Law of War

Prosecutors on Tuesday charged a 98-year-old who features on Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center’s wanted list with war crimes, saying he had helped to deport Jews to Auschwitz in World War II.

Laszlo Csatary was found guilty in absentia in 1948 of whipping or torturing Jews and helping to deport them to the death camp while serving as police commander in the Nazi-occupied eastern Slovak city of Kosice in 1944.

The Hungarian was sentenced to death and lived on the run for decades until Hungarian authorities detained him and put him under house arrest in Budapest in July last year. He has denied any guilt.

A top commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States and has been living in Minnesota since shortly after World War II, according to evidence uncovered by The Associated Press.

Michael Karkoc, 94, told American authorities in 1949 that he had performed no military service during World War II, concealing his work as an officer and founding member of the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion and later as an officer in the SS Galician Division, according to records obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Galician Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organization he served in were both on a secret American government blacklist of organizations whose members were forbidden from entering the United States at the time.

The U.S. government has recovered 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a confidante of Adolf Hitler who played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War II.

“The documentation is of considerable importance for the study of the Nazi era, including the history of the Holocaust,” said the assessment, prepared by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich’s policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that compliments, and in part contradicts, already known documentation.”