Wanted for the deaths of 430,000 Jews. Evaded justice for 67 years. Died a free man.

Samuel Kunz was third on the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals

Like hundreds of other suspected Nazi war criminals before him, the former death-camp guard Samuel Kunz died quietly at his home in the German provincial city of Bonn last week at the ripe old age of 89.

He was never obliged to stand trial although he was thought to have the blood of thousands on his hands. Despite being one of the world's most wanted men, he managed to escape the courtroom where he would have faced charges of mass murder.

Even in today's Germany where a renewed effort is under way to bring war criminals to trial, the wheels of justice turn slowly. Kunz was the third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. As a camp guard at the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland he was suspected of taking part in the murder of more than 430,000 Jews.

However yesterday, it was left to Alfred Brendel, the German state prosecutor, to announce his death. "Samuel Kunz died on 18 November at 5.30 in the afternoon," he said in a statement. "Most probably he died at his home," he added.

Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi hunter admitted that he found it "incredibly frustrating" that Kunz had died before his impending trial which had been due to open early next year. But he noted it was important that he had been indicted at all. "At least a small measure of justice was achieved," he said.

Like many other Nazi war criminals, Kunz was ignored by the German justice system for decades. After the war he managed to live quietly in Bonn. Until his retirement 14 years ago he had worked as a handyman in Germany's Federal Ministry for Building and Urban Development.

That he was charged at all was the result of a significant change in official German attitudes to Nazi war criminals. A little over a decade ago state prosecutors, under pressure from organisations such as the Wiesenthal Centre, launched an attempt to bring the last of them to justice.

One of them was the world's most wanted suspected war criminal, the Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, who is thought to have been a murderous guard at the Sobibor death camp. Now aged 90, Demjanjuk is on trial in Munich where he is charged with taking part in the murder of 27,900 mostly Dutch Jews.

Demjanjuk, who is accused of unspeakable acts, including driving naked Jews into the gas chambers with a whip, had managed to escape justice for decades. He was finally extradited to Germany from the United States in 2009 and his trial began almost exactly a year ago.

The decision to indict Kunz came as a by-product of the Demjanjuk investigation. Prosecutors only began questioning him in January after his name surfaced during preparations for the Demjanjuk trial. Not only did Kunz face a trial of his own, but he had been due to appear next month as a key witness in the Demjanjuk trial.

As a member of an ethnic German family living along River Volga in the USSR before the Second World War, Kunz's wartime record was similar to that of many ethnic Germans. At the beginning of the war he joined the Red Army. But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he was captured and given the choice of working with the Nazis or being interned.

Kunz almost certainly chose to co-operate with the Nazi invaders. He is alleged to have attended a training camp for SS death-camp guards at Trawniki in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thereafter, he was widely suspected of having served as a guard at the Belzec extermination camp which was little more than a murder factory. According to SS records 434,508 Jews were gassed, shot or beaten to death there between January 1942 and July 1943.

The Demjanjuk trial opened a year ago and was scheduled to end in April 2010. The final date for a verdict has now been put forward to March 2011. Some relatives of Holocaust victims have said they fear that Demjanjuk may be dead by then. Kunz, it seems, may not be the only one of the world's last remaining suspected Nazi war criminals to escape justice.

WIESENTHAL CENTRE'S OTHER MOST-WANTED NAZIS

Dr Sandor Kepiro

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Kepiro is being sought for his participation in the massacre of 1,200 citizens in Serbia in 1942. He was convicted in Hungary in 1944, but never punished; Hungary refuses to implement his sentence, but is conducting a new criminal investigation – which has so far taken three years.

Milivoj Asner

A Croatian police chief, and second on the Wiesenthal list, he was involved in persecuting and deporting Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Now living in Austria, where his extradition to Croatia was refused on medical grounds in 2005. Last year doctors said he suffered from dementia, but he has given media interviews, which raise doubts about the diagnosis.

