PHILADELPHIA
-- The chief Nazi hunter with the Simon Wiesenthal Center
says age and the passage of time are no barriers to investigating
alleged Nazi activity during World War II.
If a person is charged with war crimes, you don't just ignore the crime because
a suspect has reached old age, said Efraim Zuroff, who called
the German-led investigation of now 87-year-old Johann "Hans" Breyer of Philadelphia a powerful message that such efforts will continue.
"Old age should not protect
people who committed such heinous crimes," Zuroff said Monday by phone from Israel.
Germany has launched a war crimes
investigation against Breyer on allegations that he served
as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp complex after
years of failed attempts by the U.S. to revoke his citizenship.
Breyer resolutely denied those allegations
and told The Associated Press in an interview in his home
late last week that he was never at the camp.
"I had nothing to do with
the camp. I told them over and over," he said, recalling a yearslong failed effort by the U.S. to strip him of his
citizenship.
Instead, Breyer said he was at a nearby
SS camp where he was trained to use a light infantry cannon.
On Sunday, Breyer repeated that he's
not been contacted by Germany nor notified that he's under
any investigation.
"I heard this from you," he
told an AP reporter, reiterating that he was never a guard.
On Monday, a few reporters were parked
outside the three-level row home he shares with his wife.
No one answered the door but a handwritten sign read: "We do not have any comment. Please leave."
Breyer did not respond to messages
left at his home.
Some neighbors declined to comment
while others did not answer their doors.
For more than a decade, the Department
of Justice 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.
The Justice Department noted that
it had proved, in court, that Breyer was involved in "Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution while serving as an SS guard" at Buchenwald and Auschwitz during World War II.
"However, findings concerning
his mother's birth and the date of his SS enlistment made
it legally impossible to deport him from the United States," Rebekah Carmichael, a department spokeswoman, told the AP in an email Monday.
"As a general matter, the
Department of Justice has a more than 40-year record of close
cooperation with European governments that seek to prosecute
cases involving Nazi crimes, including through sharing of
evidence and facilitation of extradition and deportation," she said.
German officials have not yet filed
charges against Breyer, but he could be charged with accessory
to murder, the same legal theory that prosecutors in Munich
used to try and convict former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk
on charges served as a death camp guard at Sobibor in occupied
Poland.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who died
in a Bavarian nursing home in March while appealing his 2011
conviction, was the first person convicted in Germany solely
on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence
of involvement in a specific killing.
Under the new legal theory, anyone
who was involved in the operation of a death camp was an
accessory to murder.
About 1.5 million people, primarily
Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940
and 1945.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/09/24/3831753/pursuit-of-alleged-nazi-camp-guard.html#storylink=cpy
kansascity.com
|