Rudolf
Kasztner
THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997
Czech
film about Rabbi Weissmandel: Among Blind
Fools
Simon
Wiesenthal Centre
Shamash:
The
Jewish Internet Consortium: Holocaust Home
Page
The
Confession of Adolf Eichmann
Revolt
of Warsaw's Jews
|
The
Nazis round up the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto,
1943
Rudolf Kastner and the fate of
Hungary's Jews in 1944 features prominently in Hannah
Arendt's account of the trial of the Nazi war criminal
Adolph Eichmann in Israel in 1960 in her book Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil (Penguin,
London, England, 1994). If Kastner had not been assassinated
in 1958 for being an alleged Nazi collaborator, he would
undoubtedly been called by Eichmann as a witness in his
trial for crimes against humanity and involvement in the
murder of six million Jews in occupied Europe. In fact, the
Israeli's had first come across Eichmann when Kastner was
still alive. Although all trace of Eichmann had been lost
after the war in Europe in May 1945, he had actually
remained in Europe until 1950, maintaining no contact with
his family. In 1950, with the help of the ODESSA network
(which assisted former Nazis to leave Europe), he escaped to
Argentina. Two years later, he sent for his wife and
children. For the next seven years, like many leading Nazis
who escaped justice, no one had heard of Eichmann. However,
in the autumn of 1957, an official from the Israeli Foreign
Ministry, Walter Eytan, got a call from Fritz Bauer, the
public prosecutor of the province of Hesse, Germany. Hesse
told him that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina.
MOSSAD soon mounted a daring operation to capture him, which
only just suceeded in 1960, when he was kidnapped by them in
Buenos Aires. He was brought back to Israel for trial and
later executed in 1962. Thus, within four years of each
other, two of the most important people who were involved or
witnesses to the genocide of Hungary's Jews were
dead.
According to Arendt, after
Eichmann was arrested, went "to considerable lengths" to try
and somehow prove that "never harboured any ill feelings
against his victims" something he notes, he also explained
to Kastner. When he was being interrogated in Israel
over his complicity in war crimes, Eichmann claimed that he
had Jewish friends and as he had Jewish relations through
his stepmother, he had his own "private reasons" for not
hating the Jews (p30). He spoke of how he had helped a
half-Jewish cousin escape during the war, and claimed he had
intervened to save a Jewish family in Vienna:
"The daughter of
this marriage, half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg
Laws. . . . came to see me in order to obtain my
permission for her emigration into Switzerland. Of
course, I granted this request, and the same uncle came
also to see me to ask me to intervene for some Viennese
Jewish couple. I mention this only to show that I myself
had no hatred for Jews, for my whole education through my
mother and my father had been strictly Christian; my
mother, because of her Jewish relatives, held different
opinions from those current in S.S. circles."
(p30).
Eichmann on
Kastner
As Arrendt observes, Eichmann
had a high regard for Kastner:
The greatest
"idealist" Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was
Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the
Jewish deportations from Hungary and with whom he came to
an agreement that he, Eichmann, would permit the
"illegal" departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine
(the trains were in fact guarded by German police) in
exchange for "quiet and order' in the camps from which
hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz. The few
thousand saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and
members of the Zionist youth organizations, were, in
Eichmann's words, "the best biological material." Dr.
Kastner, as Eichmann understood it, had sacrificed his
fellow-Jews to his "idea," and this was as it should be.
Judge Benjamin Halevi, one of the three judges at
Eichmann's trial, had been in charge of the Kastner trial
in Israel, at which Kastner had to defend himself for his
cooperation with Eichmann and other high-ranking Nazis;
in Halevi's opinion, Kastner had "sold his soul to the
devil." Now that the devil himself was in the dock he
turned out to be an "idealist," and though it may be hard
to believe, it is quite possible that the one who sold
his soul had also been an "idealist." (p42)
'"To Sum It All Up,
I Regret Nothing" - Nazi mass-murderer Adolph
Eichmann
Eichmann himself had talked
about Kastner a lot already when his interview Life
magazine was first published on the 28th November and 5th
December 1960:
I resolved to show
how well a job could be done when the commander stands
100% behind it. By shipping the Jews off in a lightning
operation, I wanted to set an example for future
campaigns elsewhere . . .
