One of the last most-wanted Nazi war criminals still at large has been found
living comfortably in Budapest and the group that has been
hunting him for decades is urging Hungarian prosecutors to
finally bring him to justice.
Laszlo Csatary, who is accused of helping send 15,700 Jews to their death at
Auschwitz, was photographed by Britain's tabloid Sun newspaper,
which identified him as Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, living
in a two-bedroom apartment in a "smart district" of the city. The photos show the fugitive, now 97, standing at his door wearing
just socks and underpants.
The newspaper quoted him denying complicity
with the Holocaust-era killings but last week the Nazi-hunting
Simon Wiesenthal Center submitted new evidence to Hungarian
prosecutors on the man who is No. 1 on its most-wanted list.
The Center said Csatary was a senior
police officer in the Slovakian city of Kassa (now known
as Kosice), then under Hungarian rule. In 1941, he is said
to have played a "key role" in the deportation of 300 Jews to Ukraine, where they were killed.
As a “commander” in the Royal Hungarian
Police in Kassa, Csatary is accused of complicity in the
deportations of thousands of other Jews from Kosice and the
surrounding area to the Auschwitz death camp in the spring
of 1944. According to the Wiesenthal Center, witnesses reported
that he oversaw the Jewish ghetto with extreme cruelty, whipping
women and forcing them to dig holes with their bare hands.
“Several thousand Jewish families
have felt sorrow and hurt because of this man and it would
be a disgrace, for the entire Hungarian nation, if Csatary
were to escape justice,” Peter Feldmajer, president of the
Hungarian Jewish Community, told the Sun.
Cstary was sentenced in absentia to
death by a Czech court after the war. By then he had fled
to Canada, where he worked under a false identity as an art
dealer. He was discovered in the mid-1990s but disappeared
before the Canadian government could deport him. His whereabouts
were unknown for 15 years until he was tracked down in a
quiet neighborhood of Budapest.
"The passage of time in
no way diminishes his guilt and old age should not afford
protection for Holocaust perpetrators," said Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff, whose group's Operation Last
Chance aims to bring the last surviving Nazis to justice
before they die of natural causes.
huffingtonpost.com
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