The Justice Department began denaturalization proceedings Tuesday against an elderly New Jersey inhabitant charged with having served as a Nazi propagandist during World War II.
A complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Newark against Ferenc Koreh, a resident of Englewood, N.J., who during the war edited and wrote virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American articles for Hungarian publications.
The complaint, filed by the Office of Special Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the district of New Jersey, charges that Koreh concealed his wartime background both in 1950, when he applied for a U.S. visa in Salzburg, Austria, and in 1955, when he applied for American citizenship in Brooklyn.
Koreh was found guilty by the People’s Court of Budapest in 1947 of war crimes committed as an editor of a Hungarian magazine that espoused the Nazi cause.
Koreh was admitted to the United States as a displaced person on Dec. 11, 1950. In the United States, Koreh did Hungarian-language broadcasts for Radio Free Europe.
Some of the information about Koreh was provided by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in June 1978, in response to a request by American Nazi-hunter and journalist Charles Allen.
But the information on him that may have gotten the most widespread public exposure was provided by United Nations correspondent David Horowitz, whom Koreh later sued for libel.
SUED FOR $3 MILLION
Koreh sued Horowitz for $3 million because of articles published in Horowitz’s United Israel Bulletin and syndicated in Anglo-Jewish newspapers. The articles charged that Koreh, through his writings, had paved the way for the Hitler to take over Hungary.
Horowitz and his lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, found in Hungarian records that Koreh had been a member of the Nazi Arrow Cross.
The civil action suit was settled without trial in 1978, after a year’s proceedings in U.S. District Court in New York. At the hearing, Judge Joseph Griesa read out a statement, saying Koreh was responsible for the mass murder of Jews, Horowitz recalled Wednesday.
Between 1941-44, Koreh was chief editor of Szekely Nep, a Transylvanian newspaper.
The Justice Department complaint charges that as editor of Szekely Nep, Koreh wrote and published anti-Semitic articles with such titles as “The Role of Jewish Capital in the Present World War,” “Disloyal, Unscrupulous, Cheating Jews in the Pages of Hungarian History,” “The Need to De-Jewify the Legal Profession” and “How Did World Jewry Drive the People of the United States into War?”
The government’s complaint also alleges that from mid-1944 to May 1945, Koreh was press officer in the Hungarian Ministry of Propaganda and that in the summer of 1944, he was editor in chief of Tolnai Vilaglapja, an eminent Hungarian magazine that supported the Axis war effort.
He was found guilty of war crimes for this work.
Koreh, reached by phone at his home in Englewood, declined to respond to the complaint. “I will, I will, but not now, thank you,” he said as he hung up.
This is not the first time the Justice Department has prosecuted an alleged Nazi propagandist. It succeeded in its case against Vladimir Samarin-Sokolov, a former Yale University teacher who edited a Nazi newspaper in the Soviet Union during the war.
Sokolov was ordered deported. His request for asylum in Canada is pending.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
