Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - Page updated at 04:06 PM


U.S. seeks to revoke citizenship of Bellevue man for alleged war crimes
The U.S. Department of Justice has moved to revoke the citizenship of an 86-year-old Bellevue man it says was a member of a Nazi death squad responsible for the murders of more than 17,000 Serbian civilians during World War II.

By Mike Carter

Seattle Times staff reporter

Related

Complaint (PDF)
Affidavit in support of complaint (PDF)
The U.S. Department of Justice has moved to revoke the citizenship of an 86-year-old Bellevue man it says was a member of a Nazi death squad responsible for the murders of more than 17,000 Serbian civilians during World War II.

Federal Nazi hunters allege that Peter Egner, who was born in Yugoslavia, joined the notorious Nazi-run Security Police and Security Service (SPSS) in Belgrade in 1941, and served through 1943 when he was wounded.

During that time, according to a complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the unit participated in the roundup and killings of tens of thousands of Serbian Jews, Gypsies and political dissidents.

The DOJ's Office of Special Investigations, which is responsible for finding war criminals on U.S. soil, identified Egner's participation through Nazi documents, the complaint says.

"The Nazi unit in which Peter Egner is alleged to have participated was responsible for countless deaths and unimaginable suffering," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich in a news release issued from Washington, D.C.

"No one who participated ... in the diabolical Nazi program of persecution is entitled to retain U.S. citizenship," added Office of Special Investigations Director Eli Rosenbaum.

Court documents allege that during the first nine months that Egner was with a member of the SPSS, the unit operated as the Belgrade Einsatzgruppe, a special mobile unit charged with early efforts to systematically murder Jews as part of Hitler's Final Solution.

All were asphyxiated or suffocated by carbon monoxide in the back of a special mobile gas van while being driven to burial pits near, according to the court documents.

During the fall of 1941, the complaint says, Egner's unit killed 11,164 Serbians, most of them Jewish men, but the dead also included suspected Communists and Gypsies.

"The organization played a leading role in the Nazis' mass murder of 6,280 Jewish women and children" at the Semlin Concentration camp, according to an affidavit filed by Elizabeth White, the Office of Special Investigation's chief historian and deputy director.

The complaint says Egner said during a February 2007 interview that he was a member of the SPSS and that he guarded prisoners being take to Avala and to the Semlin camp.

Egner also told investigators that he acted as an interpreter during interrogations of political prisoners. According to White's affidavit, "Interrogations conducted by SPSS personnel sometimes involved severe torture, often followed by execution."The documents say Egner came to the U.S. in 1960 and became a citizen in 1966.

The complaint alleges that he lied on his citizenship petition and omitted his SPSS service, saying instead he served as an infantry sergeant in the "German Army."

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

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