By Sasha Uzunov

A post war Hungarian migrant to Australia, believed to be a Nazi collaborator involved in war crimes against Jews during WWII, was incorrectly given a clean bill of health by Australia’s domestic spy chief, a newly declassified Federal Attorney Generals Department file has revealed.

Dr Laszlo Megay, who migrated in Australia from Hungary in 1950, was alleged to have taken part in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Post war he had been detained by the US military but inexplicably let go.

When allegations later surfaced in Australia in the 1950s, the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Agency (ASIO), Brigadier Charles Spry incorrectly claimed that Dr Megay had been cleared of any wrong doing.

Dr Megay died in 1959. As to why he was let go by the US military in 1946 and later by ASIO leads to speculation he might have been an intelligence asset for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which used emigre Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats and others who had been Nazi collaborators during WWII and would be useful in the Cold War after the US and Britain fell out with their wartime ally the USSR.

The Federal Attorney General’s Department set up the Special Investigations Unit in 1986-87 which re-examined claims of Nazi war criminals being allowed entry into Australia. The SIU was disbanded sometime in 1994. Dr Megay came to the attention of the SIU. His death in 1959 led the SIU to close the case.

Megay’s SIU file – mentioned above – contains an entry from a book by prominent Australian hunter of Nazi criminals in Australia, Mark Aarons. Aarons details the charges against Megay.

Mr Peter Wertheim the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry in 2018 wrote that Megay “became active in the Liberal Party [of Australia] from the 1950s onwards. Laszlo Megay, who had been listed as a wanted war criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission, was a leader of the Liberal Party’s Migrant Advisory Council in the late 1950s, sharing a speaking platform with senior Liberal politicians, including a Federal Minister. As mayor of Ungvar in wartime Hungary, Megay is accused of enthusiastically aiding the Nazis in rounding up the town’s 18,000 Jews and confining them to a ghetto in appalling conditions before they were transported to the Auschwitz death camp where most of them were murdered.”