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HUNGARIAN PROSECUTORS HAVE today charged a 98-year-old top Nazi war crimes suspect over his brutal role in organising the deportation of some 12,000 Jews to World War II death camps.
Laszlo Lajos Csatari, under house arrest in Budapest since last year, was “actively involved in and assisted the deportations” in 1944 of Jews from a ghetto in then-Hungarian Kassa, now known as Kosice in Slovakia, prosecutors said.
The former police officer “regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons, regardless of their sex, age or health,” prosecutors said in a statement.
He also refused to cut windows in train wagons into which some 80 people would be crammed in “inhuman circumstances” with no fresh air, the statement said.
Csatari “intentionally assisted the unlawful executions and tortures committed against Jewish people who were deported from Kassa”.
The Jewish population of Kassa and the surrounding area were rounded up and crammed into a ghetto in the town by local police following the occupation of Hungary by German troops in March 1944.
Prosecutors say Csatari was from May 1944 the commander of a collection and deportation camp subsequently set up in a brick factory in the ghetto. The Jews were then crammed into cargo trains and sent to Nazi concentration camps, mostly Auschwitz.
Csatari, whose full name is Laszlo Csizsik-Csatari, sometimes spelt Csizsik-Csatary, tops the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of alleged Nazi war criminals.
He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1948 by a court in what was then Czechoslovakia 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 lived freely until prosecutors began investigating his case in September 2011 on the basis of information provided by the Wiesenthal Center, and he was placed under house arrest last July.
British tabloid newspaper The Sun brought attention to his case after tracking down the old man, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.
Last July Csatari appeared in a court at a closed-door hearing and denied all the accusations against him. At the time, the state prosecutor said he was in good mental and physical health despite his advanced years.
In recent years authorities in Europe have made renewed efforts to bring the dwindling number of people still alive who were involved in the Holocaust to justice.
Most notable was Ukrainian-born former Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk who was sentenced in Germany in 2011 to five years’ prison for complicity in some 28,000 murders. He died at a nursing home last year while freed awaiting an appeal.
That verdict, stating that simply having worked at an extermination camp is enough to establish complicity in murder, set something of a precedent and Germany is now investigating around 50 suspected ex-Auschwitz guards.
Last month, a 93-year-old alleged former Auschwitz guard, named as Hans Lipschis by the Wiesenthal Center, was arrested in Germany. He reportedly told the authorities that he worked as a cook, not a guard.
In Hungary in 2011 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 described the verdict as an “outrageous miscarriage of justice.” Six weeks later Kepiro died.
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Not much come back if he’s 98. He’s lived his life
98 or 108 he still deserves to die in jail.
If found guilty of course. Funny how trial by media assumes everyone guilty until proven innocent with no shortage of people willing to commit crimes themselves in order to ensure revenge.
HE died 6 weeks after the trial, Did your read the article?
It must never ever be forgotten that SF/IRA supported the Nazis.
What goes around, comes around
Hahahaha
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Whilst on this tack so did the catholic church
The church did not support the Nazis in fact they broke centuries of tradition by releasing an encyclical in the German language to be read in Germnay so there was no misunderstanding.
It was called ‘Mit brennender Sorge’
Well said Sean but I think your factual knowledge falls on deaf ears with the usual anti catholic bigots.
The catholic church along with the Lutheran Church were the only churches to condemn the Nazis. Except for the Jewish faith of course
bigjake, there a plenty of reasons to dislike the Church,but I just hate when people don’t know the actual facts.
The Catholic Church helped leading Nazis escape to South America, and they openly supported the Fascist regimes in Italy and Spain. In fact they were given the Vatican by Mussolini in return for full support if you want to look it up.
Also, only one Nazi was ever excommunicated by the Catholic Church, Joseph Goebbels Nazi Minister for Propaganda. Why? – Because he married a divorced Protestant. Consider that Hitler was also a Catholic and was never excommunicated.
”It must never ever be forgotten that SF/IRA supported the Nazis.”
As did the Vatican – and many US industrialists eg Joe Kennedy
The Church also helped thousands of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ escape all throughout Europe. The true extent of which we will probably never know because the priests involved never wrote about it. And the Roman Question as it was called was resolved by the Lateran Treaty and it did end with the Church gaining the Vatican but if you knew anything about the Lateran treaty yould know the whole argument went much further back than the Fascist Italian government.
Hitler may have been baptized a Catholic but he cetainly wasn’t one and his close friend Albert Speer remarked about how he made harsh pronouncements against the Church to his political associates.
Should then read “The Rat Run” to see how the Vatican was complict in smuggling Nazis out to South America and the USA under “operation paperclip.”
