Washington, A US judge has ordered the deportation of a former Nazi camp guard to Germany, where as a citizen he was still getting a pension for his “wartime service”, a media report said.
In her, immigration judge Rebecca Holt said Friedrich Karl Berger, a 94-year-old resident of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had served in the Neuengamme concentration camp, the BBC reported on Friday.
In her ruling, she said Berger’s “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place” constituted assistance in Nazi persecution.
Holt said he had served in Neuengamme where prisoners were held in “atrocious” conditions and worked “to the point of exhaustion and death”.
During the trial, Berger admitted he had prevented prisoners from fleeing the camp in Meppen, north-western Germany.
But he later told the American that he had been forced to work in the camp, spent a short time there and carried no weapon, reports the BBC.
It was not immediately clear if Berger would appeal – a move that could delay his deportation for several years.
He has been living in the US since 1959.
The Neuengamme concentration camp was a network of Nazi concentration camps in Hamburg’s Bergedorf district that consisted of a main camp and its over 85 satellite camps.
After Germany’s defeat, the UK Army used the site as an internment camp for SS and other Nazi officials.
