FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 1997 202-633-2010 TDD 202-514-1888 JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INITIATES DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS AGAINST NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Department of Justice announced today that it had initiated deportation proceedings in U.S. Immigration Court against a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, man who served the Nazis in World War II as an armed SS concentration camp guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the Philadelphia District Office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service yesterday served Johann Breyer, 71, with an order to show cause why he should not be deported from the United States for assisting in the persecution of civilians on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and political opinion during World War II. In July 1993, after Breyer admitted that he served as an armed SS perimeter guard at both Nazi camps with orders to shoot escaping prisoners and that he escorted slave laborers to work sites, U. S. Distrct Judge William H. Yohn, Jr. in Philadelphia, stripped Breyer, a native of Slovakia, of his U.S. citizenship. Yohn concluded that because Breyer had assisted in persecution and was a member of a movement hostile to the United States, Breyer's naturalized citizenship was illegally procured. Yohn's decision to strip Breyer of his naturalized citizenship was unanimously affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1994. In his decision denaturalizing Breyer, Yohn wrote that "[d]efendant admits, and history confirms, that activities which occurred at these camps [Buchenwald and Auschwitz] were brutal and included such acts upon the inmates of the camps as murder, torture, confinement, forced labor and experimentation. While at these camps, defendant wore a uniform, carried a rifle with ammunition, was paid a stipend, was allowed to leave camp, and had orders to shoot prisoners attempting to escape. The court does not believe any difficult line drawing is necessary. (A)s a matter of law . . . defendant assisted in persecution. . . ." OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum stated that "Breyer had no right to enter this country in the first instance," and that the government would seek to have him removed from the United States "as expeditiously as possible." The Breyer proceeding is a result of OSI's ongoing investigation of Nazi persecutors illegally residing in the U.S. Since OSI was created in 1979, 57 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of their illegally-obtained citizenship, and 48 persons have been permanently removed from the United States. # # # 97-030