Johann "Hans" Breyer has been arrested by U.S. Marshals, accused of
working as a Nazi prison guard in WWII:
According to court documents, Breyer has been charged with complicity in the murder of 158 trainloads of Jewish deportees at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp between May 1944 and October 1944.
German officials began pushing for his arrest two years ago:
He has previously admitted he worked at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during the war, but told the Associated Press in an interview in 2012 that his duties consisted solely of guarding the outside of a labor camp.
This isn't the first time the U.S. has considered deporting him:
The U.S. Justice Department opened an inquiry into his status in the country in the late 1990s. But a federal court at the time chose not to deport him, largely because it found he had enlisted when he was a minor.
Many are eager to see him returned to
Germany, despite his age:
Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said with Germany asking for Breyer's extradition, there was no reason that he should not be sent overseas for trial.
"If a country asks for him and they have a basis for the request, the United States is anxious, of course, to be rid of all of the Nazi perpetrators who immigrated there, it's a case where hopefully there will be no obstacles," he said.
"Germany deserves credit for doing this — for extending and expanding their efforts and, in a sense, making a final attempt to maximize the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators."