Deception

How the Nazis Tricked the Last Jews of Europe

Christopher Hale

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780750988179
• eBook ISBN: 9780750992893
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

'I suppose you know who I am? I was in charge of the actions in Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia. I am prepared to sell you one million Jews: Goods for blood … Blood for goods.' These were the chilling words uttered by one of the most notorious Nazi bureaucrats, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, to a young Jewish businessman called Joel Brand in the spring of 1944. Brand embarked on a desperate mission to persuade the Allies to barter with Eichmann – and failed. At the same time, the SS deported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau packed in cattle trains. The majority were gassed, then incinerated. For decades after 1945, many blamed the Allies for callously abandoning a million Hungarian Jews to their fate. In Deception, Christopher Hale presents a new account of the 'Brand Mission' based on evidence in the national archives of Germany, Hungary, Britain and the United States. Hale reveals that Eichmann's offer formed one part of a monstrous deception designed to outwit the leaders of the last surviving Jewish community in Europe. The deception was more complex and – from the German point of view – more successful than any operation mounted by the secret services of the Allied governments.

1

‘BLUT GEGEN WAREN’: A PUZZLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA

It is one of the most notorious events of the Second World War – and yet one of the most mysterious. Seventy-five years ago, on 19 May 1944, an SS officer called Hermann Krumey drove two Hungarians from Budapest to an airport close to Vienna. Two months earlier, Hitler had ordered troops to occupy Hungary, which had been Nazi Germany’s military ally since the invasion of the Soviet Union, to forestall any attempt by its government to abandon the Axis alliance. In the wake of the army divisions came a Sonderkommando led by SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann. His task was to liquidate the last surviving Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe. At the airport, the two men boarded a German aircraft and were flown to Istanbul in neutral Turkey. The names of the two men were Joel Brand and Andor ‘Bandi’ Grosz. The leaders of the Allied governments in London, Washington and Moscow soon discovered that Brand had been sent with an extraordinary mission. In a series of meetings with Eichmann and other SS officers, he had been offered the chance to barter Jewish lives for military trucks and other supplies.

Not long after they were flown out of Hungary to Istanbul, Brand and Grosz were arrested by British police in Aleppo and brought to Cairo for lengthy interrogations. At the highest levels of government in Washington and London, the offer to barter hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives provoked incredulity, confusion and dismay. On the eve of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe, the release of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees was unthinkable. How could they be cared for? It was assumed that many tens of thousands of Jews would try to reach the British mandate of Palestine. For the British such an influx was anathema. The mandate was already a tinderbox. In short, it was rapidly concluded that there could be no negotiations. When the story of the ransom offer was leaked, British and American newspapers denounced a German trick. Brand and his mysterious companion stayed under lock and key in Cairo. For the rest of his life, Brand blamed the British for abandoning the Jews of Hungary to a terrible fate.

There was very good reason to doubt the good faith of the ransom offer. Throughout the summer of 1944, between mid May and early July, Eichmann and his Hungarian collaborators deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. Three-quarters of the deported Jews perished in a paroxysm of slaughter.

As this tragedy unfolded, another remarkable story was unfolding in Budapest. Brand was a member of a Zionist Rescue Committee known as the ‘Va’adat ha-Ezra ve-ha-Hatzala e-Budapest’ or simply – the Va’ada. The most prominent member of the committee was a former journalist called Rezső, or Rudolf Kasztner. When Brand had been chosen to travel to Istanbul with the SS ransom offer, Kasztner had remained in Budapest and continued negotiating with Eichmann and another SS officer, Kurt Becher. Through Kasztner’s efforts, the Germans permitted, in exchange for substantial payments, some 1,700 Hungarian Jews, most of them from Kasztner’s home town of Kolozsvár, now the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca, to leave Hungary on a special train. After a terrifying journey, the Germans held the Hungarians hostage for some months in a special compound known as the ‘Ungarnlager’ (Hungarian camp) at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Between 18 August and December 1944, the majority of the passengers on the train arrived in the Swiss village of Caux. And yet the story of ‘Kasztner’s Train’ remains mired in toxic argument to this day. A recent book is called Kasztner’s Crime. Was the Jew who negotiated with Eichmann a criminal?

