Albert Wass - World War II Sentence For War Crimes

World War II Sentence For War Crimes

In May 1946, both Wass and his father, Endre Wass, were sentenced to death in absentia by a Romanian tribunal for ordering the killing of Romanian peasants from Sucutard and Mureşenii de Câmpie and their possessions were confiscated, by Romanian People's Tribunal, a tribunal set up by the post-World War II government of Romania, overseen by the Allied Control Commission to trial suspected war criminals, in line with Article 14 of the Armistice Agreement with Romania. The tribunal were to a large extent set up on the model of the Nürnberg International Tribunal. They accused for events that happened in September 1940, during the march in of the Hungarian forces to North Transylvania, when a Hungarian lieutenant, Pakucs, arrested six inhabitants (a Romanian priest and his family, and his Hungarian servant, and Romanian peasants, and a local Jewish merchant and his family) of Sucutard (Szentgothárd), and then shot to death two Romanian men and two Jewish women, Eszter and Róza Mihály in Ţaga (Czege), at the order the Albert and Endre Wass, when they allegedly attempted to escape. Albert Wass was also accused for, as the alleged instigator, for the shootings at Mureşenii de Câmpie (Omboztelke), when Hungarian soldiers, led by Lieutenant Gergely Csordás, killed 11 Jews. Wass defended himself as not present at the killings.

Romanian authorities tried several times to extradite him to Romania, however in 1979, after several revisions, the U.S. Department of Justice refused the petition due to lack of evidence. This was confirmed even after the Wiesenthal Center denounced him, as he was among the people who were accused of killing Jews. After the analysis of the case, the U.S. dropped the charges against him.

Albert Wass claimed several times that the secret police of Communist Romania, the Securitate, was trying to assassinate him, but he was not able to prove it. In 1996, he shot a film on bullet marks allegedly trying to kill him, but no solid evidence was found to link it to the Securitate. The two perpetrators of that attempt had been captured by American police, but they were released on account of their Romanian diplomatic passport.

In 2008, his son, Andreas Wass, appealed to the Romanian courts to annul the sentence, but the Romanian courts found that no new evidence was presented and as such, the sentence was upheld.