Speaking
of the ongoing case against 90-year-old Hungarian-born Karoly (Charles)
Zentai - which has lasted seven years and was lately referred to
Australia’s highest court by the government to support its decision to
approve his extradition to Hungary in 2009 – the head of the Israel
branch of the (international Jewish human rights and Holocaust education
organisation) Simon Wiesenthal Center, Dr Efraim Zuroff, condemned
Australia’s belatedness in implementing a Budapest People’s Court appeal
for arrest dating back to 1948:
“It’s
hard to be optimistic about a case of a Nazi war criminal in Australia
given the country’s terrible record to date”, he said. “But in this
case, the government has acted in the proper manner and perhaps we will
finally see a successful result.”
The
Australian government was forced to appeal to the country’s top
judicial authority, after their original decision to extradite Zentai in
2009 was overturned on appeal on the basis that a “war crime” is not an
extraditable offence.
The
Simon Wiesenthal Center was, in fact, responsible for eventually
tracking down Zentai to Perth in 2005, where he was arrested. Having
always protested his innocence of Nazi war crimes, his son now claims he
is too frail and that extradition to Hungary would be “a virtual death
sentence”.
Zuroff,
however, disputes the legitimacy of such an argument, saying: “The
passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers. Old age
should not afford protection for people who committed murder.”
This
is an argument that Hungarian-born Australian Holocaust survivor Deborh
Weinerger keenly advocates. Weinberger, who lost much of her immediate
family in concentration camps, said: “My grandmother was also nearly 90
when she died at Auschwitz. That doesn’t do anything for me when they
say he’s an old man. I don’t care; there were lots of old men and women
who were taken to the gas chambers.”
Australia
has been widely criticised for its record on convicting Nazi war
criminals with a special unit set up in 1987 by the federal government
investigating 841 suspects without a single successful conviction,
before it was dismantled in 1992.
A
2006 US Justice Department report criticised Australia’s attitudes to
Nazi “persecutors” as “ambivalent”, describing attempts by the US
government to extradite suspected Latvian-born Australian Nazi Konrads
Kalejs in 2000 as a “hideous failure”.
Mark Aarons, author of War Criminals Welcome, an
exploration of successive Australian governments’ failure to tackle the
issue, wrote in 2009: “Future historians may well conclude that some of
the world’s last surviving Nazis died peacefully in Melbourne, Sydney
or Perth. This would be a deserved judgement – and a pity.”
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