Serbia will seek the extradition of Peter Egner, a naturalized United States citizen, for alleged war crimes while serving in a Nazi unit in Belgrade. Egner, who was born in Yugoslavia 87 years ago, is currently living in a retirement community in Bellevue, Washington. U.S. authorities are currently trying to remove his citizenship, which would ease extradition moves.
War Crimes prosecutor Vladmir Vukcevic said that investigators have compiled sufficient evidence about Egner to put him on trial in Serbia. Representatives of Serbia’s Jewish community have been informed that the prosecution filed the request for investigation against Egner in late August 2008, and that the decision to start the investigation was made in September last year.
Egner, who is trying to prevent the U.S. federal government’s extradition move, denies the accusations. He claims that he knows nothing about the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-led Serbian police unit that rounded up Jews, political prisoners, and others who were opposed to Hitler’s Third Reich. Mr. Egner’s Attorney, Robert Gibbs, told the Associated Press last July that his client served in a low-level position in the Serbian army when he was about 19.
The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit in July to revoke the citizenship of Egner. The Justice Department claims that Egner, who became a citizen in 1966 after emigrating in 1960, failed to disclose details from his past on his naturalization application.
The Justice Department, which cited Nazi documents, claims that in 1941 Egner’s unit murdered 11,164 people, mostly Serbian Jewish men and some Communists and Gypsies – and that in 1942, his unit murdered 6,280 Jewish women and children by gassing them with carbon monoxide in special killing vans.