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.
Re: post 17
I still want to see the ones at the top hang for the coup attempt...
Then other conspirators that assisted/financed them.
Start at the top and hunt down the others.
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The risk to the public is greater when the top ones still have resources with which to retaliate; arrest one and civil unrest with help from outside the US (state actors) costs innocent lives. Take out all their resources first and then they’re just pinata’s in need of discipline.
They will receive justice, but not at the risk of stability of the union, and that of nations around the world (financial, civil, etc.)
70 years from now they might arrest and jail someone.
No, I was responding to the statement that I do not believe that Russian who participated in atrocities were not punished. My readings over time tell me that many had...
I understand the there were many who did not know about the camps. did not understand that the prison camps were death camps.
Thank you for clarifying.
He was 14. He was a messenger boy for a friend of his family who was head of the Jewish Council set up by the occupiers. He did not know the intentions of the Nazis. He did not know about the Holocaust to come. He was not a guard, he was not a Kapo. These smears are insane.
14 and didn’t know the intentions of the Nazis?
He sure got smarter as he matured
He was a kapo junior
Not like he turned over folks in the ghetto to Heydrich admittedly but it’s not exactly something to be proud of
I don’t care if they are 190 years old. Hang ‘em. I have Uncles I’ll never meet because of Hitler and Tojo and their followers.
The picture isn't Soros, it's Oskar Groening, an Auschwitz accountant.
We remember the Holodomor, 14MM+
And we know that Stalin was an antisemite who died while planning his own final solution, a death march through Siberia under pretext of the Doctor's Plot
what...like 75 yrs ago?....what a waste of time and effort....
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