US News

World’s most wanted alleged Nazi war criminal, aged 96, faces Hungarian court

BUDAPEST, Hungary — The world’s most wanted alleged Nazi war criminal was charged Monday over the massacre of civilians — nearly 70 years after the World War II killings and 15 years after he returned to Budapest from exile in Argentina.

Sandor Kepiro, 96, a former major in the Hungarian gendarmerie, or law enforcement agency, is accused of commanding a patrol whose members killed four civilians in Novi Sad, northern Serbia, in January 1942 when the area was occupied by Hungary.

One of the victims, Irene Weisz, was shot in her bed, according to court papers. The trial will take place in the Budapest Municipal Court, Gabriella Skoda, a spokeswoman for the prosecution, said.

The (London) Times reported the case touches the rawest nerve in Hungary — the complicity of the Hungarian state, especially the gendarmerie, in the Holocaust. More than 500,000 Jews were killed and almost all of them were rounded up by gendarmes before being deported to concentration camps.

During the Novi Sad massacres hundreds of Serbian civilians were shot on the bank of the Danube and their bodies tossed into the water. The killings, which went on for several days, were halted only when senior officers arrived from Budapest.

Kepiro was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1944 for his role in the killings, but the verdict was later annulled. He denied knowing anything about the massacre and insisted that his role was solely to check the identities of those being rounded up.

Kepiro fled to Argentina after 1945 and returned to Hungary in 1996. The case was reopened by Hungarian authorities after he was discovered in 2006 by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, which put him on top of its list of alleged Nazi war criminals.