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| FILE - This January 1941 file photo shows entry to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, with snow-covered railtracks leading to the camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was the largest camp where people were terminated during the fascist regime rule of dictator Adolf Hitler over Germany during World War II. Germany has launched a war crimes investigation against an 87-year-old Philadelphia man it accuses of serving as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp, The Associated Press has learned, following years of failed U.S. Justice Department efforts to have the man stripped of his American citizenship and deported. Johann "Hans" Breyer, a retired toolmaker, admits he was a guard at Auschwitz during WWII, but told the AP he was stationed outside the facility and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of some 1.5 million Jews and others behind the gates. |
BERLIN (AP)
-- Germany has launched a war crimes investigation against an
87-year-old Philadelphia man it accuses of serving as an SS guard at the
Auschwitz death camp, The Associated Press has learned, following years
of failed U.S. Justice Department efforts to have the man stripped of
his American citizenship and deported.
Johann
"Hans" Breyer, a retired toolmaker, admits he was a guard at Auschwitz
during World War II, but told the AP he was stationed outside the
facility and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of some 1.5
million Jews and others behind the gates.
The
special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes has recommended
that prosecutors charge him with accessory to murder and extradite him
to Germany for trial on suspicion of involvement in the killing of at
least 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied
Poland.
The AP also has obtained documents that raise doubts about Breyer's testimony about the timing of his departure from Auschwitz.
The
case is being pursued on the same legal theory used to prosecute late
Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in March while appealing his
conviction in Germany on charges he served as a guard at the notorious
Sobibor death camp, also in occupied Poland.
The
conviction was not considered legally binding because Demjanjuk died
before his appeals were exhausted. But prosecutors maintain they can
still use the same legal argument to pursue Breyer. Under that line of
thinking - even without proof of participation in any specific crime - a
person who served as a death camp guard can be charged with accessory
to murder because the camp's sole function was to kill people.
Experts
estimate that at least 80 former camp guards or others who would fall
into the same category are likely still alive today, almost 70 years
after the end of the war.
Authorities in the
Bavarian town of Weiden, who have jurisdiction, are currently trying to
determine if the evidence is sufficient for prosecution. A German
official working on the case confirmed that Breyer was the target of the
probe; he spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized
to release the information.
Breyer
acknowledged in an interview in his modest row house in northeastern
Philadelphia that he was in the Waffen SS at Auschwitz but that he never
served at the part of the camp responsible for the extermination of
Jews.
"I didn't kill anybody, I didn't rape
anybody - and I don't even have a traffic ticket here," he told the AP.
"I didn't do anything wrong."
He said he was
aware of what was going on inside the death camp, but did not witness it
himself. "We could only see the outside, the gates," he said.
Breyer
said he had recently suffered three "mini-strokes." But he was cogent
and clear as he talked about his past for more than an hour, sitting in
his living room.
For more than a decade, the
Justice Department waged court battles to try to have Breyer deported.
They largely revolved around whether Breyer had lied about his Nazi past
in applying for immigration or whether he could have citizenship
through his American-born mother. That legal saga ended in 2003, with a
ruling that allowed him to stay in the United States, mainly on the
grounds that he had joined the SS as a minor and could therefore not be
held legally responsible for participation in it.
Breyer
testified in U.S. court that he served as a perimeter guard at
Auschwitz I, which was largely for prisoners used as slave laborers,
though it also had a makeshift gas chamber used early in the war; it was
also the camp where SS doctor Josef Mengele carried out sadistic
experiments on inmates.
But he denied ever
serving in Auschwitz II, better known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death
camp area where the bulk of the people were killed. He also said he
deserted in August, 1944 and never returned to the camp, though
eventually rejoined his unit fighting outside Berlin in the final weeks
of the war.
A U.S. Army intelligence file on Breyer, obtained by the AP, calls that statement into question.
In
1951, American military authorities in Germany carried out a background
check on Breyer when he first applied for a visa to the U.S. The file
from that investigation lists him as being with a SS Totenkopf, or
"Death's Head," battalion in Auschwitz as late as Dec. 29, 1944 - four
months after he said he deserted. The Army Investigative Records
Repository file was obtained by the AP from the National Archives
through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The
document is significant because judges in 2003 said Breyer's testimony
on desertion was part of what convinced them that his service with the
Waffen SS after turning 18 might not have been voluntary, further
mitigating his wartime responsibility.
Also
weighing in Breyer's favor with the judges was his testimony that he
refused to have the SS tattoo; he does not have such a mark today or
evidence that one was removed.
Kurt Schrimm,
the head of the specials prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg, which
carried out the Breyer probe before it was turned over to Weiden
prosecutors, said he felt there was sufficient evidence to bring charges
against Breyer, although he declined to discuss details.
"All
of these guards were stationed at times on the ramps (where train
transports of prisoners were unloaded), at times at the gas chambers and
at times in the towers," he said.
Weiden
prosecutors, who were chosen because the office is nearest where Breyer
last lived in Germany, say it could take several months before deciding
whether to file charges.
A former prosecutor
in Schrimm's office, Thomas Walther, said he had known of the file on
Breyer from his time there. He is now already representing, pro bono, a
woman who lost her two siblings in Auschwitz at the time that Breyer is
alleged to have been there. The woman will join any prosecution as a
co-plaintiff as allowed under German law. Walther said he has
established the email address auschwitz.coplaintiff(at)gmail.com for
other victims' families.
"Time is swiftly
running out to bring Nazi criminals to justice," Walther said. "I hope
that prosecutors in Weiden will act soon on this case."
The
Breyer case was handled in the U.S. by the Justice Department's Office
of Special Investigations. Eli Rosenbaum, who previously headed the
office, would not comment on any details of evidence that had been
collected against him, nor say whether American agencies were involved
in helping with the German probe. Rosenbaum is now with the Justice
Department's Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, into which
the OSI was merged.
Breyer was born in 1925 in
what was then Czechoslovakia to an ethnic German father and an American
mother, Katharina, who was born in Philadelphia. Slovakia became a
separate state in 1939 under the influence of Nazi Germany. In 1942, the
Waffen SS embarked on a drive to recruit ethnic Germans there and
Breyer joined at age 17. The fact he was a minor at the time was
critical in the 2003 decision to allow him to stay in the United States.
Called
up to duty in 1943, Breyer said he was shipped off the same day to
Buchenwald - in Germany - where he was assigned to the Totenkopf.
By
treaty, the U.S. can extradite its citizens to Germany. But Breyer said
he would fight any attempts to take him away from the U.S. and his wife
and family.
"I'm an American citizen, just as if I had been born here," he said in his Philadelphia home. "They can't deport me."
