Johann Breyer, German SS officer (b. 1925)
Johann Breyer (May 30, 1925 – July 22, 2014) was a onetime SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration and death camp guard and retired tool and die maker whom the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI) unsuccessfully attempted to denaturalize and deport for his teenage service in the SS. His was considered the "most arcane and convoluted litigation in OSI history", owing to the convergence of three unusual legal factors in the case:
the question of whether the inability of American mothers to transmit citizenship to children born outside the U.S. before 1934 was unconstitutional,
if so, then whether Breyer should be retroactively a U.S. citizen at birth and whether that citizenship was lost by volunteering to participate in SS activities,
and if so, then whether those activities or a later misrepresentation of his wartime activities to evade U.S. immigration law and enter the U.S. allowed for loss of his later-acquired citizenship, and
his lawsuits against the media over coverage of the case.In a series of rulings, federal district courts and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overall held that Breyer should have been born a U.S. citizen, and that while he had volunteered for SS activity in support of a totalitarian regime and its actions while age 17, there was insufficient evidence of the voluntariness of his activities after reaching age 18 to result in renunciation of that citizenship.In 2013 Germany issued an arrest warrant accusing him of aiding in killing 216,000 Jews as a guard at Auschwitz. He was arrested at his home in Philadelphia on June 17, 2014, age 89, and held without bail pending an extradition hearing. His health rapidly deteriorated while in custody and he died on July 22 prior to his hearing.