John Demjanjuk

Demjanjuk has faced three decades of court actions over his Nazi history. At the age of 90, he is finally on trial on charges of a role in the death of almost 30,000 Jews as a death camp guard – but the process has repeatedly been delayed because of his ill health. A year after the case opened, it is not expected to conclude before March 2011.

Independent

Zentai loses appeal against extradition

On his 88th birthday, alleged Nazi war criminal Charles Zentai has lost a Federal Court appeal to avoid extradition to Hungary to face war crimes charges.

The full bench of the court delivered its judgment in Perth today, granting a stay of 14 days on the execution of the extradition warrant on Zentai. The Hungarian government alleges the Hungarian-born Zentai, a resident of the southern Perth suburb of Willeton, was one of three men who tortured Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in November 1944, leading to his death. Zentai denies the accusation and has fought against his extradition since a warrant was issued for his arrest in 2005.

Perth magistrate Barbara Lane last year ruled the former Hungarian soldier was eligible to be surrendered for extradition to face the charge. Zentai's lawyers appealed the decision in the Federal Court, but it was upheld by Justice John Gilmour in March.

The lawyers took the legal fight to the full bench of the Federal Court in August. They argued that under a treaty between Australia and Hungary, the crime was not an offence when it was allegedly committed.

Zentai has the option of applying to the High Court for leave to appeal.

Last year, the High Court dismissed an appeal by Zentai and two others challenging the validity of Australia's extradition law, claiming the law involved a "constitutionally impermissible" attempt by the commonwealth to impose a duty upon magistrates as holders of a state statutory office. Attorney-General Robert McClelland has the final say on Zentai's extradition.

Mr McClelland has delegated the decision to Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor, who has already invited submissions on the matter.

A spokesman for Mr O'Connor said once the appeals process was exhausted and Mr O'Connor was asked to make a decision, it would come "expeditiously". Zentai's bail was renewed and he was to attend a cardiologist's appointment ordered by the attorney-general's office on Thursday afternoon. His son Ernie Steiner said outside the court the family would consider its options in the next two weeks.

"We're leaving all options open at the moment, because we haven't read the full extent of the judgment. There may be things in there that are worth pursuing," he said.

The cost of seeking leave for the case to be heard in the High Court was cause for hesitation to push the case further, with the legal bill topping $200,000 to date, Mr Steiner said.

"There is a hesitation (to go to the High Court); the cost is a factor but we'll do what needs to be done," he told reporters.

Mr Steiner said he had lodged a 570-page submission with Mr O'Connor and said the minister could be his father's best hope of avoiding extradition.

"As far as that goes we've never been able to present any arguments about my father's innocence in the courts in Australia," he said. "Obviously I am very concerned for my father, and I've had to ask him some very direct questions, and I'm convinced through my own family history, statements he made in 1994 when my mother was still alive, about the date of his departure from Budapest. He wasn't even there. So this is really a travesty, this whole thing."

Zentai turned 88 today. Mr Steiner said he understood that his father would be remanded in custody after 14 days when the stay lapses.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre lists him among their top 10 wanted war criminals. The Jewish human rights group says Zentai and two others beat Balazs because he was not wearing a Jewish star. If Zentai is extradited, he will be the first Australian ever extradited to face charges of alleged war crimes.

news.com.au

Germany gets go-ahead to prosecute 'Ivan the Terrible' in last Nazi trial

Germany is preparing for what could be the last Nazi war criminal trial as the country's highest court ruled a former death camp guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible' can be tried in Munich

Ivan Demjanjuk, alleged to be Ivan the Terrible, moved to
America in 1952 and changed his first name to John Photo: AP

Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, 88, is alleged to have been involved in the murder of over 29,000 Jews when he served as a guard in several Nazi prisons including the death camp Sobibor in Poland during World War II.

Demjanjuk moved to America in 1952 and changed his first name to John, and now lives as a retired car worker in Ohio.

