When Dahlonega's Melvin Burson saw the news this week that a Lawrenceville man was accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, he thought of the letter.

Dated June 13, 1945, the handwritten letter to Burson's mother from his father described the atrocities of Buchenwald, where officials say 85-year-old Paul Henss was a dog handler.

Barney Burson was a 27-year-old machine gunner with the 30th Infantry Division when he heard of the horrors of the Holocaust at Buchenwald.

He was compelled to write his wife Avie in Gainesville to describe what he saw, and included a small news clipping about the prison camps.

"It's a hell of a place," Barney Burson wrote, before referring to the news clipping. "Show it to the Christian people and tell them it is so. For I was with the outfit that took over the concentration camp."

Burson described for his wife the furnaces where Jews were incinerated and the elevators the Nazis used to slowly crush their bodies.

"Their evil doings are all over now Thank God," Burson wrote his wife. "We are going to see to it they will pay with their lives and God will finish them."

Barney Burson died in 1960 in a car accident in Gainesville. His son, now 66, never heard much of the camps when he was young.

"He wouldn't talk to me about it," Melvin Burson said.

But his father felt strongly enough to write his wife and tell her to spread the news.

"People didn't know what was going on," Melvin Burson said. "You could tell people, but they wouldn't believe it. Some of them still don't want to believe it now."

This week the U.S. Justice Department announced it has begun deportation proceedings for Henss, a German citizen who entered the United States in 1955.

Burson said the thought that an accused guardian of Hitler's death camps lived a few counties over "blows my mind."

"It's scary," he said. "They're out there, and some are right next door."

Burson said his father would have shown no forgiveness for anyone associated with Buchenwald. The son has the same sentiments as the father.

"He should pay for what he did to those people," he said.