Ex-Nazi Living In U.S. For Decades To Be Deported

[appalachiablue]

Source: ABC News

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- The U.S. government said Thursday that it is deporting a 94-year-old German ex-Nazi who has been in the United States for decades. An immigration judge ordered Friedrich Karl Berger's deportation on Feb. 28 after a two-day trial in Memphis, authorities said. It's unclear when he will be removed. Berger, who's been living in Tennessee, has 30 days to appeal the ruling.

The government says Berger was an armed guard at a concentration camp near Meppen, Germany, in 1945.

The immigration judge found that the prisoners Berger guarded were held in atrocious conditions and were exploited for forced labor. Berger also was accused of guarding prisoners during a forced evacuation to a main camp that took two weeks and left 70 prisoners dead as they traveled in inhumane conditions, according to two government news releases.

Berger acknowledged that he never requested a transfer from the concentration camp guard service and that he still gets a pension from Germany. He has been living in the U.S. since 1959.


Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/nazi-living-us-decades-deported-69422950

[empedocles]

1. At least he had to worry for years about being deported?

[Rebl2]

15. Apparently not

How did he get away with this for 60 years?

[handmade34]

2. better the U.S. Government...

than "Hunters"


it would be like trump to stop the deportation

[lagomorph777]

20. I thought Trump had exempted Nazis from deportation.

I'm sure he'll look into this and put a stop to it.

[wnylib]

3. I am amazed there are any of the scum

still alive.

No sympathy for his age, either. How much sympathy did his aged victims get? Shame that he had such a long life while they did not.

Surprised, too, that Germany pays him a pension.

[woundedkarma]

4. Sooooo...

When are we going to deport all the lowlife thugs guarding OUR concentration camps? Pretty sure they're living in atrocious conditions as well.

[Mosby]

5. Your post is offensive and historically amoral.

[marble falls]

9. Its offensive we have black site prisons, abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay detention camp, all sorts

of camps in Afghanistan .....



We have leaders and soldiers committing war crimes.

ALL war criminals should be tried.

[MosheFeingold]

19. Couple problems with that idea

Number one:

1. Nazis are deported back to their home country (e.g., Germany) for punishment. Our thugs did not immigrate anywhere. Ergo, their punishment should be here.

2. As bad as our people were, I don't see a state sponsor of their acts and their acts (while foul) don't include mass murder of 6-8,000,000 prisoners, nor large scale "science" experiments, nor mass starvation, or anything of the sort.

To make the comparison makes you look silly and cheapens the Shoa.

[appalachiablue]

6. NBC News report:

About 100,000 people were imprisoned in the Neuengamme system between 1938 and 1945, and at least 42,900 were killed, according to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial.

Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, where prisoners were “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis, according to the Justice Department.

Meppen prisoners were held in “atrocious” conditions during the winter of 1945, and exploited for outdoor labor that often led to death, Holt found.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-nazi-camp-guard-living-tennessee-be-deported-germany-judge-n1150586



Neuengamme Concentration Camp.




SS guards at Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Christmas 1943.

[bucolic_frolic]

7. Accountability is important, even at this late date

I always wonder though about the ability of soldiers to question or disobey orders at the time. It would have been tantamount to suicide. It's a kind of comment about the inhumanity of war and how it warps the human mind to numbed compliance.

[DEbluedude]

8. What about the current one whose been living in the WH for the past 3 years?

[nycbos]

10. Delayed justice is better than no justice at all.

[jberryhill]

11. As long as it doesn't affect the assets of VW, Mercedes, Merck, Bayer, BMW, etc....

Guard at a camp.... lol....


https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/04/02/more-than-a-dozen-of-europes-wealthiest-billionaires-and-their-families-had-nazi-ties/#31bb874a6015

More Than A Dozen European Billionaires—Linked To BMW, L’Oréal, Bosch—Have Families With Past Nazi Ties

Last week, the German billionaire Reimann family, whose JAB Holdings owns Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread and Pret a Manger, admitted to profiting from, and taking part in, Nazi abuses and slave labor during the Nazi regime.

The acknowledgement came after the German newspaper Bild reported that Albert Reimann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr., both dead, were active in the Nazi Party and used Russian civilians and French prisoners of war as slaves during World War II. The family—which includes four billionaire children of Reimann Jr. worth an estimated $3.7 billion each—plans to donate about $11 million to a “suitable organization,” according to family spokesperson Peter Harf, though it hasn’t yet announced which. Harf also claims the family had already been looking into its ancestral ties to Nazism, commissioning German historian Pauk Erker to do so in 2014; his work is ongoing and is expected to be completed in 2020, a spokesperson told Forbes.