Last month, a court in Munich ruled that Demjanjuk, who was dubbed Ivan the Terrible for his role in the mass murder, could not be charged in Germany. But Germany's Federal Court of Justice has overturned the verdict, making it possible for Demjanjuk to be indicted and tried in Munich, where he lived before emigrating to America.

The court ruling read: "Demjanjuk, who is accused of involvement in the killing of at least 29,000 Jews in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in 1943, lived for several months in 1951 in a camp in the current jurisdiction of the court."

The office of the German Federal Prosecutor indicated that new evidence that surfaced after Demjanjuk trial in Israel in 1986 would be sufficient to charge him with war crimes. Demjanjuk always denied having served in the Nazi army and claimed to have been fighting in the former Soviet armed forces.

German authorities are now expected to seek extradition and put Demjanjuk on trial, which is likely to be the last high-profile process of an alleged Nazi war criminal. Demjanjuk was already extradited to Israel once where he was sentenced to death in Israel in 1986, but a higher instance court overturned the verdict for lack of evidence and he was allowed to return to America.

Demjanjuk's relatives in America repeatedly said that he was too old to stand trial, but Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, urged authorities to "do everything legally possible to accelerate the process so that Demjanjuk can be held responsible for his crimes during his lifetime."

"Demjanjuk and all other Nazi criminals still alive should know that for them there is no mercy," Mrs Knobloch said.

Telegraph

Disgraced UN chief and Nazi war criminal Waldheim, dies aged 88

So the old rogue is dead. That is all I could say when I heard yesterday that Kurt Waldheim had reached the end of his days at 88.I spent months, years, investigating his dark past in what we now call Bosnia, when he - let us not be coy about this - was part of the Bosnien-Kampfgruppen of Wehrmacht Army Group E of General Löhr, fighting "terroristen" (yes, indeed, the Nazis called them terrorists, just as they talked about the "RAF Terroristenfliegen") in the Balkans. Waldheim had been secretary general of the UN, had lectured UN officers in Lebanon on the lessons of "terrorism" and, well - as was later to ruminate - he knew about that, didn't he?

I remember, when Waldheim was President of Austria - stamps were issued, heaven spare us; no mention of course of 1943 or 1944 or 1945 - how he turned up in Jordan where the Plucky Little King Mark One (King Hussein, who liked to rule a British Jordan) met him on the apron. I was at Amman airport when this outrageous little man snapped to attention in front of the Jordanian guard of honour, clicked his heels just a little too quickly, I thought, much as he must have done when he saluted his masters in Yugoslavia during the Second World War.

Waldheim - how his friends would prefer that they didn't read these words this morning - was based at a town called Banja Luka, a market town where Serbs and Jews and communist Croatians were murdered en masse, hanged like thrushes from mass gallows or raped to death in the nearby Jasenovac extermination camp. Waldheim would have us believe that he knew nothing of all this, that he was a mere intelligence officer for Army Group E of the Wehrmacht, whose commander, Löhr, just happened to be tried for war crimes after the Second World War.

It was an Austrian journalist who alerted me to Waldheim, a reporter whose father had fought in the Wehrmacht, who had survived the evacuation of north Africa ("I do hope I didn't kill him," the "Enigma" cryptologist said to me when I told her of his attempt to escape by air - his plane got through the Allied net). "Look for the letter W," the Austrian journalist said, the letter W after each debriefing, each Allied commando captured by the Gestapo, each prisoner to be extinguished by "nacht und nebel" - by night and fog.

No, Waldheim didn't order their deaths. He didn't even interview the captured British commandoes, or so he said, but merely "collated" their reports. His junior officers did the interviewing (let us not contemplate what that meant). Then the British prisoners disappeared into night and fog.

I recall finding the German interrogation papers of a young Briton who had been caught trying to escape from Yugoslavia during the war. They lay in the files of the Public Record Office at Kew (now known as the National Archives) and they were pitiful proof of what the Nazis could do. Yes, he admitted he was a British agent, yes he was wearing British uniform, and yes - there it was, in all its symmetry, the "W" - he was interviewed by Waldheim. And then he was taken away and executed, and Waldheim - whose colleagues (no secretary generals, they) had saved the lives of British prisoners - didn't give a fig about their souls.

