It's the Sun Wot Done It: War Criminal Found in Budapest

I missed this story a couple of days ago but The Sun tracked down a Nazi war criminal to his home in Budapest.  Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, 97, was a police commander in charge of a Jewish ghetto in Kassa, Hungary, during World War Two. He is alleged to have sent 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz.

He fled Kassa — now renamed Kosice in Slovakia — after the Allied victory and was sentenced to death for war crimes in his absence in Czechoslovakia in 1948 creating a new identify and life for himself as an art dealer in Canada.


When his past was discovered  i 1997 his Canadiancitizenship was revoked and the government began to build a case against him. He fled before deportation papers could be served.
For 15 years his whereabouts have been a mystery.

Sun reporters thracked him down to an apartment in Budapest using information provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. They confronted him at the flat where he had been living quietly. When asked if he could justify his past, he looked shocked and stammered “No, no. Go away.” Questioned about his deportation case in Canada he answered angrily in English: “No, no. I don’t want to discuss it.” Our reporter asked: “Do you deny doing it? A lot of people died as a result of your actions.”

He replied: “No I didn’t do it, go away from here,” before slamming the door.
The atrocities that made him the most hunted Nazi war criminal still alive were detailed by the Canadian government when it stripped him of citizenship. The Justice Department’s war crimes unit said he was a “commander” in the Royal Hungarian Police in Kassa in charge of officers who guarded the ghetto.He supervised the drawing-up of lists of its inhabitants, conducted personal searches of Jews and confiscated valuables.The police transferred the Jews from the ghetto to a brickyard at the end of April 1944 and loaded them on to freight trains to Auschwitz and other camps.

In a summary of its case against Csizsik-Csatary the Canadian Government stated: “For at least two transports, he was present for the embarkation, checking the Jews’ names on a list.” Of the approximately 12,000 Jews gathered in the brickyard and deported, just 450 survived.
During the case, Csizsik-Csatary admitted to some involvement in the “ghettoisation” of Jews and said he had played a “limited role” in the movement of Jews to the brickyard.

He also admitted handing over at least two Jews to the Germans and to attending the last mass deportation of Jews out of Kassa.But his lawyers claimed he “did not know where the Jews were to be deported”.

And so on...

There is little chance that  Csizsik-Csatary will face trial given his age and the reliability of witnesses after all this time - let's not even dwell on the response of a government that seems hell-bent on rehabilitating Hungarian-style fascism after all this time. That he was identified and doorstepped by journalists should send a message to him - "We know where you live and we will find you if you run again". That may not seem like much justice for his crimes but it's probably the best his victims are
 going to get, sadly.

Also credit whee credit is due to the Sun. This is not its usual type of story (to say the least!)

Dirty War pilot extradited to Argentina

Back in September I posted an item about the arrest of Transavia pilot Julio Alberto Poch at Valencia airport.

Poch, was a military pilot at Argentina's Naval Mechanics School, a butal torture and detention centre during the Dirty War. He is alleged to have been involved in the so-called "death flights", in which political prisoners of Argentina's military were drugged and dumped into the sea from the planes.

Poch had boasted about hurling drugged prisoners into the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean during Argentina's Dirty War."He told me that on board his planes, people were thrown into the sea while still alive with the goal of killing them, and he justified the practice by saying that the people were terrorists," one fellow pilot stated.

It is pleasing to report that Spain approved his extradition to Argentina to face charges on Friday.

If this is true then the bastard can rot in jail then rot in hell

Q. How do you find a Nazi war criminal?

A. Look them up in the phone book according to the Times and several other papers.

90-year-old Adolf Storms, a former member of elite Waffen SS Wiking Division has been charged with the murder of 58 Hungarian Jews. He was found by University of Vienna

Towards the end of the war the Wiking Division was in Austria
Storms was charged at a regional court in Duisburg with the following

“On March 29, 1945, the accused and his accomplices brought at least 57 Jewish forced labourers in several groups to a nearby forest area, where they had to surrender their valuables and kneel by a grave. The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot the Jewish forced labourers from behind.”

According to testimony laid before the court 57 labourers were killed near the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen. On 30 March Storms allegedly shot another Jewish labourer who could not keep up on a forced march between Deutsch Schuetzen and the village of Hartberg

The mass grave at Deutsch Schuetzen was excavated in 1995 and the bodies were given proper funerals

As yet no living witness has been found to testify on the mass shooting; the case against Mr Storms for that alleged atrocity will be based on written statements made in previous trials.

