A 95-year-old man who was a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II has been deported from the US to Germany, authorities announced 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 removal from the US demonstrates that the department is “committed to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other violations of human rights “.
Department of Justice
“In this year when we have the “75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions,” continued Wilkinson, “this case shows that even the passage of many decades will not stop the ministry from pursuing justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes.”
Berger is the 70th person identified as a Nazi persecutor to be removed from the US, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
A trial in 2020 revealed that Berger served the Nazi regime during the Holocaust in a subcamp Neuengamme near Meppen, Germany. The judge presiding over the 2020 case said Meppen prisoners, many of whom were Jewish, Russian, Dutch and Polish, were held at the camp in the winter of 1945. The conditions, the judge ruled, were “appalling,” as inmates were forced to work outside “to the point of exhaustion and death,” the DOJ said.
According to the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centers, prisoners at the camp in Meppen were forced to build a so-called “friesenwall” to protect the north coast of Germany. On the day the camp was evacuated, there were 1,773 prisoners in the camp, the foundation says.
Berger worked in the camp until the Nazis evacuated it in March 1945, at which point the prisoners were forced to go to the main Neuengamme camp. The two-week transfer took place under “inhumane conditions,” the DOJ said, and 70 people who were detained died.
Berger admitted during the trial that he guarded the prisoners and prevented them from escaping, US officials said. He also admitted that he had never requested a transfer from his role as a concentration camp guard.
To this day, the DOJ said, Berger receives a pension from Germany for his former job in the country, including his ‘wartime’.
He was removed under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment for his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners in a concentration camp where persecution was taking place,” the DOJ said.
Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tae Johnson said the department “will never stop pursuing those who persecute others.”
“This case illustrates the steadfast commitment of both ICE and the Department of Justice to pursue justice and to pursue relentlessly those who participated in one of the greatest atrocities in history,” said Johnson, “however long it takes. “