A 95-year-old Tennessee resident, who worked as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, has been deported back to Germany, the US Justice Department.
CNN quoted the Justice Department as saying on Friday that Friedrich Karl Berger, a 95-year-old German citizen, was ordered removed from the US in February 2020, when a US immigration judge determined his "willing service" as a guard of concentration camp prisoners "constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution".
The court further said, "In February 2020, Friedrich Karl Berger, 95, was ordered removed from the US-based on his participation in Nazi-sponsored persecution while serving in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme)."
He has been removed from the US under the Holtzman Amendment that prohibits people who participated in the Nazi persecution from living in the US.
CNN reported that Berger's trial found he had worked as an armed guard at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, in 1945.
The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, on their way to worksites and on their way back to the SS-run subcamp in the evening.
"Berger's removal demonstrates the Department of Justice's and its law enforcement partners' commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humty and other human rights abuses," said Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions, this case shows that the passage even of many decades will not deter the Department from pursuing justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi crimes, the court added.
( With inputs from ANI )
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