German Arrest For WWII Massacres

An 86-year-old former commander of a Nazi-backed unit suspected in the World War II massacres of Slovak civilians, including Jews, has been arrested at his home in Munich, prosecutors said Monday.

The unit also captured a group of U.S. and British officers on a behind-the-lines mission in Slovakia in 1944 as well as an Associated Press war correspondent, Joseph Morton, who was with them. They were executed at a concentration camp in Austria.

The suspect, whom German authorities identified only as Ladislav N., is being investigated for possible charges of 164 counts of murder in what could lead to one of the last trials of Nazi-era suspects in Germany. He is not being investigated for the capture of the Americans and Britons.

The man, arrested Friday, is accused of having headed a Slovak unit that hunted down resistance fighters when Slovakia was a Nazi puppet state during World War II.

He is being investigated in the killings of 146 people in the villages of Ostry Grun and Klak in central Slovakia in January 1945. He is also accused of ordering the shooting of 18 Jewish civilians who were discovered in their hiding places at Ksina in February 1945. In both cases, most victims were women and children, Munich prosecutors said.

A court in then Czechoslovakia in 1962 convicted the man, now a German citizen, of those and other killings and sentenced him to death in his absence.

Historians identify the Slovak unit's commander as Capt. Ladislav Niznansky.

In late 1944, Niznansky's unit captured U.S. and British officers who were on a mission to Slovakia to investigate and assist a revolt that liberated downed Allied airmen from enemy prison camps. With them was Morton.

When Nazis closed in, Morton and U.S. intelligence officers were forced to flee to the mountains. They were captured in a Slovak mountain hut on Dec. 26, 1944, and deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, where they were tortured and executed on Jan. 24, 1945.

Morton was the only war correspondent known to have been executed by any side during World War II.

Munich prosecutors said they began investigating in 2001 after the Slovak government approached them about the case. German prosecutors reviewed archives and court documents in Czech Republic and Slovakia, and attended the questioning of witnesses as part of their investigation.

Niznansky is believed to have fled to Germany after a 1948 communist coup in then Czechoslovakia. He later worked for several decades at Radio Free Europe, a U.S.-financed station in Munich that broadcast to the East Bloc during the Cold War.

Jozef Spetko, who worked with Niznansky in the station's Slovak section, said the 1962 conviction was "no secret" around Radio Free Europe.

"He said he was innocent. He claimed he had only been an interpreter," Spetko told The Associated Press by telephone.

Slovak historians say members of Niznansky's unit on Jan. 21, 1945 first attacked Ostry Grun, killing 62 people. They went on to Klak, where they killed another 84. In one case, partisan Martin Herka was brutally tortured, then thrown into a burning house, according to the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica.
By Andrea Dudikova