A former Nazi concentration camp guard living in Tennessee will be deported to Germany following a ruling from an immigration judge.
Friedrich Karl Berger, a German citizen and Tennessee resident, was sentenced to be removed under the Immigration and Nationality Act after serving as an armed guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany. He specifically served at a Neuengamme subcamp close to Meppen, Germany.
Judge Rebecca L. Holt issued her ruling after a two-day trial in which she ordered his removal because of his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where prosecution took place.”
“This case is but one example of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) commitment to ensuring that the United States will not serve as a safe haven for human rights violators and war criminals,” David C. Shaw, the assistant director of the National Security Investigations Division, Homeland Security Investigations, which oversees the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, said in a statement. “We will continue to pursue these types of cases so that justice may be served.”
Holt found that Berger admitted to guarding prisoners and making sure they didn’t escape the camp while they were on their way to and from work sites. The court also found that he helped guard the prisoners during their forced evacuation at the end of March 1945, when the British and Canadian forces advanced.
“Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. “This ruling shows the department’s continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution.”
