An 89-year-old Philadelphia man has been ordered held without bail on a German arrest warrant charging that he aided and abetted in the deaths of 216,000 Jews while he was a guard at the Auschwitz death camp.
U.S. authorities arrested retired toolmaker Johann ‘Hans’ Breyer on Tuesday. He spent the night in custody and appeared frail during a detention hearing in federal court on Wednesday, where he wore an olive green prison jumpsuit and carrying a cane.
A district court in Weiden, Germany, issued a warrant for Breyer’s arrest earlier this week, charging him with 158 counts of complicity in the commission of murder.
Each count represents a trainload of Nazi prisoners from Hungary, Germany and Czechoslovakia who were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between May 1944 and October 1944, the documents said.
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.
During Breyer’s arrest on Tuesday, he asked the marshals to retrieve papers in his home that document his right to stay in the U.S., Donnelly testified…..
….Breyer’s wife and two grandsons attended the hour-long hearing in Philadelphia. His extradition hearing is scheduled for August 21.
Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said he hoped there would be no obstacles to Breyer’s extradition and trial overseas.