Former concentration camp guard deported to Germany | Currently Germany | DW

 The  US has expelled a former concentration camp guard to Germany.

 The  95-year-old Friedrich Karl B. landed at Frankfurt Airport, as a spokesman for the federal police confirmed.

 The  news magazine “Der Spiegel” had previously reported on the imminent arrival.

Accusation: complicity in murder

B. arrived according to the information in the late morning with an ambulance plane in Frankfurt.

 The  federal police handed him over to the Hessian State Criminal Police Office (LKA). An LKA spokesman said there was an interrogation order from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Celle.

 The  charge is complicity in murder.

According to US authorities, B. confessed to guarding prisoners in a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg near Meppen in Lower Saxony. He last lived in the state of Tennessee. In February 2020 a judge in the USA ordered the deportation, in November 2020 an appellate court rejected the objection of the person concerned.

 The  man was “an active participant in one of the darkest chapters in human history,” said a representative of the immigration service.

 The  US offered no protection to “war criminals”.

 The  reasoning for the February ruling stated that Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, French and political prisoners, among others, had been detained in the subcamp.

 The y were interned in the winter of 1945 under “terrible” conditions and had to work “to the point of exhaustion and death”. Around 70 prisoners were killed “under inhuman conditions,” it said.

Not sufficient for evidence of the crime?

In September 2020, the public prosecutor’s office in Celle took over the investigation against the man, but closed it again in December “for lack of sufficient suspicion”.

 The  granted guarding of prisoners in a concentration camp, which was not used for the systematic killing of the prisoners, was not sufficient as such to prove the crime, it was said at the time.

 The  investigation had the man “not associated with a specific killing act”.

Index cards from a sunken ship

A spokesman for the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Celle told the German Press Agency that it was first about clarifying the man’s willingness to give evidence.

 The  termination of the proceedings was “not set in stone”. According to “Spiegel”, the man had remained unrecognized in the USA for many years. Only when index cards from the Nazi era were found in a sunken ship in the Baltic Sea did the investigators track him down. B. had admitted his role as a guard during his time in the USA, but at that time he only carried out the orders of his superiors, it said.

ml / as (dpa, afp)