Simon Wiesenthal Center provides information on whereabouts of its most-wanted Nazi criminal to newspaper´s investigative reporters • Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary tracked down to Budapest apartment 15 years after fleeing Canada

Wanted Nazi war criminal, Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, has been found in Budapest, Hungary by the British daily tabloid The Sun.

According to the report on their website, the 97-year-old was tracked down by the Sun team to a two-bedroom apartment in a smart district of Budapest. The investigators were given details of his possible whereabouts by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. The organization had received a tip-off after launching Operation Last Chance, aimed at bringing World War II Nazis to justice before they die, The Sun said. Csizsik-Csatary was number one on the Wiesenthal Center´s most-wanted list and helped send 15,700 Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Csizsik-Csatary was a police commander in charge of a Jewish ghetto in Kassa, Hungary, during World War II. According to documents uncovered by the Wiesenthal Center, he took pleasure in beating women with a whip he carried on his belt and forced them to dig ditches in frozen ground with their bare hands. In addition, he made dissenting Jews take up stress positions for hours, hit them with a dog leash and oversaw a shoot-on-sight policy if they tried to escape.

He fled Kassa, which is today Kosice in Slovakia, after the Allied victory and was sentenced to death for war crimes in his absence in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Csizsik-Csatary created a new identity, becoming an art dealer in Canada, the Sun reported. His cover was blown in 1997 and his citizenship revoked, but fled the country before the deportation papers could be served.

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His whereabouts were unknown for the last 15 years, until the Sun´s team apparently managed to establish that the 97-year-old was indeed the Nazi collaborator. When the Sun´s team asked if he could justify his past, he looked shocked and stammered “No, no. Go away.” When the Sun´s 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,” and slammed the door.

Holocaust campaigners reportedly hailed the Sun´s investigation and called on Hungarian prosecutors to arrest him. Prosecutors in Hungary are studying dossiers of evidence handed over by The Sun. Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center, told the Sun that he must be put on trial in Hungary.

“Csatary was a police commander in the ghetto of Kassa and was responsible for sending 15,700 people to death camps. He was known to be a sadist, he had a determination to round all Jews up and forcibly deport them to Poland. To achieve justice against this man will bring a degree of closure for families of the victims, for the Jewish communities of Hungary and Slovakia,” Zuroff told the Sun.