A 95-year-old suspected Nazi war criminal was deported from the US to Germany, bringing to an end a 13-year stand-off in which no country wanted to take him in.

Jakiw Palij was taken from his home in the New York and flown to Düsseldorf in the early hours of the morning, after Germany finally agreed to accept him.

But he is thought unlikely to face prosecution over his alleged crimes because there is not enough documentary evidence against him.

Mr Palij was stripped of his US citizenship in 2003 after he admitted that during the Second World War he had served as a volunteer guard at Trawniki concentration camp in occupied Poland, where thousands of Jews were murdered.

He was ordered to be deported in 2005 but no country would agree to take him. Germany refused because he was not a German citizen and his crimes were not committed in Germany.

Mr Palij was born Polish, but Poland refused to take him because the village where he was born became Ukrainian territory after the war. Ukraine rejected him on the grounds he was never Ukrainian.

With no country agreeing to accept him, he continued living in the New York borough of Queens for 13 years despite the deportation order.

Germany finally agreed to take him in because it faces a “moral responsibility” for the crimes of the Nazis, Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, said on Tuesday.

“The responsibility that comes from our history includes the uncovering and honest appraisal of the crimes of the Nazis’ reign of terror,” Mr Maas told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “It is from this conviction that we accept our responsibility to the victims of National Socialism and to our international partners — even  if this sometimes requires difficult political considerations.”

“The guilt of those who committed the worst crimes in historty in the name of Germany does not pass,” he told Bild newspaper separately. “It still hurts.”

Germany’s decision to take Mr Palij in follows intense lobbying by the Trump administration, which took up the case more forcefully than its predecessors.

Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, thanked Angela Merkel’s government for agreeing to a “fresh start in the case”.

“President Trump’s instructions were clear and his leadership crucial to getting a former Nazi guard deported from the US,” he wrote on Twitter.

“The United States will not tolerate anyone who has supported Nazi crimes or other human rights abuses, and these people will not find refuge on American soil,” the White House said in a statement.

Mr Palij emigrated to the US in 1949, and became an American citizen in 1957. He claimed in his visa application that he had spent the war working as a farmer and factory worker under Nazi occupation.

But investigators later found his name in Nazi records and a fellow former guard told them he was living in the US. Mr Palij later admitted that he had lied, saying: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.”

He admitted he had actually served with the notorious Trawniki men: local volunteers who were trained by the SS to help guard concentration camp.

The volunteers were trained at Trawniki concentration camp in occupied Poland, where Jewish forced labourers were imprisoned under horrific conditions in which many died. Many of the volunteers were later transferred to extermination camps including Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.

Mr Palij claims he remained at Trawniki and was not involved in any killings or other serious crimes, but only guarded “bridges and rivers” under the threat of death if he refused.

But US prosecutors allege that by guarding the camp he was was an accessory to the massacre of more than 10,000 Jewish inmates when the camp was liquidated in 1943.

In Operation Harvest Festival, the largest single Nazi massacre of Jews, inmates at several concentration camps were ordered to dig what they were told were anti-tank trenches, but were in fact their own graves. They were then shot and buried. In total, 43,000 Jews were killed.

Mr Palij is thought unlikely to face trial in Germany for his alleged crimes. German prosecutors closed an investigation against him several years ago because there is not enough documentary evidence to tie him to the Trawniki massacre or other war crimes.