Two of the men on The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most wanted list avoided trial this month, due to the decisions of two different courts.

On Wednesday, according to CNN, Australia’s High Court rejected a request from the Hungarian government to extradite Charles Zentai – a former Hungarian soldier, accused of having ties to the Nazi party. CNN’s Alex Lai reports that Zentai was accused of participating in the beating death of a Hungarian teenager in 1944. According to Lai, Zentai and his fellow soldiers allegedly beat the young man for “failing to wear the yellow Star of David.” In spite of the seriousness of the charges, Lai reports that the court ruled overwhelmingly against extradition “because “war crime” did not exist as a legal offence in Hungary in 1944.”

According to ABC News Australia, Zentai and his son Ernie Steiner maintain that Zentai is innocent. Steiner also objected to sending his father to Hungary citing medical concerns, but told reporters that he and Zentai invited Hungarian officials to visit Australia and to question Zentai at his home.

According to ABC News Reporters, Steiner claims that his father was not in Budapest at the time of the murder and that he was “never a Nazi.” However, according to The Washington Examiner, The Simon Wiesenthal Center maintains that Zentai participated in “manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944.”

Meanwhile, earlier this month, a Hungarian court dropped some charges against Laszlo Csatary, a former Hungarian Police Chief who, according to Bruno Waterfield of The Telegraph, “did not show any regret over charges of overseeing the 1944 deportation of 15,700 Jews to Nazi extermination camps.”

Waterfield also reported that Hungarian State Prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said that Csatary was still an anti-Semite, though he claimed that he was “just following orders” in 1944.

According to Waterfield, Csatary was particularly brutal in his treatment of Jews. “While in the town, known as Kassa in Hungarian and Kaschau in German,” said Waterfield, “He was renowned for his brutality, beating women with a whip he carried on his belt and forcing them to dig holes with their bare hands.”

Nevertheless, according to Cnaan Liphshiz of The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Budapest Prosecutor’s Office dropped many of the charges against Csatary without listening to the testimony of Marika Weinberger, who claims that Csatary sent nine of her uncles to their deaths in 1941.

According to Liphshiz, Hungarian prosecutors “are said to be continuing to probe allegations pertaining to the allegations from 1944.” However, because some of the charges have been dropped, says Liphshiz, a prominent Hungarian Lawyer has called for the indictment of The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff who “tracked down Csatary”. That lawyer, says Liphshiz, told Hungarian newspapers that “there are now valid grounds to charge Zuroff with deliberately making a false accusation.”

jewocity.com