The Israel Foreign Ministry instructed its legation in Budapest today to investigate allegations in a Hungarian newspaper that Dr. Alexander Toerock, counselor in the West German Embassy in Tel Aviv, was a wartime member of the Hungarian Nazi Party. Dr. Toerock has denied the charge, and contended that a reproduction of his alleged party membership card was a forgery.
Dr. Toerock, a naturalized West German citizen, was a Hungarian during the war and represented Hungary in Berlin during the Nazi regime. The charges and alleged document were reported in Israeli newspapers last week. Yediot Achronoth, an evening newspaper which first aired the charges of past Nazism against Dr. Toerock, repeated those accusations today. The newspaper reported that, in a telephone interview with the Hungarian Jewish historian, Jano Libai, of Budapest, the latter repeated his charge that Dr. Toerock had been a member of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi party, during the war.
(The spokesman for West Germany’s Foreign Office denied again in Bonn today charges that Dr. Toerock was a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Nazi Party during the Hitler period. The allegations, said the spokesman, were “typical Communist maneuvers, designed to provoke dissension between the Bonn Government and those states with which it is in harmony.”)
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