BERLIN (JTA) -- Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff is fighting libel
charges filed by an alleged war criminal in Hungary.
The case, being heard in a Budapest courtroom, began Oct. 8 and is scheduled
to continue through a final hearing
Dec. 16.
It
is likely the first time that a man
under investigation for mass murder
has sued his accusers, Zuroff told JTA.
Zuroff,
who has been searching for Nazi war
criminals under the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's Operation Last Chance program,
submitted documents to the Hungarian
authorities in August 2006 to prove
that Sandor Kepiro, while serving as
a Hungarian gendarmerie officer in World
War II, organized a massacre of about
1,246 residents -- Jews, Serbs and Roma
-- in the city of Novi Sad in January
1942.
The
investigation of the charges is continuing,
according to Zuroff's attorney, Marton
Rosta.
Kepiro,
now 96, sued Zuroff in 2007, alleging
that Zuroff had made statements about
the case as fact rather than opinion.
Rosta
said the court agreed with Kepiro and
opened the current trial, in which Zuroff
is required to back up his "factual" statement.
"This
is a very trying and frustrating experience," Zuroff wrote in an e-mail to JTA, "since Kepiro should have been tried a long time ago ... and instead I'm the one
on trial."
According
to Zuroff, in 2006 he provided the authorities
with documents from a 1944 court verdict
finding Kepiro and 14 other Hungarian
army and police officers guilty of "violating the code of honor of the Hungarian military/gendarmerie" by participating in the Novi Sad massacre. All were given harsh sentences, but
were freed and given promotions following
the Nazi invasion of Hungary, Zuroff
said.
After
World War II, Kepiro allegedly fled
to Austria and then Argentina; in 1946,
the Communist government of Hungary
retried him in absentia and sentenced
him to 14 years in prison.
Twice
convicted, Kepiro nevertheless returned
to Budapest in 1996.
"He's
saying that he did not kill anyone and
that all he did was verify/ferret out
armed 'partisans' ... who posed a threat
to the occupying Hungarian forces," Zuroff wrote in his e-mail. It is a "blatant lie, since his men rounded up hundreds of [civilians], almost all of
whom were taken to the Danube to be
shot."
Should
the judge find Zuroff's proof lacking,
he faces a fine or up to two years in
prison. Even if Zuroff is cleared, Kepiro
remains innocent in the eyes of the
court, and may or may not be tried on
the war crimes charges, Rosta said.
While
Zuroff told JTA he had never been sued
before, a Lithuanian Nazi war criminal
living in Scotland, the late Antanas
Gecas, succeeded in stopping the sale
of Zuroff's first book, "Occupation Nazi-Hunter: The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust," for six years.
jta.org
|