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Chapter 25 HUNGARY,
THE CRIME WITHIN A CRIME
Who told a Berlin
audience in March 1912 that "each country can absorb only
a limited number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders
in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews"? No,
not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of
the World Zionist Organization and later still the first
president of the state of Israel. And where might you
find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917
but republished as late as 1936: ¨The Jew is a
caricature of a normal, natural human being, both
physically and spiritually. As an individual in society
he revolts and throws off the harness of social
obligation, knows no order nor discipline°? Not in
Der Stürmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth
organization, Hashomer Hatzair.
As the above quoted
statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and
exploited self-hatred in the Diaspora. It started from
the assumption that anti-Semitism was inevitable and even
in a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the
land of Israel. It is true that only an extreme lunatic
fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to join the war
on Germany's side in 1941, in the hope of establishing
"the historical Jewish state on a national and
totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German
Reich." Unfortunately this was the group which the
present Prime Minister of Israel chose to
join.
That fact gives an extra
edge of topicality to what would in any case be a highly
controversial study of the Zionist record in the heyday
of European fascism by Lenni Brenner, and American
Trotskyist writer who happens also to be Jewish. It is
short (250 pages), crisp and carefully documented. Mr
Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists
collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including
Hitler's; he is careful also to put on record the
opposition to such policies within the Zionist
movement.
In retrospect these
activities have been defended as a distasteful but
necessary expedient to save Jewish lives. But Brenner
shows that most of the time this aim was secondary. The
Zionist leaders wanted to help young, skilled and
able-bodied Jews to emigrate to Palestine. They were
never in the forefront of the struggle against fascism in
Europe.
That in no way absolves
the wartime Allies for their callous refusal to make any
serious effort to save European Jewry. As Brenner says,
"Britain must be condemned for abandoning the Jews of
Europe"; but, "it is not for the Zionists to do it."
Except of a review of Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators, by Edward Mortimer, "Contradiction,
collusion and controversy," The Times, (London, UK),
February 11th, 1984.
The destruction of Hungarian
Jewry is one of the most tragic chapters in the Holocaust.
When the Germans finally occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944,
the leaders of the Jewish community knew what to expect from
the Nazis, as Hungary had been a refuge for thousands of
Polish and Slovakian Jews, and they had been warned by the
Bratislava working group that Wisliceny had promised that
Hungary's 700,000 Jews would eventually be
deported.
The Nazis summoned the Jewish
community leaders and told them not to worry, things would
not be so bad if the Jews co-operated. As Randolph Braham
has written, 'History and historians have not been kind to
the leaders of Hungarian Jewry in the Holocaust
era.'[(1)] For as Braham admits, many 'tried to
obtain special protection and favors for their
families'.[(2)] Some did not have to wear the yellow
star and, later, were allowed to live outside the ghettos
and were permitted to look after their property. In post-war
years the roles of two Hungarian Labour Zionists - Rezso
Kasztner and Joel Brand, leaders of the Budapest Rescue
Committee-- were subjected to detailed scrutiny in Israeli
courtrooms. Kasztner had been accused of betraying the
Hungarian Jewish masses.
'They . . . Begged Them to
Hush up the Matter'
On 29 March 1944 these two
Zionists met Wisliceny and agreed to pay him the $2 million
he had previously mentioned to Weissmandel, if he would not
put the Hungarian Jews in ghettos or deport them. They also
asked for transport along the Danube of 'some hundred
people' with Palestine certificates, saying that it would
make it easier for them to raise the cash from their people
abroad.[(3)] Wisliceny agreed to take their bribe
and to consider the transport, but was concerned that it be
done secretly in order not to antagonise the
Mufti
who wanted no Jews released. The first instalments of the
bribe were paid, but the Nazis nevertheless set up ghettos
in the provinces. Then, on 25 April, Eichmann
summoned Joel Brand and told him that he was to be sent to
negotiate with the WZO and the Allies. The Nazis would allow
a million Jews to leave for Spain in exchange for 10,000
trucks, soap, coffee and other supplies. The trucks were to
be used exclusively on the eastern front. As a token of Nazi
good faith, Eichmann would allow the Zionists the
preliminary release of a Palestine convoy of 600.
