Authorities in the United States have deported a 95-year-old man who admitted working as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said in a statement that Friedrich Karl Berger, a German national, was sent back to Germany this month for serving as a guard of a Neuengamme concentration camp subcamp near Hamburg in 1945.
The incident was investigated by the US Department of Justice and Friedrich Karl Berger was ordered to be expelled by a Memphis, Tennessee court in February 2020 but will not stand trial in Germany because prosecutors dismissed the case against him for lack of evidence.
According to an ICE statement, Friedrich Karl Berger worked at the subcamp near Meppen, Germany, where prisoners, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Jewish and others were held in cruel conditions and worked to the point of exhaustion and death.
Friedrich Karl Berger acknowledged serving as a guard for several weeks near the end of the war but said he didn’t witness any abuse or killings, news agencies have reported.
Friedrich Karl Berger admitted he guarded prisoners, and that he also accompanied prisoners on the forced evacuation of the camp that resulted in the deaths of 70 prisoners.
He’d been living in the United States since 1959.
A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office in Celle said police in the German state of Hesse had been asked to investigate Friedrich Karl Berger on his return to Germany, but a police spokesperson said there was no live investigation linked to him and he was a free individual and had not been taken into custody.
In recent years, prosecutors have brought charges against several former Nazis, grabbing the last chance to obtain justice for the millions who died in concentration camps.
Earlier this month, prosecutors indicted a 100-year-old German man with being an accomplice to 3,518 deaths perpetrated while he was supposedly a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. However, you’re never too old to pay for a crime like this because we often forget about the horrors that occurred in those concentration camps.
Hitler of course, led through fear and failure, and not to follow him would ultimately cost you your life, but often the soldiers that served him were worse than the leader himself. Hitler commanded, his foot soldiers just followed the orders that ultimately made them feel powerful and special.
Can you just imagine being removed from your home and community, where they thought they belonged, thought that they had rights – forcing them to make a journey somewhere they didn’t want to go, into a hostile unknown?
The war ended 76 years ago, and seventy-six years ago isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, but so quickly we forget, especially when we’re persecuting those that come into our countries because they’ve also been forced to make that journey to someplace they really didn’t want to go, into another hostile unknown.
We create and protest that the war was such a bad thing, which of course, it was, yet we appear to have no difficulty doing it over again to other people – they might not be Jews, but they are human beings!
Friedrich Karl Berger might have been extradited to Germany, but in Germany, he will be hailed as a national hero.
And America is no better, especially when Donald Trump was keeping immigrants in cages. So, did this make Donald Trump an orange Nazi?
Then, of course, there was Operation Paperclip, which was a covert programme of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) mostly carried out by special agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians, such as Werner von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to the United States, for US government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959 – many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party.
