“We have plenty of summer camps, and I swear to you they can be used again. On the gate: work makes you free,” he told a colleague in one video, according to a translation by the Telegraph.
The chilling German phrase — Arbeit macht frei — was a Nazi slogan plastered on the gates of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
The unidentified guard said he had “swastikas in my eyes” when he talks about the migrants who pass through the office. Hundreds begin to line up before dawn each day to register at the center.
“In two years, there will be a revolution here and there will be no more of all this s--t,” he said. “We’ll clean it all out.”
A second video caught another one of the guard’s Nazi tirades, in which he discussed a government proposal to hold refugees at the border while their applications are handled.
“We call them transit zones. That’s a beautiful word. In the Third Reich, they called them prison camps,” he said.
The holding bill has since been abandoned by lawmakers.
Both videos showed the guard talking to a colleague in a security control room. It’s unclear who recorded the cellphone footage.
Mario Czaja, the minister in charge of refugee policy for the Berlin state government, condemned the guard’s rhetoric.
“There is no justification for this,” Czaja told the German paper. “We expect anyone who works in public offices to share our democratic values and respect the constitution.”
Guards who patrol the refugee center are contracted through a private company and are not government employees.
Gegenbauer Security Services, the private security firm, said it was looking into the newspaper’s allegations.
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