On July 18 the Budapest state attorney placed 97-year-old Laszlo Csatary under house arrest. Csatary, accused of being a Nazi war criminal, was sentenced to death in absentia in Czechoslovakia in 1948. He had been living in hiding and evading arrest for decades. He was finally tracked down by reporters from British tabloid The Sun, in an apartment in Budapest. He is now on trial for the murder of nearly 16,000 Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust and faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Who is Csatary?

It is alleged that Csatary, who was a senior officer of the Hungarian gendarmerie (a paramilitary force) of the town of Kassa (which is now Kosice and in Slovakia), organised the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in 1944. He has denied the charges. He says he had “only been following orders” and “doing his duty” as a police officer.

The case is being fought by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, formed to track down Nazis who fled Germany and escaped trial after the Allied Forces liberated the camps. Experts have said that the evidence against Csatary is strong, with “strong witness statements” to stand testimony to his brutality.

Authorities have charged Csatary with “unlawful torture of human beings”, saying he supervised the loading of trains bound for death camps in 1944. He is said to have used a dog whip to hit prisoners and is said to have refused to cut holes in a compartment to allow people to breathe.

Last year another Hungarian suspect, Sandor Kepiro, was acquitted of war crime charges for lack of evidence. However, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says this trial will be different as witnesses are still alive and willing to testify. There are documents available that give evidence of Csatary’s actions.

The successful search for Csatary is part of a controversial operation by the Centre, called ‘Operation Last Chance’, launched in 2002. This offers monetary rewards in exchange of information about Holocaust criminals.

How did Csatary evade capture?

Csatary, convicted in 1948, reached the Canadian province of Nova Scotia the following year. In 1955 he became a Canadian citizen and worked as an art dealer in Montreal.

In 1997 when a deportation hearing was on, after it was alleged that he had failed to tell Canadian authorities about his involvement with the Nazis, he quietly left the country and seems to have settled in Budapest. It is alleged by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre that Hungarian authorities knew of his whereabouts since 2006 but did nothing to pursue the war crimes case.

What are the challenges?

Some historians have said that it is strange that Csatary was handed the death sentence when two of his superiors, the Kosice mayor and the police chief, received prison terms. Experts maintain that it will be difficult to prove Csatary knew he was sending people to their deaths.

Hungary is now ruled by the right-wing Citizens Federation (Fidesz) under Victor Orban. In May a statue of fascist dictator Miklos Horthy, under whom Hungarian authorities deported or killed more than 400,000 Jews in the 1940s, was erected in southwest Hungary. Another statue is due to come up in Budapest.

Writer Jozsef Nyiro, who died in 1953 and was once wanted for a war crimes trial, has been exhumed and reburied in Transylvania with a state funeral. The state attorney has said the investigation will be difficult because the crime scene is now in another country and dates back more than half a century.

The status now

There is still hope for the prosecution, as Slovakian historian Zoltan Balassa says he has found the original 1948 Nazi war crimes trial documents for Laszlo Csatary. Hungarian news agency MTI quoted him saying, “The National Memory Institute archives in Bratislava possess a legal dossier from the death sentence of Laszlo Csatary.” The documents, which include witness testimony, show that he was in charge of a brick factory that served as an internment camp for Jews, where he “persecuted people because of their ethnic origin, religion or ideology”. Witnesses said he routinely abused his powers and personally participated in torture.

Csatary will make a court appearance on Tuesday. He is said to be cooperating with the investigation, and is in good mental and physical health.

The historical context

When Allied Forces invaded Germany and Adolf Hitler shot himself other members of the Nazi party fled Germany. However, in the hunt launched after the war, most of the top officials were captured and sentenced in the famous Nuremberg Trials of November 1945. Of the 22 men tried — one in absentia — 18 were found guilty. Eleven were hanged.

But many Nazis who participated in the Holocaust escaped and some are still believed to be at large. There are several conspiracy theories and leaked documents that suggest several countries, including the Soviet Union, the US and the UK, harboured Nazi war criminals using their skills as spies or scientists during the Cold War. Many others lived under false identities in South America, especially Argentina.

However, efforts to find and capture them continue. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has spearheaded the search. Now headed by Efraim Zuroff, the Centre is dedicated to finding and charging the last surviving Nazis and bringing them to trial.

The Centre was founded by Simon Wiesenthal, a Ukrainian-born Jew and concentration camp survivor.

Having lost 89 members of his extended family in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal has dedicated his life to hunting down the Nazis.

newindianexpress.com