An admitted armed guard at the Nazi Auschwitz death camp and Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II may remain in the United States if he proves he is a U.S. citizen.
Johann Breyer, a 68-year-old retired tool and die maker in Philadelphia, has confessed to serving as a perimeter guard at both camps with orders to shoot escaping prisoners, and that he escorted slave laborers to work sites, the Justice Department said Wednesday.U.S. District Judge William Yohn Jr. revoked Breyer's naturalized U.S. citizenship on Tuesday after finding that his admissions and captured Nazi documents showed he was ineligible for his 1952 visa because of his work at the concentration camps.
Therefore, Yohn said, Breyer was ineligible for the certificate of naturalization he obtained on Nov. 7, 1957.
However, the Philadelphia judge said Breyer has the right to prove his citizenship by birth.
Breyer contends, and the judge agrees, that his mother was born in the United States. Under current law, that would entitle him to citizenship.
But under the law in force when he was born in Slovakia in 1925, only a U.S.-born father, not a mother, could convey U.S. citizenship to a child.
If Breyer is declared a citizen by birth, then the revocation of his certificate of naturalization will be meaningless, Yohn said in a separate findings of facts.
"We couldn't deport a citizen," said Denise Slavin of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, who helped prosecute Breyer.
Breyer's attorney, Joseph Restifo, said, "The judge was wrong in refusing to issue an order that dismissed the case altogether. He said in his findings of law that Breyer was an American citizen by virtue of his mother" and that Breyer therefore did not need an immigration visa or naturalization certificate.