An 89-year-old Philadelphia man has been detained on charges of aiding the extermination of more than 200,000 Jews during World War II, USA Today reports.
Johann "Hans" Breyer, who was a Nazi guard at the Auschwitz concentration camps, could be extradited to Germany.
Johann "Hans" Breyer, a retired toolmaker and a U.S. citizen, was arrested Tuesday at his home and ordered held without bail Wednesday pending an extradition hearing in August. His attorney argued unsuccessfully that Breyer is too frail to be held, telling the federal magistrate he "is not a threat to anyone."
A court in the Bavarian town of Weiden, where Breyer lived before coming to the United States more than 50 years ago, charged him with complicity in the murders of 158 trainloads of prisoners hauled from Hungary, Germany, and Czechoslovakia to the death camp in occupied Poland between May 1944 and October 1944.
He has admitted being a perimeter guard at Auschwitz I, a camp where slave laborers were held and where Josef Mengele conducted inhumane experiments on prisoners. But he denied working at Auschwitz II, more commonly known as Birkenau, where an estimated 1.5 million Jews were systematically murdered.
Breyer told the Associated Press in 2012 that he "didn’t kill anybody" or "rape anybody."
He also said he did not witness any killing but that he was aware of the killing going on inside.