Johann Breyer

Johann Breyer (May 30, 1925 – July 22, 2014) was a Czech-American tool and die maker and onetime SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration and death camp guard

In a series of rulings, federal district courts and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overall held that Breyer should have been born a U.S. citizen, and that while he had volunteered for SS activity in support of a totalitarian regime and its actions while age 17, there was insufficient evidence of the voluntariness of his activities after reaching age 18 to result in renunciation of that citizenship. He was arrested at his home in Philadelphia on June 17, 2014, age 89, and held without bail pending an extradition hearing. His health rapidly deteriorated while in custody, and he died on July 22, prior to his hearing.

Background Breyer was born in 1925 in the ethnic German farming village of Neuwalldorf, Czechoslovakia (now Nová Lesná, Slovakia), to farmer Johann Breyer and his wife Katrina. Katrina Breyer was purported to have been born in 1895 in Manayunk, Philadelphia and to have moved with her family to Neuwalldorf while a teenager. (While there was no official record of her birth there and there was conflicting secondary evidence as to the place of her birth, a district court eventually ruled her to have been born in the United States. This issue of her birth in the U.S., and the failure of the Department of Justice to timely investigate and raise the issue of whether it was later lost or automatically renounced before giving birth to Johann Breyer would play a pivotal role in the efforts to deport him. Soviet troops began to approach Auschwitz in January 1945; Breyer was on home leave at the time and was re-routed to a forward fighting unit until taken prisoner by the Soviet Army in May 1945.

He emigrated to the United States in 1952 under the Displaced Persons Act (DPA). The DPA, in its form at that time, specifically excluded from admission to the United States "any person . . . who is or has been a member of or participated in any movement which is or has been hostile to the United States or the form of government of the United States, or to any person who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin." This would later lead the government to allege the Breyer had engaged in willful misrepresentation or deliberate concealment of his particular World War II activities when he immigrated, in violation of federal law. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1957.

OSI prosecution The OSI became aware of Breyer when a routine cross-check of Auschwitz guard records with Immigration and Naturalization Service records showed that he had emigrated to the United States. In 1992, the OSI filed a denaturalization action with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania alleging that Breyer was ineligible to enter the U.S. through the DPA since he had assisted in wartime persecution and been part of a movement hostile to the U.S., which he had concealed from the U.S. government in violation of federal law.

Breyer asserted that he should be deemed to have entered the country lawfully as his mother had been born in the U.S. and that the laws in place at the time that granted derivative citizenship only patrilineally were in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. He therefore had to file an application for derivative citizenship with the INS. The cases then proceeded on parallel tracks (the OSI's efforts at denaturalization and Breyer's claim of derivative citizenship) for many years.

In the OSI litigation, the district court held that Breyer was ineligible to enter under the DPA but that the statute denying Breyer citizenship at birth was unconstitutional. At that time, the INS had yet to rule on Breyer's application for derivative citizenship so the court deferred to the INS, thus abstaining from deciding whether Breyer was indeed a U.S. citizen at birth.

Meanwhile, the Immigration and Nationality Technical Corrections Act had been introduced in Congress to retroactively provide for United States citizenship at birth for persons born abroad before 1934 to a mother who was a United States citizen and a father who was not. The OSI pressured Congress to place a "singular exception into the statute" to "deny application of the law to anyone who would not have been eligible to enter the United States under the DPA." Then-Congressman Charles Schumer noted that the exception would avoid placing into jeopardy "Nazi expatriation cases pending in the United States", for whom "proper prosecution ... depends on the ability to denaturalize and deport them to stand trial overseas for war crimes,"

The court noted that Breyer voluntarily joined both the Waffen SS, which was a voluntary organization, and then the Death's Head Battalion, which was composed of volunteers from other SS units.

Extradition request from Germany and death On June 17, 2013, the District Court of Weiden, Germany issued an arrest warrant for Breyer for being an accessory to murder while a guard at Auschwitz. He was arrested at his home in Philadelphia on June 17, 2014. Although Breyer was 89 and was in poor health, he was held without bail pending an extradition hearing. On July 19, 2014, Breyer was granted bail and transferred to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, on the grounds of his worsening health. He died there three days later, just hours before his extradition to Germany was approved.