Former Nazi guard dies amid deportation battle

Anton Geiser served in SS as concentration camp guard before moving to US

27 December 2012, 1:41 am

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Anton Geiser, who has lived in the US for more than 50 years, didn't deny serving as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Photo credit: CC BY/ hsivonen via Flickr.com)

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A lawyer says a former Nazi concentration camp guard who had been fighting attempts to deport him from the US has died in Pennsylvania.

Attorney Adrian Roe says 88-year-old Anton Geiser died over the weekend and was buried Monday in Hermitage, about 75 miles north of Pittsburgh.

Geiser was born in what is now Croatia. He’d been living in Pennsylvania for more than 50 years but didn’t tell his family about the Nazi service until 2004, when the Justice Department began legal proceedings.

Geiser has said he was forced to join the SS at the age of 17 in 1942 and that he never killed anyone. But federal prosecutors say his work as a concentration camp guard made him a party to the persecution of countless men, women and children.

Earlier this month the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church heard an appeal from Geiser of Sharon, who acknowledges serving in the Nazi SS as a guard in the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps. A federal judge ordered him deported in 2010.

Geiser, who had been recently hospitalized, did not attend the hearing. He came to the US in 1956 and was naturalized in 1962. He lived in Sharon, about 75 miles north of Pittsburgh, where he worked in a steel mill for decades and raised five children.