Hungarian authorities on Wednesday detained, grilled and put under house arrest a 97-year-old who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s dwindling wanted-list of suspected Nazi war criminals.
However, Laszlo Csatary, accused by the Wiesenthal Center of organizing the World War II deportation to their deaths of about 16,000 Jews from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day Slovakia, protested his innocence.
“Our viewpoint is that at this age, being under house arrest is already quite a shock,” state prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said. “We have to make sure that this man remains alive and is able to stand trial.”
Photo: AFP
“One of his arguments in his defense is that he was obeying orders,” he added.
Clutching a plastic bag, dressed in a grey jacket and surprisingly sprightly for his age, the former senior police officer said nothing as he was whisked away in a car by two friends or relatives.
This followed his early-morning arrest in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, and several hours of questioning by an investigating magistrate at a military prosecution office.
“The suspect is in good physical and mental health. He is being cooperative. He was surprised [about being arrested] but he expected to be questioned,” Ibolya said.
Csatary, full name Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, helped run the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, a town now in Slovakia that was visited in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazis’ Final Solution, the Wiesenthal Center says.
While there between 1941 and 1944, Csatary beat and brutalized Jews and sent 16,000 to their deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz extermination camp, it says.
In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Csatary to death in absentia, but he made it to Canada where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship there in the 1990s.
He ended up in Budapest where he has lived freely ever since, until the Wiesenthal Center alerted Hungarian authorities last year.
British tabloid the Sun raised attention to his case with a report at the weekend after tracking down the old man, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.
Acting on the information provided by the Wiesenthal Center, which was supplemented by fresh evidence last week, prosecutors began an investigation in September.
Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, welcomed the arrest and urged Hungarian authorities “to complete the rest of the judicial process and bring Csatary to justice as quickly as possible.”
“This is the debt owed to his many victims who were tortured and sent to be murdered at Auschwitz. The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and old age should not afford protection to the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes,” Zuroff said.
That Csatary lived freely in Hungary for about 15 years and the lack of progress by prosecutors also added to worries about the direction of the EU member state under right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Almost exactly a year ago, a court in Budapest acquitted Hungarian Sandor Kepiro, 97, of charges of ordering the execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs in the Serbian town of Novi Sad in January 1942.
The Wiesenthal Center, which had also listed Kepiro as the most wanted Nazi war criminal and helped bring him to court, described the verdict as an “outrageous miscarriage of justice.” Six weeks later Kepiro died.
Meanwhile, recent months have seen something of a public rehabilitation of controversial figures, most notably of Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s dictator from 1920 until 1944, when he fell out with his erstwhile ally Adolf Hitler.
Anti-Semitic writers like Albert Wass and Jozsef Nyiro, a keen supporter of the brutal Arrow Cross regime installed in power by the Nazis in 1944, have also been reintroduced into the curriculum for schools.
The decision by the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, Orban ally Laszlo Kover, to attend a ceremony in May honoring Nyiro, prompted Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to return Hungary’s highest honor in disgust.
Holocaust survivor Wiesel, 83, said: “It has become increasingly clear that Hungarian authorities are encouraging the white-washing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary’s past.”
A far-right Web site posted photos of several dozen “anti-Hungarian” Jews who gathered outside Csatary’s flat on Monday calling for his arrest, offering a reward for information on the protesters.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
IN PURSUIT: Israel’s defense minister said the revenge attacks by Israeli settlers would make it difficult for security forces to find those responsible for the 14-year-old’s death Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday condemned the “heinous murder” of an Israeli teenager in the occupied West Bank as attacks on Palestinian villages intensified following news of his death. After Benjamin Achimeir, 14, was reported missing near Ramallah on Friday, hundreds of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli forces raided nearby Palestinian villages, torching vehicles and homes, leaving at least one villager dead and dozens wounded. The attacks escalated in several villages on Saturday after Achimeir’s body was found near the Malachi Hashalom outpost. Agence France-Presse correspondents saw smoke rising from burned houses and fields. Mayor Amin Abu Alyah, of the