Posted on 10/15/2010 12:37:51 PM PDT by Bokababe
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff is fighting libel charges filed by an alleged war criminal in Hungary. The case, being heard in a Budapest courtroom, began Oct. 8 and is scheduled to continue through a final hearing Dec. 16.It is likely the first time that a man under investigation for mass murder has sued his accusers, Zuroff told JTA.
Zuroff, who has been searching for Nazi war criminals under the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Operation Last Chance program, submitted documents to the Hungarian authorities in August 2006 to prove that Sandor Kepiro, while serving as a Hungarian gendarmerie officer in World War II, organized a massacre of about 1,246 residents -- Jews, Serbs and Roma -- in the city of Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) in January 1942.
The investigation of the charges is continuing, according to Zuroff's attorney, Marton Rosta.
Kepiro, now 96, sued Zuroff in 2007, alleging that Zuroff had made statements about the case as fact rather than opinion.
Rosta said the court agreed with Kepiro and opened the current trial, in which Zuroff is required to back up his "factual" statement.
"This is a very trying and frustrating experience," Zuroff wrote in an e-mail to JTA, "since Kepiro should have been tried a long time ago ... and instead I'm the one on trial."
According to Zuroff, in 2006 he provided the authorities with documents from a 1944 court verdict finding Kepiro and 14 other Hungarian army and police officers guilty of "violating the code of honor of the Hungarian military/gendarmerie" by participating in the Novi Sad massacre. All were given harsh sentences, but were freed and given promotions following the Nazi invasion of Hungary, Zuroff said.
After World War II, Kepiro allegedly fled to Austria and then Argentina; in 1946, the Communist government of Hungary retried him in absentia and sentenced him to 14 years in prison.
Twice convicted, Kepiro nevertheless returned to Budapest in 1996.
"He's saying that he did not kill anyone and that all he did was verify/ferret out armed 'partisans' ... who posed a threat to the occupying Hungarian forces," Zuroff wrote in his e-mail. It is a "blatant lie, since his men rounded up hundreds of [civilians], almost all of whom were taken to the Danube to be shot."
Should the judge find Zuroff's proof lacking, he faces a fine or up to two years in prison. Even if Zuroff is cleared, Kepiro remains innocent in the eyes of the court, and may or may not be tried on the war crimes charges, Rosta said.
While Zuroff told JTA he had never been sued before, a Lithuanian Nazi war criminal living in Scotland, the late Antanas Gecas, succeeded in stopping the sale of Zuroff's first book, "Occupation Nazi-Hunter: The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust," for six years.
Just an observation here. Exactly how many NAZIs are actually left on earth (not counting Demoncrats). I understand the concept of retribution, but from a practical point of view, how many suspects are left? My guess is they can only find camp guards who were in their late teens during the war left alive. Shoosh.
Some people have no sense of honor do they? /s
You'd think so, but that's not really the case -- although these guys are dying off every day, many were fairly high ranking guys who are currently in their 90's.
Kepiro isn't some "little cheese" -- he killed 1200 people. Nor is Milivoj Asner who was a Police Chief, nor the WWII Nazi mayor of Dubrovnik who just died 2 years ago.
Operation Last Chance was organized in 2002, and more have died off than have been prosecuted.
Milivoj Asner, know WWII War Criminal — who the Austrian government says is “too sick to stand trial” — at a football game with his wife.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1294928.ece
Some of these guys are walking around living with no fear that they will ever be prosecuted, because they have friends in high places.
I expect these war criminals to try anything to get out of being prosecuted, they don't surprise me. It's those who are letting them get away with it or even helping them, that blow me away!
He's still slime of course. Fortunately airplanes continue to work and the doors open ~ even in flight.
“Milivoj Asner, know WWII War Criminal — who the Austrian government says is “too sick to stand trial” — at a football game with his wife.”
Okay, but the NAZI hunters better hurry up, these guys are 90+.