When Kasztner settled in Tel Aviv after the war, many Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust who had come to live in the new state were dismayed by his assiduously cultivated reputation as a rescuer of Jews and his increasingly cosy relations with Mapai, the ruling political party led by David Ben-Gurion. Many survivors alleged that Kasztner had failed to warn Hungarian Jews of what he knew about German plans for mass murder. For the leaders of Mapai, it was imperative to protect Kasztner’s reputation and in 1953 the Attorney General sued one of his accusers for libel. The ‘Kasztner Trial’ had calamitous consequences. For many Israelis, he was no longer a rescuer of Jews but a despised collaborator. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge made biting use of a phrase from the Roman poet Virgil:

timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts). By accepting this present [the rescue train] Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil … The success of the rescue agreement depended until the last minute on the Nazi goodwill, and the last minute didn’t arrive until long after the end of the extermination of the Jews in the provincial towns.

Just after midnight on 4 March 1957, a squad of right-wing Zionists waited for Kasztner to return to his apartment in Tel Aviv. He would not live to see his German tormentor Adolf Eichmann kidnapped by Mossad agents and brought to stand trial in Jerusalem. Even today, the embers of Kasztner’s trial still smoulder.

These are the bare bones of the narrative this book will unfold. Telling it again requires some justification. The Blood for Trucks deal has been recounted, often at length, in most accounts of the Holocaust. This obsessive retelling was started by Brand himself, who published books about his story and confronted the shabby and diminished Eichmann across the Jerusalem courtroom. Brand was a man consumed by bitterness who believed until the end of his life that his mission had been coldheartedly betrayed by both the British and the wartime Zionist establishment. He could never forgive. After Brand’s early death in 1964, many historians have reiterated and amplified Brand’s recriminations. Just as the Allies refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, it is argued that they rebuffed the offer to ransom the lives of a million Hungarian Jews.

I first heard about the story from an old university friend who had fled Britain to become an American citizen and had cultivated some contempt for the land of his birth. Some years ago, he wrote to me about Joel Brand and the dastardly way his mission had been sabotaged. He quoted the notorious and perhaps apocryphal words of Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), the British Minister of State in the Middle East: ‘What can I do with a million Jews?’

It was a troubling story. Had the Allies betrayed the Jews of Hungary? Might the chronicle of the Holocaust have turned out differently if British and American officials acted with greater moral resolve? As I sifted through the many retellings of Brand’s mission and its aftermaths, I became ever more puzzled. To begin with, Eichmann was insistent that the ‘ten thousand trucks’ would be deployed only on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Army. This was surely an outlandish condition. In the spring of 1944, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill feared putting at risk their bond with Joseph Stalin, and indeed competed obsequiously for the Russian dictator’s favours. Blood for Trucks seemed to be more provocation than deal. I was surprised to discover that Eichmann had repeatedly insisted to Brand and the Rescue Committee that he could not permit any Jews to travel to Palestine. He explained that Hitler did not wish to offend Arab opinion. This implied that if the ransom offer was serious and the German conditions were met, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would need to be sent towards the West. Since an Allied invasion of Europe was expected at any moment, this was simply not a convincing proposal. The most chilling realisation was that at the very moment Brand set off for Istanbul, Eichmann and his Hungarian allies had already begun to deport Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz at a rate of up to 12,000 people a day. For weeks, Eichmann had been working closely with his friend, the camp commandant Rudolf Höß, to prepare for the arrival of daily transports from Hungary and the liquidation of anyone not deemed fit to work. Camp guards alluded to enjoying ‘Hungarian salami’ when the transports arrived. It would seem that Eichmann acted in the very worst of bad faith. What then was the purpose of his offer to trade lives?

I began to suspect that the story of Blood for Trucks, which has so often been told as a callous refusal to barter and save lives, concealed a very different narrative. But what was it? I was reminded of the legal axiom: cui bono? Who gains? I discovered that the SS officers who came to Budapest in the spring of 1944 had a very great deal to gain from playing a cynical and deadly game of deception and bluff. The German onslaught on European Jews was motivated not only by racial fanaticism but by a lust for profit. During the war, the SS had grown into a bloated and avaricious business empire. As he preached a message of German decency and probity, Himmler hatched a campaign of plunder that was itself founded on the mythologies that fuelled the mass killings of European Jews under German rule. In Nazi ideology, Jews were either murderous Bolsheviks or mercantile robber barons. It was the moral duty of the Nazi state to reclaim the vast and uncounted riches of the global Jewish clans. It is a newsroom cliché to urge reporters to ‘follow the money’ but mercenary plunder on a vast scale was integral to the Nazi Final Solution. Herding Jews into ghettoes and then deporting the majority to camps for labour or death was inextricably bound up with a systematic pilfering of assets. Inside the German camps, a finely tuned and ruthless apparatus of avaricious pillage harvested every remaining possession of the dead from the clothes on their backs to the gold in their speechless mouths. Mass murder took place hand-in-hand with the most ruthless profiteering. I began to suspect that it was these mercenary plans and desires that drove the deceitful actions of the SS men who enticed Brand and Kasztner with offers of rescue and salvation.