Brand was confirmed by the
Rescue Committee as their representative and the Germans
flew him to Istanbul on 19 May in the company of another
Jew, Bandi Grosz, a German and Hungarian agent who had
additional contacts with various Allied intelligence
services. Grosz was to conduct his own negotiations with
Allied intelligence about the possibilities of a separate
peace. On arrival, Brand met the local representatives of
the WZO's Rescue Committee and demanded an immediate meeting
with a Jewish Agency leader. The Turks, however, refused to
grant a visa to Moshe Shertok, the head of the Agency's
Political Department, and the Istanbul committee finally
advised Brand to confer with him in Aleppo, on Syrian
territory, which was then under British control. On 5 June,
when Brand's train passed through Ankara, two Jews-one a
Revisionist, the other an Agudist-warned him that he was
being lured into a trap and would be arrested. Brand was
reassured by Echud Avriel, a leading WZO rescue figure, that
this warning was false and motivated by factional
malice.[(4)]; However, Brand was in fact arrested by
the British.
Shertok interviewed Brand on 10
June in Aleppo. Brand described the encounter in his book,
Desperate Mission (as told to Alex Weissberg):
Moshe Shertok
withdrew into a corner with them [the British],
and they talked softly but vehemently together. Then he
came back to me and laid a hand on my shoulder . . . 'You
must now go on further south . . . it is an order . . . I
cannot change it' . . . 'Don't you understand what you're
doing?' I shouted. 'This is plain murder! Mass murder! .
. . You have no right to seize an emissary. I am not even
an emissary from the enemy . . . I am here as the
delegate of a million people condemned to
death.'
Shertok huddled with the
British and returned again: 'I will not rest until you are
free once more . . . you will be set free.'[(5)] In
fact Brand was escorted by a British officer to imprisonment
in Egypt. They stopped in Haifa, where he strolled around
the harbour:
I even considered
the possibility of escape. But only those who have
belonged to a party held together by the strongest ties
of ideology will understand . . . I was a Zionist, a
party member . . . I was bound by party discipline . . .
I felt so small, so insignificant - a man thrown by
chance into the boiling cauldron of history-- that l dare
not take on my own shoulders the responsibility for the
fate of a hundred thousand people. I lacked the courage
to defy discipline, and therein lay my true historical
guilt.[(6)]
Brand never had any illusions
that the Eichmann proposition would be accepted by the
Western Allies. However, he believed that, as with the
earlier negotiations with Wisliceny, some serious SS of
ficers wanted to invest in their own future. Live Jews were
now a negotiable currency. Brand hoped that it would be
possible to negotiate for more realistic arrangements or, at
least, to decoy the Nazis into thinking that a deal could be
made. Possibly the extermination programme would be slowed
down or even suspended while an accord was being worked out.
However, the British were not interested in exploring the
possibilities of Eichmann's scheme and notified Moscow of
Brand's mission; Stalin naturally insisted that the offer be
rejected. The story reached the press and on l9 July the
British publicly denounced the offer as a trick to divide
the Allies.
On 5 October Brand was finally
allowed to leave Cairo and he rushed to Jerusalem. He tried
to go on to Switzerland, where Rezso Kasztner and SS Colonel
Kurt Becher had been sent to negotiate further with Saly
Mayer of the Joint Distribution Committee. The Swiss were
willing to allow him entry, providing the Jewish Agency
would sponsor him. The British gave him a travel document
under the name of Eugen Band, the name Eichmann had given
him for reasons of secrecy. He went to Eliahu Dobkin, head
of the Jewish Agency's Immigration Department, who was
supposed to represent the WZO at the negotiations, to get
his sponsorship paper; Dobkin refused:
'You will
understand, Joel,' he said, 'that I cannot vouch for a
man called Eugen Band, when your name is Joel Brand.'
'Are you aware, Eliahu, that many Jews in Central Europe
have been sent to the gas chambers simply because
officials have refused to sign documents that were not
absolutely correct?'[(7)]
Late in 1944, at a Tel Aviv
Histadrut meeting, Brand was introduced, as '"Joel Brand,
the leader of the Jewish workers' movement in Hungary. He
has brought with him the greetings of Hungarian Jewry" . . .