Only reason the church released that in Germany was because Adolf was breaking their grip on German society..Hitler introduced the hated ,and still collected today German Church Tax [Kirchen steuer] to deprive the church of its monies that it was shovelling into its coffers as usual.
Wow! So that makes it ok then?
I don’t know how these people lived with themselves all these years knowing that they had a hand in the deaths of all those innocent people. I feel sorry for their families who have to live with the knowledge that their loved one was a murderer and have to deal with the backlash.
He not guilty yet.
Most if not all will proably tell you they dont lose much sleep over it.Not because they are psychopaths or callous,and admittedly there were plenty of those too.
But because they had no choice in the matter and were under orders to do so in a wartime situation. For a cause that they belived in,or not at the time.Its difficult to understand this ,unless you have been in their situation at the time. We can all say 60 years on well why didnt they protest to their superiors?Or help these people escape? Your superiors would have laughed at you at best ,or have had you taken out and shot for being a traitor,and if found out that you were helping them ,you would praobly have been tortured,then shot if you were lucky.
Backlash, not really…Dr Josef Mengele for example,the doctor of Auuschwitz his family and decendents make agricultural machinery in Germany today.Ironically their biggest export client is Israel!!!
Simon, I think you are probably right in that many of those guilty of these terrible crimes had moved on with their own lives, this fact wasn’t helped by administration failures and complicity by powerful people.
The greater reality for us is that there are a great many guilty of genocide in the much more recent past living comfortable lives, and they answer to no one. Many still have active, successful political careers .
We won’t even begin to smell justice until they are locked up
Quite comfortably I’d say Shirley unfortunately.
Sorry Apu… He is guilty…. He was found guilty in 1948 and sentenced to death absentia. This usually means that the individual was not available. The courts use evidence, witnessess and holds a trial. They normally have prosecuters and defence lawyers. So he was found guilty once.
When information was disclosed to the Canadian authorities…. He again went before the system. Instead of inprisoning him and running up a full trial… The sent him back to his country of orgin. So he was found guilty for the second time.
Now he is being investigated for the third time.
How much more do you need?
Apu they have had 60+ years to investigate I would hope after all that time they would get the right man.
@Simon Jester. I don’t think you are correct. The Nazis only put hardened people on duty in the concentration camps. The holocaust began on the Eastern front, and it was those people who had taken part in the savagery on the Eastern front, hardened murders, who were put on duty in concentration camps etc. They followed their orders with enthusiasm. Also following orders wasn’t a requirement, those who disagreed with what they were doing at Auschwitz etc could request to be transferred. The following orders stuff only applies to people who were indirectly involved, like those who operated the train signals, those who sent the supplies to the death camps, those who took part in the building of roads and railroads etc etc, but for those directly involved the,” I was only following orders argument” is pure BS.
They had no choice?? I would die before carrying out these inhuman acts!
He believed he was doing good, strange as it may seem to any rational person.
And you would have…Along with your family too..Easy to say you would rather die and all that.Different when you are actually IN that situation…
@ Dave.
It is questionable whether the Nazis put hardned people in as gaurds in the camps.The records show a remarkable low amount of actual German military forces doing the gaurding for such a large prision pouplation.Most of the enforcement seems to have been done by Kapos or loyal prisioners of the different ethnic groups.The ratio is aomthing like 200 German gaurds to 500 KAPOS to X tens of thousands of prisioners.
Sorry following orders was a serious requirement in any situation in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries..You were expendable and requesting a transfer as a German gaurd,would proably have got you on a penal battalion on the Russian front as cannon fodder,or some other nastier life threatning duty.At best a serious mark on your record of “moral cowardice” or “unfit for work of national importance” It wouldnt have got you a cushy number in Berlin that’s for sure.
It is total and utter BS to sit here 70 years ago and pontificate on what we “would have done,” or judge these people too harshly either.We werent there,have never lived in those times and hopefully never will live in them again,or have the remotest concept what it is like to live under a total military dictatorship where you didnt dare express a dissenting opinion in front of your own family or friends about the regime,or complain about anything privately or publicly.
Least of all when you were in uniform and had sworn absolute loyalty to Adolf Hitler personally,and not to Germany.Only following orders is not an excuse granted,when you have options to avoid doing this illegal task.Not when you have a gun pointed at the back of your head as well.
….and our beloved Gov sent a message of condolance on the death of Hitler, and only very recently pardoned Irish Srrvice Men who went to fight the Nazi.
As Stanley Millgram’s famous obedience experiment showed, the majority of people are as bad as, if not worse than, the Nazis.
https://truthandconsequences1.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/the-wannsee-species/
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