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Nazi Does not Like Being Forced Out of His Home

Huckleberry

By Huckleberry
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Huckleberry

Huckleberry 33669

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Not like a mean guy I'm calling a Nazi. An actual Nazi. A concentration camp guard. Complaining that he's being forced out of his home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/friedrich-karl-berger-nazi-concentration-camp.html

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.”

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Armybrat

Armybrat 41037

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Yet we lauded Werner Von Braun and his team.

And on the other hand the Americans who were held as POWs by the Japanese for three tortured and starved long years have been denied seeking restitution from that country by the US government. Every administration since WW2 has slapped those poor guys in the face for 3/4 of a century.

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Huckleberry

Huckleberry 33669

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1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Here’s my question: is this actually justice? Or are we just inconveniencing a really old man to feel better?

It's revenge. And I'm perfectly fine with that in this case. Some crimes are so horrific that a measured amount of revenge is a valid legal consequence. He's not being executed, and we're not even doing anything except sending him back to Germany. If they want to punish him, they can do so. We're simply saying that we will under no circumstances knowingly allow Nazi concentration camp guards who enabled the Holocaust to live comfortably within our borders.

Edited by Huckleberry
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Chooky

Chooky 13322

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1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Here’s my question: is this actually justice? Or are we just inconveniencing a really old man to feel better?

It's legitimate justice. And if anything is worthy of no statute of limitation I'd put participation in genocide up there. I'm not being snarky or self righteous. And it does make me feel better. So maybe a little self righteous. But still, beat it, Kraut. Pack up your oxygen tank and nazi shit and get on the other side of the pond. Fuck outta. 

Edited by Chooky
Me no write good phone bad
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Foosters

Foosters 17951

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1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Here’s my question: is this actually justice? Or are we just inconveniencing a really old man to feel better?

We're just deporting him, not killing him. As far as losing sleep over individual's deported, this guy is going to be closer to the bottom of the list.

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23170

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1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Here’s my question: is this actually justice? Or are we just inconveniencing a really old man to feel better?

If the millions of Jews who died could answer, what would their answer be? What about the survivors and their children, what do you think their answer would be? 

He got to live a full life. If only he could've extended the same courtesy to just one Holocaust victim...

He should feel extremely lucky if his being inconvenienced is the only penalty that he'll have to pay.

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31705

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1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Here’s my question: is this actually justice? Or are we just inconveniencing a really old man to feel better?

I applaud the question.  Not sure of the answer.  I am comforted that he is merely being deported to a (more) civilized country, and not criminally punished.

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SDG

SDG 3319

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1 hour ago, Armybrat said:

Yet we lauded Werner Von Braun and his team.

And on the other hand the Americans who were held as POWs by the Japanese for three tortured and starved long years have been denied seeking restitution from that country by the US government. Every administration since WW2 has slapped those poor guys in the face for 3/4 of a century.

Good comment (my question is going to be a bit off topic).  Are there an good recommended sources as to his participation and how exactly he got to that point?  Everything I’ve seen or read is rather vague on the topic limiting it to “he didn’t have a choice.”  Was coming to the US a redemption tour for him and a chance to beat the USSR in the space race for the US?  

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Armybrat

Armybrat 41037

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Peenemunde, Nordhausen, & Mittlewerk facilities were built with slave labor from the Camp Dora system. 10,000 prisoners died producing Von Braun’s V1 “Buzzbombs” & V2 rockets. Lot of material out there about the topic.

Edited by Armybrat
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aggie08

aggie08 21606

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I've watched many a documentary, but my memory is a little fuzzy...couldn't camp guards ask out of their duties at any time? I seem to remember that many did for conscience and psyche related reasons, even if it meant a much more dangerous assignment. Many more seemed to view it as a favorable alternative to the frontlines.

I do not believe that "I was just a soldier doing what I was ordered" holds much water here.

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Loco

Loco 3754

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

I don't think so.  The SS ran the camps.  He was a navy "soldier."

His big act of complicity was not seeking transfer.

Even if that's true... at best he held women, children, and men and made them work themselves to death.  There are no two ways about it.  No way he didn't know what was going on.  Fighting for your country is one thing... genocide is another.  Fuck them all

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