LONDON — A 98-year-old man whose name figured prominently on an authoritative list of suspected Nazi war criminals died over the weekend in Budapest while awaiting trial, his lawyer said Monday.

The man, Laszlo Csatary, was charged in June with having “intentionally assisted the unlawful executions and tortures committed against Jewish people” for his role in the deportation of Jews from the ghetto in Kassa, now called Kosice, in eastern Slovakia, according to prosecutors. He had denied the accusations.

His lawyer, Gabor Horvath, told news agencies in Budapest on Monday that the Hungarian-born Mr. Csatary died in a hospital of pneumonia on Saturday. Mr. Csatary ranked high on an annual list compiled by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of the most-wanted Nazi criminals. In 1948, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death in what was then Czechoslovakia, but, according to the Wiesenthal Center, he fled to Canada and obtained citizenship.

In 1997, the Canadian authorities accused him of lying to immigration officials about his wartime activities and stripped him of citizenship. He left the country, and people trying to discover his whereabouts lost track of him until he was discovered living in Budapest in 2011. He was detained there in July 2012.

The Hungarian indictment said that in May 1944, Mr. Csatary was the commander of a concentration camp in Kosice, where Jews were collected for deportation.

Mr. Csatary “regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog whip without any special reasons and irrespective of the sex, age or health condition of the assaulted people,” the indictment said.

On June 2, 1944, according to the indictment, when a freight train was loaded at the camp with Jews bound for Auschwitz, Mr. Csatary “prohibited cutting windows on the wagons, which could have helped the about 80 people being crammed under inhuman circumstances in the windowless wagons to get more fresh air.”

According to the Wiesenthal Center, about 15,700 Jews were sent to Auschwitz from the Kosice camp and nearby areas in the spring of 1944.

The charges against Mr. Csatary reflected a broader debate in Hungary over how to assess the country’s role in World War II, when the country was an ally of Germany.

A powerful shift to the right has been highlighted by the rise of the far-right Jobbik party, some of whose members have been accused by critics of anti-Semitism.

In 2011, Jobbik championed the cause of another Hungarian war crimes suspect, Sandor Kepiro, 97, who had been accused of participating in a 1942 massacre in Serbia. He wasacquitted.

Nazi-hunters had depicted the prosecution of Mr. Csatary as a bellwether of Hungarian sentiment after the acquittal of Mr. Kepiro. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem office of the Wiesenthal Center and its chief Nazi-hunter, described the trial of Mr. Csatary as “a way of showing good will and doing the right thing.”

After word of Mr. Csatary’s death emerged on Monday, Mr. Zuroff said his organization was “deeply disappointed” that he had died weeks before he was to face trial and had “ultimately eluded justice and punishment at the very last minute.”

“The fact that a well-known war criminal whose Nazi past was exposed in Canada could live undisturbed for so long in the Hungarian capital raises serious questions as to the commitment of the Hungarian authorities to hold their own Holocaust criminals accountable,” Mr. Zuroff said in a statement.

Mr. Csatary’s death left nine names on the Wiesenthal Center’s list, suspected war criminals living in the United States, Canada, Germany and Estonia. But, Mr. Zuroff said in a telephone interview, “they are just the tip of the iceberg.”

“There’s no shortage of suspects,” he said. “What we have to do is find them.”

nytimes.com