Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary, who according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem had played a key role in the deportation of 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz, died while awaiting trial in a Hungarian hospital, his lawyer said Monday.
Csatary, 98, died of pneumonia in a Budapest hospital on Saturday.
Hungarian authorities have said Csatary was the chief of an internment camp set up in a brick factory for around 12,000 Jews in Kosice (Kassa)— a Slovak city then part of Hungary — in 1944, beating them with his bare hands and a dog whip regularly and without reason. He also had been charged with “actively participating” in the deportation of about 12,000 Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
A Czechoslovak court sentenced Csatary to death in absentia in 1948 for war crimes. At the time, Csatary had already fled to Canada, where he worked as an art dealere in Montreal and Toronto, but he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in 1997 and forced to return to his native Hungary.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center said it was "deeply disappointed" by the news of Csatary’s death.
"It is a shame that Csatary, a convicted... and totally unrepentant Holocaust perpetrator who was finally indicted in his homeland for his crimes, ultimately eluded justice and punishment at the very last minute,'' Efraim Zuroff, the Center's Jerusalem director, said in a statement.
Last month, the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched its Operation Last Chance II project, offering rewards for information that could help it track down the last surviving Nazi war criminals and bring them to justice.
Among the most wanted Nazis is Alois Brunner, a key operative of Adolf Eichmann, who was last seen in Syria in 2001, and Aribert Heim, a doctor at three concentration camps, who disappeared in 1962 and was last seen in Egypt in 1992.