij has 30 days to appeal the deportation order.

A Ukrainian government spokeswoman said she had no information about the case.