Warm Southern Breeze

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Posts Tagged ‘guard’

95 Year Old Nazi German Living In Oak Ridge Tennessee Ordered Deported

Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Thursday, March 5, 2020

UPDATE: Monday, 22 February 2021 – WWII Nazi Concentration Camp Guard Removed to Germany
February 20, 2021
Man is the 70th Nazi Persecutor Removed from the United States.
Press Release Number: 21-169
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wwii-nazi-concentration-camp-guard-removed-germany

“Today a Tennessee resident with German citizenship was removed to Germany for participating in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution while serving as an armed guard at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.

“In February 2020, Friedrich Karl Berger, 95, was ordered removed from the U.S. based on his participation in Nazi-sponsored persecution while serving in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme).

““Berger’s removal demonstrates the Department of Justice’s and its law enforcement partners’ commitment to ensuring that…”

“In November 2020, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld a Memphis, Tennessee, Immigration Judge’s Feb. 28, 2020, decision that Berger was removable 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. The court found that Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, and that the prisoners there included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis. The largest groups of prisoners were Russian, Dutch and Polish civilians.

Friedrich Karl Berger (1959), Visa photo

“After a two-day trial in February 2020, the presiding judge issued an opinion finding that Meppen prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 in “atrocious” conditions and were exploited for outdoor forced labor, working “to the point of exhaustion and death.” The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, on their way to worksites and on their way back to the SS-run subcamp in the evening.

“At the end of March 1945, as allied British and Canadian forces advanced, the Nazis abandoned Meppen. The court found that Berger helped guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp – a nearly two-week trip under inhumane conditions, which claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners. The decision also cited Berger’s admission that…”
–MORE–


UPDATE: Saturday, 21 November 2020 – Friedrich Karl Berger appealed his deportation case and lost. He will be deported as originally ordered.

• See: Removal Order Upheld Against Tennessee Man Who Served as Nazi Concentration Camp Guard During WWII
Thursday, November 19, 2020
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/removal-order-upheld-against-tennessee-man-who-served-nazi-concentration-camp-guard-during


The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) has dismissed the appeal of Tennessee resident Friedrich Karl Berger, a German citizen who was ordered removed from the United States earlier this year on the basis of his service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme).

“Berger’s willing service as an armed guard at a Nazi concentration camp cannot be erased and will not be ignored,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “On the eve of tomorrow’s 75th anniversary of the commencement of the Nuremberg trials of the surviving leaders of the defeated Nazi regime, this case shows that the passage of time will not deter the department from fulfilling the moral imperative of seeking justice for the victims of their heinous crimes.”

“Berger was an active participant in one of the darkest chapters in human history. He attempted to shed his nefarious past to come to America and start anew, but thanks to the dedication of those at the Department of Justice and Homeland Security Investigations, the truth was revealed,” said Deputy Assistant Director Louis A. Rodi III of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) National Security Investigations Division, which oversees the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. “War criminals and violators of human rights will not be allowed to evade justice and find safe haven here.”

The BIA upheld a Memphis, Tennessee, Immigration Judge’s Feb. 28, 2020, decision that Berger was removable 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. The court found that Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, and that the prisoners there included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis. The largest groups of prisoners were Russian, Dutch and Polish civilians.

After a two-day trial in February, the presiding judge issued an opinion finding that Meppen prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 in “atrocious” conditions and were exploited for outdoor forced labor, working, “to the point of exhaustion and death.” The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, and on their way to the worksites and also on their way back to the SS-run subcamp in the evening.

At the end of March 1945, as allied British and Canadian forces advanced, the Nazis abandoned Meppen. The court found that Berger helped guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp – a nearly two-week trip under inhumane conditions, which claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners. The decision also cited Berger’s admission that he never requested a transfer from concentration camp guard service and that he continues to receive a pension from Germany based on his employment in Germany, “including his wartime service.”

In 1946, British occupation authorities in Germany charged SS Obersturmführer Hans Griem, who had headed the Meppen sub-camps, and other Meppen personnel with war crimes for “ill-treatment and murder of Allied nationals.” Although Griem escaped before trial, the British court tried and convicted the remaining defendants of war crimes in 1947.

The trial and appeal of the removal case were handled by Eli Rosenbaum, Director of Human Rights Enforcement and Policy in the Criminal Division’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP), HRSP Senior Trial Attorney Susan Masling, and attorneys from ICE New Orleans, Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (Memphis), with assistance from HRSP Chief Historian Jeffrey S. Richter, and the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. The investigation was initiated by the HRSP and was conducted in partnership with the Nashville ICE HSI office.

Since the 1979 inception of the Justice Department’s program to detect, investigate, and remove Nazi persecutors, it has won cases against 109 individuals. Over the past 30 years, the Justice Department has won more cases against persons who participated in Nazi persecution than have the law enforcement authorities of all the other countries in the world combined. HRSP’s case against Berger was part of its ongoing efforts to identify, investigate and prosecute individuals who engaged in genocide, torture, war crimes, recruitment or use of child soldiers, female genital mutilation, and other serious human rights violations. HRSP attorneys prosecuted the first torture case brought in the United States and have successfully prosecuted criminal cases against perpetrators of human rights violations committed in Guatemala, Ethiopia, Liberia, Cuba, and the former Yugoslavia, among others.