But the family was far from alone in participating in Nazi activities or profiting from the Nazi regime. More than a dozen European billionaires and their families whose business roots predate World War II—including Kuehne and Nagel’s Klaus Michael Kuehne and Knorr-Bremse AG’s Heinz Hermann Thiele—had ties to Nazism through contracts, slave labor, the appropriation of stolen goods or other means.

“These kind of stories never come as a surprise. In 1944, one third of the whole workforce in Germany was forced labor. This means that almost every company which produced back then was in one way or the other involved in the war economy,” says Roman Köster, a German historian. “From 1942 it proved very complicated [for German businesses] to maintain production [that] was not in one way or the other related with the war.” He adds that Bild’s findings in the case of the Reimann family are worse than others because of the abuse and mistreatment of these workers, though a Reimann family spokesperson says Albert Reimann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr. did not personally assault or harm any laborers.

---------

For the math-impaired 11M is about .29% of 3.7B.

.29%.

It's not going to make you dislike Krispy Kreme doughnuts, so, yeah, let's go after Sargent Schultz!

Hang him high!

Just don't touch the money.

[denem]

17. +1

[MrModerate]

18. You realize that the policies that led to these abuses...

Were rather suddenly ended some 75 years ago?

If the topic is reparations, that should be the headline, IMO.

[jberryhill]

22. So, wait...

If a guy was drafted into the army and posted as a guard, we gotta make sure he gets punished.

If a guy made a fortune off the backs of the prisoners and his family continues to enjoy the fruits of that fortune, well that's just another topic entirely.

[MrModerate]

24. Except that "the guy who made a fortune" has been dead for 50 years. n/t

[jberryhill]

27. Fortunately, the money doesn't die

it's immortal.

That's why money is better than people.

[CaptYossarian]

12. Does Stephen Miller need an assistant?

If so, expect Barr to reverse this order.

[LuvNewcastle]

36. That would be just about perfect.

He could tell Miller bedtime stories.

[cstanleytech]

13. If only we could deport the one in the White House.

[Dopers_Greed]

14. Will Trump intervene to let him stay?

And offer him a cabinet position.

[MrModerate]

16. Luckily this is a problem that won't be with us much longer...

Because there's something disturbing and absurd about deporting someone who's 94. The process of rooting out superannuated Nazis at this point seems degraded, as if it's descended from justice into revenge.

I understand the need for the nation to expel evil people (although we don't do a very consistent job of it), but I'll be glad when time has taken care of the problem — rather than the courts.

[Steelrolled]

39. I agree - it is very odd.

Particularly when you consider all of the atrocities committed in the 70 years since, for which there is little interest or concern.

[Sunlei]

21. didn't USA allow about 20,000 nazis to come live in America?

This person is a German citizen using visa to live in America. His pension is from his nazi service.

Out of those 20,000 nazis many could still not be USA citizens.

Finally a bright side to the deportation laws....deport them all! I wouldn't mind if citizenship papers were yanked away from the "USA citizens" who lied on their paperwork about their Nazi careers- and they were deported as well.

[jberryhill]

28. "His pension is from his nazi service"

No, his pension is likely from his service in the German army.

Couple of things:

1. Not every conscript in the German army was a member of the Nazi party.

2. Not every Nazi was a war criminal.

On point #2, it is a basic idea of traditional Western notions of justice that an individual is held accountable for their actions, and not for mere associations.

20,000 war criminals were not brought in by the US government.

[Sunlei]

30. 1959 was his entrance date, I wonder if he was part of operation paperclip

Hes a old man now, in 1959 that's not to many years after the war ended. Large groups of paperclip persons came in during the 50s, even in 1959 they brought them in through mexico.

In my world all nazis are war criminals, none of them deserve a good life in the USA. I bet it was much higher than even 20,000 who slipped into the USA. Its not like the 30s,40s 50s Immigration and Naturalization Service functioned the same as today.

[jberryhill]

31. "Its not like the 30s,40s 50s Immigration and Naturalization Service..."

Operation Paperclip was a very small fraction of immigrants from Germany in the late 40's and 50's. Not even a drop in the bucket.

