"Nazi Hunters" of the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Wednesday welcomed the arrest of Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, the number one on the organization’s list of Nazi war criminals, RIA Novosti said.

“This moment is very important for us, it is an unprecedented achievement. We are overjoyed at the news that Hungary has finally made all the necessary moves,” Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told RIA Novosti by phone.

The Wiesenthal Center accuses Csizsik-Csatary, 97, of sending at least 15,700 Jews to death camps when he served as a police chief of the Jewish ghetto in Kosice, a town which at that time was in Hungary but is now part of Slovakia.

A Czechoslovakian court sentenced him to death in absentia in 1948, but he fled to Canada where he worked as an art dealer. After Canadian authorities discovered his involvement in war crimes in the 1990s, Csizsik-Csatary was stripped of his citizenship and fled before his extradition documents were ready.

He has since lived in Budapest until the Wiesenthal Center found him and requested his arrest last year.

Founded in 1977, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, is among the world’s largest Jewish human rights organization and known for its “hunt” for Nazi war criminals.