Alleged Nazi war criminal dies at age 98
Print Edition
A 98-YEAR-OLD Hungarian who topped the dwindling list of surviving Nazi war crimes suspects has died in hospital while awaiting trial for allegedly sending 12,000 Jews to death camps.
Laszlo Csatari “died on Saturday morning. He had been treated for medical issues for some time but contracted pneumonia, from which he died,” his lawyer Gabor Horvath said yesterday.
Csatari was alleged to have been a senior police officer actively involved in the deportations from the Jewish ghetto in Kassa, now known as Kosice in present-day Slovakia, during World War II.
After being sentenced to death in absentia by a Czechoslovakian court in 1948 he made it to Canada where he worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s.
He returned to Hungary, where he lived undisturbed for some 15 years until prosecutors began investigating his case in late 2011 on the basis of information from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which put him at the top of its list of surviving alleged Nazi war criminals.
He was placed under house arrest in July 2012 and in June prosecutors charged him. They said as commander of a collection and deportation camp in the Kassa ghetto he was “actively involved in and assisted the deportations” in 1944.
Csatari, also known as Csatary, “regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip,” prosecutors said.
He also allegedly refused requests to cut windows into airless train wagons each transporting around 80 men, women and children to the gas chambers of Nazi-occupied Europe, mostly at the Auschwitz camp in Poland.
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