To learn more about HRSP, visit https://www.justice.gov/criminal-hrsp.


• See also: https://news.yahoo.com/94-old-former-nazi-concentration-150221553.html

• See also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/20/94-year-old-former-nazi-concentration-camp-guard-deported-us/

• See also: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/nov/19/friedrich-karl-berger-nazi-guard-loses-deportation/

• See also: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/board-dismisses-appeal-on-removal-order-for-former-nazi-concentration-camp-guard/ar-BB1bbepu


Friedrich Karl Berger, 94, of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who voluntarily served as an armed guard in a Neuengamme Nazi concentration camp subcamp, had been a Tennessee resident for over 75 years, and was drawing an employment-based pension which included his Nazi service, has been ordered deported by the U.S. Department of Justice to Germany, where he still has citizenship.

An index card found submerged in a sunken ship in the Baltic Sea helped federal prosecutors prove their case. Justice Department historians documented his service at the camp with information from that index card which summarized his Nazi work.

Berger emigrated from Germany to Canada after the war with his wife and daughter, and entered the United States in 1959.

While in the United States, he made a living building wire-stripping machines, and is now a widower with two grandchildren.

After a two-day trial, Judge Rebecca L. Holt, a Federal Immigration judge in Memphis, TN, found him deportable 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.

He voluntarily served as a Nazi guard at Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in - Did they REALLY say that?, - My Hometown is the sweetest place I know, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Keep Your Horse And Your Heart Healthy: A How To Guide

Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, July 26, 2017

In the late-1970s, a pioneering medication was discovered in Japan which was made from a single microorganism.

Isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan, it came from a single Japanese soil sample, and has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people worldwide. And, despite continued research since, it has only been found in Japan.

While it was originally introduced as a veterinary medication and found to kill a phenomenally wide range of internal and external parasites in livestock and companion animals, it was quickly discovered to be ideal in combating two of the world’s most devastating and disfiguring diseases which have plagued the world’s poor throughout tropical regions for centuries. It’s now being used free-of-charge as the exclusive tool in campaigns to eliminate both diseases globally, and has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases, with new uses for it continually being found.

Few medications can seriously lay claim to the title of ‘Wonder Drug’, and penicillin and aspirin are two that have perhaps had the greatest beneficial effect on the health and well-being of Humankind. But this medication can also be considered alongside those worthy contenders, based on its versatility, safety and the beneficial impact that it has had, and continues to have, worldwide — especially on hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people.

The medication treats Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in - Even MORE Uncategorized!, - Faith, Religion, Goodness - What is the Soul of a man? | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Nazi War Criminal found hiding in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA… City of Brotherly Love.

Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, September 25, 2012

AP Exclusive: Philadelphia man target of German Nazi war crimes probe; will fight extradition

By Associated Press, Published: September 23, 2012

BERLIN — Germany has launched a war crimes investigation against an 87-year-old Philadelphia man it accuses of serving as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp, The Associated Press has learned, following years of failed U.S. Justice Department efforts to have the man stripped of his American citizenship and deported.

Johann “Hans” Breyer, a retired toolmaker, admits he was a guard at Auschwitz during World War II, but told the AP he was stationed outside the facility and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of some 1.5 million Jews and others behind the gates.

The special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors charge him with accessory to murder and extradite him to Germany for trial on suspicion of involvement in the killing of at least 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.

The AP also has obtained documents that raise doubts about Breyer’s testimony about the timing of his departure from Auschwitz.

The case is being pursued on Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in - Did they REALLY say that?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A True Tale of a Good Man Gone Bad… Gone Good

Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, June 3, 2012

A Jail Guard’s Tale of His Journey to Inmate

June 3, 2012, 4:26 pm, By COREY KILGANNON
NY state prison guard 04cityroom-guard-blog480

Gary Heyward, once a Rikers Island guard, in Harlem selling copies of his book recounting his experiences. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

Gary Heyward stood on 125th Street in Harlem, not far from the Apollo Theater, wearing a jumpsuit that was half blue and half orange.

Mr. Heyward, 44, had this odd-looking uniform specially made — part prison guard, part inmate — to illustrate that at Rikers Island, where he worked as a corrections officer from 1997 to 2006, he went from cop to criminal.

“One day you’re taking the count and the next day you’re in the count,” he said, referring to the jails’ regular head counts of inmates.

This abrupt transition is precisely the angle of his new book, a self-published paperback called “Corruption Officer: Perpetrator With a Badge.”

It is a raunchy tell-all and a critical portrayal of Rikers Island, where Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in - Faith, Religion, Goodness - What is the Soul of a man?, - Read 'em and weep: The Daily News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Saga Continues…

Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, June 16, 2010

In a previous entry entitled The Mute, Poignant Ironies of a Life Well Lived,  I had shared how God’s provision for my life has included some very seemingly coincidental times, which in reflection, I have perceived as mute irony.

Thankful as I have been and remain, I promised to share this entry with you a bit later, and in keeping that promise, here it is.

I hope you enjoy it. …Continue…

Posted in - Faith, Religion, Goodness - What is the Soul of a man?, - Uncategorized II | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

 
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