I wondered where this Hungarian Jewry was., He tore into the
meeting:
'You were the last
hope of hundreds of thousands condemned to death. You
have failed them. I was those people's emissary yet you
let me sit in a Cairo prison . . . You have refused to
declare a general strike. If there was no other way, you
should have used force.' . . . They hurried up to the
reporters who were present and begged them to hush up the
matter.[(8)]
An inquiry commission was
hurriedly set up to appease Brand, but it met only once and
decided nothing. Weizmann arrived in Palestine and Brand
asked for an immediate interview. It took Weizmann 'a
fortnight' to reply.[(9)]
29 Dec. 1944, Dear Mr Brand: .
. . As you may have seen from the press, I have been
traveling a good deal and generally did not have a free
moment since my arrival here. I have read both your letter
and your memorandum and shall be happy to see you sometime
the week after next - about the 10th of
January.[(10)]
They finally met, and Weizmann
promised to help him get back to Europe; Brand never heard
from him again.
'Hardly likely to Achieve
the Salvation of the Victims'
The WZO approach to the crisis
in Hungary had been timid throughout. On 16 May 1944 rabbi
Weissmandel had sent detailed diagrams of Auschwitz and maps
of the railway lines through Slovakia to Silesia to the
Jewish organisations in Switzerland demanding 'absolutely,
and in the strongest terms', that they call upon the Allies
to bomb the death camp and the railways.[(11)] His
proposal reached Weizmann in London, who approached the
British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in an extremely
hesitant manner. Eden wrote to the Secretary for Air on 7
July:
Dr Weizmann admitted that there
seemed to be little enough that we could do to stop these
horrors, but he suggested that something might be done to
stop the operation of the death camp by bombing the railway
lines . . . and bombing the camps
themselves.[(12)]
A memorandum by Moshe Shertok
to the British Foreign Office, written four days later,
conveys the same hangdog scepticism:
The bombing of the
death camps is . . . hardly likely to achieve the
salvation of the victims to any appreciable extent. Its
physical effects can only be the destruction of plant and
personnel, and possibly the hastening of the end of those
already doomed. The resulting dislocation of the German
machinery for systematic wholesale murder may possibly
cause delay in the execution of those still in Hungary
(over 300,000 in and around Budapest). This in itself is
valuable as far as it goes. But it may not go very far,
as other means of extermination can be quickly
improvised.[(13)]
After setting out all the
reasons why the bombing would not work, Shertok then
elaborated on the theme that 'the main purpose of the
bombing should be its many-sided and far-reaching moral
effect'.[(14)]
The Jews of occupied Europe,
through Weissmandel and Brand, were imploring immediate
action. The bombing of Auschwitz was not only possible, it
happened by mistake. On 13 September 1944 American pilots,
aiming for an adjacent Buna rubber works, hit the camp and
killed 40 prisoners and 45 Germans. In July, when Eden had
asked if the question could be discussed in Cabinet,
Churchill had replied: 'Is there any reason to raise these
matters at the cabinet? You and I are in entire agreement.
Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if
necessary.'[(15)] Nothing happened. It was felt the
cost to the attacking planes would be too high. Weizmann and
Shertok continued to petition the British to bomb the camps,
but lost the initiative.[(16)]
The British Zionist leadership
likewise faltered in its reaction to the Hungarian crisis.
When the Germans occupied Budapest, Alex Easterman,
Political Secretary of the British section of the WJC, went
to the Foreign Office; when the officials asked that the
establishment not organise any street demonstrations, of
course he agreed. Again, on 11 July, Selig Brodetsky, a
member of the WZO Executive and the President of the Board
of Deputies, rejected a call from the Palestinian Vaad Leumi
(National Council) that they should put on a mass march in
London.[(17)] Lady Reading, Eva Mond, was the
President of the British section of the WJC, and she came
out against 'nagging'. 'Don't let us drift into continental
Jewish habits,' she admonished on 23 May, when the death
trains were still rolling.[(18)]
'He Agreed to Help Keep the
Jews from Resisting Deportation'
The destruction of Hungarian
Jewry took place at a time when the Nazi structure was
showing all the signs of collapse. Canaris's Abwehr
Intelligence had concluded that the war was lost; it
therefore started making its own contacts with Western
Intelligence, and had to be taken over by the SD. Count
Klaus von Stauffenberg's bomb on 20 July 1944 came in the
middle of the Hungarian crisis and almost destroyed the Nazi
edifice. The Germans had invaded the country because they
knew that Admiral Miklos Horthy was planning to pull Hungary
out of the war. The neutrals, under the prodding of the War
Refugee Board, protested against the new murders, and some
made efforts to extend diplomatic protection to some of the
Jews. From the beginning Eichmann, who had responsibility
for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, was concerned
that Jewish resistance or attempts at escape over the border
to Romania, which by then was unwilling to hand over Jews to
the Nazis, would trigger off political shock waves that
could slow down his operation.
