A neo-Nazi website in Hungary is offering money for information about protesters
that called for the arrest of a suspected war criminal, it emerged on
Sunday.
Kuruc.info promised 100,000 forints ($450) to anyone who provides
data on the demonstrators who called for the trial of suspected Nazi
collaborator Laszlo Csatary outside his house near Budapest last
week.
“We will distribute 100,000 forints among those who send us the
most useful information about the [participants],” text appearing on the website
read.
“75 thousands forints have been offered by our Comrade Bela Varga
who lives in America. Good hunting!” The website – which is full of
anti-Semitic imagery, including a Nazi hammer crushing a Star of David – accused
gatherers at the rally organized by a Jewish student group of conspiring to
“kill Hungarians.”
“They complain about various crimes when they are
responsible for corrupting our country into communism and later into
capitalism,” the text read. “They are responsible for the death of many
thousands of Hungarians, for the emigration of hundreds of thousands, for the
killing of six million fetuses, for the selling of the country not to speak
about the genocide in Palestine and the other crimes against
humanity.”
Last Thursday, Hungarian authorities indicted Csatary for
involvement in the sending of 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz when he was police chief
of Kosice.
The 97-year-old’s whereabouts had been unknown since he fled
Canada in the 1990s after his wartime history had been discovered.
Nazi
hunter Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, traced him to Hungary late
last year and asked prosecutors to act. Last week, Csatary was formally charged,
making headlines around the world and apparently arousing the ire of
sympathizers.
On Sunday, Zuroff said the offer by Kuruc.info was an
attempt to intimidate protesters.
“Apparently, the Hungarian right-wing
extremists cannot bear the exposure of the criminals who committed crimes
against humanity against fellow Hungarian citizens during World War II who were
inspired to do so by the same anti-Semitic fascist ideology that they are
currently trying to disseminate in Hungary,” he said.
He said several
protesters including Andrea Gergely, one of the organizers of the demonstration
against Csatary, had received threats.
An employee at the Hungarian
Embassy in Israel on Sunday said it could not comment on the website as it was
closed.