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An 86-year-old Bellevue man who faces being stripped of his citizenship for allegedly recumbent about his membership in a Nazi death squad denies the allegations in a new court filing that asks a federal judge to throw the case audibly.

In the filing, Peter Egner accuses the government of delaying its pursuit of him for in the same manner long that witnesses who could esteem helped in his defense have died and evidence has been lost.

He says he knows nothing about the Einsatzgruppe, the brutal Nazi-run Serbian police one that rounded up Jews, political prisoners and other enemies of the Third Reich in the wake of Hitler’sitting attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. And the closest he came to “interrogating” prisoners was acting as an interpreter in the public lobby of a Belgrade police character, he claims.

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

The U.S. 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 following coming to the U.S. in 1960. He lived quietly for many years in Portland, and moved to subsist allied by blood kindred in Bellevue after his wife died in 2005.

According to the body politic’s distemper, Egner said he was a branch of the German army, omitting his involvement in the notorious Nazi-run Security Police and Security Service (SPSS) in Belgrade, Serbia, from 1941 end the fall of 1943, when he was wounded.

That unit was constituent of an Einsatzgruppe that rounded up tens of thousands of Serbs because the Nazi army advanced east end what was at another time Yugoslavia. The unit, according to the lawsuit, operated a mobile unit used to gas prisoners, including more than 6,200 women and children. Many were suffocated in the back of a specially rigged truck on a trip to Avala, a mount south of Belgrade where the Nazis executed more than 80,000 prisoners.

“On both occasions, [Egner] sat in back of the bus with the prisoners,” Gibbs wrote. “Following these brief assignments, he returned to his post in Belgrade, where he worked doing clerical office act.

“He had no knowledge during the time that to the prisoners’ ethnic or religious background, the reason for their transfer, nor any enlightenment about what happened to them after thing arrived at Avala or Semlin.”

Gibbs’ answer to the government complaint claims that the U.S. government “did not act with due perseverance to pursue this require.”

“As a result, the defendant has suffered severe prejudice in that witnesses that could be obliged testified in defendant’s countenance require died and other evidence has been lost,” the document says. Gibbs is asking that the action be dropped and that the government pay Egner’s attorney’s fees.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kipnis declined to discuss Egner’s claim. “We’ll accord legally at an appropriate time,” he said. “I don’familiarily litigate in the press.”

Serbian officials have said they are interested in extraditing and prosecuting Egner as a war felonious, should he lose his U.S. citizenship. Gibbs said he has not heard from the Serbian dominion.

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