Wiesenthal Center raps Hungary for neo-Nazi memorial

Flyer for a Veteran’s Day event in town of Szekesfehervar featuring SS veteran shows a Nazi underneath the banner ‘Remember the Heroes!’

The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Friday strongly condemned Hungarian officials for allowing a neo-Nazi event to take place in the city of Szekesfehervar.

A Hungarian flyer for the event scheduled for February 6 showed a Nazi soldier beneath the words “Remember the Heroes!” The event was to feature an SS veteran and neo-Nazis.

The hate speech watchdog organization strongly condemned the event, calling it “another blatant attempt to honor and glorify the perpetrators of the Holocaust.”

“For such an event to be allowed to go forward without any condemnation in the country that is currently chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and has a law against Holocaust denial, is an exercise in political and historical hypocrisy,” the Center’s Director of Government Affairs Mark Weitzman charged.

Szekesfehervar made headlines last year after the city council proposed to erect a monument to Balint Homan, a Hungarian government minister who ordered the deaths of some 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

The life-sized statue of Homan was scheduled to be unveiled on December 29 for the 130th anniversary of his birth, but outcry from Jewish groups and others prompted the town to scrap the project late last year.

Homan supported calls for the deportation of Jews from Hungary in 1944 after the Nazi takeover. Around 600,000 Hungarian Jews were later transported to Nazi death camps and murdered.

After World War II, Homan was handed a life sentence for his role in approving Hungary joining Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He died in prison in 1951.

However, a Budapest court in March found there had been a lack of evidence for his conviction, after which Szekesfehervar City Hall approved the statue plan.

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