AKIPRESS.COM - An 89-year-old man has been arrested and denied bail in the United States for alleged war crimes as a teenage Nazi guard at Auschwitz.

Johann Breyer, a retired machinist born in Czechoslovakia to a US mother, admits joining the Waffen SS aged 17 but denies being a guard at the concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.

He emigrated to the United States after World War II and is married with children and grandchildren. But German authorities in 2012 opened an inquiry against him on suspicion he was an accessory in the killings of hundreds of thousands of Jews in 1944 as an Auschwitz guard.

US media quoted court documents as saying that Breyer has been charged on 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities. His lawyer Dennis Boyle told AFP that Breyer was arrested in Philadelphia on Tuesday on a warrant from the German government and faces an extradition hearing on August 21.

Breyer insists he was only in a field artillery unit of the Waffen SS and deserted weeks later after serving in the vicinity of Auschwitz, but not as a prison guard. Breyer appeared in a US district court in Philadelphia on Wednesday where magistrate Timothy Rice denied him bail due to the severity of the charges.

Boyle said his client was in poor health and appeared frail and dishevelled in court after spending his first night in prison.

Auschwitz is an enduring symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, of whom one million were killed there from 1940 to 1945.