Below is an article that I meant to publish over a year ago. I wrote something on it, but either never completed it or bothered to publish it if I did.
So, here it is:
Johann Breyer, 89, a retired machinist born in Czechoslovakia to a US mother, admits joining the Waffen SS aged 17 but denies being a guard at the concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
He came to the United States after World War II
US media quoted court documents as saying that Breyer has been charged on 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities.
His lawyer Dennis Boyle told AFP that Breyer was arrested in Philadelphia on Tuesday on a warrant from the German government and faces an extradition hearing on August 21.
Breyer insists he was only in a field artillery unit of the Waffen SS and deserted weeks later after serving in the vicinity of Auschwitz, but not as a prison guard.
"He denies any involvement in any war crimes whatsoever. He was never a Nazi," Boyle said, adding that his client had spent time in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at the end of World War II.
"He was as much a victim of the Nazis as anyone else. He did not volunteer to be in the SS, he did not want to be in the SS, he deserted from the SS," Boyle said.
Breyer appeared in a US district court in Philadelphia on Wednesday where magistrate Timothy Rice denied him bail due to the severity of the charges.
For more than 60 years German courts only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they personally committed atrocities.
But in 2011 a Munich court sentenced another US immigrant to five years in prison for more than 27,000 counts of accessory to murder, establishing that all former camp guards can be tried.
US arrests alleged Auschwitz guard, 89 by the AFP, June 18, 2014:
http://news.yahoo.com/us-arrests-alleged-auschwitz-guard-89-231848374.html
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