If anyone needed any proof of the relevance of the trial of Dr. Sandor Kepiro for contemporary Hungarian society, it was forthcoming at Friday's session, the second day of the legal proceedings against the 97 year-old former officer of the gendarmerie, who is accused of war crimes committed in the course of a mass murder carried out by Hungarian forces on January 23, 1942 in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, then under Hungarian occcupation. It came as Hungarian ultranationalists, responding to calls by a website of the local extreme right-wing, came to support the elderly Hungarian "patriot" now on trial for his role in an atrocity which claimed the lives of at least 1,246 Jewish, Serb and Roma residents of the city. That is the essence of the drama unfolding in the Buda District Court, where Kepiro is the first local Nazi war criminal/collaborator to ever be prosecuted in Hungary since the transition to democracy following the fall of Communism, and the conflicting sides of the current political debate in Hungary view this historical event in diametrically-opposed ways.

Kepiro does not deny that he was serving as an officer of the Hungarian gendarmerie in Novi Sad on that date. There is no doubt about his identity or his rank. Nor is there any question about the final result of the action taken by the Hungarian military and gendarmerie on that fateful day. Thousands of the local Jews, Serbs and Roma, men, women, and children, including infants, were rounded up and taken to the Sokolski Dom, a large theater in the center of town. Those too old or too sick to proceed to the theater were shot on the spot. At the theater, a committee of Hungarian officers decided whether any of those arrested should be released, but the overwhelming majority were marched to the banks of the Danube, which flows through Novi Sad, where they were mowed down line by line by teams of executioners. After several hours, a light plane landed on the river, which was iced over (the temperature was about -30 degrees Centigrade) and high-ranking officers from Budapest emerged, demanding that the massacre, which had not been authorized by the High Command in Budapest, be immediately halted. If not for their arrival, many more thousands of innocent people would have been murdered.

The officers responsible for the massacre, among them Sandor Kepiro, were later put on trial in Hungary and were convicted for violating military regulations.
They were convicted in late January 1944, but their sentences were never implemented due to the Nazi invasion of Hungary on March 19 of the same year. The guilty were returned to service, in some cases after being given promotions. After the war, Kepiro escaped to Austria and from there, in 1948, to Argentina, where he lived in Buenos Aires until 1996, when he returned to Budapest, after being informed by the Hungarian Embassy that there were no outstanding warrants for his arrest. I discovered him living in the Hungarian capital about ten years later, after we discovered a photo of his in his gendarmerie uniform on the wall in the home of a fellow gendarme living in Scotland, who had attracted our attention by bragging publically about how he had helped deport Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.

There was no question in my mind that Kepiro should be held accountable for his role in the massacre in Novi Sad. Thanks to his conviction in 1944, we knew exactly what his role had been. He was in charge of the roundups in an area in the center of town heavily populated by Jewish families. Several people had been murdered on the spot, and those he sent to Sokolski Dom were subsequently marched to the banks of the Danube, where many were killed. There was also evidence that he had sent a group of 30 people directly to the river to be shot. There were, however, those who believed that given the fact that he was already 92 years old, it was too late for justice and there were those who viewed his role as that of a patriotic Hungarian, who was merely carrying out an operation to protect the occupying troops from threats by partisans or terrorists.

My answers to those arguments can be divided into two-those which relate to the specific circumstances of the mass murder in Novi Sad, and those which pertain to all cases of elderly Nazi war criminals and collaborators. In the former case, it is absolutely clear that the Novi Sad massacre had nothing to do with the ostensible threat supposedly posed by partisans, since practically all the people murdered were either young children, elderly men and women or others with no connection whatsoever to any resistance activities. As far as Kepiro's age and the many years which had elapsed since the crime was committed, my reply is that:
1. The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers;
2. Old age should not afford protection for people who commit such heinous crimes against defenseless civilians;
3. Every victim of the Nazis' and their allies deserves that an effort be made to try and find those who turned them-innocent men, woman, and children-into victims, in order to hold them accountable for their crimes;
4. The fact that such criminals are brought to justice today sends a powerful message that if one commits such terrible crimes, the effort to bring such people to justice will continue even many decades later.
The question therefore is not Kepiro's date of birth, but rather his current state of physical and mental health, and in that respect, he certainly is able to face justice. If he is healthy enough to sue me for libel (that I exposed him as a Nazi war criminal/collaborator) as he did, and to give interviews in which he pleaded his innocence, there is no legitimate legal or moral basis to ignore the fact that he was living convicted but unpunished in Budapest.

Given the current political situation in Hungary, and especially the very disturbing gains made in the most recent election by the ultra-right Jobbik party, which has a clearly anti-Roma and anti-Semitic agenda, and which has publically expressed strong sympathy and nostalgia for Hungary's World War II fascist past, the Kepiro trial sends a very powerful message that racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia can lead to violence with horrific results. That is what brought dozens of young members of Hungary's Faith Church to stand wearing yellow stars in front of the courthouse in support of the prosecution of Kepiro on the opening day of the trial, and their advesaries on the extreme right to rush to Kepiro's defense on the very next day, with Hungary's political future hanging in the balance. One can only hope that justice will prevail and that the court will not only convict and punish Kepiro, but deal a death-blow to the forces of intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism which threaten the democratic future of Hungary.

Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is Coordinator of Nazi war crimes research for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Director of its Israel Office. He relates how he found and exposed Dr. Sandor Kepiro in his latest book Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice published by Palgrave/Macmillan.

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