When Eichmann first went to
work for von Mildenstein, the fervent philo-Zionist gave him
Herzl's Judenstaat. He liked it. He was also fond of Adolf
Bohm's Die Zionistische Bewegung (The Zionist Movement) and
once, in Vienna, he recited an entire page of it by heart
during a meeting with some Jewish leaders, including the
mortified Bohm. He had even studied Hebrew for two and a
half years, although, he conceded, he never really spoke it
well. He had had many dealings with the Zionists before the
Second World War. In 1937 he had negotiated with the
Haganah's representative, Feivel Polkes, and had been their
guest in Palestine. He had also had close contacts with the
Czech Zionists. Now, again, he would negotiate with the
local Zionists.
In 1953 the Ben-Gurion
government prosecuted an elderly pamphleteer, Malchiel
Gruenwald, for having libelled Rezso Kasztner as a
collaborator for his dealings with Eichmann in 1944. The
trial had considerable international coverage throughout
1954. Eichmann must have followed it in the press, for he
described his relationship with Kasztner at length in taped
interviews he gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem
Sassen, in 1955, parts of which were later published in two
articles in Life magazine after his capture in 1960.
Gruenwald had denounced Kasztner for having kept silent
about the German lies that the Hungarian Jews were only
being resettled at Kenyermezo. In return, he was allowed to
organise the special convoy, which ultimately became a train
to Switzerland, and place his family and friends on it.
Further, Gruenwald claimed, Kasztner later protected SS
Colonel Becher from being hung as a war criminal by claiming
that he had done everything possible to save Jewish lives.
Eichmann described Kasztner as follows:
This Dr Kastner [many
sources Anglicise Kasztner's name] 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 or
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...
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.[(19)]
André Biss, Joel Brand's
cousin, who worked with Kasztner in Budapest, and who
supported his policy, nevertheless corroborated Eichmann's
statement in part in his book, A Million Jews to
Save, when he described who boarded the famous train
which reached Switzerland on 6 December 1944:
Then came the most
numerous group, Kasztner's pride - the Zionist youth.
These were composed of the members of various
organisations of agricultural pioneers, of extreme
right-wing 'revisionists' who already possessed
immigration certificates, and a number of orphans . . .
Lastly came those who had been able to pay cash for their
journey, for we had to collect the sum the Germans
demanded. But of the 1684 in the train 300 at the most
were of this category...
Kasztner's mother, his
brothers, sisters and other members of his family from
Klausenburg [Kluj] were passengers . . . Members
of the families of those who had fought for the formation
of this convoy formed at the most a group of 40 to 50
persons . . . In the confusion that ensued about 380
persons managed to clamber into the train which left
Budapest, not with 1300 passengers as expected, but
crammed full with more than 1700
travellers.[(20)]
The Israeli Labour Party got
more than it bargained for when it set out to defend
Kasztner. Shmuel Tamir, a former Irgunist, a brilliant
cross-examiner, appeared for Gruenwald. Later, in 1961, Ben
Hecht wrote his book, Perfidy, a remarkable expose of
the Kasztner scandal, and he presented many pages of Tamir's
masterly demolition of Kasztner's defence.
Tamir
How do you account for the fact that more
people were selected from Kluj [Kasztner's home
town] to be rescued than from any other Hungarian
town?
Kastner
That had nothing to do with me.
Tamir I put
it to you that you specifically requested favoritism for
your people in Kluj from Eichmann.
Kastner
Yes, I asked for it specifically.
Kastner . .
. All the local Rescue Committees were under my
jurisdiction.
Tamir
Committees! You speak in the plural.
