Kasztner's Crime

Paul Bogdanor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412863407
• eBook ISBN: 9781351510301
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost?After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided.Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people.

1

The Underground

When the Nazis occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Jewish public was caught by surprise. Many ordinary Jews did not know what to expect. The Jewish community leaders were also in shock.

Major disasters had already struck the country’s Jewish population. From 1941, many Jewish men were drafted to the Hungarian army’s labor units on the Soviet front. Some of the army officers were made to understand that the draftees were not to return alive. As a result, tens of thousands of Jews died from starvation, typhus, shooting, and other brutalities.

Then in July–August 1941, Hungary resolved to expel all Jews from the East who could not prove their Hungarian citizenship. Some fourteen thousand to sixteen thousand Jews were deported to Nazi-controlled Galicia, where they were massacred by the local SS at the site of Kamenets-Podolsk.

Finally, a third atrocity was carried out: when Hungarian gendarmes were killed in January 1942 by insurgents in the Bácska area (recently annexed from Yugoslavia), Hungarian forces rounded up and massacred three thousand to four thousand Serbs and Jews in and around Újvidék (now Novi Sad).

These horrors were, of course, dwarfed by the genocide taking place in the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. Between the beginning of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of Hungary, most of Europe’s Jews had been put to death. Helpless men, women, and children had been rounded up and shot at mass execution sites, starved to death in ghettos, or deported to the death camps and gassed.

In early 1942, Holocaust survivors from Poland and Slovakia began to cross the border into Hungary. The challenge of helping these refugees provoked a group of Zionists in Budapest to establish a Relief and Rescue Committee at the end of the year. This rescue committee came into contact with Zionist outposts in Istanbul and Geneva and was soon granted official recognition by the Jewish Agency. The committee also received funds from the non-Zionist American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), via its Swiss delegate Saly Mayer.

The Zionist rescue committee quickly compiled an impressive record of humanitarian achievements. It saved Jews from the Holocaust in most of the countries around Hungary. Having made contact with foreign Jewish bodies, the Zionists in Budapest became vital sources of intelligence on the Final Solution and provided some of the first information about Auschwitz. To rescue Jews from the surrounding Nazi-occupied lands, they enlisted the aid of German military agents, high-ranking Hungarians, and citizens on both sides of the border. Thanks to their achievements, when the Nazis decided to destroy the Jews in Hungary, an underground Zionist rescue apparatus with an experienced leadership and hundreds of Jewish personnel was ready for action. Nothing of the kind existed in any other country before its subjugation by the Germans.

The Jewish rescue committee’s achievements before 1944 were the work of a small group of activists. The most important of them was Rezső Kasztner.

Who Was Kasztner?

Rezső Kasztner was born in 1906 in the Transylvanian city then known as Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca). He grew up in a Zionist home, and one of his brothers soon immigrated to Palestine. Kasztner gained a legal doctorate and worked as the political editor of the Jewish newspaper Új Kelet. His journalism was highly regarded—so highly regarded that he was granted an interview by Romania’s prime minister.¹ In 1937, he married the daughter of József Fischer, the head of the city’s Jewish community. The marriage was advantageous: Fischer was a preeminent Jewish figure in Transylvania and a representative of the Jewish Party in Romania’s Chamber of Deputies. Before long, Kasztner became the chairman of the Jewish Party’s parliamentary group.²

Kasztner’s good fortune did not last. Hungary’s annexation of North Transylvania ended his parliamentary role, while its antisemitic laws forced the closure of Új Kelet. All of a sudden, his public career had vanished. In late 1940, the newly unemployed Kasztner moved to Budapest. There he became deputy head of Ihud—one of the smallest of the Zionist factions—and was reduced to earning his living as a Zionist fundraiser.³

In July 1942, Kasztner was drafted into a Jewish forced labor unit. His friends in Budapest tried but failed to secure his release. His unit was ordered to the front to assist the Hungarian troops against the Red Army—a virtual death sentence. However, Kasztner was never sent: in December 1942 his entire unit was suddenly discharged and the Jewish conscripts returned home.⁴ According to Joel Brand, his friend and rescue committee colleague, he was widely suspected of draft evasion: “Another claim, which hung in the air long afterwards, was that the circumstances of his release were ethically suspect and that Kasztner had played a role in it. The exemption of his entire unit from the battlefield at the time is shrouded in fog to this day.”⁵

The true explanation for these events has since come to light. After Kasztner’s release, Jewish leaders in Budapest began to receive complaints. It was alleged that Kasztner had freed his unit through bribery—using funds embezzled from his Jewish community. A commission was appointed to investigate; but its chairman was none other than József Fischer, the father-in-law of the accused. Kasztner’s exoneration, predictable as it was, did not impress his Zionist colleagues in Budapest: he was promptly fired from his fundraising position.⁶

These allegations shed some light on the character of Rezső Kasztner, or at least the general perception of his character. The descriptions by friends and acquaintances are remarkably consistent.

