Buchenwald concentration camps (Archives)
Photo: AP
US Judge orders ex-Nazi guard deported to Austria
Former SS officer Anton Geiser, who was a guard at Sachsenhausen and the Buchenwald concentration camps, was stripped of US citizenship in 2006 and now faces deportation
A former Nazi concentration camp guard who has been living in Pennsylvania is to be deported to Austria, the US Justice Department said on Tuesday.
Anton Geiser, 85, has admitted that during World War Two he served as an armed guard at the Sachsenhausen and the Buchenwald concentration camps. He was given orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape, prosecutors have said.
Geiser came to the United States from Austria in 1956 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1962. A federal court in Pennsylvania revoked his citizenship in 2006, after ruling that he had served as a guard in Nazi camps.
During those court proceedings to revoke his citizenship, Geiser said that he was "coercively inducted into the Nazi Waffen SS, sent to the Russian front as a combat soldier and then assigned to serve as a guard at two concentration camps."
He said that he served as a perimeter guard, did not participate in the activities inside the camps and was not a war criminal. However, the court said that did not protect him from deportation.
Geiser can appeal the order by an immigration judge in Philadelphia.