My father fought in Europe during the war, and was also posted in Austria during the occupation. That is where he met my Austrian mother who was conscripted to serve in an anti-aircraft battalion in the German army. If you were not a rich singing group, but a poor person from a small village, it didn't work as shown in the movies. Her brother was conscripted to serve in a tank battalion on the eastern front.

Even though my mother was marrying an officer in the US Army, she had to go through extensive interviews and record verification from then-captured archives before being permitted to immigrate to the US. Likewise, when my parents sponsored her brother and his wife to immigrate later on, there was extensive background checking.

Because my mother had briefly been in Russian territory at the end of the war, from which she escaped into the US zone, there were problems later in my father's career when he was passed over for a security clearance to work at the DuPont Savannah River Site. Ultimately, it was potential exposure to Communists, not Nazis, that caused a problem down the road, even though her brother was shooting at them before it was fashionable.

Some lunkhead who was posted as a prison camp guard was not a high value emigree who would have come in under Operation Paperclip. Operation Paperclip was for persons with particularly valuable technical knowledge - scientists and academic researchers.

If one is a member of a privileged class, there are always advantages. But the US did not have a wide open door policy for Nazis after WWII, and there were extensive background checks. That is why cases of this type are not very common despite the very high volume of ordinary persons who were not criminals and committed no crimes who immigrated to this country.

[SoCalNative]

33. He wasn't in the army

he was in the German navy.

And to your assertion that they weren't all Nazis? The Nazi party was the ONLY political party allowed to exist in Germany after Hitler seized power so yes, they were ALL Nazis.

[jberryhill]

35. You have utterly no idea what you are talking about

Party membership was important for social climbers and the relatively well off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Military_membership

When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party had over 2 million members. In 1939, the membership total rose to 5.3 million with 81% being male and 19% being female. It continued to attract many more and by 1945 the party reached its peak of 8 million with 63% being male and 37% being female (about 10% of the German population of 80 million).[3][118]


Military membership


Nazi members with military ambitions were encouraged to join the Waffen-SS, but a great number enlisted in the Wehrmacht and even more were drafted for service after World War II began. Early regulations required that all Wehrmacht members be non-political and any Nazi member joining in the 1930s was required to resign from the Nazi Party.

...

The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that junior officers in the army were inclined to be especially zealous National Socialists with a third of them having joined the Nazi Party by 1941. Reinforcing the work of the junior leaders were the National Socialist Leadership Guidance Officers, which were created with the purpose of indoctrinating the troops for the "war of extermination" against Soviet Russia.[119] Among higher-ranking officers, 29.2% were NSDAP members by 1941.[120]

Breathtaking ignorance. It became the sole legal party in 1933, so explain why less than 30% of the OFFICERS, let alone the enlisted soldiers, were Nazis.

[3Hotdogs]

32. One of them wrote a book. I believe the title is, "I Aim At The Stars (and hit London).

It also became a movie.

[rustydog]

23. Why, did he quit the GOP?

[Initech]

25. This is one deportation I actually won't be sad about.

Yeah really, fuck Nazis.

[beachbumbob]

26. Netflix "Hunters" had this as subject matter of american GOVT sponsorship of thousands of

Nazis to our country which is ALL true. Our govt backstabbed us.

[appalachiablue]

29. I haven't seen 'Hunters' but read two more recent books

on the subject. 'Operation Paperclip' deals with German scientists and 'experts' who were brought to the US to work on the rocket program in 1945.

'The Nazis Next Door' ventures into the realm of Nazi collaborators whose records were largely scrubbed so they could enter the US or work in other parts of the world for US intelligence agencies after the war. Some of these characters were pretty low level and low life-- thugs basically who lived well in America or other locations.

A guy we knew in college was the son of a former German army soldier who came over in 1945 to work in White Sands, New Mexico and then for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. He had no scientific expertise, must have pulled some strings to get over here with the lax oversight of the govt. He and his family enjoyed a good, long life. I learned much of this from his obit, many years later.

NPR, How Thousands Of Nazis Were Rewarded With Life In The US
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-nazis-were-rewarded-with-life-in-the-u-s

[HarlanPepper]

38. Hunters is fun but its more of a comic book type of a story than a serious look at the subject.

[SoCalNative]

34. A bit more detail in the WaPo report

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/nazi-concentration-camp-guard-in-united-states/2020/03/05/b906cdf8-5efc-11ea-9055-5fa12981bbbf_story.html

[Flaleftist]

37. WTF is the pension about?

[Progressive Jones]

40. Why should this fucking nazi be allowed to live? nt