Alleged Nazi war criminal Laszlo Csatary has been taken into custody in Hungary
after he was tracked down by tabloid journalists in Budapest.
He was dressed neatly, ready for a nice day out. Dressed
in new khaki pants, a fresh shirt, a grey-white checkered
jacket and a cap, he left his apartment and took the tram
to a nearby shopping center in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
Laszlo Csatary did not feel watched when he went out for
several hours, browsing through shops and buying a newspaper.
But Csatary was being watched. Reporters from the English
mass-circulation daily The Sun were closely following his
every move. They had received information from the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, which hunts down Nazi criminals and attempts
to bring them to justice.
Already last September, the center had received infomation
about Csatary's whereabouts and had contacted the Hungarian
government about the matter. "But
nothing happened," recalls Efraim Zuroff, the director of the center, which has Csatary listed
as their most wanted Nazi war criminal.
Worldwide attention
"We then passed the information on to ... The Sun, with which we have a sort of
cooperation and which has already tracked down some other
Nazi criminals in the past," Zuroff told DW. "Before that we got zero attention, but when The Sun had a picture of him in his
underwear, all the world suddenly knew about him."
Csatary, 97, was found by the British journalists in a small
apartment in Budapest where the reporters confronted him
with his past. They say that Csatary was shocked and closed
the door in their face, stuttering "No,
no, go away."
Csatary is accused of being responsible for the deportation
of some 16,000 Jews to Auschwitz from the Hungarian occupied
part of Slovakia in 1941, where he was the police chief in
the town of Kosice. It is also alleged that he was known
for brutally abusing women with a whip, which he carried
with him.
The Hungarian was sentenced to death in Yugoslavia in absentia
in 1948, but had left Europe after the war to live in Canada,
where he worked as an art dealer. In 1955 he was granted
Canadian citizenship, which was later revoked in 1997 when
details about his past emerged. But before he could be arrested
in Toronto he returned to Hungary, where he has been living
since then.
Hungarian authorities still hesitant
Hungarian authorities have now taken Csatary into custody
for questioning, prosecutors said on Wednesday. They reportedly
want to hold him under house arrest. They said that, given
his age, he is in good health.
Efraim Zuroff hopes the investigation will get underway as
soon as possible. He took over at the helm of the Wiesenthal
center after the death of founder Simon Wiesenthal, and set
his focus on the perpetrators of the Holocaust who are living
in the Balkans.
In 2011, the Israeli historian published the book "Operation
Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice." But time is running out. The few Nazi criminals who are still alive are mostly
over 90 years old and have only few years left to live.
Yet murder does not fall under the statute of limitations,
and the perpetrators can still be held accountable decades
after the crime. The tracking down and "hunting" of
the criminals is "incredible frustrating," said Zuroff. But the difficulties he experiences in his job are nothing, he
says, compared to the pain and suffering of the victims and
survivors of the Holocaust. dw.de
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