Exactly, how many of these guys are still around....yet we have a whole section of the Justice Department with a multi-million dollar budget, paid for by our tax dollars, still running around trying to find these ninety-something year old guys....twenty years from now they will still be getting funding.
I think there is a real problem here, but not an obvious one.
I have no problem with the iron determination to hunt down and punish old Nazis. I think it is a grand idea. Grand enough so that organizations should have been created to do the same thing for other horrific acts that happened subsequently to WWII.
Yes, there are some efforts to hunt down war criminals from other conflicts, and even human monsters who commit their acts in time of peace, but none of them have this passionate drive seen in the hunt for Nazis.
Why not?
The US Marshals service typically chases down some 35,000 or so fugitives every year. They are very good at what they do. Imagine if there was an international agency with that kind of determination to police up war criminals?
Looking in every nook and cranny in the world. Publishing the names of known fugitives being protected by some nation’s government could be hugely embarrassing to them. Catching those fugitives if they ever dare to leave their benefactor nations.
There are far too many such villains able to die of old age in their own beds.
So why hasn’t George Soros been arrested?
His past is well known and he has publicly admitted collaboration with the Nazis!
I’m sure he’s had help from ‘friends in high places’ — no doubt about that — but opportunities haven’t been exploited, I’ll bet, even when there was opportunity and good cause to arrest him out in the open.
There was a WWII Nazi War criminal named Andrija Artukovic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrija_Artukovi%C4%87 , who lived here in the US, in Seal Beach Ca, for nearly 40 years with EVERYONE knowing who he was and what he did. This guy was the second in command of the WWII Nazi Independent State of Croatia who sent hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their deaths. But still it took 40 years to finally get him deported in the 1980’s. By that time he was old & senile, and wound up living under house arrest until he died, even though he’d officially been given the death sentence.
In answer to your question, prosecuting these guys has always been a matter of diplomacy and how powerful their friends and enemies are — not a matter of “justice”.
For example with Artukovic, I had a family friend who worked on Artukovic’s original deportation trial back in the 1950’s. At the time, Simon Wiesenthal had other big fish to fry so he and another Jewish lawyer were on their own. They got nowhere. The gov of Yugoslavia didn’t want Artukovic back and Artukovic had the Roman Catholic church on his side. They lost. His assesment was that until Jews took up the cause wholeheartedly, nothing would happen. He was right. When Jewish organizations banded together back in the 1980’s to push the Artukovic case, it got done.
He'll give money to expell Jews from Judea and Samaria, but not those he wronged in the Holocaust.
You said, “He was a teenager and had no choice.”
Umm...everyone makes choices during their lifetime.
Some of these fellows targeted by Nazi hunters, who were prison guards working for the Germans, also were teenagers at the time of WWII.
I’m one who believes even teenagers can tell the difference between right and wrong, moral and immoral.
It just burns me that Soros seems to hugely benefit through the suffering of others, and never experiences punishment or retribution for his crimes against humanity or nations.
Incredible as it may seem to the young or middle aged confused, obese, and impossibly ignorant, tattooed hordes inhabiting vast swaths of ObamaTVLand today, many 82 year-olds are still in possession of complete mental and physical assets.
If the above mentioned committed a crime against humanity in 1945, they ought to be rounded up and tried. Of course, the officers who directed the other ranks in these depredations are more worthy of arrest and trial and they of course, would be older in many cases.
If these Japs NAZIs, Commies and Fascists are found guilty, straight-shooting senior citizens such as myself would be happy to volunteer for the firing squads. Do me a favor and comb the Wal-MArt parking lots for tattooes jerks and line them up, as well.
Zuroff, who has been searching for Nazi war criminals under the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Operation Last Chance program, submitted documents to the Hungarian authorities in August 2006 to prove that Sandor Kepiro, while serving as a Hungarian gendarmerie officer in World War II, organized a massacre of about 1,246 residents -- Jews, Serbs and Roma -- in the city of Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) in January 1942.
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