Sandor kepiro biography of william

  • Sandor Kepiro (pictured) had been

    • Frail year-old ex-police captain cleared by war crimes court of rounding up and killing Jews and Serbs in World War II

    • Hungarian had topped Simon Wiesenthal's most wanted Nazi list
    • Verdict being read out over two days because of Sandor Kepiro's ill health
    • Admitted supervising IDs of victims rounded up but claimed to know nothing of their slaughter

    By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
    Updated:

    Acquitted: Sandor Kepiro, 97, was on trial for war crimes dating back 69 years

    A year-old man was sensationally cleared of committing war crimes during World War II today.

    The charges stemmed from a raid by pro-Nazi Hungarian forces in Serbia.

    Sandor Kepiro had been charged by prosecutors of involvement in the killing of some 35 people.

    The killings took place during an anti-partisan raid in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, which was then under Hungarian control, on January 23,

    Hungary was a member of the Axis powers - allied with Germany, Italy and Japan - from , participating in the invasion of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia was then part.

    Prosecutors had claimed that unidentified members of a patrol under Kepiro's command killed four people during the raid.

    Kepiro, at the time a gendarmerie captain, was also suspected of being involved in the deaths of around 30 others who were executed on the banks of the Danube River.

    Many of the dozens of people attending the court session cheered and clapped after judge Bela Varga read out the verdict of the three-member tribunal.

    Kepiro, who returned to Hungary in after decades in Argentina, was discovered living in Budapest in by Nazi-hunters with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

    Before reading out the verdict, Mr Varga said Kepiro had been brought to the tribunal by ambulance and had spent the past week in hospital after apparently being given the wrong medication.

    In a statement from Kepiro read out at the start of the court session, he rejected all the charges.

    Frail: He was accused of ordering the deaths of Serbian civi

    Israeli Scene
    Life + Style

    Yad Vashem’s online Pages of Testimony is more than a database of records on the six million who died in the Holocaust. It has also become a memorial to each victim and a way of bringing together those who survived.

    Sick and emaciated, year-old Hannah Weiss listened as the translator told her and the other survivors they were free to leave the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The date was May 5, , and the 11th Armored Division of the United States Third Army, the three-corps, seven-division field army sometimes called Patton’s Own, had penetrated the camp’s electrified barbed wire and high stone walls. She could hardly believe she was alive after surviving four years of hiding, imprisonment and a death march. All she could think of was going home. She succeeded in making her way back to the wooden house in the mountain town of Munckacs in Czechoslovakia, where she waited for her parents and four siblings. No one ever came.

    Weiss contacted the Red Cross, plus registries in Europe and in Israel. She learned that her mother, Sheindl, had died in Auschwitz. But there was no master list to help her locate other survivors and find out the fate of her relatives. Nor was there a comprehensive list of the six million. For more than half a century, Weiss assumed she was the sole survivor of her family.

    After the war, Weiss moved to Israel, married and became Hannah Katz; she had children and grandchildren. Merav Zamir, one of her grown granddaughters, read an article in a Hebrew daily newspaper about the digitalization and online accessibility of the vast records of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.

    Zamir logged onto the Yad Vashem site and typed in her great-grandmother’s name in Hebrew. Sure enough, a file of information and biographical details, called a Page of Testimony, popped onto her screen. But then Zamir noticed something that made her heart race.

    “At first I

    US student volunteers to help hunt Nazi war criminals

    Harvard law student locates four suspects for Wiesenthal Center.

    By ORI RAPHAEL
    William Charles Gray, 24, from Munster, Indiana, always wanted to work for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but he never knew the methods he learned in law school might assist the veteran Nazi-hunting organization in locating four potential suspects living in the United States. Gray, who is Professor Alan Dershowitz's research assistant at Harvard Law School, recently volunteered to work as an intern at the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem under a special program sponsored by his university. One of his tasks was to review a collection of data on suspected Lithuanian Nazi war criminals and collaborators, many of whom had emigrated to the United States and other Anglo-Saxon democracies shortly after the end of World War II. While the center had successfully tracked down the new addresses of quite a few of the suspects, there were still some missing. Gray employed the techniques he learned in law school and his access to database programs such as LexisNexis, Westlaw, and New Detective that lawyers have at their disposal. He also searched voting records, land transfer documents, professional licenses, and death records. In Gray's first month he located four potential suspects in America. "I also found one name in the death records, I am just disappointed he won't face justice." "The investigation process centers on two major elements-finding evidence regarding crimes committed during the Holocaust and research using refugee records to trace the postwar escape of Nazi war criminals. Each element presents specific problems which hamper the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice," explains the center's Israel director, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, who also coordinates its Nazi war crimes research worldwide. "Ultimately, however, it is up to the governmental prosecution agencies to indict and try these criminals and often we encounter a dis

    By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent BosNewslife 

    BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (BosNewsLife)&#; Hungarian prosecutors say they have charged a former Hungarian military officer with war crimes in the World War Two massacre of up to 1, civilians in neighboring Serbia. The decision to charge Sandor Kepiro follows pressure from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is searching for Nazi war criminals around the world.

    Hungarian prosecutors confirmed Monday, February 14, that Kepiro has been indicted for involvement in murdering over one thousand civilians in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, during World War Two. &#;In January the defendant, as an officer of the gendarme, participated in the illegal massacre of unarmed and innocent people in Vojvodina,&#; said Gabriella Skoda, the spokesperson of the Budapest prosecutor&#;s office.

    Prosecutors say Kepiro, who will turn 97 this week, ordered his patrol to shoot civilians to death between January 21 and January 23, , near the Danube river. The bloodshed became known as &#;the massacre of Novi Sad&#;, named after the city where the killings took place.

    He escaped to Argentina, but in the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center revealed that he was now living in Budapest. Prosecutors launched an investigation into the case a year later and officials say the current charges are based on documents obtained from archives in Hungary and Serbia.

    MOST WANTED

    Kepiro has been on of the most wanted list of the Wiesenthal Center, which is working to track down war criminals such as Kepiro, explained its director Efraim Zuroff. &#;He was in charge of the round ups of hundreds of civilians living in a section of the city of Novi Sad. Who were then taken, most of them, were marched to the embankment,&#; the Naz5-hunter said.

    Experts say Hungarian forces rounded up as many as 1, people, mainly Jews, Serbs and Roma, also known as Gypsies. They killed them with machine-gun fire on the shores of the river Danube

  • The decision to charge
  • Alleged Nazi Sandor Kepiro died while