West Germany Asks Hungarian Government for Documents on Dr. Tceroek

The West German Foreign Office said today it had asked its commercial representative in Budapest to ask the Hungarian Government for documents needed to clarify the issue of charges that Dr. Alexander Toerosk, counsellor to the West German Embassy in Israel, was a wartime member of the Hungarian Fascist Arrow Cross.

The request was made to the commercial representative because West Germany does not have diplomatic relations with Fungary. Dr. Toeroek, who has consistently denied the charges since they were aired earlier this year by Communist sources, asked the West German Foreign Office to make an investigation of the accusation to clear his name. He visited Bonn over the weekend in connection with the problem and returned to his post in Tel Aviv today.

The Foreign Office has said that there were several ways in which the matter could be cleared up with little difficulty. Foreign Office officials said on several occasions that the Office had received only copies of the documents allegedly showing that Dr. Toeroek had applied for membership in the Arrow Cross in 1943 and became a member. He was then a Hungarian citizen, later becoming a naturalized German citizen.

The Foreign Office officials said also that since the copied documents may be false, it is necessary to have the original ones for an investigation, a view the Foreign Office said it shared with the Israel Foreign Ministry. For this reason, the officials said, they were asking the Hungarian Government to present the original documents to the West German commercial representative in Budapest.

Alternatively, the Bonn officials said, they were asking Hungarian officials to agree to have the documents investigated and checked at the source by experts–Hungarian experts, if Hungary so insisted.

The officials added that, at the present stage of their investigation of the charges, there was no reason why Dr. Toeroek should not resume his duties in Tel Aviv.