New evidence in Hungarian Nazi case
New evidence has emerged suggesting that Hungarian Nazi
war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary was sentenced to 20 years in jail after World
War II in 1945 but then escaped, a historian said Sunday.
Historian Zoltan Balassa told the online version of the
HVG weekly he has discovered documents showing that Csatary was captured in the
Hungarian town of Veszprem and then sentenced in Pecs, but that he then fled
the country.
The documents were found in Kosice, the town in
present-day Slovakia where Csatary is accused of having committed war crimes as
a senior police officer in Hungary's pro-Nazi regime with responsibility for
the Jewish ghetto.
Balassa said that with the only other evidence being
testimonies from a Czechoslovakian 1948 trial in absentia – which sentenced him
to death – these new documents could support a new conviction if the
97-year-old is tried.
The archives of the Veszpem police and the Pecs court
should contain some records of this, Balassa said. Earlier documents indicated
that he left Kosice in 1944, travelling with German troops.
Csatary, full name Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, tops the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's dwindling list of surviving suspected Nazi war criminals,
which accused him of deporting 15,700 Jews to their deaths from the Kosice
ghetto.
Making it to Canada after the war, he worked as an art
dealer before being stripped of his citizenship and returning to Hungary 15
years ago.
Last September prosecutors began an investigation and he
was put under house arrest on July 18. On July 31 he rejected all accusations
against him, denying being the commander of the Kosice ghetto or signing
documents in that capacity.
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