LONDON — A 98-year-old man accused of whipping and beating Jews and helping send them to the Auschwitz death camp in World War II, and whose name figures prominently on an authoritative list of alleged war criminals, died over the weekend in Budapest while awaiting trial, his lawyer said Monday.
Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Laszlo Csatary was charged in June with having “intentionally assisted the unlawful executions and tortures committed against Jewish people.”
War Crimes Suspect Is Detained in Budapest (July 19, 2012)
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 highly on an annual list, most recently in April, of the most-wanted Nazi criminals published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. The accusations about his past have followed him since World War II. In 1948, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death in in the former Czechoslovakia, but, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he fled to Canada and became a citizen there.
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 tracking his movements lost track of him until he was discovered living in Budapest in 2011. He was detained there in July 2012.
The Hungarian indictment in June said that in May 1944, Mr. Csatary was the commander of a concentration camp in Kassa, 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, he “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 Simon Wiesenthal Center, some 15,700 Jews were sent to Auschwitz from the Kassa 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.
Accused War Criminal, 98, Dies Awaiting Trial
No comments:
Post a Comment