Federal judge in Memphis orders former Nazi SS guard back to Germany

 A Tennessee resident, Friedrich Karl Berger, was ordered back to Germany after a U.S. immigration judge found he had been an SS guard at a concentration camp near Meppen, Germany. 

U.S. Immigration Court Judge Rebecca Holt ordered Berger's removal after a two-day trial, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release announcing the verdict.

"Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a statement. 

Berger admitted, the DOJ said, that he was a guard in 1945 at a sub-camp near Meppen, which was part of the Neuengamme concentration camp system.

Meppen, and similar sub-camps camps held Jews, Poles, Russians and residents of other European countries and the slave labor housed there helped power the Nazi war effort. Prisoners — mostly Jews — from the subcamps were often sent to the larger concentration camp to be exterminated, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. 

The Department of Justice said the Meppen camp contained Jews and other civilians from seven European countries. The largest group of prisoners were Russian, Polish and Dutch citizens. 

Prisoners at the Meppen camp worked dawn to dusk to the point of exhaustion and death. Berger guarded the captives while they worked and back to their barracks at night, the news release said. 

In 1945, Berger was among the SS who guarded prisoners during a forced evacuation to the main Neuengamme camp. Seventy were killed. Such forced evacuations were common toward the end of World War II as the Nazis sought to hide their wholesale slaughter of millions before the war ended. 

This is a developing story. It will be updated.