In the chapters that follow, I will try to follow the money to reveal the true story of the Blood for Trucks ransom offer. But, invariably, human action has many and contradictory motivations. Over time, these intents shift and alter in a kind of fractal psychic topology. When Eichmann was dispatched to Hungary in March 1945, he and his superiors were preoccupied by two strategic setbacks that had taken place the year before. On 19 April 1943, the eve of the Jewish Passover, German forces began the final liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. They were taken by surprise when a Jewish resistance group known as ZOB (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa) fought back – with a fierce and passionate resolve. It took heavily armed SS forces, led by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, close to a month to crush the Jewish uprising. Even as Stroop set charges to destroy the Great Synagogue and rejoiced in the destruction of the ghetto, other Germans voiced disquiet. The liquidation had proved ‘very difficult’ reported one official: ‘One noticed that armed Jewish women fought to the last …’ Then in September, Hitler insisted that the semi-autonomous government of Denmark, occupied in 1940, ‘solve its Jewish problem’ and begin deporting Danish Jews. As I will explain in detail in a later chapter, the German plans were unexpectedly thwarted. Some 7,000 Jews were ferried to safety in neutral Sweden by Danish rescuers. The majority of Danish Jews survived the war. For the German master planners of the Final Solution, the Jewish ghetto revolt followed by the spectacular rescue of Danish Jews were troubling setbacks. Despatched to Budapest in the spring of 1944, Eichmann understood that his reputation as the master planner of deportation could not survive any more mishaps.

There is another puzzle. Why was Brand accompanied by ‘Bandi’ Grosz? The decision to send a second emissary to Istanbul was made by Eichmann or someone else on the German side and Brand, it seems, was taken by surprise. He was bewildered by the presence of someone he knew well both as unscrupulous smuggler and a devious informant who played off German and Allied intelligence agencies. Like Brand, Grosz ended up in a British military prison in Cairo, where he soon confounded his interrogators. He insisted that he, not Joel Brand, had been entrusted with the ‘real mission’. The ransom plan, he claimed, was a smokescreen. According to Grosz, the SS Chief himself, Heinrich Himmler, had grasped that Germany could no longer win the war and was ‘putting out feelers’ to the British and Americans behind Hitler’s back. The strategic purpose of the Brand/Grosz mission was not to end the war but to rupture the western alliance with the Soviets. A number of historians continue to argue that this was indeed Himmler’s masterplan – and accept that ‘the architect of the Final Solution’ was willing as early as the summer of 1944 to spare hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives as a means to acquire military supplies and/or a strategic lever to split the Allies. For historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust this argument has very significant implications. Might the lethal momentum of the Final Solution have taken a different course in the final years of the war? How convincing, then, is the evidence?

In this book I hope to prove that the evidence for Himmler’s ransom masterplan is flimsy and circumstantial. It is, in my view, a chimera. To begin with, Himmler was intent on mass murder until the very end of the war and remained the stubbornly loyal perpetrator of Hitler’s racial obsessions ‘to the final hour’. Neither Himmler nor his henchmen would have made any serious decision to deviate from that course. That is one aspect of my case. Another is that much of the evidence cited to explain Himmler’s involvement in the Blood for Trucks mission is based on claims made by the enigmatic ‘Bandi’ Grosz when he was arrested by British intelligence agents. The records of these marathon interrogations can be found in the British National Archives – and close reading of these documents casts serious doubt on Grosz’s credibility and motivations. The records show that Grosz was deeply involved with a network of spies, informers and couriers known after the code name of its founder as Dogwood. ‘Dogwood’ was a Czech Jew called Alfred Schwarz who had lived for many years in Istanbul. All his agents were named after flowers. Grosz was ‘Trillium’.

During the Second World War, Turkey was a neutral power and the streets, cafés and hotel rooms of her second city resembled the cells in a noisy hive of conspiracies and secrets. Istanbul was a refuge for a number of shady Germans who occupied their time fantasising about plots to depose or assassinate the upstart corporal Adolf Hitler. The American OSS, the fledgling precursor to the CIA, eagerly forged links with ‘Dogwood’ and his agents such as ‘Trillium’, who boasted about running valuable ‘assets’ in Eastern European cities including Budapest. Schwarz also cultivated representatives of the Jewish Agency based in Istanbul, who used Dogwood to smuggle messages and money to Jewish rescuers inside German-occupied Europe. Until it was too late, the OSS and the Zionists stubbornly refused to take seriously a stream of evidence that the Dogwood network had been compromised of German and Hungarian intelligence agents. By the spring of 1944, Dogwood was a poisoned snare, the leakiest network in the history of wartime intelligence. The story of the ‘Brand Mission’ was closely woven together with the downfall of Dogwood.

