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The documents, however, call his testimony into question, suggesting he was at Auschwitz through the rest of 1944 and into 1945, which would have meant he was there during the time some 426,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, 320,000 of whom went directly into the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A form from SS administrative authorities, filled out on Jan. 17, 1945, in Pressburg, which today is Bratislava, Slovakia, indicates that the previous day Breyer was there in person and applied for
-- and was granted -- financial assistance for his parents' farm while he was away serving in the SS. And it notes that Breyer at the time of the application was based at "Auschwitz 2." In a 2002 case in the United States, the judge questioned the trustworthiness of the document
-- noting among other things that the birthdates of both of Breyer's parents were wrong, and the size of his family farm was written down as double what it actually was. In his testimony, Breyer suggested the document was "a fraud." But a court expert testified there was no evidence of a forgery. And U.S. federal prosecutors noted that Breyer's date of birth, date of induction into the SS, profession, parents' names and hometown are all correct. They also cited Breyer's first interrogation in 1991, when he told investigators he had gone home after "they granted me vacation end January
'45" -- which fits with the timeline of the document. In the current German case, Thomas Walther, a former prosecutor in Schrimm's office, said it was also plausible to think that Breyer would have made his parents seem older, and his farm larger, in order to bolster the case for receiving assistance. If nothing else, he said, the document and other evidence raise enough suspicion for prosecutors to file charges. "Where this evidence fits has to be decided at trial, regardless of what the U.S. judge said the German court needs to decide," said Walther, who is now in private practice and represents several family members of Jewish victims at Auschwitz who have joined the investigation as co-plaintiffs as allowed under German law. Weiden prosecutor Gerhard Heindl, who is heading the current investigation, said he could not comment on any evidence. Another document, an April 26, 1944, letter to the SS administration in Pressburg from the leader of the pro-Nazi Slovakian "Deutsche Partei," makes a case to have Breyer excused from his duties to help on his family's farm, noting that he was assigned at the time to the 8th Company of the SS Totenkopf in Auschwitz. The 8th Company was stationed at Auschwitz II during the time Breyer is alleged to have been there, according to camp orders cited by Raul Hilberg in his book "The Destruction of the European Jews." A U.S. Army intelligence file on Breyer, obtained by the AP, from a 1951 immigration background check also lists him as being with the SS Totenkopf in Auschwitz as late as Dec. 29, 1944
-- four months after he said he deserted. The Army Investigative Records Repository file was obtained by the AP from the National Archives through a Freedom of Information Act request. "Clearly we can't say what the result will be at the end of a long presentation of evidence to a court
-- that's not our job," Walther said. "But our contention is with this evidence the state prosecutors must file charges."
[Associated
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