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WASHINGTON – The United States deported a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to Germany on Saturday, the Justice Department said.
The deportation of Friedrich Karl Berger, who had been living in Tennessee, was “possibly the last” US expulsion of a former Nazi, given the dwindling number of survivors of the war, a US official said.
Berger, who had retained German citizenship, was deported for participating in “Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution” while serving as an armed guard in the Neuengamme concentration camp system in 1945, the department said.
Berger’s deportation demonstrated “that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humanity,” Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson said in a statement.
The Justice Department obtained evidence from US and European archives, “including records of the historic Nuremberg trial of the most notorious former leaders of the defeated Nazi regime,” Wilkinson said.
NUREMBERG ANNIVERSARY
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, in which jurists from the allied powers tried leading Nazis under international law. Twelve defendants received death sentences and were hanged.
The deportation of Berger, who had lived in the United States since 1959, was first ordered in March of last year by an American immigration judge.
When he was young, he had been stationed in a subcamp near Meppen, Germany, where prisoners were being held in “appalling” conditions and working “to the point of exhaustion and death,” Judge Rebecca Holt said at the time.
Prisoners in the vast camp system included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians and political opponents” of the Nazis, “according to the Justice Department.
More than 40,000 prisoners died in the Neuengamme system, records show.
Holt’s opinion followed a two-day trial in which Berger admitted that he had prevented the prisoners from fleeing the Meppen camp during their long working hours or while moving to and from the SS-run camp.
The court also found that in March 1945, as British and Canadian forces advanced, Berger helped protect the prisoners as they were forcibly evacuated under inhuman conditions that resulted in the deaths of some 70 prisoners.
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS”
Berger said he did not know that the prisoners had been mistreated and that some had died.
In an interview last year with The Washington Post, he expressed disbelief at the possibility that he could be deported, saying he was only 19 years old while serving at Meppen, unarmed and following orders.
“After 75 years, this is ridiculous,” he told the Post. “I can’t understand how this can happen in a country like this.”
But he had never applied for a transfer from the camp and later received a German pension based in part on his service during the war, the Justice Department said.
Berger was transferred to Germany on Saturday and arrived in Frankfurt, where he will be questioned, the Celle prosecutor’s office said.
It was not immediately clear whether he will be tried. German prosecutors dropped the charges against Berger in December 2020, citing insufficient evidence.
But if you’re willing to speak out about the allegations against you, the case could be revived.
In 1979, the United States government created the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations dedicated to finding Nazis. The department said Saturday that the program had won cases against 109 people.
The last deportation was that of former SS guard Jakiw Palij, 95, who had lived in New York since 1949 and was expelled in August 2018.
The Friedrich Berger case was “possibly the last” in the United States, Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s program, told AFP last year.
For prosecutors in such cases, he added, “the greatest enemy … is time.”
