Alleged war criminal's lawyers ask judge to throw out citizenship case

The U.S. Department of Justice's attempt to strip the citizenship from an elderly Bellevue man for belonging to a Nazi-run Serbian death squad during World War II is a case of guilt by association and should be thrown out, according to lawyers for 86-year-old Peter Egner.

"Mr. Egner vehemently denies any involvement in persecution or mistreatment," wrote Seattle lawyer Robert Gibbs, whose firm is representing Egner. "The government seeks to denaturalize the defendant through incendiary allegations of wartime atrocities committed by others."

In an unusual legal move at this point in the litigation, Gibbs is asking U.S. District Judge James Robart to find the government's case lacking on its face and throw it out.

The Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, which hunts war criminals, filed a lawsuit against Egner in July alleging that he lied on immigration documents when he applied for citizenship in 1965 after coming to the U.S. in 1960. He lived for many years in Portland, and moved to be near family in Bellevue after his wife died in 2005.

According to the complaint, Egner said he was a member of the German army, omitting his involvement in the notorious Nazi-run Security Police and Security Service (SPSS) in Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia), from 1941 through the fall of 1943, when he was wounded.

The complaint alleges that Egner was a guard and interpreter for the police service, which participated in the roundup and systematic killings of tens of thousands of Serbian Jews, Gypsies and political dissidents.

The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) identified Egner's participation through Nazi documents, the complaint says.

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

The SPSS "played a leading role" in the gassings of more than 6,200 Jewish women and children at the Semlin concentration camp near Belgrade, according to OSI officials. Most were killed in specially disguised trucks rigged to pump exhaust fumes into an enclosed compartment. The prisoners would be loaded into the trucks, ostensibly to be taken to another camp, and then driven around until they had suffocated.

Gibbs points out that the complaint never alleges that Egner participated in any SPSS atrocities. Moreover, immigration law in effect in 1966, when Egner won his citizenship, would not necessarily have barred him from becoming a citizen even if he had disclosed his SPSS membership, Gibbs said.

The government, Gibbs argues, has an extraordinarily high burden of proof in trying to strip someone of his citizenship and must meet it with "clear, unequivocal and convincing" evidence.

Instead, the complaint "includes only conclusory allegations of law and unwarranted interferences of fact."

A hearing will be held on the issue next month.

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