Hungarian acquittal raises doubts about future prosecutions

The recent acquittal of Sándor Képíró is having a difficult time finding any supporters.

On one hand, attorneys for the 97-year-old former Hungarian gendarme captain say he was only acquitted because of a lack of evidence in his role in the deaths of 36 Jews in the 1942 Nazi-ordered raid on the Serbian city of Novi Sad. Zsolt Zétényi, attorney for the man dubbed the "Last Nazi," is appealing the grounds of the acquittal in hopes of having Képíró declared innocent.

"It is my conviction that Képíró did not commit any crime. ... It is not that there is no evidence but that he did not do anything," he said.

On the other hand, Jewish leaders and Holocaust groups have called the July 18 verdict an "outrageous miscarriage of justice" with the prosecuting attorneys vowing an appeal of their own.

"It's infuriating," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which specializes in tracking down and bringing evidence against former Nazi soldiers and collaborators. "If ever there was a case that looked like a sure bet to result in a conviction, it was this one."

Zuroff, the so-called "Nazi Hunter," had a personal stake in the case as he had originally found Képíró - who, after the war, fled Hungary for Argentina, where he lived for 50 years - and presented evidence to Hungarian authorities in 2006. His 2009 book Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice had an entire chapter devoted to Képíró's case.

Képíró was accused of having been in charge of several patrols of the German-allied Hungarian Army ordered to round up and execute residents of Novi Sad. Most of those murdered are believed to have been beaten to death or shot by machine guns and thrown into the frozen Danube River. Képíró was 24 at the time and was charged in 1944 with the deaths of 36 people in a war crimes trial in Budapest.

He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison but was freed after a coup catapulted the extreme right-wing Hungarian Arrow Cross Party into power, and he escaped to Argentina. In 1946, he was again convicted in absentia by the communist government in Hungary and sentenced to 14 years.

Much of Zuroff and the prosecution's argument against Képíró hinged on those prior convictions. But the panel of judges that heard the case, led by Budapest Municipal Judge Béla Várga, refused to allow the nearly 70-year-old rulings to be taken as evidence against Képíró, claiming the verdicts had sought collective guilt, disregarding individual responsibilities.

Várga, after acquitting Képíró, said the ruling was based on "insufficient evidence, not an absence of crime."

"After 70 years, there are no answers to many questions that we want to know about those tragic events in 1942," he told the court. "We just simply do not know who gave the command to the people serving under Képíró."

Zuroff said the decision was a "political judgment" made by judges in a country that has long expressed ambivalence toward its Holocaust past.

"The judge said the prosecution had not sufficiently proved [Képíró's] guilt," he said. "Well, that's hard to do when they disqualified the main pieces of evidence against him. One of the reasons we thought this would be a conviction is the fact that he's always admitted he'd served in Novi Sad. So, what was he doing there? Helping old ladies cross the street?"

For most of the trial, which began May 4, Képíró sat in a wheelchair flanked by his nurse and his granddaughter. Court assistants often had to repeat questions to him several times, and he was spotted falling asleep on a number of occasions. On the first day of the trial, he entered the courtroom holding a sign reading, "Murderers! The murderers of a 97-year-old man!" On the day the verdict was read, he whispered, "I have never killed people, never plundered. I served my country," according to the Hungarian News Agency.

Zuroff - who referred to his job as one-third detective, one-third historian and one-third political lobbyist - said that as former Nazi war criminals get older, it becomes more difficult to prosecute them.

"Most people think it's because of their age, but that's not it," he said. "The lobbyist part of my job is the hardest. You have to try to create the political will to bring these people to trial, and that just doesn't exist anymore. He should have been brought to justice long ago."

Hungarian World War II historian Láslzó Karsai is a vocal advocate of putting all "professional Nazi hunting" to rest and told The Prague Post he has personally urged Zuroff to cease his attempts to prosecute Nazi war criminals because, like the court, he believes enough evidence cannot possibly exist to convict them. The Wiesenthal Center, he said, had "overplayed its hand" in order to justify its existence.

"They put a trembling old man on trial without confirming living witnesses and without any real existing evidence," he said. "This is almost 70 years after the fact and all because of the wishes of a hysterical, exhibitionist and self-serving professional Nazi hunter."

But Zuroff said the search for former war criminals from the Holocaust should be viewed no differently than a police search.

"If a serial killer were on the loose, local authorities would be doing everything possible to make sure the killer was apprehended, convicted and punished," he said. "The thought with these war criminals is, 'What's the likelihood this old man will kill again? Zero.' There's the notion that many of these criminals didn't commit crimes before the Shoah, and they didn't commit crimes after the Shoah. But that's not good enough. During the war, they committed the most heinous acts in history."

praguepost.com