Johann Breyer, German SS officer (born 1925)

Johann Breyer was a Czech-American tool and die maker and onetime SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration and death camp guard whom the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI) unsuccessfully attempted to denaturalize and deport for his teenage service in the SS. His was considered the "most arcane and convoluted litigation in OSI history", owing to the convergence of three unusual legal factors in the case:

• the question of whether the inability of American mothers to transmit citizenship to children born outside the U.S. before 1934 was unconstitutional,
• if so, then whether Breyer should be retroactively a U.S. citizen at birth and whether that citizenship was lost by volunteering to participate in SS activities,
  • and if so, then whether those activities or a later misrepresentation of his wartime activities to evade U.S. immigration law and enter the U.S. allowed for loss of his later-acquired citizenship, and
• his lawsuits against the media over coverage of the case.

The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.