Index card found in sunken ship helps implicate former Nazi concentration camp guard living in Tenne

[groundloop]

Source: CBS 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 after information was found in a sunken ship, implicating him as a concentration camp guard. An immigration judge ordered Friedrich Karl Berger's deportation on Feb. 28 after a two-day trial in Memphis, authorities said.

The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department traced Berger's Nazi service to an index card that was found in a sunken ship years after it was mistakenly bombed by the British Royal Air Force in May 1945. The card apparently documented Berger's work at the Neuengamme concentration camp system.

The government says Berger was an armed guard at a concentration camp near Meppen, Germany, in 1945. Berger, who was reached by phone by The Washington Post, said he did not carry a weapon and said the court's conclusions about his work at the camp were based on "lies."

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.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-nazi-guard-friedrich-karl-berger-faces-deportation-index-card-found-sunken-ship-helps-implicate-tennessee-man/

[sandensea]

1. They should start looking in Carlsbad and Escondido, CA

Last edited Sat Mar 7, 2020, 12:32 AM - Edit history (1)

There was a sizable community of Nazi escapees, and their descendants are still there (most of them Republicans, natürlich).

[2naSalit]

5. And those are pretty

nice areas.

[sandensea]

6. Just beautiful!

Great climate, too.

Escondido. It means 'hidden' in Spanish.

[2naSalit]

9. Used to live there, still have

friends and relatives in the area.

[sdfernando]

10. Meh...it gets too hot in Escondido during the summer

Its amazing that the temperature difference can easily be 10 to 15, sometimes 20 degrees from the coastal areas...its not that far.

[C Moon]

12. That was my first thought: too friggin' hot.

[sandensea]

13. True. It ain't Laguna Beach

A little slice of heaven, that is - or would be, were it not for the yooge number of tourists driving, jostling, and milling about all the time (weekends especially).

[BigmanPigman]

32. My sister lives 10 min away from me in

Pt Loma while I live in Hillcrest. Her house hardly ever sees the sun in Summer due to coastal clouds and is 10° colder than here. Meanwhile, Esconido is about that much hotter than Hillcrest. There are Coastal, Inland, Mountain and Desert weather forecasts every day. All within about a two hour's drive of each other. Always wear layers when you live here.

[sdfernando]

42. We must be neighbors

I’m very close to Park & Robinson.

[BigmanPigman]

43. Fellow DUer "FreeState" lives by us too.

She/he has lived in this area for about as long as I have (about 32 years). How the rents and prices have changed!$!$ My original apt at 5th and Brooks was $400 a month in 1986, now it is $1,875!

[Juneboarder]

23. Seriously?

I've lived in North County my entire life and have yet to run into a Nazi escapee or descendant. I could be oblivious, though, as it's not something I really seek out.

On a side note, I just finished a really good book called Beneath A Scarlet Sky about an Italian youth in Milan during the Nazi invasion. If that sparks any interest, then I would highly suggest reading the book.

[sandensea]

25. I'm exaggerating - but they're there

Obviously you can't tell from looking at them - but if you work with some and they get to know you and trust you, they'll tell you themselves.

The ones I met - and they assured me there's a sizable community there - seemed proud of their parent/grandparent.

I was careful not to show outrage, in hopes they'd tell me more - and it worked to some extent. People like confiding in me for some reason.

In each case they were also Republicans. One was a recovering alcoholic (quite fat, despite being in his late 20s); most seemed perfectly normal.

And they were - but for that one detail: that they had a father/grandfather/grand-uncle in the SS.

[Juneboarder]

28. Wowsers!

That's quite interesting and sad. Having a sense of pride for a history of that nature is not something I could tolerate, so I'm glad I've nestled under my rock so well, lol.

#vistarepresent

[Lord Ludd]

36. From Barton Fink (1991)

(At lunch in the studio commissary)
Ben Geisler (Tony Shaloub): "Talk to another director."
Barton Fink (John Turturro): "Who?"
Geisler: "Throw a rock in here, you'll hit one."
[Gets up to leave] "Do me a favor, Fink. Throw it hard."

[sandensea]

40. Ha!

I was exaggerating, I'll admit. But they're there.

Besides the ones I got to know I remember once walking into a Danish bakery in Carlsbad in the late 1990s, with a number of old Germans - very much of World War II age - speaking in hushed tones (I took German in high school, und kann ein bischen verstehen und sprechen).

Lili Marlene was playing on the speakers.

[Renew Deal]

2. It's crazy that they're still finding these people alive.

[PatSeg]

15. He would have only been nineteen in 1945

He was probably part of the German Youth, having just been a child at the beginning of the war. He undoubtedly was indoctrinated young and Nazi Germany would have been pretty much all he knew. Hitler rose to power in 1933, when this guard would have only been seven years old. He wouldn't have remembered life before Fascism.

[JudyM]

17. Poor guy.

[PatSeg]

18. I'm not being sympathetic

Just bringing some perspective. People who are brainwashed from a very young age are pretty much cogs in the wheel. The people who orchestrated the horrors of World War II knew what they were doing, the children were often their pawns.

