Slovakian Jews call for extradition of suspected 97-year-old war criminal

by admin
Jul 28, 2012
The Slovakian Jewish community has called for the extradition of a 97-year-old man suspected of having committed war crimes during the Holocaust, who is currently under house arrest in Hungary.

Laszlo Csatary, stands accused of sending over 15,000 Jews to concentration camps in 1944, as an officer in the Hungarian Royal Police. The town that he served in, Kosice, was then part of Hungary, but is now part of Slovakia.

Slovakia’s Central Union of Jewish Communities (ÚZŽNO) called on Slovakian authorities to bring Csatary into Slavakia, with ÚZŽNO chair Igor Rintel stating,
“The witnesses live in Slovakia; there are actually none in Hungary.”
Further, Rintel noted that Csatary was sentenced to death in absentia by Czechoslovakian courts in 1948, commenting that therefore,
“there is a bigger supposition that justice will be finished in real time in the Slovak Republic.”
Meanwhile, original documents from Csatary’s 1948 trial have been unearthed, which could provide crucial evidence for any future trials.

Zoltan Balassa told the Hungarian state news agency MTI that,
"The National Memory Institute (UPN) archives in Bratislava possess a legal dossier from the death sentence of Laszlo Csatary".
The documents, which include witness testimonies from the town of Kosice, where the trail was held, state Csatary was "very high-ranking political officer" in charge of a Jewish ghetto during World War II.

Balassa also said that Csatary "told his subordinates to be cruel to the Jews in the ghetto, and personally participated in torture," with witnesses saying he "regularly abused his powers".

See our earlier post: 97 yr old charged with Nazi era war crimes – Hungary (18 July 2012)

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