Johann Breyer (May 30, 1925 – July 22, 2014) was a onetime SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration and death camp guard and retired tool and die maker whom the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI) unsuccessfully attempted to denaturalize and deport for his teenage service in the SS. His was considered the "most arcane and convoluted litigation in OSI history", owing to the convergence of three unusual legal factors in the case:
the question of whether the inability of American mothers to transmit citizenship to children born outside the U.S. before 1934 was unconstitutional, if so, then whether Breyer should be retroactively a U.S. citizen at birth and whether that citizenship was lost by volunteering to participate in SS activities, and if so, then whether those activities or a later misrepresentation of his wartime activities to evade U.S. immigration law and enter the U.S. allowed for loss of his later-acquired citizenship, and his lawsuits against the media over coverage of the case.
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.
In 2013, Germany issued an arrest warrant accusing him of aiding in killing 216,000 Jews as a guard at Auschwitz. 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 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.) Johann Breyer attended German school and worked on his parents’ farm.
In 1942, at age 17, Breyer volunteered to enlist in the Waffen SS, and was then placed with the SS's Death's Head Battalion (the SS-Totenkopfverbände), composed of volunteers from the overall SS. He was assigned as a guard at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. He acknowledged serving as an armed guard and escorting prisoners to their work sites and denied any personal role in or witnessing of any atrocities. 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.
Breyer settled in Philadelphia where he raised three children with his wife and worked as a tool and die maker for an engineering company. 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.