Kastner Yes
- wherever they existed.
Tamir Where
else except in Kluj was there such a
committee?
Kastner
Well, I think the committee in Kluj was the only one in
Hungary.
Tamir Dr
Kastner, you could have phoned the other towns, just as
you phoned Kluj?
Kastner
Yes, that's right.
Tamir Then
why didn't you contact the Jews of all these towns on the
phone to warn them?
Kastner I
didn't because I didn't have time
enough.[(21)]
There were 20,000 Jews in Kluj
and only a limited number of seats on that train. Judge
Benjamin Halevi began pressing Kasztner and he blurted out
his criteria for choosing who to save:
Kastner
. . . the witnesses from Kluj who testified here - in my
opinion, I don't think they represent the true Jewry of
Kluj. For it is not a coincidence that there was not a
single important figure among
them.[(22)]
Levi Blum, also from Kluj, had
attended a dinner for Kasztner in 1948, which had been
arranged by the train passengers; he had spoiled the
occasion by suddenly leaping up and calling the honoured
guest a collaborator and daring him to take his accuser to
court:
Blum
. . . I asked him, 'why did you distribute post cards
from Jews supposed to be in Kenyermeze?' Someone yelled
out, 'This was done by Kohani, one of Kastner's men.'
Kohani was also in the hall. He jumped up and yelled,
'Yes, I got those post cards.' I asked him, 'Who were
they from?' He answered, 'That's none of your business. I
don't have to explain what I do to you.'
Judge Halevi
All of this happened in public?
Blum Yes,
several hundred people were
there.[(23)]
Kasztner was also involved in
the affair of Hannah Szenes which was described at the
trial. Szenes was a brave young Zionist from Hungary, whom
the British finally allowed, together with 31 others, to
parachute into occupied Europe to organise Jewish rescue and
resistance. She landed in Yugoslavia on 18 March, one day
before the German invasion of Hungary; she smuggled herself
back into Hungary in June and was promptly caught by
Horthy's police. Peretz Goldstein and Joel Nussbecher-Palgi
followed her in and they contacted Kasztner, who conned them
both into giving themselves up to the Germans and Hungarians
for the sake of the train. Both were sent to Auschwitz,
although Nussbecher-Palgi managed to saw through some bars
on his train and escape.[(24)] Szenes was shot by a
Hungarian firing squad. Kasztner's admission in court that
he had failed to notify the Swiss, who represented Britain's
interests in Budapest, of the Hungarians' capture of a
British officer and spy - 'I think I had my reasons'--
outraged the Israeli public, many of whom had read her
poetry and knew of her bravery in the Hungarian
prisons.[(25)]
'Are We Therefore to be
Called Traitors?'
On 21 June 1955 Judge Halevi
found there had been no libel of Kasztner, apart from the
fact that he had not been motivated by considerations of
monetary gain. His collaboration had crucially aided the
Nazis in murdering 450,000 Jews and, after the war, he
further compounded his offence by going to the defence of
Becher.
The Nazis' patronage of
Kastner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred
prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the
Jews. Kastner was given a chance to add a few more to that
number. The bait attracted him. The opportunity of rescuing
prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the
rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal
success and a success for Zionism.[(26)]
The Israeli Labour government
remained loyal to their party comrade and the case was
appealed. Attorney-General Chaim Cohen put the fundamental
issue before the Supreme Court in his subsequent
arguments:
Kastner did nothing
more and nothing less than was done by us in rescuing the
Jews and bringing them to Palestine . . . You are allowed
- in fact it is your duty-- to risk losing the many in
order to save the few . . . It has always been our
Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in
arranging the immigration to Palestine. Are we therefore
to be called traitors?
Cohen freely conceded
that:
Eichmann, the chief
exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and
not resist if he allowed the prominents to be saved, that
the 'train of the prominents' was organized on Eichmann's
orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole
people.
But Cohen insisted:
There was no room
for any resistance to the Germans in Hungary and that
Kastner was allowed to draw the conclusion that if all
the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is
entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is
not only entitled to do it but is also bound to act
accordingly.[(27)]
On 3 March 1957 Kasztner was
gunned down. Zeev Eckstein was convicted of the
assassination, and Joseph Menkes and Dan Shemer were found
guilty of being accessories on the basis of a confession by
Eckstein. The assassin claimed that he was a government
agent who had infiltrated a right-wing terrorist grouping
headed by Israel Sheib (Eldad), a well-known right-wing
extremist.[(28)] However, the matter did not end
with Kasztner's death. On 17 January 1958 the Supreme Court
handed down its decision in the Kasztner-Gruenwald
case.
