Hungarian Man Charged With Nazi War Crimes

Hungarian prosecutors have put a suspect on trial for his potential involvement in the violent handling and deportation of Jewish people during World War II.

Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary allegedly moved almost 12,000 Jews to concentration camps around Europe during spring of 1944, the Metropolitan Chief Prosecution Office in Budapest told CNN.

Csizsik-Csatary was a senior Hungarian police officer working in the city of Kosice, now Slovakia.

After Csizsik-Csatary, who is in his late 90s, was found living in Hungary in 2011, Jewish rights organization The Wiesenthal Center and British publication The Sun blew the lid off his case last year, publicizing his alleged war crimes.

He was number one on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals.

Prosecutors claimed that Csizsik-Csatary was commander of a collection and deportation camp in a brick factory, where thousands of Jews living nearby were forcibly moved into a ghetto and work camp after German troops stormed the town.

According to the indictment, in May of 1944, Csizsik-Csatary "regularly beat the interned Jews with his bare hands and whipped them with a dog-whip without any special reasons and irrespective of the sex, age or health condition of the assaulted people."

He was "actively involved in and assisted deportations" from May to the beginning of June, when nearly 12,000 Jews were deported in jam-packed freight cars to death camps.

The indictment also stated that most of the Jews transferred from Kosice went to Auschwitz-a sure move toward the grave.

During the start of June, he also reportedly "prohibited cutting windows on the wagons which could have helped the about 80 people being crammed under inhuman circumstances in the windowless wagons to get more fresh air."

The Wiesenthal Center told CNN that Csizsik-Csatary has been convicted before, in absentia-he was sentenced to death for performing crude and violent acts on Jews, as well as his participation in transporting prisoners to Auschwitz.

Csizsik-Csatary fled to Canada at the end of WWII, but lost his citizenship in the country in 1997. He left the country voluntarily, then was found in Hungary two years ago as part of the Wiesenthal Center's Last Chance project.