Two months ago, the Hungarian justice decided to uphold Laszlo Csatari for war crimes committed during the Nazi occupation. On Monday, with the date for the commencement of the trial still not known, comes the news of the death of the one that has come to be one of the world's most wanted Nazis. Was 98 and died at a hospital in Budapest.
Laszlo Csatari was hospitalized for pneumonia and died on Saturday, in the Hungarian capital, said his lawyer, Gabor Horvath. Until admission, Csatari was awaiting trial under house arrest.
Last June was formalized charges of torture and participation in the deportation of thousands of Jews to extermination camps against former police commander Kosice, a city that currently integrates Slovakia but which belonged to Hungary then occupied by Hitler's troops.
Csatary was the most wanted list of criminals that the Simon Wiesenthal Center continues to try to bring to justice, almost 70 years after the end of World War II.
Discovered by journalists from Britain's The Sun, was arrested by the Hungarian authorities in the summer of last year and placed under house arrest.
In June, the Budapest attorney formalized the charge against the Hungarian. "By their acts and behavior, Laszlo Csatari intentionally contributed to extrajudicial killings and torture committed against Jews," said the prosecutor.
Csatari always rejected the accusations. He admitted that he had only been an intermediary between the German and Hungarian authorities.
The crimes attributed to him began after the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, and with the installation in Kosice of a ghetto where almost all of the approximately 12,000 Jews then living in the city would be closed. Csatari "regularly beat Jew detainees with bare hands, whipping them with no particular reason, without regard to the condition, sex, age or health of people battered", it can be read in the his accusation. In May 1944, actively participated in the deportation of thousands of people held in Kosice for the Nazi death camps, the vast majority to Auschwitz.
With the end of World War II fled to Canada, which did not prevent a court from Czechoslovakia to sentence him to death in a trial in absentia. It would be known after that he was living in Canada, where he worked as an art dealer, until 1997 when the authorities were alerted about his past and he withdrew nationality. Eventually disappeared, being located just over a decade later in Budapest.