Laszlo Csatary, 97, accused of organising the World War II deportation of 16,000 Jews to their deaths, is arrested in Hungary

Hungarian authorities have interrogated a 97-year-old man who tops a dwindling wanted-list of suspected Nazi war criminals, and placed him under house arrest.

But Laszlo Csatary, who is accused by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, of organising the World War II deportation of 16,000 jews to their deaths from the ghetto of Kosice in present-day Slovakia, is protesting his innocence.

“Our viewpoint is that at this age, being under house arrest is already quite a shock,” state prosecutor Tibor Ibolya said. “We have to make sure that this man remains alive and is able to stand trial.”

“One of his arguments in his defence is that he was obeying orders.”

Clutching a plastic bag, dressed in a grey jacket and surprisingly sprightly for his age, the former senior police officer said nothing as he was whisked away in a car by two friends or relatives.

This followed his early-morning arrest in the Hungarian capital Budapest and several hours of questioning by an investigating magistrate at a military prosecution office.

“The suspect is in good physical and mental health. He is being cooperative. He was surprised (about being arrested) but he expected to be questioned,” Mr Ibolya said.

Mr Csatary, full name Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, helped run the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, a town now in Slovakia that was visited in April 1944 by Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazis’ Final Solution, the Wiesenthal Centre says.

While there between 1941 and 1944, Mr Csatary beat and brutalised Jews and sent 16,000 to their deaths in Ukraine and to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz extermination camp, it says.

In 1948, a Czechoslovakian court condemned Mr Csatary to death in absentia but he made it to Canada where he lived and worked as an art dealer before being stripped of his citizenship there in the 1990s.

He ended up in Budapest where he has lived freely ever since, until the Wiesenthal Centre alerted Hungarian authorities last year.

British tabloid The Sun raised attention to his case with a report at the weekend after tracking down the old man, photographing him and confronting him at his front door.

Acting on the information provided by the Wiesenthal Centre, which was supplemented by fresh evidence last week, prosecutors began an investigation in September.

Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi-hunter, welcomed the arrest and urged Hungarian authorities “to complete the rest of the judicial process and bring Mr Csatary to justice as quickly as possible”.

He said: “This is the debt owed to his many victims who were tortured and sent to be murdered at Auschwitz. The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and old age should not afford protection to the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes.”

The fact that Mr Csatary lived freely in Hungary for some 15 years and the lack of progress by prosecutors also added to worries about the direction of the EU member state under right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Almost exactly a year ago, a court in Budapest acquitted Hungarian Sandor Kepiro, 97, of charges of ordering the execution of over 30 Jews and Serbs in the Serbian town of Novi Sad in January 1942.

The Wiesenthal Centre described the verdict as an “outrageous miscarriage of justice”. Six weeks later Kepiro died.

Recent months, meanwhile, have seen something of a public rehabilitation of controversial figures, most notably of Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s dictator from 1920 until 1944 when he fell out with his erstwhile ally Adolf Hitler.

Anti-Semitic writers like Albert Wass and Jozsef Nyiro, a keen supporter of the brutal Arrow Cross regime installed in power by the Nazis in 1944, have also been reintroduced into the curriculum for schools, meanwhile.

The top five surviving World War II criminals

Laszlo Csatary is number one on Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s list of Nazi war criminals known to be still alive and at large almost seven decades after World War II.

Two other top names are Alois Brunner and Aribert Heim but they are thought to be dead.

This is the list ...

1. Laszlo Csatary, Hungary

• Laszlo Csatary served as a Hungarian police chief in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and helped organise the deportation of Jews from the town of Kosice. He is accused of being instrumental in sending thousands to death camps.

2. Gerhard Sommer, Germany

• Gerhard Sommer is a former German SS officer who was involved in the massacre of 560 civilians in August, 1944 in Italy. Since 2002 he has been under investigation in Germany but no criminal charges have yet been brought against him, the centre says.

3. Vladimir Katriuk, Canada

• Vladimir Katriuk served in a Ukrainian battalion which murdered Jews and other civilians in Belarus during the war. He escaped to Canada after the war and has lived there since. He was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in 1999, but it was reinstated in 2010.

4. Karoly Zentai, Australia

• Karoly Zentai took part in the persecution and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944. He escaped to Australia after the war and Hungary asked for his extradition in 2005. A court halted the extradiction but an appeal is pending.

5. Soeren Kam, Germany

• An officer in an SS division during the war, Soeren Kam took part in the murder of an anti-Nazi newspaper publisher in Denmark. Germany has refused to extradite him to Denmark.