Mr Forster, who was studying the forest massacre for part of his university course, was reviewing the files on the Hitler Youth burial unit and came across the name of Mr Storms. He searched German telephone books and worked out that a Duisburg pensioner matched the description.

Storms, apparently, remembers nothing about the massacre.

It remains to be seen if he ever comes to trial but even at this very late stage I wonder if there are others like him who realise that there is still just enough time for that knock at the door

Radovan Karadzic trial to start

Karadzic with fellow war criminal Rat(ko) Mladic

Tomorrow sees the start of the trial of war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Poet and psychiatrist, convicted embezzler and new age guru, Karadzic was responsible for mass murder and some the most barbaric behaviour in Europe since the Nazis.

According to the Guardian the trial is likely to open with a test of strength. Karadzic insists on defending himself and, after 15 months in detention, maintains he is not ready, having had to plough through around one million pages of prosecution evidence. The judges run the risk of repeating fateful mistakes that handicapped previous big trials, awarding an early psychological victory to the man in the dock.

"Karadzic has learnt the lessons of [earlier] trials and may suspect a lack of confidence on the part of the judges to deal with obstructive tactics," said Sir Geoffrey Nice, the British QC who led the prosecution of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. "The judges let Milosevic defend himself. This allowed him to manipulate the system to slow the trial."

Mirko Klarin, who has been chronicling the workings of the court for more than a decade as director of the Sense news agency, believes that the judges have learnt their lessons from past fiascos, and that they may impose defence counsel on Karadzic to try to avoid the trial degenerating into a political circus. "You had a disaster in the Milosevic case, and now you have a looming disaster in the Karadzic case," he said. "The biggest single mistake was letting the accused defend themselves."

Whatever happens, justice must be seen to be done. Whatever he does to obstruct, Karadzic deserves a fair trial (even if he denied that to many thousands of Bosnians).

While it will be good to see him tried and sentenced to rot in prison for the rest of his worthless life, fellow butcher General Ratko Mladic, remains at large...

...Worse still is that Karadzic’s creation, Republika Srpska, born out of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes, still abides....

Did Mengele continue his perverted work in Brazil?

The Angel of Death

If someone ever deserved the sobriquet "Angel of Death" it was Joseph Mengele. As a doctor at Birkenau from 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army in January 1945, he conducted appalling experiments (although what the evil bastard did could hardly be called scientific), mainly on twins but also on others including the dwarf Ovitz family. He once attempted to create conjoined twins from two Roma children. Essentially he represented a clinically callous evil. Click here for more details of his ghastly deeds.

Mengele's subjects rarely if ever had the benefit of anaesthetic

After the war Mengele escaped capture and justice (although death would have been far too good for him) or possibly the fate meted out to amoral scum like Werner von Braun or the utterly evil Japanese Unit 731 - to be taken in to the service of the USA or the other allies, He lived the rest of his life in South America dying from a stroke while out swimming in 1979. It is believed that the sharks refused to touch his body.

According to an article in the Telegraph last week a historian claims believes that Mengele's ghastly experiments may have borne fruit: for years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

The twins of Candido Godoi

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years. After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins. After working with cattle farmers in Argentina to increase their stock, Mengele fled the country after fellow Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped by Israeli agents. He allegedly found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil – the farming community of Candido Godoi. And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

"I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele's laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans," he said. "There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

Some of Mengele's victims

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople. “He told us he was a vet," said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer. "He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man." Another farmer, Leonardo Boufler, said: "He went from farm to farm checking the animals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out artificial insemination of cows and humans, which we thought impossible as in those days it was unheard of."

A former mayor and town doctor, Anencia Flores da Silva, set out to try to solve the town's mystery. He interviewed hundreds of people, and discovered one character who crept on cropping up: an itinerant medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss. Dr da Silva said: "In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood."
The people of Candido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war criminal was an inadvertent guest of theirs for several years in the early 1960s. The town's official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a "Farming Community and Land of the Twins". There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

"Nobody knows for sure exactly what date Mengele arrived in Candido Godoi, but the first twins were born in 1963, the year in which we first hear reports of his presence," he said.



Again I have no idea whether this is all a load of nonsense but it is intriguing. It is the greatest tragedy that Mengele did not answer for his crimes. Having said that when I think of his sort I really hope there is a hellish afterlife, despite being a very lazy atheist. I am sure eternity would be painful for him....

Eva Kor, a victim of Mengele's experiments who has found it in her heart to forgive. More on her in a later post.