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Debus, who is 64, is well known to residents of New South Wales as a former long-time state MP. He has held a number of state portfolios, including seven years as NSW attorney-general.

He is less known nationally, after being elected to Federal Parliament only last year, but his state-level experience led to his immediate front bench appointment as minister for home affairs.

According to Robert Goot and Peter Wertheim, members of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Debus is well regarded within the Jewish community.

Most recently, he was instrumental in assisting the quick passage of legislation that made Jewish security expenses tax deductible.

Wertheim, the former president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, who worked closely with Debus when he was NSW attorney-general, said “unlike many other politicians, Bob is an independent thinker and does not fit neatly into any ideological pigeon-hole”.

He spoke of a man who worked hard, even when it was not politically popular, to help eliminate racial vilification.

“I remember being called to Bob’s office to discuss an anti-Semitic publication that had come to his notice,” Wertheim said. “He was genuinely outraged by it and sought advice about prosecuting the publisher.”

Debus was informed that criminal prosecution was not an option, so he set about appointing a committee, eventually chaired by Wertheim, to consider amending the NSW anti-vilification laws.

“The working party made certain recommendations, which Bob fully supported, even though he knew they would not be politically popular and they were, in fact, blocked by senior bureaucrats,” Wertheim said.

“It was one of the few occasions Bob did not get his way. But there was no doubt where his sympathies lay.”

Last month Magistrate Barbara Lane ruled that Zentai -– who is being pursued by the Hungarian government for allegedly murdering a Hungarian Jewish teenager during the Holocaust – had satisfied administrative requirements for extradition.

According to the bilateral extradition treaty signed by Australia and Hungary in 1997, a number of criteria must be fulfilled.

The alleged crime must be punishable by more than one year in prison, and it must be an offence under the laws of both countries. The charges must not be politically motivated.

Following Lane’s decision, and pending Zentai’s appeal, it will be up to Debus to ensure the judicial requirements for extradition have been fulfilled.

According to the Attorney-General’s Department, the minister has to be assured that the accused will not face torture following extradition and that the alleged crime is not punishable by death.

Finally, the minister can use his own discretion in making the final decision and this may include the consideration of any humanitarian aspects.

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Commonwealth prosecutor Michael Corboy SC said that, under extradition proceedings, the magistrate was not permitted to delve into foreign law. He said whether the legislation was valid was a matter for the federal Attorney-General.

Ms Lane is due to hand down her judgment tomorrow, determining whether Mr Zentai is “eligible for surrender” after the Republic of Hungary submitted an extradition request in 2005.

If it is deemed that the great-grandfather should be extradited, the final decision will lie with Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus.

Mr Zentai’s son, Ernie Steiner, said the trip back to Hungary would kill his father, who was admitted to hospital last week with heart problems.

Mr Steiner said that, if the magistrate decided his father should be extradited, the family could appeal against the decision to the Supreme Court or Federal Court. But the final decision rested with Mr Debus.

“My father is completely innocent,” Mr Steiner said. “He was never a Nazi, never a member of the fascist Arrowcross, never involved in anything to do with the Holocaust, detested the German occupation of his country and he had many Jewish friends in Hungary.

“We have faith in the Australian legal system but have no trust in the Hungarian Government who are willing to pursue an innocent (86-year-old) man to this extent.”

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Mr Zentai, 86, is wanted in Hungary for allegedly torturing and murdering 18-year-old Jewish man Peter Balazs in Budapest during army service in World War II.

Last month, he lost a constitutional challenge in the High Court against the power of state magistrates to rule on extradition matters, and will now face the Perth Magistrates Court on May 20 for a hearing allocation date on his extradition.

Mr Zentai’s son Ernie Steiner says his father has fibrillation, a heart rhythm disorder, and an unidentified blockage in the brain which could be responsible for his two or three mini-strokes every week.

The octogenarian also has peripheral neuropathy which causes numbness in the hands and feet and can lead to diabetes.

Mr Zentai today said he was too sick to be sent to Hungary for trial.

