Hungarian Man, 97, Judged For Crimes Committed During WWII
Sandor Kepiro (reuters.com)
Sandor Kepiro, 97, Hungarian national, appeared on Thursday before a Hungarian court where he is to be judged for participating in the massacre of more than a thousand people in the Serbian city of Novi Sad during WWII.
Kepiro served as a gendarme during the regime of Miklos Horty, an ally of the Nazi Germany, and participated in the massacre of Serbs in Novi Sad, as the Serbian province of Voyvodina was occupied in 1941 by the third Hungarian Army.
In 1942, there was a massacre of the population in Voyvodina, causing a thousand Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to die.
The Hungarian court accuses Kepiro of having participated in rounding up these people and putting them in front of a firing squad. He was also accused of participating as a member of the squads that killed people at their homes.
He denied that he had anything to do with this mass murder he stood accused of, and said he had no knowledge of such crimes having been committed by the Hungarian army at the time.
He claims to have participated in raids only to ask people for their papers, but that he was no criminal whatsoever, and that the allegations against him were based on lies.
The trial will continue on Friday and a ruling is expected to be passed on May 19.
Sandor Kepiro lived in Argentina between 1948 and 1996. in 2006 he was spotted in Budapest by a member of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and was deferred to justice.
His capture is deemed as a great achievement by the famous Nazi-hunter organization.
Map of Hungary During WWII (ro.wikipedia.org)
During the WWII, in a wish to annul the provisions of the Trianon Treaty, at the end of WWI, by which independence of Serbs, Romanians, Croats, Slovaks was recognized, thus reducing the territory of Hungary to a third of what it had previously been as it was occupying these nations, Hungary cooperated with the regime in Berlin led by Hitler.
Hungary signed on November 20, 1940, the Tripartite Pact, by which it entered a political alliance with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperialist Japan,
Consequently, it received some territorial claims, among which one of the most important was north-western Transylvania, a province of Romania, and the Serbian Voyvodina.
What Kepiro stands accused of having done in Voyvodina was done by Horthyst army in Transylvania, inhabited by an overwhelming Romanian majority since the beginning of recorded history.
It is worth saying that north-western Transylvania was occupied in spite of the fact that it joined the Tripartite Pact on November 23, 1940.
Massacres occurred in Transylvanian territory at Nusfalau, Treznea, Ip, Cerisa, Marca or Bretcu. North-western Transylvania was freed by the Romanian troops in 1944, and the Hungarian ethnics that remained behind and had participated in these massacres were judged by the Romanian popular tribunals, while the Hungarian troops that went across the border were never brought to justice.
