Federal officials arrested an 89-year-old man they say is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people while he was a Nazi guard at an Auschwitz death camp.

Johnan Breyer, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was taken into custody in Philadelphia on Tuesday and was ordered held without bail on Wednesday, The Vancouver Sun reported. He is charged with joining the Nazi SS guard at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II and aiding the murders of 216,000 Jewish men, women and children.

Breyer is the oldest person ever accused of committing crimes during Nazi Germany by U.S. prosecutors, The New York Times reported. To this day federal prosecutors are still tracking down suspected Nazis who fled to the U.S. after the war.

Breyer, who was under investigation by German authorities, has admitted to being a guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. But the retired tool maker said he was posted outside the camp and did not partake in the gruesome killings that went on inside, the Associated Press reported.

Breyer's lawyer, Dennis Boyle, argued that his client is too feeble to be detained and that he suffers from dementia and other health issues. But Judge Timothy R. Rice determined that for the time being, "Mr. Breyer does have the ability to understand the nature of the proceedings against him," The NY Times reported.

U.S. official have tried and failed for years to get Breyer striped of his citizenship and deported. The investigation was picked up by German investigators, and now that Breyer has been arrested, they want him extradited to stand trial in Germany, The Vancouver Sun reported.

A German warrant charges Breyer with 150 counts of aiding and abetting the Nazis, The NY Times reported.

"Germany deserves credit for doing this- for extraditing and expanding their efforts and, in a sense, making a final attempt to maximize the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators," Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, told The Vancouver Sun.

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