I remember how I visited Bosnia in 1990 to investigate Waldheim's past. He had written a PhD thesis, he told the world, in the last years of the war; he knew nothing of the Nazi subjugation of the Balkans. He had been wounded on the Russian front. But there was a certain manipulation of the truth. He had been sent to Yugoslavia. He was an intelligence officer for Army Group E. He was based at Banja Luka and - years before the town became the Bosnian Serb capital in the outrageous war between Muslims and Christians - I visited his former headquarters, where the Serbs showed me his files, still cloaked in the see-through parchment of the Wehrmacht.

I even visited his interrogation office, next to an execution pit wherein Serbs and Jews were massacred daily. Did the rifle shots not disturb Kurt Waldheim's concentration? Oh, what it must have been to have the peace and quiet of the UN headquarters on the East River.

Monty Woodhouse was the top man for SOE - Special Operations Executive - in Greece during the war, and he pursued Waldheim for years afterwards, along with an immensely brave Jewish academic. Waldheim published a "White Book" claiming to prove his innocence of war crimes (he was later based in the Hotel Angleterre in Athens). He didn't know, he said. And his friends noted quietly that it was his wife who was the Nazi party member in Austria in the 1930, not himself; that Waldheim was merely a civil servant, one who - in the damning words of the Jewish academic - "helped to give the wheel a push."

So what memories did Waldheim carry with him to the grave? During the war, Woodhouse's Greek partisans captured a Gypsy who was spying on his comrades for the Italians. Woodhouse decided that he should be hanged.

I asked him what it felt like to do such a thing - to commit what, I suppose, we would call a war crime, were it Waldheim whom it had been proved had done it. Woodhouse replied to me - and I have his words in my own handwriting as I write this: "It was terrible - I felt terrible. I still bring the scene back to me from time to time. He was a wretched youth. He didn't say anything really - he was so shaken. He was a sort of halfwit. I was at the hanging. He was hanged from a tree. They simply pulled a chair from beneath his feet. I don't think it took long for him to die. I don't know exactly how long. We were only a hundred men or so - it was the early days of the occupation. If we had let him go, he would have told the Italians... After that, I told Zervas not to take any prisoners."

When I left Bosnia in the summer of 1988 in the aftermath of my Waldheim investigations, I called my foreign news editor, Ivan Barnes of the The Times, to tell him that I saw so many parallels in modern-day Yugoslavia with Lebanon on the eve of conflict in 1975 that I believed a civil war would break out in Bosnia in the near future. The local Serbs even abused me for driving to Waldheim's ex-headquarters with a Croatian driver. "We'll report it if it happens," Barnes roared down the phone at me. In 1992, I did report the Bosnian war - for The Independent.

And what of Waldheim? The Austrian state defended him. He appeared on postage stamps. He went to the opera. He was forbidden entry to the United States - long after he ever needed to go there. He produced a "White Book", supposedly proving he knew nothing of war crimes.

His former United Nations colleagues clucked and re-clucked over his hypocrisy. And I well remember his number two at the UN telling me how he always knew that "KW" was a "crook" - this just three days before I came across a second-hand copy of Waldheim's memoirs in Waterstone's bookshop in Piccadilly with the very same man's warm appraisal of Waldheim as a "man of principle" in the frontispiece.

In 1987, King Hussein took Waldheim to the heights of Um Queiss to overlook the Israeli-occupied West Bank and awarded him the Hussein bin Ali medal - named after Hussein's grandfather. The Plucky Little King praised Waldheim for his patriotism, integrity, wisdom and "noble human values". General Löhr, I should add - Waldheim's superior officer in Yugoslavia - was hanged as a war criminal.

Independent