Extradition of Breyer

Johann Breyer (defendant) served as a “Death’s Head” guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The Federal Republic of Germany sought Breyer’s extradition to stand trial in Germany for his role in the murder of 216,000 European Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The United States sought an extradition certification. Breyer claimed that he was unaware of and did not participate in the murders. The Nazi concentration camps were established in 1933 initially to silence political opponents. The camps were staffed by the Schutzstaffel (SS), the armed wing of Hitler’s political party, and the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret political police force. During World War II, the camps were used to house prisoners of war, foreign civilians, and “asocial” groups such as homosexuals and Jews. After SS national leader Heinrich Himmler was charged in 1942 with ethnically cleansing all German territories, the camps were used to implement the “final solution” to the Jewish question. The original plan was to exterminate the Jewish people through forced labor. The Nazis segregated their victims in prisons or ghettos, relocated them by train to concentration camps, selected those fit for forced labor (ranging from 5 to 40 percent of the total passengers), brutally murdered the rest with lethal doses of the poisonous gas Zyklon B, and cremated the bodies. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, two packed train cars at a time were unloaded onto ramps for the selection process. Armed SS guards encircled the trains to prevent passengers from escaping or hiding. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp had six gas chambers and four crematoria that could burn 4,420 bodies per day. There were so many murders after the German occupation of Hungary that cremations also took place in open pits. Screams could be heard outside the gas chambers, and the smell of burning bodies filled the air outside the crematoria.