Nazi Hunter Era End Is Near

Apr.8th, 2010

The age of Nazi hunting in the US is well in the past. The number of men and women suspected of war crimes is dwindling fast, reduced by the efforts of federal prosecutors and by the passing of the years. Those that are left are now in their late 80s and 90s.

The sight of John Demjanjuk, currently on trial in Munich, being extradited from the US in a wheelchair last year illustrated the point.

But the search by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) goes on. Eli Rosenbaum, director of the OSI and America’s chief Nazi hunter, thinks that a few dozen of the hundreds of criminals and collaborators who fled to the US after the Second World War are still in the country.

But age may get them before he does. He has only ten cases left on his books.

One of them is Peter Egner, an 88-year-old former maitre d’ living in a retirement home in Seattle. Serbia has just issued an international warrant for his arrest, accusing him of serving in a Nazi unit that killed more than 17,000 Jews and other civilians in Belgrade during the German occupation of Serbia.

The claims against him are chilling. It is alleged that as a teenager in 1941 he was a member of an SS death squad, or Einsatzgruppe.

OSI investigators cite Nazi documents which show that in the autumn of 1941, the unit executed 11,164 people — mostly Serbian Jewish men, suspected communists and Gypsies — and that in early 1942 it killed 6,280 Serbian Jewish women and children who were held as prisoners.

According to the Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, Mr Egner supervised the transfer of victims from Belgrade to the concentration camp at Semlin.

The OSI claims that during an interview in 2007 at his home Mr Egner told investigators he had guarded prisoners en route to Semlin and Avala. He was also an interpreter for political prisoners, who were sometimes tortured, then executed.

Mr Egner has denied the accusations through his lawyers, saying he knows nothing about the Einsatzgruppe and the closest he came to “interrogating” prisoners was acting as an interpreter in the public lobby of a Belgrade police station.

He has been fighting the Department of Justice’s efforts to strip him of his American citizenship since 2008.

Mr Egner is said to have entered the US in 1960, and was naturalised in 1966. When questioned about prior military service, he allegedly omitted his SS involvement, saying only that he had been a sergeant in the German Army.

That is enough, say prosecutors, to revoke his citizenship. Once stripped of it, proceedings to extradite him can go ahead. The process is likely to take several more years.

In the meantime Mr Egner, who has suffered heart problems, has asked a court in Seattle for a protective order limiting the exposure of evidence in his case to avoid causing him “embarrassment, oppression and unfairness”.

Since it was set up in 1979 the OSI has won denaturalisation and deportation cases against 107 accused Nazis. While some say it is time to drop cases against elderly men who can do no further harm, Mr Rosenbaum, whose father served in the US army in WW2 and reported on the horrors of Dachau after its liberation, says there can be no letting up.

But his department’s focus has been changing. It is now investigating modern-day perpetrators of genocide, torture and other human rights violations, such as those in Rwanda. The OSI is about to disappear, merged with another section of the Department of Justice into a new unit called the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section.

Whatever happens to Peter Egner, it will mark the end of the era of the American Nazi hunter.

(article edited from Times Online)