Posted on 11/24/2003 2:23:04 PM PST by anotherview
Just in, from the Ha'aretz ticker:
00:16 U.S. federal judge rules that former Nazi concentration camp guard, 78, living in U.S. will be deported (AP)
Send him to Tel Aviv....
... which was the way many of the people he oversaw the execution of were found in their own homes in Germany.
16 years after escaping deportation, Nazi guard found hiding in Michigan
My thought exactly. I'd like to think post 9/11 changes led to his arrest, but I don't think that's the case.
These men must be brought to justice. I will say however that I fear much more the anti-semitic Islamofascists/EUleftists/ etc., these days, than the old decrepit Nazis. But perhaps the deportation will send a message.
Not hardly. They revoked his citizenship in 1986.
I was referring to his arrest this year. Since jumping bail in 1987, despite being a fugitive, he's lived openly in the US and Canada, frequently crossing the border, and keeping his Michigan drivers license current, until July, 2003.
By Patty Pensa
Staff Writer
Posted November 24 2003
The scene, so repugnant and inhumane, replays itself in Renee Goldberg's memory as if it happened yesterday.
There she is, 16 years old, tied to a chair with only her hands free, writhing. There is the guard, a woman, standing above her with what look like pliers in hand.
"You'll be a cripple for life," the guard spits out before peeling off, one by one, each of Goldberg's fingernails.
The pain unbearable, Goldberg passes out. She awakes in a bloody mess and screams in agony.
This is Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp in what is today Poland. It is 1944, the third year of Goldberg's four years of abuse, humiliation and torture in a ghetto and three concentration camps.
Then there is Adam Friedrich, an admitted Nazi guard who the U.S. government says volunteered to serve under Hitler's regime. He reported for duty with the Death's Head guard unit at Gross-Rosen in 1943 and stayed until World War II ended in 1945.
Friedrich, the government alleges, misrepresented himself to become a U.S. citizen. The government wants Friedrich out and is looking for help from Goldberg, 75, who lives west of Delray Beach. Government lawyers recently interviewed Goldberg for more than two hours in their case against Friedrich, 82, who lives in St. Louis.
"I want him to be deported and to take away his American citizenship. When I think he is getting Social Security and all the benefits of being a citizen ...," said Goldberg, trailing off into her own frustration.
"I can never forget or forgive."
It isn't possible for Goldberg to forget the face of the woman who pulled out her nails. But Goldberg can't be sure if she ever came face to face with Friedrich. Her testimony, she said, will be to contradict any defense attempts to downplay the brutality of Gross-Rosen.
The civil complaint filed last year alleges that Friedrich personally advocated or assisted in Nazi persecution while serving at Gross-Rosen and its subcamp, which was the site of a poison-gas factory.
He guarded prisoners from a watchtower and kept watch over slave laborers at Gross-Rosen's infamous quarry work site, the U.S. Department of Justice claims. Friedrich has denied lying about his wartime record.
At Gross-Rosen there were ditches. Those dreaded ditches where 500 women took turns climbing down into knee-deep water in the dead of winter. They had no gloves, no socks, no underwear. Just a thin coat in sub-freezing weather and wooden clogs that split skin.
"It was brutal, absolutely brutal," said Goldberg, still unsure how she survived.
When it came time for Goldberg's mother to stand in the icy water, Goldberg tried to slip past the guards and take her mother's place.
They spotted her, and that's when they sent her to a barrack to be tortured. It was some kind of miracle, Goldberg said, that an elderly Polish man risked his own well-being to nurse her back to health. He washed her fingers with warm water and then brought snow to numb her fingers inside bandages.
It took a few weeks for her fingers to heal and for the crusts that had formed to shed so that new nails could grow.
Indelible memories, when spoken about, come in a quiet voice followed by tears. Goldberg sits recounting a past she could not bring herself to explain until moving to Florida 13 years ago and being invited to speak before a concert of her father's music. Her tanned hands folded, she shifts her interlaced fingers with long, pink nails.
Some might say it's pointless to prosecute a man allegedly affiliated with such torture because he is old and now harmless.
Those who say so are wrong, said Bill Gralnick, southeast regional director of the American Jewish Committee.
"It would be an injustice to the 6 million Jews and 5 million gentiles butchered by these men," Gralnick said. "You can't just let them disappear quietly into the woodwork knowing that they escaped justice. It's just wrong."
Goldberg remembers her life in Prague, where her ancestors built the synagogue and her father was a cantor and pianist. She was 11 years old and never knew that being Jewish could cause her harm.
Then the Germans plowed through her neighborhood in tanks and her family members, like many others, were separated, numbered and cordoned off to a ghetto. She spent her days drawing with the other children. One of Goldberg's pictures -- a brown sun peeking behind purple mountains -- was uncovered years later and now hangs in a Jewish museum in Prague. A copy hangs in her living room.
Goldberg's father was ordered from that ghetto and never returned. She and her mother were sent to Auschwitz to be shaved, starved, worked to the bone and brought to the brink of death in a room of hundreds of showerheads -- the gas chamber.
Between Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, Goldberg didn't shower once, and when liberation came in 1945, four baths weren't enough to remove layers upon layers of dirt. Goldberg, free at age 17, shook a mound of lice from her body and weighed 62 pounds. "You have no idea. You have no idea what an impression, what I felt like, what they made out of us, what was left of us," she said.
The federal Office of Special Investigations deported 56 former Nazis between 1979, when it began efforts to prosecute Nazis living in the United States, and 2002, when the charges against Friedrich were announced. More than 170 U.S. residents were under investigation for possible Nazi affiliation at that time.
Friedrich, born in Romania, immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1955. He became a U.S. citizen in St. Louis in 1962. The government's case is based on a statute that bars those who assisted in Nazi persecution from entering this country.
"What can justice consist of for such a monumental, unprecedented crime?" said Alan Berger, director of Florida Atlantic University's Holocaust and Judaic Program Studies.
"Clearly there is no justice in the sense that one can say, `Ah-ha, here's a Nazi guard and he's being sentenced. The case is closed.' The case is never closed. This is a moral stain in the history of humanity."
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