Torture files uncovered

By Natasha Robinson
February 18, 2006

Lajos Polgar at home last year. He is under investigation. /File COURT papers detailing torture, rape and murder at the headquarters of a Nazi-aligned regime allegedly commanded by a Melbourne pensioner have been uncovered in Holocaust archives in Jerusalem.

The testimonies of Holocaust survivors tortured in the basement of the Budapest headquarters of the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross party back up the new evidence revealed this week by 82-year-old Susanne Nozick.
Mrs Nozick's testimony that she was raped and beaten inside the building's cellars together with her mother, who was later murdered, is being examined by Hungarian prosecutors.

Included in the evidence sent to Budapest by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre are several additional testimonies of survivors who gave evidence in the post-war trials of Arrow Cross officials.

Lajos Polgar, 89, from Ferntree Gully in Melbourne's east - chief of the notorious House of Loyalty - is under investigation for war crimes by Hungarian authorities. He denies he committed any war crimes during late 1944, when the Arrow Cross held power, but evidence uncovered in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, sourced from Hungarian government archives, provides witness accounts of torture and murder in the basement at the party headquarters at 60 Andrassy Boulevard.

Simon Wiesenthal's chief investigator, Efraim Zuroff, said it was not yet clear whether the witnesses were still alive.

Their testimony was sourced from the court trials of Arrow Cross henchmen who were convicted and hanged after the war, Dr Zuroff said.

"These are specific instances of people who were tortured in the headquarters of the Arrow Cross," he told The Weekend Australian yesterday. "The people who were involved in those crimes were convicted."

Mr Polgar denies any knowledge of the torture taking place inside the cellar of the building he commanded, which is now a museum. The torture of Jews in the building's cellar - which was later used as a jail by the communist regime - is today documented at the museum.

After The Australian published the evidence of Mrs Nozick yesterday, questions arose as to the evidentiary tests that Hungarian prosecutors must apply in considering war crimes charges.

Dr Zuroff is adamant that the existence of historical court records in which party leader Jozsef Gera names Mr Polgar as commander of the House of Loyalty, combined with court records that contain evidence that Jews were murdered in the building's basement, is evidence enough to charge him.

But the former chief historian of the now-defunct Australian war crimes unit, Konrad Kwiet, said that Mrs Nozick's testimony alone would be unlikely to be admitted as evidence in any court trial. "The horrifying testimony of this woman, as gripping as it is, if she can't substantiate it, if she does not have evidence for that, I think it would not be admitted, or at least that it would be disputed," Professor Kwiet said.

"And whether that survives the legal process - I doubt it."

Professor Kwiet said that in a criminal prosecution, it would have to be proven that Mr Polgar was "part or present or instrumental" in the rape, murder and torture taking place in the building's cellar.

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