A former Nazi concentration camp guard who has lived in the United States since 1959 was deported to Germany on Saturday, according to the Justice Department.
Friedrich Karl Berger, 95, was removed from the United States based on his work as an armed guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp complex near Hamburg in 1945. He kept dozens of prisoners in “atrocious” conditions in the camp, making them work to the point of “Exhaustion and death”, according to court documents.
Berger also participated in a forced evacuation from the camp in March 1945, to escape the advance of British and Canadian soldiers. The two-week forced march under “inhumane conditions” resulted in the death of 70 prisoners, according to the DOJ, who was able to track Berger’s role during the war thanks to a card that was found on a shipwreck years after having been bombed by the British in May 1945.
“What are the chances, you know, that that card survived … and reached us decades later?” said Eli Rosenbaum, director of Strategy and Policy for the Application of Human Rights at the DOJ in an interview with The Washington Post last year.
Berger, a longtime resident of Tennessee, who still received a pension from Germany for his service during the war, is the 70th Nazi removed from the United States, according to the DOJ.
“The Department has gathered evidence that our Human Rights and Special Proceedings Section has found in archives here and in Europe, including records of the historic Nuremberg trial of the most notorious former leaders of the defeated Nazi regime,” said Interim Attorney General Monty Wilkinson in a Saturday statement. “In this year in which we mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions, this case shows that even the passing of many decades will not prevent the Department from seeking justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes.”