♦ Sámuel Springmann, an early member of the rescue committee, regarded him as “a very capable and experienced Zionist worker of the cold intellectual variety. Rather bohemian in his way of life, and at the same time an opportunist, he was not very well-liked by many of his fellow Zionists, as he was tight with his money and often did not repay his debts.”⁷

♦ Joel Brand described him as “a courageous man who put his whole heart and soul into the rescue of the Jewish people and who achieved a great deal.” All the same, Brand viewed him as “a typical Jewish intellectual, with all the good and bad qualities of his kind . . . to many people he seemed to be the prototype of the snobbish intellectual who lacked the common touch.”⁸

♦ Fülöp Freudiger, the Orthodox leader in Budapest, praised his political idealism and fearless approach to danger, but drew attention to several faults. He was unreliable in keeping appointments and commitments. He was “dictatorial” and “jealous of the success of others.” Worse yet, “It is probable that he had the ambition to become the sole master and leader of the Hungarian Jews, i.e., almost one million souls.”⁹

♦ Moshe Krausz, director of the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Office in Budapest—a man who repeatedly clashed with Kasztner—acknowledged his ability and personal charm. On the other hand, “I considered him a megalomaniac. He had delusions of grandeur. . . . He tried hard to be the focus of attention in every group. And when it came to his own interests, he was without conscience or consideration.”¹⁰

♦ Moshe Alpan, a Zionist youth activist, remembered him as “a very, very bright, intelligent man, capable of analyzing political things brilliantly,” who was also “an egomaniac” with “boundless and unrestrained ambition and drive.”¹¹

In the various profiles of Rezső Kasztner by friends and foes, a number of character traits loom large: exceptional intelligence, resourcefulness, vision, and boldness, combined with vanity, amorality, and relentless ambition for power and status. In the words of one of his academic champions, Yechiam Weitz, he had “courage and nerves of steel,” but he also “assumed titles and honors he was not entitled to, obsessively tried to take center stage,” and displayed “cunning and the ability to lie without batting an eyelid.”¹²

In the context of wartime underground operations that required self-confidence and unconventional thinking, such traits were sometimes an asset. As the rescue operations expanded, Kasztner became the committee’s dominant figure. The committee’s chairman was Ottó Komoly, a Zionist leader and decorated World War I army officer. But according to Brand, its “political director and operational manager” was Kasztner.¹³

Gathering Intelligence

In the Hungarian Jewish community before 1944, the Zionist rescue committee quickly became the main repository of information on the Final Solution. From mid-1942, wrote Kasztner, there were “countless reports, eye-witness testimonies and accounts from escapees about what was happening in Poland.”¹⁴ Brand described how the committee set up an intelligence center in Budapest to interview the survivors and send reports to world Jewry. Upon arrival, “the refugees would be closely questioned so that we could ascertain and record the situation in the ghettos from which they had come.” The rescue committee sent “hundreds of these records” to the Zionists abroad.¹⁵

The rescue activists in Hungary received vital information from their counterparts in Slovakia (the Jewish “Working Group”), who had approached the SS offering ransom payments to stop the killing. From their correspondence, which he forwarded to the Jewish Agency after mid-1942, Kasztner learned that Adolf Eichmann was the SS officer coordinating the deportation and murder of Europe’s Jews.¹⁶

One of the most authoritative sources on the destruction of Polish Jews was Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist and Holocaust rescuer. Schindler visited Budapest in November 1943 to meet Springmann and Kasztner, who reported his observations to the Jewish Agency.

“It is not part of the art of war to trample the heads of infants under your jackboots,” began Schindler. The SS was led by “coarse people with the instincts of brutes” who “find it hard to drop the habit of shooting a few dozen or a few hundred Jews a day.”

Schindler was asked how many Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis: “I can only speak of the figures given by the SS leaders. They speak of 4–4.5 million. But I reckon that this number is exaggerated. They pride themselves on such numbers.”

The discussion turned to the fate of Jewish children: “They have been virtually exterminated. I believe that 90% of the children up to the age of 14 were shot or gassed. . . . The old folk have suffered the same fate. Not a single person over the age of 50 has remained alive.”

When Schindler referred to the Jewish workers in “Oswiencim,” Kasztner interjected: “We have heard that Oswiencim [Oświęcim, i.e., Auschwitz] is a death camp.” Came the reply: “That may be the case as far as children and old people are concerned. I have also heard that Jews were burnt and gassed there. A scientific method of extermination has been developed there.”¹⁷

From this source alone it was possible to learn every important fact about the Holocaust: the death toll ran into several millions; children and the elderly had been wiped out; the SS was in charge of the slaughter; mass killing had been industrialized in death camps; and the process consisted of gassing and burning.

“I gave Dr. Kasztner a precise description of what was happening to the Jews, the increasingly ruthless actions of the SS, the primary threats, the most effective forms of aid and possible escape routes,” wrote Schindler. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Underground
• 2 Negotiating with Nazis
• 3 Salvation or Extermination?
• 4 Two Days in May
• 5 Co-opting the Rescuers
• 6 The Brand Mission
• 7 The Kenyérmező Deception
• 8 Sabotaging Rescue in the Ghettos
• 9 The Strasshof Deal
• 10 Deceiving the Outside World
• 11 The Strasshof Operation
• 12 Gestapo Informer
• 13 Sabotaging Rescue in Budapest
• 14 Pseudo-Rescuer
• 15 A Guest of the SS
• 16 Nuremberg
• 17 Kasztner in Court
• 18 The Verdicts
• Conclusion
• Source Abbreviations
• Important Names
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index