Sándor Képíró
Hungarian police officer (1914–2011)
Sándor Képíró (18 February 1914 – 3 September 2011) was a Hungarian gendarmerie captain during World War II accused of war crimes committed by Hungarian forces.
Wartime career
A police officer in the Hungarian gendarmerie, by 1942 Képíró was serving in the region of Bácska (Bačka) (today divided between Hungary and Serbia), which had been transferred to Hungary as a result of the Axis invasion and partition of Yugoslavia. In January 1942 raids were conducted in several parts in the region, including Novi Sad, and an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 civilians, mostly Serbs and Jews, were rounded up and killed. Képíró took part in this rounding up and later admitted playing that part in the affair. In 1944 he was put on trial, with fourteen other Hungarian army and police officers, accused of taking part in the raids. The court found that he had been implicated in the round-up, but he was not severely punished.
Later events
In 1948, the post-war Communist authorities in Hungary took Képíró's case back to court in his absence, relying on the evidence of a man called János Nagy, who claimed to have been a member of Képíró's platoon in 1942. Képíró later claimed that he had never heard of Nagy, but was found guilty and sentenced in his absence to fourteen years' imprisonment. It was later found that the testimony of Nagy had been obtained under torture by the communist secret service.
Képíró stayed away from Budapest until 1996, when after the fall of the communist government he quietly returned home and was not identified with the man convicted in 1948.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q515405. VIAF identifies the subject as 186198675. The Library of Congress control number is no2014012278. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 2011, 1942 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sándor Képíró” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.