Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect dies at 98

(Vatican Radio) A 98-year-old Hungarian man who topped the dwindling list of surviving Nazi war crimes suspects has died in hospital while awaiting trial for allegedly sending nearly 16,000 Jews to the death camps. The lawyer of László Csatáry said the Nazi-war crimes suspect died in hospital over the weekend after contracting pneumonia. His death came as a setback for Holocaust survivors seeking justice.

Csatáry was allegedly involved in the deportations of as many as 15,700 Jews to death camps in World War II from a town in present-day Slovakia. After being sentenced to death in absentia in 1948 he made it to Canada where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s. He returned to Hungary where he lived calmly for years. Prosecutors only began investigating his case in late 2011 after pressure from the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.Csatáry was eventually charged with involvement and assisting the deportations in 1944 of Jews from a ghetto in Kassa, now known as Kosice.

Csatáry was placed under house arrest in June last year, where activists demanded a trial against him. "We shall never forget", younger and elderly people shouted outside his home in Budapest while forming a human chain. Eventually a court suspended the trial saying he had already been convicted.
Some have also questioned whether it was fair to prosecute a frail elderly man. However, Simon Wiesenthal Center director Efraim Zuroff believes it's never too late for justice. “When you look at a man like Csatary, don't see an old frail individual. Think of someone with the height of his physical powers who was devoting all his energy to the mass murder of innocent people. Old age should not effort protection to people who committed such heinous crimes,” he argued. Till the last moment, Csatáry mantained his innocence.

The Csatáry case comes amid concerns within the Catholic Church about rising antisemitism in Hungary which was a close ally of Nazi Germany during World War Two. Hungarian cardinal Péter Erdő made a point of participating in the annual Budapest March of the Living to remember the Holocaust, in which 600,000 Hungarian Jews were among those who died.

Questions have also been raised as to why it took prosecutors so long to start a case against Csatary. Analyst Péter Krekó, who leads the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, says the reluctance was only partly due to legal difficulties. Krekó told Vatican Radio that Hungary and other East European countries were discouraged for decades by the previous Communist regime from facing their troubled history. “If a society was not forced to face its past in the last 40 years, it's a difficult job to do afterwards, " he said.

Krekó fears that far right Hungarians will make the grave of Csatary a site of pilgrimage. However he says most Hungarians view him as a war criminal. Yet with the number of Holocaust survivors and Nazi war crime suspects rapidly dwindling, he is concerned about adequate education on the Holocaust for future generations.

Listen to Stefan Bos’ report: