Nearly seven decades after the alleged crimes, a 97-year-old man was arrested
by Hungarian prosecutors and charged with torturing Jewish
detainees before they were sent to Nazi death camps.
The arrests came days after Laszlo Csatary was confronted by a British tabloid,
which used a tip passed on by a Jewish organization to find
the elderly man at a Budapest apartment. The former Hungarian
police official, who had eluded authorities decades earlier
in Europe and Canada, came to the door in his socks and underpants,
the Sun reported Sunday, and stammered at questions about
his past, “No, no. Go away.”
Jewish groups were galled that British
reporters got to Csatary before the Hungarian authorities,
some complaining that Hungary had not taken the case seriously
until they were shamed into doing so.
“They want to sweep it under the table,
to have you believe that the only people who were guilty
of those crimes were German Nazis,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier,
founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered
in Los Angeles, which tracks Nazi-era crimes. “We made a
public outcry and they were embarrassed. The pressure was
on.
“If there was no pressure, would he
have been arrested? He would not have,” Hier said.
Hungarian officials have defended
their actions and said they were already pursuing the case
before it hit headlines. Prosecutor Tibor Ibolya argued the
hunt spurred by the Wiesenthal Center may have put Csatary
on alert, “greatly endangering the success of the investigation,”
the Associated Press reported.
Csatary was charged with torture,
accused of using a dog whip on Jewish detainees while heading
an internment camp at a Kosice brick factory. Thousands of
Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the camp in Hungary,
penned into crowded wagons. Ibolya told reporters Wednesday
that the elderly Hungarian denied being guilty of war crimes
and said he had only followed orders.
A judge ordered Csatary to be put
under house arrest for a maximum of 30 days and his passport
could be confiscated, his attorney told the Associated Press,
a reflection of widespread worry that Csatary would slip
away again.
After World War II, Csatary was convicted
in absentia of war crimes in Czechoslovakia and fled to Canada,
where he lived for decades as an art dealer. Canadian officials
eventually found he had lied to immigration officials, saying
he was from Yugoslavia, and stripped him of his citizenship.
But Csatary slipped away from Canada in 1997 before he could
be deported, evading capture. The Wiesenthal Center labeled
him as its most wanted Nazi war criminal. Last year it said
it had uncovered evidence that Csatary was in Budapest and
urged Hungarian authorities to bring him to justice.
The Sun said its reporters had used
information from the Wiesenthal Center to track down Csatary
in a two-bedroom apartment in a “smart district” in Budapest.
Government officials, under pressure from Jewish protesters
to act, said that bringing the case would be difficult after
so much time had passed.
Hungary insisted that it was nonetheless
committed to the case. "The government has always supported the exhaustive exploration of past crimes
and the prosecution of perpetrators,” a Hungarian government
spokesman told the Telegraph amid the protests.
The timing was especially embarrassing
for Hungarian President Janos Adler, who was visiting Israel
days after the Sun story broke and facing questions from
Israeli leaders about surging anti-Semitism in his country.
In a poll this year, the Anti-Defamation League found that
about three of four Hungarians surveyed said Jews had too
much power in business and international markets. Nearly
two-thirds said Jews “still talk too much about what happened
to them in the Holocaust.”
Such attitudes have risen strikingly
since 2009, the poll found. The apparent escalation of Hungarian
bias against Jews so alarmed Nobel laureate and Holocaust
survivor Elie Wiesel that he returned a state award to Hungary
this year, saying the country was trying to whitewash its
past.
Csatary was arrested one year after
Hungarian authorities acquitted another accused war criminal,
Sandor Kepiro, had had been the Wiesenthal Center's most
wanted Nazi criminal. With Kepiro now dead and Csatary under
house arrest, the Wiesenthal Center is still seeking prosecution
of alleged criminals residing in other countries including
Germany, Canada and Australia. latimesblogs.latimes.com
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