WASHINGTON — In what could prove to be the last Nazi case on US soil, federal officials in Philadelphia on Tuesday arrested an 89-year-old immigrant accused of having been a Nazi SS guard at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Johann Breyer, a retired toolmaker born in Czechoslovakia, is the oldest person accused of ties to the Third Reich by US authorities who for decades have hunted for Nazis who escaped to America. Breyer is accused of joining the Waffen SS at 17 and working at the concentration camps.
Breyer is accused of working as an armed guard at Auschwitz and taking part in the murders of "hundreds of thousands" of Jews from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany in 1944.