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By AP/ JOVANA GEC Friday, Nov. 26, 2010
(BELGRADE, Serbia) —Serbia is seeking extradition from the U.S. of a naturalized American citizen who is suspected of serving in a Nazi unit that killed some 17,000 Jewish and other civilians here during World War II, the justice minister said Friday.
Snezana Malovic told the Associated Press that Serbia sent its formal request for the extradition of Peter Egner earlier Friday.
Belgrade has worked closely with the U.S. on the case of 88-year-old Egner, who was born in Yugoslavia, but emigrated to the United States in 1960, gaining American citizenship six years later.
Egner has lived in a retirement community outside Seattle, fighting U.S. federal government efforts to strip him of his American citizenship. The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to revoke his citizenship, saying he failed to disclose details from his past on his naturalization application.
Egner has denied any knowledge of the Einsatzgruppe, a Nazi-run Serbian police unit that rounded up Jews, political prisoners and other enemies of the Third Reich in the wake of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1940s.
The U.S. Justice Department, citing Nazi documents, has said that in 1941 Egner's unit executed 11,164 people—mostly Serbian Jewish men, suspected communists and Gypsies—and in 1942 killed 6,280 Serbian Jewish women and children by gassing them with carbon monoxide in a specially designed van.
Serbia's war crimes prosecutor has said that he wants to try Egner in Serbia. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also has encouraged Serbia to try Egner and two other alleged Nazis here.
time magazine
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