In obedience to Himmler's
directive I now concentrated on negotiations with the
Jewish political officials in Budapest . . . Among them
Dr. Rudolph Kastner, authorized representative of the
Zionist Movement. This Dr. Kastner was a young man about
my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He
agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation -
and even keep order in the collection camps - if I could
close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand
young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good
bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price . . .
was not too high for me . . . We trusted each other
perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarettes
as though he was in a coffeehouse. While we talked he
would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking
them from a silver case and lighting them with a silver
lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have
made an ideal Gestapo officer himself. Dr. Kastner's main
concern was to make it possible for a select group of
Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel . . .
As a matter of fact,
there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes
in the S.S. and the viewpoint of these immensely
idealistic Zionist leaders . . . I believe that Kastner
would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of
his blood to achieve his political goal . . . 'You can
have the others', he would say, 'but let me have this
group here'. And because Kastner rendered us a great
service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I
would let his groups escape. After all, I was not
concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews . .
. That was the 'gentleman's agreement' I had with Kastner
(Quoted in
Hecht, ibid., p.260-61)
Only Heinrich
Himmler could turn off the liquidation machine. It was in
1944, the year of the assassination attempt on Hitler,
when Reichsführer Himmler took over as commander of
the Reserve Army, that he authorized me to propose an
exchange: one million Jews for 10,000 winterized trucks
with trailers. The World Jewish Organization could decide
for itself what Jews it wanted to choose. We asked only
that they get us 10,000 trucks. Thanks to Himmler's
directive, I could assure them, on my word of honor, that
these trucks would be used only on the Eastern front. As
I said at the time, "When the 10,000 winterized trucks
with trailers are here, then the liquidation machine in
Auschwitz will be stopped.
In obedience to Himmler's
directive I now concentrated on negotiations with the
Jewish political officials in Budapest. One man stood out
among them, Dr. Rudolf Kastner, authorized representative
of the Zionist movement. This Dr. Kastner was a young man
about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist.
He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting
deportation and even keep order in the collection camps
if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few
thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It
was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the
price of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews - in the end there may
have been more - was not too high for me.
Except perhaps for the
first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of
the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals.
People forget that. We were political opponents trying to
arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other
perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarettes
as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked he
would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking
them from a silver case and lighting them with a little
silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he
would have made an ideal Gestapo officer
himself.
Dr. Kastner's main
concern was to make it possible for a select group of
Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel. But the Arrow
Cross, the Hungarian fascist party, had grown strong and
stubborn. Its inspectors permitted no exceptions to the
mass deportations. So the Jewish officials turned to the
German occupation authorities. They realized that we were
specialists who had learned about Jewish affairs through
years of practice.
As a matter of fact,
there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes
in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic
Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their
last battle. As I told Kastner: "We, too, are idealists
and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we
came to power."
I believe that Kastner
would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred- thousand
of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not
interested in old Jews or those who had become
assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly
persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish
blood, that is, human material that was capable of
reproduction and hard work. "You can have the others," he
would say, "but let me have this group here." And because
Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the
deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups
escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups
of a thousand or so Jews.
At the same time Kastner
was bargaining with another SS of ficial a Colonel Kurt
Becker. Becher was bartering Jews for foreign exchange
and goods on direct orders from Himmler. A crafty
operator, Becher had come to Hungary originally to
salvage a stud farm which the SS wanted. He soon wormed
his way into dealings with the Jews. In a way,
Reichsführer Himmler was Becher's captive. Becher
showed me once a gold necklace he was taking to our
chief, a gift for a little lady by whom Himmler had a
child. There were other agencies, German and Hungarian,
which tapped Kastner for foreign exchange in return for
Jews, but I held aloof from money affairs and left the
material transactions to Becher.
Men under Becher's
command guarded a special group of 700 Jews whom Kastner
had requested from a list. They were mostly young people,
although the group also included Kastner's entire family.
I did not care if Kastner took his relatives along. he
could take them whereever he wanted to.