The story of Blood for Trucks cast a long shadow across the tumultuous decades that followed the end of the war and the foundation of the state of Israel. Brand’s desperate journey was undertaken inside a hall of shattered mirrors that has hidden its secret purpose to this day. After the violent birth of the new state of Israel, Brand struggled to make a living in his new homeland. He was embittered and forgotten. Brand appeared, reluctantly, as witness for the defence at the trial that shamed his old friend Rudolf Kasztner and devoted his time to writing a memoir about his wartime mission to save the Jews of Hungary. Then, on 20 May 1960, a team of Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann as he returned to his shabby family home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was secretly flown, disguised in an air steward’s uniform, to Israel to stand trial. Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, signed a bill of indictment against Eichmann on fifteen counts, including crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. Now the arrogant SS man who had managed the destruction of so many lives stood before the world inside a bulletproof glass booth: an unkempt symbol, it was said, of the ‘banality of evil’. It was in that courtroom that Joel Brand confronted Eichmann once again.

Finally, a few comments on the form of this book.

It is conventional, even obligatory, to shape non-fiction with the story of a single character, or protagonist. It became clear that this approach was neither feasible nor appropriate. The truth about the rescue negotiations in Hungary in 1944, if it was possible to recover at all, could not be excavated from the experience of a single life. What follows is not ‘the story of Joel Brand’. There are few heroes in this tale. It was necessary to probe events from multiple points of view. We must enter and take account of a political landscape in which power was distributed with extreme inequality. In German-occupied Europe, the exercise of power by a tyrannical state committed to violence compromised every individual drawn into its corrosive web. The narrative of this book must, then, find its way through this tangled and continuously evolving terrain. This Nazi state extinguished the lives of millions and destroyed the moral footing of those men and women who carried out its bidding. Hitler’s malevolent exploitation of the loyalty of satraps like Himmler generated a treacherous landscape of competitive struggle. The violence of the state was mirrored by aggressive pursuit of power and favour among its elite. At the lower levels of the Nazi state, subalterns such as Eichmann and his SS colleagues engaged in a struggle for survival that stripped away the values they purported to defend. There is no single individual who, alone, illuminates such a world of power.

It became clear too that I could not hope to understand the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews by confining the narrative to a single year, or even the entire Second World War. The experience of Hungarian Jewry was forged by the experience of Jews as citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its traumatic dissolution at the end of the First World War. Before 1914, the Emperor’s Hungarian realms wove a network of alliances that connected, uneasily to be sure, Jews and Magyars. It was Jewish entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, writers and journalists and their gentile partners who powered the advent of a Hungarian modernity before the cataclysm of the Great War.

After 1918, the evisceration of Austro-Hungary by the Allied powers tore open festering wounds between the peoples of the defunct empire. The collapse of the German Empire infected the violent fantasies of Adolf Hitler and his followers with the same kind of poison. They believed that Imperial Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ on the threshold of victory by a conspiratorial cadre of disloyal Jewish profiteers and traitors. The Russian Revolution, they believed, had spawned a hostile new state that threatened the existential survival of the West. Other new nation states that sprang up in the aftermath of the Great War shared this detestation and terror of their Jewish minorities. Two decades later, the poison of ethnic hatred would infest the strategic bonds between Hitler’s Germany State and the leaders of Romania and Hungary. As the fugitive Eichmann boasted: ‘Hungary was the only country where we could not work fast enough.’

The Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin did not live to experience the horror of Germany’s war. But he foresaw what would take place:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on the ‘Auschwitz’ Concentration Camp
• Prelude: Cairo, June 1944
• 1 ‘Blut Gegen Waren’: A Puzzle Wrapped in an Enigma
• 2 Geneva, April 1945
• 3 Despair Deferred
• 4 The Twisted Road to Genocide
• 5 The Worlds of Hungarian Jewry
• 6 The Politics of Envy
• 7 Ransom and the Slovak Trick
• 8 The Trap
• 9 Who was Adolf Eichmann?
• 10 Managing the Whirlwind
• 11 The Dogwood Connection
• 12 Occupation and Deception
• 13 Deceiving the Rescuers
• 14 Agents of Deceit
• 15 Eichmann’s Gambit
• 16 Emissary of the Deceived
• 17 The Ramp
• 18 The Fallacy of Ransom
• 19 Plunderers
• 20 Quandary
• 21 Horthy Hesitates
• 22 Aftermaths
• Epilogue: Endgame in Israel
• A Note on Numbers
• Important Organisations and Terms
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Section