A United Nations spokesman has rejected as trivial a charge by a Swedish newspaper that Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring, the UN’s special Middle East representative, was once a member of a Swedish Nazi Party. The spokesman replied to a charge by the Aftenbladet (Evening Blade), one of Sweden’s largest papers, that Dr. Jarring was a parliamentary candidate of the National Unity Party in 1936, when he was 29.
The paper said Dr. Jarring, who is now Sweden’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, was active in the party from 1926 to 1939, leaving it one year before entering the Foreign Ministry. The party, according to the Aftenbladet, demanded that Jews be barred from entering Sweden. The UN spokesman said that according to information obtained here–Dr. Jarring is in Moscow–the diplomat Joined the youth organization of the Conservative Party in 1926 when it was considered respectable.
Later, however, the youth unit broke from the party and formed a Nazi-oriented organization of its own, he said, and Dr. Jarring left the group in 1937, “Somebody must be pretty hard up for news,” the spokesman said, but he was unsure whether Dr. Jarring had left the party before or after it veered far right.
(In Washington, Swedish Embassy press attache Larus Lonnback said he could neither confirm nor deny the Aftenbladet allegations. Today’s query by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he said, was the first he had received.)
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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.