Life,
Vol. 49, No. 23, December 5, 1960, p.
146
Kurt Becher and Kastner
On witness called for
Eichmann's defense was the former SS officer Kurt Becher,
who with Kastner's help had avoided execution after the
war:
Becher, an old
enemy of Eichmann who is today a prosperous merchant in
Bremen, was called, strangely enough, as a witness for
the defense. He could not come to Jerusalem, for obvious
reasons, and he was examined in his German home town. His
testimony had to be dismissed, since he had been shown,
well ahead of time, the questions he was later called on
to answer under oath. It was a great pity that Eichmann
and Becher could not have been confronted with each
other, and this not merely for juridical reasons. Such a
confrontation would have revealed another part of the
"general picture," which, even legally, was far from
irrelevant. According to his own account, the reason
Becher joined the S.S. was that "from 1932 to the present
day he had been actively engaged in horseback riding."
Thirty years ago, this was a sport engaged in only by
Europe's upper classes. In 1934, his instructor had
persuaded him to enter the S.S. cavalry regiment, which
at that moment was the very thing for a man to do if he
wished to join the "movement" and at the same time
maintain a proper regard for his social standing. (A
possible reason Becher in his testimony stressed
horseback riding was never mentioned: the Nuremberg
Tribunal had excluded the Reiter-S.S. from its list of
criminal organizations.) The war saw Becher on active
duty at the front, as a member not of the Army but of the
Armed S.S., in which he was a liaison officer with the
Army commanders. He soon left the front to become the
principal buyer of horses for the S.S. personnel
department, a job that earned him nearly all the
decorations that were then available.
Becher claimed that he
had been sent to Hungary only in order to buy twenty
thousand horses for the S.S.; this is unlikely, since
immediately upon his arrival he began a series of very
successful negotiations with the heads of big Jewish
business concerns. His relations with HimmIer were
excellent, he could see him whenever he wished. His
"special mission" was clear enough. He was to obtain
control of major Jewish business concerns behind the
backs of the Hungarian government, and, in return, to
give the owners free passage out of the country, plus a
sizable amount of money in foreign currency. His most
important transaction was with the Manfred Weiss steel
combine, a mammoth enterprise, with thirty thousand
workers, which produced everything from airplanes,
trucks, and bicycles to tinned goods, pins, and needles.
The result was that forty-five members of the Weiss
family emigrated to Portugal while Mr. Becher became head
of their business. When Eichmann heard of this
Schweinerei, he was outraged; the deal threatened to
compromise his good relations with the Hungarians, who
naturally expected to take possession of Jewish property
confiscated on their own soil. He had some reason for his
indignation, since these deals were contrary to the
regular Nazi policy. which had been quite generous. For
their help in solving the Jewish question in any country,
the Germans had demanded no part of the Jews' property,
only the costs of their deportation and extermination,
and these costs had varied widely from country to
country-the Slovaks had been supposed to pay between
three hundred and five hundred Reichsmarks per Jew, the
Croats only thirty, the French seven hundred, and the
Belgians two hundred and fifty. (It seems that no one
ever paid except the Croats.) In Hungary, at this late
stage of the war, the Germans were demanding payment in
goods-shipments of food to the Reich, in quantities
determined by the amount of food the deported Jews would
have consumed.
