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The allegations against Zentai underline this. They include formal statements of witnesses who place Zentai in a Nazi-controlled Hungarian military unit in 1944.

They also indicate that Zentai was involved in the kidnapping, beating and torture of a young Jewish man, Peter Balazs, whose body was thrown into the Danube, a common occurrence in the last bloody months of German rule.

This evidence was reportedly first presented to a Hungarian court in 1947 during the trial of Zentai’s co-accused. Zentai had fled by then and would soon make a new life in Australia.

The Australian’s investigation of Zentai in 2005 uncovered evidence that he had been involved in systematically rounding up, beating and torturing Jews. The evidence included the testimony of witness Jakob Mermelstein, as well as documents from the 1947 trial giving graphic descriptions of the beating that Balazs suffered, allegedly at Zentai’s hands, that left him virtually unrecognisable.

Like other accused war criminals, Zentai has insisted he was far away from the scene, claiming he left Budapest on November 7, 1944, the day before Balazs’s murder. However, the testimony of the witnesses who implicated him in 1947 places him in Budapest at the scene of the crime on November 8, 1944.

The Hungarian Government lodged an extradition request with Australia on March 30, 2005, but the case has been mired in highly technical legal arguments, first in the Federal Court and finally in the High Court, which has returned the case to the West Australian courts to determine whether Zentai is eligible for extradition.

Zentai is 86 and has successfully postponed his case for three years by challenging our legal framework. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly. Even if a judicial decision is made expeditiously to extradite him, there are several avenues of appeal that could take years. So it seems likely that Zentai will either die in the meantime or, if he is alive when a judicial decision is made, he could appeal to the Home Affairs Minister (who will make the final decision), claiming old age, frailty and illness to avoid extradition.

This unsatisfactory situation results from the indifference of successive Australian governments towards accused war criminals, beginning with Chifley in the 1940s and taking in the Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser years.

In 1986 Bob Hawke finally acted, launching investigations that confirmed hundreds of Nazis had made Australia home, which was widely known in the senior echelons of our immigration, police and intelligence services. Indeed, such knowledge went all the way up to the office of successive prime ministers, yet nothing was done to bring to justice the mass killers of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, who had also frequently fought directly against Australia.

To our everlasting shame, Hawke’s efforts were abandoned in 1991 by the Keating government. Then the Howard government dead-batted many other allegations, leaving Zentai as one the last cases involving a living suspect. Most others have evaded justice through the passage of time. As things stand, Australia is the last refuge for Nazi criminals as major efforts continue in many Western countries, including Canada, Italy, Germany and the US.

The Zentai case may be Australia’s last chance to demonstrate that we, too, have used our laws to deliver some belated justice for the victims of the Holocaust. But this is only part of the story. The new Labor government has other tests ahead to cast off the shame of the Keating legacy.

It has been established that there are many monsters in Australia from recent conflicts, yet virtually nothing has been done to investigate or bring them to justice. The Rudd Government should devote adequate resources to investigate the many charges against Cambodians, Afghanis, Serbs, Croats, Chileans and Rwandans who, like Zentai, stand accused of crimes against humanity.

Labor’s next test will be the case of Dragan Vasiljkovic, the Serb paramilitary leader whose role in the Balkans wars of the 1990s has prompted an extradition request by the Croatian Government.

As we remember our war heroes today, we should also demand that our Government pursue a more systematic and determined approach to accused mass killers whose presence in Australia demeans our national pride.

Mark Aarons is the author of War Criminals Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945.

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