Man denies ties to Nazi crimes

SEATTLE – In a new court filing that asks a federal judge to throw his case out, an elderly Bellevue man who faces being stripped of his U.S. citizenship for allegedly lying about his membership in a Nazi death squad denies the allegations.

The Seattle times reports Peter Egner accuses the federal government of delaying its pursuit of him for so long that witnesses who could have helped in his defense have died and evidence has been lost.

The 86-year-old Egner says he knows nothing about 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.

Robert Gibbs, Egner’s immigration lawyer, says, “We haven’t seen anything from the government that indicates he was involved in any of the things they say he was.”

In July, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations filed a lawsuit against Egner alleging that he lied on immigration documents when he applied for citizenship in 1965 after coming to the U.S. in 1960.