U.S. deports 95-year-old who was a Nazi concentration camp guard

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A 95-year-old man who was a Nazi concentration camp guard during WWII has been deported from the U.S. to Germany, authorities announced on Friday. Friedrich Karl Berger, who lived in Tennessee, was deported "for participating in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution" while serving at the concentration camp in 1945, the Justice Department said.

Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson said in a statement that Berger's removal from the U.S. demonstrates the department's "commitment to ensuring that the United States is not a safe haven for those who have participated in Nazi crimes against humanity and other human rights abuses."

"In this year in which we mark the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg convictions," Wilkinson continued, "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."

Berger is the 70th person identified as a Nazi persecutor to be removed from the U.S., according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

A 2020 trial found that Berger served the Nazi regime at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, during the Holocaust. The judge who presided over the 2020 case said that Meppen prisoners, many of which were Jewish, Russian, Dutch and Polish, were held at the camp in the winter of 1945. The conditions, the judge ruled, were "atrocious," as the prisoners were forced to conducted labor outdoors "to the point of exhaustion and death," the DOJ said.

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