The United States late last week initiated deportation proceedings for a Philadelphia man who served the Nazis as an armed SS guard at the Buchenwald and Auschwitz camps.
Johann Breyer, 71, a native of Slovakia, “had no right to enter” the United States “in the first instance,” said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations, the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting arm.
The proceedings to deport Breyer began Jan. 23. The United States wants him removed “as expeditiously as possible,” Rosenbaum said.
Breyer was stripped of his American citizenship in July 1993.
He admitted at that time that he had served as an armed SS perimeter guard at the Buchenwald camp in Germany and the Auschwitz camp in Poland with orders to shoot escaping prisoners and that he escorted slave laborers to work sites.
U.S. District Judge William Yohn Jr. in Philadelphia concluded in his stripping Breyer of his citizenship in 1993 that he had assisted in persecution and was a member of a movement hostile to the United States.
The decision to revoke Breyer’s U.S. citizenship was upheld in 1994 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
