Former Hungarian premier Bela Imredy today told the special tribunal trying him as a war criminal that he had not known of the German death camps and did not, at first, believe the accounts of German mistreatment of Jews and others.
He alleged that when he finally learned of the atrocities he disapproved of when, but he evaded answering a question from the prosecuter as to why he had not publicly condemned the Nazi activities.
Imredy admitted that when he first introduced anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary, in 1938, he was not acting under German pressure, adding that he had not known it that time that he had Jewish blood. He did not answer a question as to how he reconciled his adherence to Catholicism with his avowal of racialism.
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