A Serbian court issued an international arrest warrant last Friday for a U.S. citizen accused of Nazi involvement in World War II.
Seattle resident Peter Egner, an ethnic German born in the former Yugoslavia, is suspected of being involved in war crimes against Jews and others during Nazi Germany’s brutal occupation of Serbia, court officials have announced. The court has said that Egner was involved in the killings of some 17,000 Serbian civilians.
On July 15, 2008, the Department of Justice first requested that a federal court in Seattle revoke Egner’s U.S. citizenship. He moved to the United States in 1960 and became an U.S. citizen six years later. According to the Department of Justice, Egner failed to declare his Nazi affiliations which would have disqualified him from U.S. citizenship.
“The government alleges that Peter Egner served in a notorious Nazi unit that murdered thousands of Serbian Jews and other unarmed civilians,” Office of Special Investigations (OSI) Director Eli M. Rosenbaum said in a press release. “No one who participated, as we allege the defendant did, in the diabolical Nazi program of persecution is entitled to retain U.S. citizenship.”
During World War II, Egner allegedly served in an Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police unit. According to the United States Department of Justice, the unit was responsible for murdering thousands of Jewish and Serbian women and children. According to Nazi documents, in 1941, the Einsatzgruppe participated in the mass murder of 11,164 people. In early 1942, the unit killed an additional 6,280 people by gassing them with carbon monoxide in what the Department of Justice describes as “specially equipped vans.”
“Prior to their deaths, these victims were confined in a concentration camp at Semlin, outside of Belgrade,” said a Department of Justice press release. “In a process that continued daily for a period of approximately two months, the women and children were taken from the camp and forced into a specially equipped vans where they were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide gas while being transported to Avala, an execution and mass burial site near Belgrade.”
Egner has denied accusations of involved in war crimes, they he has admitted to serving in a unit that guarded prisoners as they were being transferred to the Semlin and Avala concentration camps in Serbia.
“The Nazi unit in which Peter Egner is alleged to have participated was responsible for countless deaths and unimaginable human suffering,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich said in a press release.
