HUNGARY IS under growing international pressure to arrest and try a man whom Nazi hunters claim sent thousands of Jews to death camps during the second World War.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre calls Laszlo Csatary (97) its most wanted Nazi war criminal. It accuses him of helping to deport some 16,000 Jews to Auschwitz and to Kamenetz-Podolsk in Ukraine when he served as a senior policeman in Kosice, a Slovak town that was under Hungarian control during wartime.
Csatary fled Kosice after the war and, in 1948, a Czechoslovak court found him guilty in absentia of war crimes and sentenced him to death. He is believed to have arrived the following year in Canada, where for decades he lived incognito as an art dealer.
He was stripped of Canadian citizenship after his true identity was revealed in 1995. Two years later, he left the country and his whereabouts became a mystery.
Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi hunter, said he received a tip-off last September that Csatary was in Budapest and appeared to have lived there since leaving Canada.
Dr Zuroff said he had received fresh accounts of Csatary’s wartime actions in recent months, including testimony from one Holocaust survivor who said Csatary had personally overseen the expulsion from Kosice of nine members of her family.
“This new evidence strengthens the already very strong case against Csatary and reinforces our insistence that he be held accountable for his crimes. The passage of time in no way diminishes his guilt and old age should not afford protection for Holocaust perpetrators,” Dr Zuroff said.
British newspaper the Sun recently confronted Csatary at his Budapest apartment, after the Wiesenthal Centre confirmed the accuracy of the tip-off from its informant.
“No, no. I don’t want to discuss it . . . I didn’t do it, go away from here,” the Sun quoted him as saying before he closed the door on its reporter.
On Monday, a group of young Hungarians gathered outside Csatary’s apartment to demand that he face justice.
There was no sign of Csatary, fuelling suspicions that he has moved since his whereabouts were discovered.
Officials have given no details about his location and warned that prosecuting Csatary for wartime events in Kosice’s Jewish ghetto could be difficult.
“It took place 68 years ago in an area that now falls under the jurisdiction of another country – which, also with regard to the related international conventions, raises several investigative and legal problems,” the Budapest prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
France has also called for swift action from Hungary, which has shifted sharply to the political right in recent years; its conservative government places great store in national pride and patriotism, and the country’s third most popular party is ultra-nationalist.
Dr Zuroff told The Irish Times that Hungary had a “mixed” record in dealing with war crimes suspects, and he was “not confident” that its authorities would keep track of Csatary if he tried to flee again.
In an open letter to Hungarian president Janos Ader, who is now visiting Israel, Dr Zuroff bemoaned the apparent lack of urgency in Budapest’s handling of Csatary’s case.
He described him as “a cruel sadist, who frequently for no apparent reason beat ghetto inmates with a dog whip”.
“One of the most effective ways to combat the rising wave of anti-Semitism, racism and right-wing extremism in Hungary is to bring to justice those who were inspired to commit Holocaust crimes by the same ultra-nationalism that is once again rearing its ugly head in your country,” he added.
