Region: 'Nazi Hunter' nabs next on list

Known as "the Nazi Hunter," Efraim Zuroff knows he is quite literally in a dying business.

But the head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which specializes in tracking down and bringing evidence against living former Nazi soldiers and collaborators, also believes there is a great deal more work to do before the last suspected perpetrators of the Holocaust are gone.

"It's difficult to get Nazi war criminals prosecuted today, and it's difficult to find a country that is willing to do it," Zuroff told The Prague Post in a telephone interview from his office in Jerusalem. "Every time one of them is on trial, the media will call him 'the last Nazi.' But there have been 89 convictions of Nazi war criminals in the last decade alone. They're still out there. We can't ignore these people just because they've reached a certain age."

Zuroff is hoping No. 90 will be Sándor Képíró, a former Hungarian soldier and currently No. 1 on the Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted" list. Képíró is currently standing trial in Budapest for his role in the 1942 massacre in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, which saw more than 1,200 Jews, Serbs and Roma murdered between Jan. 21 and 23.

The trial opened May 4 with Képíró clutching a sign reading "Murderers! The murderers of a 97-year-old man!" Media reports from inside the courtroom say proceedings have been slow and difficult as Képíró has had to have all questions repeated to him by a courtroom assistant and has stopped testimony at times claiming to be too tired to continue. He's even been spotted falling asleep while others were being questioned.

But he has insisted he is fit to stand trial and that he wishes to clear his name.

"I'm innocent, and I am here on trumped-up charges. This trial is a terrible thing. Everything is based on lies," he told the court, according to a BBC account of the trial. He later added he was only on trial because he is "the last survivor. Everyone else who was there is dead."

'Operation: Last Chance'

After Zuroff presented Hungarian authorities with his evidence against Képíró in 2006, he said there was little interest on the government's part in pursuing it.

"I think they wanted him just to die and not have to go through this," he said. "I took the information to them, and nothing was happening. So I went to the media."

That decision to go public with his evidence resulted in Képíró filing libel charges against Zuroff, a case that ended in Zuroff's acquittal just two days before the start of the criminal trial.

Képíró, who joined the German-allied Hungarian Army in 1938 when he was 24 years old, was eventually promoted to captain and was allegedly in charge of one of several patrols tasked with rounding up and executing residents of Novi Sad. Most of the residents are believed to have been shot by machine guns and thrown into the frozen-over Danube River after the ice was broken up by cannon fire.

As early as 1944, Képíró was charged with the deaths of 36 people killed by his patrol. He was tried and sentenced to 10 years in 1944 but was quickly released by the government, and he fled to Argentina, where he lived for more than 50 years. He was tried again in 1946 and sentenced in absentia.

In 2006, 10 years after returning to Budapest on a Hungarian passport, he was tracked down by Zuroff and the Wiesenthal Center as part of their "Operation: Last Chance" initiative, created to find and prosecute all living Nazi war criminals while they were still alive.

Throughout his life, Képíró has maintained his innocence. While admitting to being involved in rounding up the residents of Novi Sad, he has repeatedly denied having executed anyone himself, and has even said he was unaware the murders took place until after the fact.

"We had a list of people who had to be collected by us," he told The New York Times in 2006, shortly after Zuroff went public with evidence that Képíró had already been convicted of war crimes and had avoided prison time. "It was given by a committee, which was dealing with the identification of the people."

In his last public interview in October 2010, speaking on Hungarian television, he said, "I have no regret. All I did was my duty."

But Zuroff said it's not that simple.

"The only reason he's saying he's innocent is because he thinks if you don't shoot someone personally that you have no responsibility, even if you're facilitating the whole act," he said. "He's not the most important officer involved, no. He's not Heinrich Himmler. But he has responsibility. He can't ignore that."

Jack Buehrer can be reached at
jbuehrer@praguepost.com