Authorities with the U.S. government announced Friday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a 95-year-old man who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
Friedrich Karl Berger was sent from Tennessee to Germany for the crime of “participating in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution” while serving at a concentration camp in 1945, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Berger was deported under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that participating in “Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing” by “any alien … is deportable.”
For his part, Berger worked at Meppen, a sub-camp in the system where prisoners were forced to work “to the point of exhaustion or death.”
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The decision to deport the 95-year-old former Nazi guard “demonstrates the Department of Justice’s and its law enforcement partners’ commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses,” explained Acting U.S. Attorney General Monty Wilkinson.
“In this year in which we mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions,” he added, “this case shows that the passage even of many decades will not deter the department from pursuing justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes.”
StopAntisemitism.org applauded the DOJ’s decision to deport Berger, saying he “helped lead a brutal [two] week death march in 1945.”
During a two-day trial in February of last year, Berger admitted to working as a guard in the concentration camp, where he forced prisoners to work and prevented them from escaping. He also admitted that he never requested a transfer and was still receiving a pension from the German government.
According to estimates from the Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 50,000 prisoners died during his time serving in the Neuengamme system, of which the Meppen sub-camp was a part.
Berger, who has lived in the U.S. since 1959, was in disbelief of the trial.
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“After 75 years, this is ridiculous,” he told The Washington Post of the trial he underwent. “I cannot understand how this can happen in a country like this. You’re forcing me out of my home.”
It is not yet clear what action — if any —the German government will take against Berger. German authorities said he would be questioned as an accessory to murder, but he was not taken into custody upon his arrival at Frankfurt Airport on a medical transport plane.
Berger is the 70th Nazi persecutor deported from the U.S., according to federal officials.
Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson said the agency is “committed to ensuring the United States will not serve as a safe haven for human rights violators and war criminals.”
“We will never cease to pursue those who persecute others,” Johnson said. “This case exemplifies the steadfast dedication of both ICE and the Department of Justice to pursue justice and to hunt relentlessly for those who participated in one of history’s greatest atrocities, no matter how long it takes.”