BERLIN (AP) – A 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard deported from Tennessee has agreed to be questioned by German prosecutors as they review whether there is enough evidence against him to file charges, authorities said Monday.
Friedrich Karl Berger arrived in Frankfurt on Saturday on a special flight from the US after being ordered deported to his native Germany by a court in Memphis last year.
He was met by Hesse state police detectives at the airport and told them he would be willing to be questioned by investigators with a lawyer present, said Bernd Kolkmeier, spokesman for the Celle prosecutor's office, which is being taken with the case.
A US immigration judge ordered Berger deported a year ago after finding that his "willing service as an armed guard of prisoners in a concentration camp where persecution took place" constituted aiding and abetting Nazi-sponsored persecution.
The court found that Berger, who had lived in the US since 1959, had served in a camp in Meppen, Germany, near the Dutch border, which was a subcamp of the larger Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg.
She said that during the winter of 1945, prisoners at Meppen were kept in "cruel" conditions and used for forced labor in the open, working "to exhaustion and death".
Berger admitted to US investigators that he served at Meppen as a guard for several weeks near the end of the war, but said he did not observe any abuse or killing. The Memphis court found, however, that Berger had assisted prison guards during a forced evacuation that lasted nearly two weeks and claimed the lives of 70 people.
Celle prosecutors dropped their initial investigation into him in December, however, saying they were unable to disprove his account. They now have a different view, with it back on German soil, Kolkmeier said.
"Nothing has changed except that he is now in Germany and we can talk to him," Kolkmeier said. "We can ask him personally, which is naturally different from reading a transcript."
Berger, who was born in 1925 in the small northern town of Bargen, was serving in the German Navy when he was assigned to guard prisoners at Meppen in 1945, according to the Neuengamme Memorial website.
He served between January 28, 1945 and April 4, 1945, as an adjutant attached to the camp's SS command, according to Celle prosecutors.
Berger is being investigated under a precedent set in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio associate John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on charges that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who denied the charges, died before his appeal could be heard.
German courts previously required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard's involvement in a specific murder, often a nearly impossible task.
However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk's trial in Munich that aiding a camp by acting as a guard was enough to convict someone of aiding and abetting murders committed there.
A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on the same reasoning.
Since Demjanjuk's conviction there has been a steady stream of prosecutions and new trials in Germany.
Earlier this month, prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on charges he served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin and a 95-year-old woman with 10,000 counts of accessory to murder on charges she served as secretary to the former SS commandant of the Stutthof camp.
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