Anton Geiser

Anton Geiser (surname also spelled Geisser; In 1956 he moved to the United States, settling in Sharon, Pennsylvania, where he had family. In 1962 he became a naturalized American citizen. In 2006 he was stripped of his citizenship on the grounds that it would not have been granted had the full details of his role in the German military been known; in 2010 a US judge ordered him deported to Austria, the country from which he had immigrated. He died in Pittsburgh on December 21, 2012, while still battling his deportation.

Background

Geiser was born in Yugoslavia on October 17, 1924, in the village of Selci Đakovački (part of Đakovo) in eastern Croatia. In September 1942, shortly following the invasion of Yugoslavia by Nazi Germany, Geiser, an ethnic German, was drafted into the Waffen SS. He was 17 years old at the time. ). He married Theresia in Austria before immigrating to the United States in 1956. After arriving in the United States, Geiser settled in Sharon, Pennsylvania, about 75 miles (120 km) northwest of Pittsburgh, and worked as a steel worker for Sharon Steel Corporation before retiring in 1987, raising three children in the process. He became naturalized as a United States citizen on March 27, 1962.

Loss of US citizenship, deportation, and death

By the late 1990s, Geiser was under investigation by the United States government's Office of Special Investigations for his World War II-era activities. Finally, on August 9, 2004, the United States government filed suit to revoke Geiser's citizenship. On September 29, 2006, US District Court Judge David S. Cercone of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ordered the revocation of Geiser's US citizenship, citing Title 8 Chapter 12 § 1451(a) of the US Code, In support of the illegal procurement claim, he cited Fedorenko v. United States, which specifically established the precedent that voluntary or involuntary assistants of Nazi persecutions were not eligible for US visas, and therefore that the revocation verbiage of the law applies.

Geiser claimed—and the US government did not dispute—that during his career as an SS guard he was never personally directly responsible for the death of an inmate, and that he in fact was friendly with some of them.

After Geiser exhausted his denaturalization appeals, the US government initiated deportation proceedings against him on April 1, 2009. A year later, on May 18, 2010, a US immigration judge ordered Geiser deported to Austria, the country from which he had immigrated. This order was not carried out, pending an appeal by Geiser, and he continued to reside in the United States.