Germans Arrest Leading Hungarian Jewish Industrialist, Send Him to Concentration Camp

Baron Andreas Hatvany, ” a big Jewish industrialist” has been arrested by the Germans in Hungary and sent to a concentration camp, the Nazi Transkontinent Press reports today.

Baron Hatvany, who headed important sugar refining and allied interests, disappeared in the middle of March and the police have been searching for him ever since, the Transkontinent dispatch said. He is charged with failure to register his property. The Hatvany family, whose original name was Deutsch, has been prominent in Hungarian industrial, political and artistic life since the middle of the 19th century.

(The Office of War Information in Washington reports that Baron Hatvany has two sisters living in the United States. They are Lily Hatvany, a playwright and novelist, who is now in Hollywood, and Antonia Hatvany, a writer on political affairs, who resides in New York.)

Meanwhile, Hungarian officials, obviously uneasy about the accounts of the persecution of Hungarian Jews appearing in the press abroad, continue to absolve them selves of all responsibility. Bela Imredi, former premier who resigned because it was discovered he had Jewish ancestors, but who is now an official of the pro-Nazi Sztojay government, declared today, according to the Hungarian radio, that “contrary to rumors abroad not a single drop of Jewish blood has soiled the hands of the authorities.” Imredi failed, however, to make any reference to the reports of deportations of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Polish death camps.