A man in Tennessee will be sent back to Germany as a result of his service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an “armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place,” a U.S. immigration judge ruled on Thursday. Friedrich Karl Berger was reportedly an armed guard during World War II at a concentration subcamp near Meppen, Germany, under the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system, which imprisoned “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents,” according to court records. U.S. Immigration Judge Rebecca Holt determined that Berger prevented prisoners who were kept in “atrocious” conditions from escaping the camp, where they were forced to work “to the point of exhaustion and death.” Berger also guarded prisoners during a two-week long evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp that left at least 70 prisoners dead. “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 David Shaw, who leads the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center.
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