by Michael Levenson
A United States immigration judge has ordered that a Tennessee man who served as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany during World War II be deported to the country, where he is a citizen and has continued to receive a pension based on his employment, “including his wartime service.”
The Justice Department said the man, Friedrich Karl Berger, 94, was an armed guard in a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, where prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 and forced to work outdoors “to the point of exhaustion and death.”
“Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement,” Brian A. Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general in the department’s criminal division, said in a statement on Thursday. “This ruling shows the Department’s continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution.”
A lawyer for Mr. Berger, Hugh B. Ward, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Berger, of Oak Ridge, Tenn., could not immediately be reached for comment. He told The Washington Post on Thursday that he was ordered to work in the camp, was there for a short time and did not carry a weapon. In the United States, he said, he had made a living building wire-stripping machines.
“After 75 years, this is ridiculous. I cannot believe it,” he told The Post, adding, “You’re forcing me out of my home.”
The Justice Department said Mr. Berger was ordered deported after a two-day trial. A federal immigration judge in Memphis, Rebecca L. Holt, found that Mr. Berger was deportable under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act because his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place” constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution, the department said.
Mr. Berger served at a Neuengamme subcamp near Meppen, Germany, where Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians and political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned, the department said. There were about 80 Neuengamme subcamps across northern Germany.
At the end of March 1945, when the Nazis abandoned Meppen to escape advancing British and Canadian forces, Mr. Berger helped guard prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the main camp — a nearly two-week trek under inhumane conditions that claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners, the department said.
Eli Rosenbaum, a veteran Justice Department hunter of former Nazis, helped prosecute Mr. Berger in federal immigration court in Memphis, four decades after he arrived at the department as a summer intern in 1979.
“If you had told me then I would be in court cross-examining a Nazi in 2020, I would have said, ‘Not happening. Not possible for anyone to be doing that in 2020.’ But there you go,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy at the department.
He declined to say how Mr. Berger’s case came to the department’s attention, but he said such cases typically develop through a tip from a foreign government or from proactive research by the department, which has developed a list of names of suspected Nazi war criminals and methodically searched for them for 40 years.
In Mr. Berger’s case, he said, the department received important investigative help from law enforcement and archival authorities in Germany, England, Denmark, Poland and Russia.
Mr. Berger, he said, was a regular soldier in the German Navy who was assigned by the SS to guard a concentration camp at Meppen, where forced laborers — many of them Russian civilians — were taken out each day in the dead of winter to dig anti-tank fortifications. He said Mr. Berger was tied to the operation through one critical piece of evidence — his name appeared on a set of SS cards identifying the guards in the Neuengamme system along with their basic service information.
The cards were found amid skeletons and other wreckage in the Thielbek, one of three German ships that were carrying thousands of prisoners when they were bombed by the British Royal Air Force in the Bay of Lübeck in 1945. In about 1950, Mr. Rosenbaum said, the Thielbek was raised from the sea and the cards were recovered and transcribed.
“Fortunately, they could make out almost everything for Berger,” he said, including when he went to Meppen and when he left. “It’s an incredibly intricate jigsaw puzzle, but this one was one of the most important pieces of evidence.”
Mr. Berger came to the United States on July 20, 1959, according to federal officials, and had apparently been living quietly in Oak Ridge, where he blended in easily with his suburban neighbors.
“It’s a nation of immigrants,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, “and we’re all accustomed to encountering people of different background from overseas.”
Given how many years have passed since the war, he said, Mr. Berger’s deportation could be “the last decision in a Nazi case.”
“We are near the very end of the period in which it is possible to secure law enforcement justice in these cases,” Mr. Rosenbaum said.
Judge Holt said that Mr. Berger acknowledged that he had never requested a transfer from concentration camp guard service and that he had continued to receive a pension from Germany based on his employment in the country, “including his wartime service.” Mr. Berger has 30 days to appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Virginia; if he loses there, he could appeal his case further in court.
Efraim Zuroff, a Holocaust historian and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter, applauded the decision to deport Mr. Berger, saying his advanced age in no way diminished his guilt or the need to hold him accountable for his crimes.
“Especially these days, when we see anti-Semitism on the rise and the rise of right-wing movements, this is a reminder that, if you commit such crimes, even many years later, you will be held accountable,” said Mr. Zuroff, who has pursued Nazi war criminals for 40 years. “There is no expiration date on justice.”
For more information contact us at http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment