The Nazis Next Door

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As many as 10,000 members of the Nazi party and the SS are estimated to have moved to the United States after the Second World War, legally and illegally. In the intervening years, around 150 of them have been subject to investigations reaching the stage of deportation or criminal proceedings. This includes Friedrich Karl Berger, who was deported from Tennessee to Germany on 21 February 2021 to face trial for his part in ‘Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution’ as a Camp Guard at Neuengamme. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Lichtblau speaks to James about how America came to be seen as a safe haven for Nazis, and the efforts to bring them to justice.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone I'm your host James Rogers and this is the history hit World Wars podcast.
0:04.1	You may have seen it in the news all over the world but in February the US
0:07.4	deported a 95 year old former Nazi concentration campguard to stand trial in Germany. His name Friedrich Karl Berger, a
0:15.5	Tennessee resident who's lived in the US since the 1950s when he moved there after the
0:20.5	war. This is the latest in a string of cases in the US stretching back to the 1980s where those
0:26.1	accused of being Nazis and committing crimes against humanity have been revealed and put to face justice.
0:32.3	But how does so many former
0:33.7	Nazis end up in the US? Did they lie, move illegally, or were they
0:38.2	perhaps more disturbingly welcomed in? To tell us more, I was joined by
0:42.1	Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and New York Times best-selling
0:45.2	author Eric Lixplow. Eric has spent years researching this history and finding out just why the
0:51.6	US became a refuge for Nazis. I know you're going to find the
0:55.2	history he reveals astonishing because it is truly shocking what he was able to
1:00.7	find out. So here is Eric Lipsplow on the World Wars. How was your week been? I'm guessing super busy given
1:24.7	the developments in the US on these historic crimes of Nazi-sponsored persecution.
1:30.9	It has been, yeah, we just had another deportation of a Nazi guard a 95 year old from
1:36.4	Tennessee flown back over the weekend into Frankfurt and is in custody now 75 years after the end of the war. Amazing. This is an
1:46.2	astonishing case. It's the case of Friedrich Carl Berger. So could you give us the
1:51.4	details of a bit of background? Who is he and what's he accused of?
1:55.0	Sure it's a remarkable case not only because of Berger's age as you said 95 years old but also how he was identified which was through the records in a sunken Nazi ship in the Baltic years ago.
2:11.0	So Berger was a campguard, a lower level SS camp guard at a camp near Hamburg called
2:19.5	Nune Game in the late stages of the war. He was 19, 20 years old at that time. Then about 14 years after the end of the war in 1959, he emigrated to the United States.
	...

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