He’s dropped sieg heil — for ho hum.
It was another year, another protest for unrepentant ex-Nazi Jakiw Palij who wasn’t fazed in the least by the 130 angry demonstrators outside his window Sunday morning, gathered to demand that he be booted from Jackson Heights — and the United States.
Jakiw Palij going into his home in Jackson Heights.
“I am starting to get used to it,” Jakiw Palij, 91, shrugged to the Post after the rally organized by Jewish community leaders outside his home — the site of a decade’s worth of similar protests since the U.S. Justice Department outed Palij as a Nazi death camp guard in Poland.
Palij shuffled to his door on Sunday morning in blue Ralph Lauren PJs to give The Post a sob story that he was forced into Nazi servitude — and claimed he doesn’t hate Jews.
He said the German Army was rounding up teen-aged boys as it swept through Poland.
Jakiw Palij, an ex-Nazi death camp guard, at his home in Queens.
“They told us we would be picking up mines. But that was a lie,” said Palij “In that camp they took us — 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys. I am one of them. They did not give us Nazi uniforms. They gave us guard uniforms: pants, black; shirts, light brown; and hats with one button in the front. You could tell we were not Nazis.
He added, “If you tried to run away, they take your family and shoot all of them,” and said, “I am not SS. I have nothing to do with SS.”
But rally leader and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, wasn’t buying it, and planned to keep the heat on cozily retired Nazis — and the U.S. government — for allowing them to stay in the country.
“There are four people, Nazis, still alive in this country, that we know about. We’re not going to let them enjoy their lives, their freedom,” said Hikind, whose parents, Frieda and Mayer, are Holocaust survivors.
“It’s an outrage that people like Palij can walk the streets of Jackson Heights,” added Rabbi Zev Friedman, who brought more than 100 students in three yellow buses from his school, Rambam Mesivta, in Lawrence, N.Y
Protestor’s chanted “Put him on a boat,” “Kick him out” and “Your neighbor is a Nazi.”
Palij, for his part, had the chutzpah to sound high-minded about the protests.
“My wife, she passed away two months ago,” he said. “She told me not to blame these children coming here and calling me a Nazi. They are just doing what they are taught to do. But the grown men? They talk nonsense.”
Meanwhile, Palij’s neighbors showed more sympathy for the Nazi next door than, apparently, the memory of millions of dead Jews.
“He’s a feeble old man. He’s no threat to anyone,” said next-door neighbor Gerry Fils-Maime, who screamed “Get away from my house!” at protestors.
Hikind and Friedman chose the 75th anniversary of the Krystallnacht riots, a German government-approved campaign of murder and terror against Jews, for this year’s protest.
“Every year, they come and scare my children,” said Juan Azzaro, 33, another neighbor. “Look at them, up on the old man’s stoop, pounding on his door! Is this legal?”
“Every year this guy [Hikind] comes here and brings this hate,” complained neighbor Giselle Beltran, 44. “ He knows the old man is dying because he just said ‘We don’t care if he’s 89 or 98!’ ”
Hikind said he’s heard these excuses before. “People have the nerve to say, ‘They are old now—why bother?’ But what of the hundreds and thousands of innocent victims that were personally tortured and murdered by these criminals? Do we have no obligation to their memories?” he said before Sunday’s protest. “ It is our obligation to root out the evil from among us.”
The U.S. has stripped Palij of his citizenship, but has been unable to find a country willing to accept him.