Memphis Judge Orders Deportation of Former Nazi Concentration Camp Guard

"This ruling shows the Department's continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution."

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A Tennessee resident who once served as a concentration camp guard in Nazi Germany was ordered out of the U.S Thursday after a two-day trial in Memphis.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, Friedrich Karl Berger, 94, admitted to serving as an armed guard for a sub-camp of Neuengamme— a network of Nazi German concentration camps in northern Germany.

"Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement," Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski said in a statement. "This ruling shows the Department's continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution."

Memphis federal immigration judge Rebecca L. Holt ordered Berger’s deportation 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.

Since 1979, when the Justice Department created a program to detect, investigate, and remove Nazi persecutors, it has won removal cases against 109 individuals, found to have assisted the Nazis.