A 95-year-old man who was a guard at the Nazi concentration camp during World War II was deported from the United States to Germany, officials said on Friday. Friedrich Karl Berger, who lived in Tennessee, was deported “for participating in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution” while serving in the concentration camp in 1945, the Justice Department said.
Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson said in a statement that Berger’s departure from the United States demonstrates the “department’s commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses. human rights”.
Department of Justice
“In this year when we mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions, “continued Wilkinson,” this case shows that the passage of many decades will not prevent the Department from seeking justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes. ”
Berger is the 70th person identified as a Nazi stalker to be removed from the United States, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
A 2020 trial found that Berger served the Nazi regime in a Neuengamme subfield near Meppen, Germany, during the Holocaust. The judge who presided over the 2020 case said that Meppen’s prisoners, many of whom were Jews, Russians, Dutch and Poles, were kept in the camp in the winter of 1945. The conditions, the judge decided, were “atrocious” because the prisoners were forced to work outdoors “to the point of exhaustion and death,” said the DOJ.
Prisoners in the Meppen-based camp were forced to build a so-called “friesen wall” to protect Germany’s north coast, according to the Hamburg Foundation for Memorials and Learning Centers. On the day the camp was evacuated, there were 1,773 prisoners in the camp, the foundation said.
Berger worked in the field until the Nazis evacuated him in March 1945, when prisoners were forced to go to the main camp at Neuengamme. The two-week transfer was made in “inhumane conditions”, according to the DOJ, and 70 people who were arrested died in the process.
Berger admitted during the trial that he kept the prisoners and prevented them from escaping, American officials said. He also admitted that he never asked to be transferred from his role as a concentration camp guard.
To this day, the DOJ said, Berger receives a pension from Germany for his previous job in the country, including his “war service”.
He was removed under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment because of his “voluntary service as an armed prisoner of prisoners in a concentration camp where the persecution took place,” said the DOJ.
Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Tae Johnson, said the department “will never cease to persecute those who persecute others”.
“This case exemplifies the unwavering dedication of ICE and the Department of Justice to seek justice and relentlessly hunt down those who participated in one of the greatest atrocities in history,” said Johnson, “no matter how long it takes.”