Washington
The United States on Saturday deported a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to Germany, the Justice Department said.
The deportation of Friedrich Karl Berger, who had been living in Tennessee, was “possibly the last” such US expulsion of a former Nazi, given the dwindling number of war survivors, one US official said.
Berger, who had retained German citizenship, was deported for taking part in “Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution” while serving as an armed guard at 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 drew evidence from both US and European archives, “including records of the historic trial at Nuremberg of the most notorious former leaders of the defeated Nazi regime,” Wilkinson said.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, in which jurists from the Allied powers tried prominent Nazis under international law. Twelve defendants received death sentences and were hanged.
The deportation of Berger, who had lived in the US since 1959, was first ordered in March of last year by a US immigration judge.
As a young man, he had been stationed at a subcamp near Meppen, Germany, where prisoners were held in “atrocious” conditions and worked “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.—AFP
