The Unsinkable Nazi Past

"The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been hunting Nazi-era war criminals for 60 years, said Mr. Csatary was a police officer in the Hungarian town of Kosice, which was also the site of the first Jewish ghetto in Hungary, established in 1944 after the German occupation. Mr. Csatary has been on the run before. After the war, he decamped to Canada for several decades. When he was discovered, and his citizenship revoked, he disappeared again. According to the BBC , Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, urged the Hungarian authorities to prosecute Mr. Csatary, saying, 'The passage of time in no way diminishes his guilt and old age should not afford protection for Holocaust perpetrators.'

Others said the resources required to prosecute people like Mr. Csatary would be better spent combating Holocaust deniers. German intelligence chief Heinz Fromm, head of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, warned his countrymen this week, in a report detailing the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, that 'great vigilance was needed' to prevent copycat killings by people trying to emulate the National Socialist Underground, a far right group accused of killing at least 10 immigrants over the course of six years. According to a BBC report, even as the number of self-identified far right extremists has declined in Germany over the last five years, from 14,200 to 7,300, neo-Nazis increased from 4,400 to 6,000 in the same period."