The Weiss affair was only
the beginning, and things were to get considerably worse,
from Eichmann's point of view. Becher was a born
businessman, and where Eichmann saw only enormous tasks
of organization and administration, he saw almost
unlimited possibilities for making money. The one thing
that stood in his way was the narrow-mindedness of
subordinate creatures like Eichmann, who took their jobs
seriously. Obersturmbannführer Becher's projects
soon led him to cooperate closely in the rescue efforts
of Dr. Rudolf Kastner. (It was to Kastner's testimony on
his behalf that Becher later, at Nuremberg, owed his
freedom. Being an old Zionist, Kastner had moved to
Israel after the war, where he held a high position until
a journalist published a story about his collaboration
with the S.S. - whereupon Kastner sued him for libel. His
testimony at Nuremberg weighed heavily against him, and
when the case came before the Jerusalem District Court,
Judge Halevi, one of the three judges in the Eichmann
trial, told Kastner that he "had sold his soul to the
devil." In March, 1957, shortly before his case was to be
appealed before the Israeli Supreme Court, Kastner was
murdered; none of the murderers, it seems, came from
Hungary. In the hearing that followed the verdict of the
lower court was repealed and Kastner was fully
rehabilitated.) The deals Becher made through Kastner
were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with
the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price
for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was
considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it
seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the
preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price
was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew-not,
of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply
because he was not used to thinking big. The price
finally arrived at was a thousand dollars, and one group,
consisting of 1,684 Jews, and including Dr. Kastner's
family, actually left Hungary for the exchange camp at
Bergen-Belsen, from which they eventually reached
Switzerland. A similar deal, through which Becher and
HimmIer hoped to obtain twenty million Swiss francs from
the American Joint Distribution Committee, for the
purchase of merchandise of all sorts, kept everybody busy
until the Russians liberated Hungary, but nothing came of
it. (pp141-143).
Zionist collaboration in
wartime Hungary
Arrendt is scathing about the
collaboration of Zionist leaders in Hungary with the
Nazis:
To a Jew this role
of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own
people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole
dark story. It had been known about before, but it has
now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic
and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work
The Destruction of the European Jews
I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there
was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish
communities of Central and Western Europe and the
Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in
Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could
be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their
property, to secure money from the deportees to defray
the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to
keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces
to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a
last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish
community in good order for final confiscation. They
distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in
Warsaw, 'the sale of the armbands of cloth and fancy
plastic armbands which were washable'. In the
Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos they
issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new
power - 'The Central Jewish Council has been granted the
right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and
material wealth and over all Jewish manpower', as the
first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We
know how the Jewish officials felt when they became
instruments of murder - like captains 'whose ships were
about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to
port by casting overboard a great part of their precious
cargo'; like saviors who 'with a hundred victims save a
thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand'. The truth
was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for
instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately
476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to
'blind fate', 'truly holy principles' were needed 'as the
guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on
paper the name of the unknown person and with this
decides his life or death'. And whom did these 'holy
principles' single out for salvation? Those 'who had
worked all their lives for the 'zibur' (community)' -
i.e. the functionaries - and the 'most prominent Jews',
as Kastner says in his report.
. . . No one bothered to
swear the Jewish officials to secrecy; they were
voluntary 'bearers of secrets', either in order to assure
quiet and prevent panic, as in Dr. Kastner's case, or out
of 'humane' considerations, such as that 'living in the
expectation of death by gassing would only be the
harder', as in the case of Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief
Rabbi of Berlin. During the Eichmann trial, one witness
pointed out the unfortunate consequences of this kind of
'humanity' - people volunteered for deportation from
Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried
to tell them the truth as being 'not sane'. We know the
physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi
period very well: they ranged all the way from Chaim
Rumkowski, eldest of the Jews in Lodz, called Chaim I,
who issued currency notes bearing his signature and
postage stamps engraved with his portrait, and who rode
around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage; through Leo
Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who
believed Jewish policemen would be 'more gentle and
helpful' and would 'make the ordeal easier' (whereas in
fact they were, of course, more brutal and less
corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them);
to, finally, a Jew who committed suicide - like Adam
Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who
was not a rabbi but an unbeliever, a Polish-speaking
Jewish engineer, but who must still have remembered the
rabbinical saying: 'Let them kill you, but don't cross
the line. (pp. 117-119)
. . . What was morally so
disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged
categories was that everyone who demanded to have an
"exception" made in his case implicitly recognized the
rule, but this point, apparently, was never grasped by
these "good men," Jewish and Gentile, who busied
themselves about all those "special cases" for which
preferential treatment could be asked. The extent to
which even the Jewish victims had accepted the standards
of the Final Solution is perhaps nowhere more glaringly
evident than in the so-called Kastner Report (available
in German, Der Kastner-Bericht über
Eichmanns Menschenhandel in Ungarn, 1961).