[JudyM]

19. Sorry, still a fail; suggesting they're mere pawns only continues to amplify your sympathy.

[PatSeg]

20. I tend to be sympathetic to abused children

I don't know enough about this man as an adult to say anymore. He could have been a monster, but I seriously doubt as a teenager, he had much say in where he would be stationed.

[JudyM]

22. WTH!? "Abused children?" Based on what evidence?! And what of the people in the concentration camp?!

[PatSeg]

24. Taking children and turning them into fascists

from a very young age is child abuse. That doesn't mean I don't have profound compassion for anyone who was in a concentration camp and I am not condoning anything the man did as a teenager in uniform. I'm just trying to get some perspective as to why someone so young was a guard in a concentration camp.

If you know anything about the Hitler Youth, you would know that there wasn't a lot of choice about the path they would take, where they would go, or how they would serve. Many were separated from their families and brought up in training camps. Taking that into possible considerable does not in any way diminish the horrors of the concentration camps, actually it makes it even more horrifying, that any government would use their children like that.

Do you condemn the child soldiers in Africa or do you condemn those who brainwashed and indoctrinated them with fear and propaganda?

Once again, I am not condoning anything the man did, just trying to understand why a teenager was working in a concentration camp and wondering how young he was when he first started working as a guard.

I really think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.

[customerserviceguy]

26. Thank you

for being a voice of reason here. Nobody under the age of 25 had any control over their lives in Nazi Germany.

[PatSeg]

27. And thank you

I was beginning to think I wasn't making my point. I wouldn't have even brought it up, but when I saw his age, I did the math and realized how young he was in the 1940s. If he was in the military, he went where he was told. People were controlled by fear and the very young would be the easiest to control. I can't put a teenage guard in the same category as the leaders who were responsible for the concentration camps, the medical experiments, or the gas chambers.

[customerserviceguy]

29. You're welcome

The Hitler Youth movement was one of the most effective propaganda machines in human history. At the age of nineteen, Nazism would have been the only thing this guy could have known.

[PatSeg]

30. You really are a "customer service guy"!

Bringing some sanity into my life.

[customerserviceguy]

34. Well, I've been

retired for three years, glad to know that somebody thinks I still have the knack!

[Mr.Bill]

31. My father flew in a B24 for 50 missions

over Nazi occupied Europe. The pilot of his airplane was 19. Just for perspective.

I'm certain he knew exactly what he was doing there.

[JudyM]

33. Thank you.

[customerserviceguy]

35. And I'm sure

that pilot knew that Charles Lindbergh had opposed US entry into the war. That's the difference, that pilot had multiple frames of reference to choose from. Hitler Youth were completely brainwashed.

[Polybius]

37. He's been living a normal life for 75 years

If this were 1960 I'd agree with you. It's been too much time. He's been normal for 5 times longer than he's been Nazi.

[JudyM]

38. What?! And if your mother had been suffering horribly or died in the camp where he was a guard...?

[Polybius]

39. I'd say the time for prosecution is over, and I'd curse his boss Hitler for the orders

I believe in a flat-rate statute of limitations for murder, and that's 50 years. It's been 75. I also don't believe teenage murderers deserve the same punishment. I never was big into prosecuting 80 and 90 yer olds for something they did as teens.

[atreides1]

3. How unfortunate for him...

...that he wasn't a rocket scientist, like SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Wernher von Braun!!!

[2naSalit]

11. His daughter

is a high ranking fellow at the a
land grant university in Idaho, or she was. Probably retired now.

[CRK7376]

4. My 95 year old

father-in-law will turn 96 next month, was a B17 Navigator during WWII. His 93 year old wife was his hometown sweetheart. She turns 94 in October.....so there are still some of the Greatest Generation still alive and well. Send that prison guard back immediately and let him rot to death in a German prison.....

[keithbvadu2]

7. "...still receives a pension from Germany for his work, "including his wartime service."

"...still receives a pension from Germany for his work, "including his wartime service."

Probably getting Social Security too.

[brooklynite]

8. Those Nazis were fastidious record keepers...

[eggplant]

14. Thank IBM.

[marble falls]

16. Pretty amazing story, a movie plot.

[BigDemVoter]

21. NO mercy for these fuckers. . .

My great grandmother and great aunt were murdered somewhere in Poland; we never found out anything other than the name of a ghetto, Izbica.

Just from the heartbreak and misery these people have caused not only for those killed but also for those who survived, I don't think there should ever be a statute of limitation. I don't find it far fetched or draconian at all. This gentleman may be 94-years-old, but he was old enough to know better at the time, and I can guarantee if he was a guard at Neuengamme, he was brutal. I don't think Neuengamme was a true "extermination" camp (the kind where they gassed people), but I think it was a labor camp where they worked almost everybody to death.

These people never should have been allowed in this country in the first place. I'm talking about how the American government looked the other way regarding certain individuals' Nazi pasts if they had some kind of scientific knowledge to contribute, even if this scientific knowledge was obtained by "questionable" means.

The only thing that makes me sad about this is that the old man is too old to spend much time in jail. I wish I believed in hell, as this would give me great satisfaction. . .

[Ilsa]

41. I've heard of Izbica. Probably saw either a

documentary or a movie about it many years ago.