Free Republic

Anton Geiser, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who fought deportation after settling in Pennsylvania, has died, his lawyer said. He was 88. Geiser, a retired mill worker with three American-born children, was an armed guard for the Nazis at the Buchenwald concentration camp, federal prosecutors said. Geiser, who was originally born in Croatia but settled in Sharon, Pa., after the war, said he was forced into service by the Nazis as a teenager and never participated in the systematic slaughter of Jews and other prisoners inside the camp. Federal prosecutors disagreed and were seeking his deportation to face a...

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A U.S. immigration judge has ordered an 85-year-old retired steelworker deported to Austria, or to any other country that will accept him, for serving as an armed Nazi death camp guard during World War II. Anton Geiser and his attorney did not immediately return calls and an e-mail for comment on the decision announced Tuesday by the Justice Department. Judge Charles Honeyman issued the 14-page order out of Philadelphia on Monday.

The U.S. Department of Justice initiated formal proceedings this week to have a former Nazi guard living in Mercer County removed from the country. Anton Geiser, 84, of Sharon, came to the Untied States in 1956. But in 2004, the federal government filed a complaint against him alleging he was not entitled to citizenship because he had "personally assisted the Nazi government in persecuting persons because of race, religion or national origin." Mr. Geiser, who the prosecution said served as an armed SS Death's Head guard at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, Germany, during most of 1943, fought the...