Even after the end of the war, Kastner was proud of his
success in saving "prominent Jews," a category officially
introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view,
too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more
right to stay alive than an ordinary one; to take upon
himself such "responsibilities" - to help the Nazis in
their efforts to pick out "famous" people from the
anonymous mass, for this is what it amounted to -
"required more courage than to face death." But if the
Jewish and Gentile pleaders of "special cases" were
unaware of their involuntary complicity, this implicit
recognition of the rule, which spelled death for all
non-special cases, must have been very obvious to those
who were engaged in the business of murder. They must
have felt, at least, that by being asked to make
exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus
earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of
the lawfulness of what they were doing. (pp132-133) . . .
.
. . . But the whole truth
was that there existed Jewish community organizations and
Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local
and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there
were recognized Jewish leaders and this leadership,
almost without exception, cooperated in one way or
another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The
whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been
unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos
and plenty of misery but the total number of victims
would hardly have been between four and half and six
million people. (p.125).
There existed, however, a
sizable group of Jews in the country whose leaders, at
least, indulged less in self-deception. The Zionist
movement had always been particularly strong in Hungary,
and it now had its own representation in the recently
formed Relief and Rescue Committee (the Vaadat Ezra va
Hazalah), which, maintaining close contact with the
Palestine Office, had helped refugees from Poland and
Slovakia, from Yugoslavia and Rumania; the committee was
in constant communication with the American Joint
Distribution Committee, which financed their work, and
they had also been able to get a few Jews into Palestine,
legally or illegally. Now that catastrophe had come to
their own country, they turned to forging "Christian
papers," certificates of baptism, whose bearers found it
easier to go underground. Whatever else they might have
been, the Zionist leaders knew they were outlaws, and
they acted accordingly. Joel Brand, the unlucky emissary
who was to present to the Allies, in the midst of the
war, HimmIer's proposal to give them a million Jewish
lives in exchange for ten thousand trucks, was one of the
leading officials of the Relief and Rescue Committee, and
he came to Jerusalem to testify about his dealings with
Eichmann, as did his former rival in Hungary, Philip von
Freudiger. While Freudiger, whom Eichmann, incidentally,
did not remember at all, recalled the rudeness with which
he had been treated at these interviews, Brand's
testimony actually substantiated much of Eichmann's own
account of how he had negotiated with the Zionists. Brand
had been told that "an idealistic German" was now talking
to him, "an idealistic Jew" - two honorable enemies
meeting as equals during a lull in the battle. Eichmann
had said to him:
"Tomorrow
perhaps we shall again be on the battlefield."
It was, of course, a
horrible comedy, but it did go to show that Eichmann's
weakness for uplifting phrases with no real meaning was
not a pose fabricated expressly for the Jerusalem trial.
What is more interesting, one cannot fail to note that in
meeting with the Zionists neither Eichmann nor any other
member of the Sondereinsatzkommando employed the tactics
of sheer lying that they had used for the benefit of the
gentlemen of the Jewish Council. Even language rules"
were suspended, and most of the time a spade was called a
spade. Moreoever, when it was a question of serious
negotiationsover the amount of money that might buy an
exit permit, over the Europe Plan, over the exchange of
lives for trucks-not only Eichmann but everybody
concerned: Wisliceny, Becher, the gentlemen of the
Counterintelligence service whom Joel Brand used to meet
every morning in a coffee house, turned to the Zionists
as a matter of course. The reason for this was that the
Relief and Rescue Committee possessed the required
international connections and could more easily produce
foreign currency, whereas the members of the Jewish
Council had nothing behind them but the more than dubious
protection of Regent Horthy. It also became clear that
the Zionist functionaries in Hungary had received greater
privileges than the usual temporary immunity to arrest
and deportation granted the members of the Jewish
Council. The Zionists were free to come and go
practically as they pleased, they were exempt from
wearing the yellow star, they received permits to visit
concentration camps in Hungary, and, somewhat later, Dr.
Kastner, the original founder of the Relief and Rescue
Committee, could even travel about Nazi Germany without
any identification papers showing he was a Jew
(pp198-199).
Arrendt's book is by far one of
the best of the trial of the Eichmann and is highly
recommended for those wishing to get a through background to
the events in Hungary in 1944 and Jim Allen's play
Perdition.
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