“I probably wouldn’t come back, wouldn’t come out of it alive,” he told ABC radio.

“I don’t think so.”

Mr Steiner has also questioned whether his father would get a fair trial before a Hungarian military tribunal.

If the Perth Magistrates Court rules that Mr Zentai’s case meets the terms of the Extradition Act, it will then be up to federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland, or his delegate, to decide whether to surrender the Perth man to Hungary.

Mr Zentai has repeatedly denied the claims brought against him by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights organisation, and today again claimed his innocence.

“Definitely, I was not involved in any such activities,” he said.

“I never murdered anybody, particularly not Peter Balazs. No, definitely not, I’m innocent of that.”

Mr Zentai was this week ranked number seven of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s top 10 most wanted suspected Nazis.

The centre says he has been under investigation by Hungary’s Foreign Ministry since December 2004 on suspicion of killing Peter Balazs in 1944 for failing to wear a yellow star identifying him as Jew.

If Mr Zentai is extradited, it would be the first time an Australian faced a court charged with Nazi war crimes.

In 2001, Konrad Kalejs died before he could be extradited from Australia to face a trial over alleged war crimes as a Nazi collaborator in Latvia.

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Mr Zentai denies any involvement, saying he left Budapest on November 7, 1944, and rejects the testimony of witnesses who implicated him at the trial of his co-accused Lajos Nagy in 1947.

Nagy and fellow soldier Bela Mader were convicted for their part in Balazs’s death.

Now 86 and a widower living in the southern Perth suburb of Willetton, Mr Zentai claims he would not receive a fair trial.

If he is extradited, his trial would be held in the military division of the Budapest Metropolitan Court in front of three military judges and no jury.

He would be entitled to hire a lawyer of his choice, or one would be provided for him and paid for by the state.

If is he found guilty, “then all charges will be paid by him”, Mr Acs said through an interpreter. If he is acquitted, “then all legal costs will be paid by the state. This is the rule in every criminal court case.”

Mr Acs said normal rules of evidence applied in the Hungarian military court.

The prosecutor was aware of claims that the evidence against Mr Zentai was tainted because it was given by former soldiers who were likely to have been beaten or told what to say by officials of the post-war Budapest People’s Court.

“There were not only soldiers giving evidence against him, but civilians as well,” he said. “There is no need to force a Jewish civilian plaintiff to tell how he was beaten up in the garrison.

“There were more than one witnesses, and not from one side only.”

Perth Magistrates Court is to set a date for Mr Zentai’s extradition hearing on May 20.

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“The fact that Bela Mader did not mention Zentai as one of the people who killed Peter Balazs is meaningless,” Dr Zuroff told The Australian.

He said it was well known that Mr Zentai’s alleged role in the beating did not come to light at Mader’s trial in the Budapest People’s Court in 1947, but was detailed at Nagy’s trial in 1948.

“All of this is irrelevant in the light of Zentai’s desperate efforts to avoid extradition, after openly declaring his willingness ‘to go to Hungary to clear his name’,” he said.

“All of Zentai’s behaviour to this point has been that of a person trying to hide his involvement in a crime.

“If he is innocent, he should be running to clear his name in a court of law rather than doing everything possible to avoid being tried.

“As much as I understand the efforts of the Steiners to extricate their father from this matter, nothing they have done has in any way undermined the basic evidence of his role in the murder of Peter Balazs.”

Dr Zuroff expressed frustration that Mr Zentai had been able to hold up his extradition proceedings for more than two years with a jurisdictional appeal that has reached the High Court.

The Hungarian Government asked Australia to extradite Mr Zentai in April 2005 but Mr Zentai’s appeal against the authority of magistrates to approve the extradition has stalled proceedings until at least February next year.

Mr Zentai has health problems that his family says have worsened in the past two years, and he would not survive extradition.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which is dedicated to finding suspected World War II criminals and helping to prosecute them, gave Australia a fail mark in its annual worldwide report this year.

