A Pensioner and a War Criminal: Csatáry Case Tarnishes Hungarian Justice System

[sysop]

Officials in Budapest sat on information that suspected war criminal Lásló Csatáry was living there for more than a year without acting. It was only after a British tabloid reported the incident that action was finally taken. The case underscores Hungary's troubled dealings with its own history.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...845417,00.html

[andre79799]

As a Hungarian born, I find your article’s tone is slightly anti-Hungarian, pro liberal. I quote: “In 1938, Hungarian regent Miklos Horthy, who collaborated with Hitler, managed to succeed in annexing the Hungarian minority region of Slovakia into Hungary.”

The fact is that according to a 1910 census the city of Kassa (Košice) – where the then Hungarian police captain Csatáry’s alleged war crimes took place – had an ethnic makeup of: 75.4% Hungarian, 14.8% Slovak and 7.2% German. The city of Kassa going back hundreds of years had as much Hungarian past as Danzig had its German heritage.

Hungary lost 2/3 (!) of its territory with its population and national treasures after the WWI. The city of Kassa (Košice) was confiscated here too. Miklos Horthy regent of Hungary choose to stand by the Germans in the faint hope that Germany wins the wars, and Hungary gets back its unjustly annexed territories and lost population who from one day to the next became persecuted, despised prisoners, the “hated enemy” in their own homes, strangers in their new rather unwelcoming country.

Another factual problem from the article. Quote: “Képiró is suspected of having acted as a henchman of the SS and of participating in the shooting of Jews at Novi Sad, a Serbian city in the former Yugoslavia that had been annexed by Hungary.”

The city Novi Sad or Újvidék had not been annexed by Hungary just hodge-podge. This was another part of the 2/3 territory that Hungary lost after WWI. By the way, not related directly to the story, but here around Novi Sad or Újvidék, Serb partisans executed 10,000 Hungarians towards the end of 1944!

Returning to the police captain Csatáry the alleged war criminal. Because of his fluency in German, he was appointed as a liaison officer between the then occupier Germans, and Hungarian authorities. This is only speculation on my part, but how likely is that a high ranking officer gets directly involved in collecting and whipping the Jewish prisoners? Then the whole idea of collecting Jews was not his either. He just did not wake up one morning and decide on his own to organize a collection campaign and go ahead. As a uniformed officer he was told what to do.

Finally the Hungarian Justice System from another angle. Many among the judges today are inherited from the Kadar communist area. These are the liberal tainted judges who just recently reduced a couple of roma murderers’ sentences to 8 years prison term. Compare this 8 years to the US justice system where in 2 states they can give 10 years for cruelty to animals. In other words, under this Solomonic wise decision a dog’s life in the US is worth more than in Hungary a man’s life if the protected roma criminal gang commits the murder!

The same forgiving pinko-crypto judges failed to convict anyone from the former communist apparatus, the secret police, and the former communist system’s henchman on whose hands the blood still not dried yet. When the current government suggested to retire these same judges at 62, mind you; not to put them into jails or hang them high, just quietly fade away, they prompty marched to Brussels complaining to their learned colleagues a sympathetic audience in the EU leadership.