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Comments (0)Germany has filed charges against the No. 3 man on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted Nazis for helping to murder 430,000 Jews during World War II.
Samuel Kunz, 90, was charged in Dortmund last week, according to the French news agency AFP. He reportedly has admitted working in the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland.
Kunz, who denies having personally murdered anyone, also is charged in connection with two incidents at Belzec in which 10 Jews were killed. He is also a witness in the war crimes trial against John Demjanjuk, who is charged as an accomplice in the murders of 27,900 Jews while serving as a guard at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
The new case underscores claims by Nazi hunters, including the Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem director Efraim Zuroff, that war criminals are living free more than 60 years after the end of World War II.
Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, had long maintainted that those tempted to call Demjanjuk’s case “the last big Nazi trial” were wrong.
Two men under investigation of Nazi-era war crimes died this month before going on trial. Former SS officer Erich Steidtmann, 95, accused of leading Nazi police battalions that committed mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, died this week in Hanover, where he lived.
Adolf Storms, 90, indicted reportedly for killing 57 Jewish men in Austria in March 1945 at the end of World War II, died in his home city of Duisburg. He allegedly forced the men, slave laborers, to hand over their valuables before he shot them.
Banker’s Kin Suing Hungary for Return of Artworks
The heirs of a Jewish banker sued the Hungarian government demanding the return of artwork valued at $100 million that allegedly was confiscated during World War II.
The heirs of Hungarian banker Baron Mor Lipot Herzog are seeking the return of more than 40 works by masters such as El Greco, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Zurbaran, van Dyck, Velazquez and Monet, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The paper called it the world’s largest unresolved Holocaust art claim.
The suit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Washington against the government of Hungary and several museums it oversees.
Herzog’s heirs have been petitioning the Hungarian government for more than two decades to return the art, most of which has been hanging in Hungarian museums after being left there for safekeeping during World War II, according to the Times.
“It’s a very emotional subject,” David de Csepel, a great-grandson of Baron Herzog, told the newspaper.
The requests have been rebuffed, as have appeals to the government from current and former U.S. senators over the years, including Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy.
A Hungarian court ruled in 2008 that the government was not required to return the art, according to the Times.
Gabor Foldvari, Hungary’s deputy consul general in New York, told the Times in a telephone interview that “it was not the government’s decision but the court’s decision” to keep the art.
Yemeni High Court Upholds Death Sentence
Yemen’s Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of a Yemeni man who killed a Jewish fellow citizen after demanding that he convert.
The court on Saturday affirmed the sentence of death by firing squad levied by an appeals court on Abdel Aziz Yahia al-Abdi, 39, for the December 2008 slaying of Masha Yaish Nahari, a father of nine from Raydah. Abdi killed Nahari after saying that Yemeni Jews should convert or be killed.
An appeals court in June 2009 had overturned a lower court ruling that had ordered Abdi to pay blood money to the family; the Abdi family had appealed to the Supreme Court.
Abdi, who is alleged to have murdered his wife two years before he killed Nahari, is said to be mentally unstable, according to the Yemen Post.
Nahari’s children moved to Israel after the murder. His parents, wife and siblings remain in Yemen.
Fewer than 200 Jews still live in Yemen, down from about 60,000 in 1948.