The centre has been highly critical of Australia for failing to track down and prosecute “at least several hundred” Nazi war criminals believed to have found refuge here.

“Australia remains the only major Western country of refuge which admitted at least several hundred Nazi war criminals and collaborators, which has hereto failed to take successful legal action against a single one,” Dr Zuroff reported in 2005.

“Numerous attempts have been made … to convince the Australian authorities to adopt civil remedies - denaturalisation and/or deportation - to deal with Holocaust perpetrators in the country, but the Government has refused to do so.”

Yesterday, Dr Zuroff said it was not easy to get justice for long-dead victims, particularly when their accused killers were old and frail. “Part of the problem in Australia in (the Zentai) case is that the judges only see the elderly defendant before them and not the battered corpse of the victim,” he said.

“If Peter Balazs’s body could have been fished out of the Danube and brought to Perth, perhaps Zentai would have been extradited to stand trial in Hungary long ago.”

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Mader’s testimony was used at Nagy’s trial in the Budapest People’s Court in February 1948, and he was convicted.

Mader was also convicted at a trial in relation to Balazs’s murder and admitted during his interrogation that he was cruel to the teenager as he lay dying in the inner office.

Mr Zentai, a retired mental health nurse living in the southern Perth suburb of Willeton, has maintained his innocence and his silence since extradition proceedings began.

Through his son, Ernie Steiner, he has said he never met Balazs and left Budapest with most of his unit the day before the murder.

Mader and Nagy, he said, arrived two days after him.

Mr Steiner has searched for two years for evidence that could help his father’s case.

Mr Steiner is buoyed by his discovery of the transcript of Mader’s interrogation in a Hungarian government archive and said relatives and friends, including Mr Zentai, helped with the translation.

“There are other witnesses who name my father, I am aware of that,” Mr Steiner said. “But to me, this interrogation is very significant because Mader is asked who did it and he does not mention my father.”

If Mr Zentai’s appeals against his extradition and the process used to decide it are unsuccessful, he will present the transcript as part of a last-minute appeal to Justice Minister David Johnston.

Mr Steiner has sifted through gruesome claims against his father, including the evidence of Janos Mahr, who served in Mr Zentai’s unit.

“Everyone knew that Lajos Nagy and Zentai were beating captives,” he testified to the Budapest People’s Court after Mr Zentai had fled Hungary.

He said he saw “a healthy, good-looking, 18- or 19-year-old boy” taken into Mader’s room about the time that Balazs was murdered.

“He was beaten by Nagy and Zentai,” Mr Mahr testified. “This beating lasted from 3pm to 8pm. Bela Mader was also present. I could tell what was going on from the noise and cries.”

On the day Balazs was plucked from a Budapest tram, the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross had been in power barely three weeks and gangs were attacking Jews.

Mr Steiner said his father, a conscript to the army, was never a member of the Arrow Cross and was fleeing communism - not justice - when he gained entry to Australia as a refugee in 1950.

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Taking into account that Mr Zentai had been given special leave on September 13 to appeal his extradition, magistrate Steven Heath adjourned the matter until February 12.

The decision pleased the retired mental health nurse and his children, who are determined to ensure he is not sent to Budapest to face trial. They say he is suffering from myriad health problems and would not survive extradition.

Mr Zentai is wanted in Hungary for the fatal beating of 18-year-old Peter Balazs in the last months of World War II, when lawlessness prospered on the streets of Budapest under the Nazi-backed Arrow Cross.

Mr Zentai was a 23-year-old warrant officer in the Hitler-aligned Hungarian army when he is alleged to have snatched Balazs from a tram on November 8, 1944, taken him to the Arena Utza barracks and participated in his fatal beating and the dumping of his body in the Danube.

He denies knowing Balazs or having any involvement in his death and says he left Budapest with his army unit for Hunta on November 7, 1944, the day before the murder.

He has said he did know the two men convicted after the war for their part in Balazs’s fatal beating, Bela Mader and Lajos Nagy, and says they arrived in Hunta by bus two days after him.

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