Interned American Jews Killed During Allied Raids on Budapest, Say Hungarians

Eighty-nine American Jews who had been interned in Hungary since the outbreak of the war were killed during recent Allied bombings of Budapest, according to the Budapest newspaper Fueggetlenseg, official organ of the pro-Nazi Sztojay government.

The paper, a copy of which was received here today, claims that the Jews were recently moved from an internment camp near a railroad station at the request of the central Jewish council which was charged with securing food and other supplies for the Americans. It has been the expressed policy of the Hungarian Government, however, to move Jews from places of comparative safety to areas close to military targets and to deny them access to air-raid shelters.

The Fueggetlenseg says that two of the seven buildings in which the American Jews were quartered had been destroyed, and that it was impossible even to find the remains of the bodies of the occupants, among whom were women and children. Survivors have been returned to their original camp, the paper adds.

The Budapest correspondent of the Berlin Boersen Zeitung reports that Jewish property in Hungary is valued at about thirty billion pengoes (approximately six billion dollars). Most of this property has been confiscated by the government under decrees issued since the German occupation of the country. The publication of the Budapest Property Owners Association, however, complains that confiscations are not proceeding rapidly enough and urges the authorities to take over 15,000 houses in Budapest won by Jews and 20,000 in the provinces.

Meanwhile, protests continue to mount against the economic and physical destruction of Hungarian Jewry by the Germans and the pro-Nazi authorities. Today the Reformed Consistory of the National Protestant Church at Basle, the Swiss Catholic Association at Geneva and other Swiss religious bodies issued statements attacking the mistreatment of the Jews. Catholic Bishop Dr. Kury joined in the protests.