Posted on 03/05/2020 4:42:27 PM PST by ransomnote
A U.S. Immigration Judge in Memphis, Tennessee, has issued a removal order against a German citizen and Tennessee resident, on the basis of his service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme).
After a two-day trial, U.S. Immigration Judge Rebecca L. Holt issued an opinion finding Friedrich Karl Berger removable 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 court found that Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, and that the prisoners there included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis. The largest groups of prisoners were Russian, Dutch and Polish civilians.
Judge Holt found that Meppen prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 in “atrocious” conditions and were exploited for outdoor forced labor, working, as at other Nazi camps, “to the point of exhaustion and death.” The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, and on their way to the worksites and also on their way back to the subcamp in the evening.
At the end of March 1945, with the advance of British and Canadian forces, the Nazis abandoned Meppen. The court found that Berger helped guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp – a nearly two-week trip under inhumane conditions, which claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners. The decision also cited Berger’s admission that he never requested a transfer from concentration camp guard service and that he continues to receive a pension from Germany based on his employment in Germany, “including his wartime service.”
“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.”
“This case is but one example of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s commitment to ensuring that the United States will not serve as a safe haven for human rights violators and war criminals,” said Assistant Director David C. Shaw of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), National Security Investigations Division, who oversees the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. “We will continue to pursue these types of cases so that justice may be served.”
In 1946, British occupation authorities in Germany charged SS Obersturmführer Hans Griem, who had headed the Meppen sub-camps, and other Meppen personnel with war crimes for “ill-treatment and murder of Allied nationals.” Although Griem escaped before trial, the British court tried and convicted the three remaining defendants of war crimes in 1947.
The removal case was jointly tried by Eli Rosenbaum, HRSP Director of Human Rights Enforcement and Policy, HRSP Senior Trial Attorney Susan Masling and ICE New Orleans, Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (Memphis), with assistance from HRSP Chief Historian Jeffrey S. Richter. The investigation was initiated by the HRSP and was conducted in partnership with HSI’s Nashville SAC office.
Since the 1979 inception of the Justice Department’s program to detect, investigate, and remove Nazi persecutors, it has won cases against 109 individuals. Over the past 30 years, the Justice Department has won more cases against persons who participated in Nazi persecution than have the law enforcement authorities of all the other countries in the world combined. HRSP’s case against Berger was part of its ongoing efforts to identify, investigate and prosecute individuals who engaged in genocide, torture, war crimes, recruitment or use of child soldiers, female genital mutilation, and other serious human rights violations. HRSP attorneys prosecuted the first torture case brought in the United States and have successfully prosecuted criminal cases against perpetrators of human rights violations in Guatemala, Ethiopia, Liberia, Cuba, and the former Yugoslavia, among others.
The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the Department of Justice. Learn more about the history of our agency at www.Justice.gov/Celebrating150Years.
“How do we know, after all this time, if this guy had a choice?”
You have a good point. They are trying to compare WWII German service to our standards. It cannot be done. Some of the documentaries I’ve watch shows them hanging soldiers that disobeyed orders in the final days. They probably did it all along.
This German guy was working under the fear of death. If he were truly a bad person (considering the era), he would have been tried for crimes decades ago.
You are right, it’s silly.
> I still don’t understand how Albert Speer didn’t hang with the rest of them. <
The Soviet judges at Nuremberg wanted to hang every last defendant. No exceptions. They were talked out of that by the Western judges.
I’m no fan of George Soros. But I’d need a link to a reputable history site before I’d begin to believe it was Soros in that picture.
Heck, I’ve seen Civil War photos where one of the generals looks a little like my grandfather. And he wasn’t even born at the time.
It is easy to see the parallels, how totalitarian regimes build.
There are plenty of Americans right now who “go along to get along”, who dare not speak out against outrageous abuses, who want to keep their job, remain safe for promotion, to maintain the approval of friends and colleagues. “Political Correctness” is a nazi/communist invention, after all.
I used to wonder how all those horrible things could happened over there, in a highly civilised, cultured and technical society. Not any more.
[But if Soros did know what was at the end of those rail lines, that would be a whole different story. That would make him much worse than a mere war profiteer.]
He was a child. Do you hold children responsible for the Holocaust?
You guys need to do some research. There is plenty to hate this guy for...you are simply using the wrong thing.
> He was a child. <
Yes. Soros was 13 years old when the Nazis occupied Hungary. And that’s one reason I’m willing to cut him quite a bit of slack. Most accounts of his behavior at that time say that he didn’t do anything outrageous at all. (By the way, I caught a lot of flak for saying that on another thread.)
My only caveat: If Soros knew about the ovens and cooperated with the occupiers in any way, then he is guilty morally. But as I have noted elsewhere, there is no evidence that he knew.
Do you think the Nazis were telling their state secrets to 14 year old boys in Hungary?
Come on....
Deport SSoros.
#DeportSoros
I’m glad that you know things about me that even I don’t know. And Soros did do the collecting, even if only for a short while. And, from all I’ve read, he hates this country. So, I’ll just let you babble on.
the fact that soros and his get walk free in the world is a sad commentary on the type of men our culture has made.
I dont think that is true.
Very true.
Excellent movie about Nazi concentration/death camps: Escape From Sobibor.
I presume you are saying you do not think it is true that most people in occupied Europe would not know about the death camps.
How would they know?
The camps were a closely guarded secret.
Information was tightly controlled, even in the United States.
Most people believed what their leaders told them.
The Polish Underground managed to get out a report to the allies, with pictures and an eye witness account, in 1944.
The Polish officer who delivered it wrote it up as The Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World.
Ridiculous
I’m surprised Lon has been spared by the white nationalist bogeyman
Paper tiger
Jesus babs That’s harsh
Soros disdains his Jewishness as much as George Lincoln Rockwell would have
Soros didn’t do what folks here often claim not to the extent folks claim
But he was a traitor to Jews as were plenty others to stay alive
Like the Dov Landau character in Exodus
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