The court ruled, 5 to 0, that
Kasztner had perjured himself on behalf of Colonel Becher.
It then concluded, 3 to 2, that what he did, during the war,
could not be legitimately considered collaboration. The most
forceful argument of the majority was put forward by Judge
Shlomo Chesin:
He didn't warn
Hungarian Jewry of the danger facing it because he didn't
think it would be useful, and because he thought that any
deeds resulting from information given them would damage
more than help . . . Kastner spoke in detail of the
situation, saying, 'The Hungarian Jew was a branch which
long ago dried up on the tree.' This vivid description
coincides with the testimony of another witness about
Hungarian Jews. 'This was a big Jewish community in
Hungary, without any ideological Jewish backbone.'...The
question is not whether a man is allowed to kill many in
order to save a few, or vice-versa. The question is
altogether in another sphere and should be defined as
follows: a man is aware that a whole community is
awaiting its doom. He is allowed to make efforts to save
a few, although part of his efforts involve concealment
of truth from the many; or should he disclose the truth
to many though it is his best opinion that this way
everybody will perish. I think the answer is clear. What
good will the blood of the few bring if everyone is to
perish?[(29)]
Much of the Israeli public
refused to accept the new verdict. Had Kasztner lived, the
Labour government would have been in difficulty. Not only
had he perjured himself for Becher, but, between the trial
and the Supreme Court decision, Tamir had uncovered further
evidence that Kasztner had also intervened in the case of SS
Colonel Hermann Krumey. He had sent him, while he was
awaiting trial at Nuremberg, an affidavit declaring:
'Krumey performed
his duties in a laudable spirit of good will, at a time
when the life and death of many depended on
him.'[(30)]
Later, in the 1960s during the
Eichmann trial, Andre Biss offered to testify. Because of
his involvement with Kasztner he had more contact with
Eichmann than any other Jewish witness - 90 out of 102 had
never seen him - and it was apparent that his testimony
would be important. An appearance date was set, but then the
prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, discovered that Biss meant to
defend Kasztner's activities. Hausner knew that, despite the
Supreme Court's decision in the case, had Biss tried to
defend Kasztner there would have been an immense outcry.
Hausner knew from the Sassen tapes of the Eichmann
interviews how Eichmann might implicate Kasztner. Israel had
gained great prestige from Eichmann's capture and the
government did not want the focus of the trial to shift away
from Eichmann towards a re-examination of the Zionist record
during the Holocaust. According to Biss, Hausner 'asked me
to omit from my evidence any mention of our action in
Budapest, and especially to pass over in silence what was
then in Israel called the "Kasztner affair"'.[(31)]
Biss refused and was dropped as a witness.
Who Helped Kill 450,000
Jews?
That one Zionist betrayed the
Jews would not be of any moment: no movement is responsible
for its renegades. However, Kasztner was never regarded as a
traitor by the Labour Zionists. On the contrary, they
insisted, that if he was guilty, so were they. Kasztner
certainly betrayed the Jews who looked to him as one of
their leaders, despite Judge Chesin's opinion:
There is no law,
either national or international, which lays down the
duties of a leader in an hour of emergency toward those
who rely on leadership and are under his
instructions.[(32)]
However, by far the most
important aspect of the Kasztner-Gruenwald affair was its
full exposure of the working philosophy of the World Zionist
Organisation throughout the entire Nazi era: the
sanctification of the betrayal of the many in the interest
of a selected immigration to Palestine.
Notes
[(1)] Randolph Braham,
'The Official Jewish Leadership of Wartime Hungary',
(unpublished manuscript), p. 1.
[(2.)] Randolph Braham,
'The Role of the Jewish Council in Hungary: A Tentative
Assessment', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. X, p. 78.
[(3.)] Alex Weissberg,
Desperate Mission (Joel Brand's story as told by WeisF
berg), p. 75.
[(4.)] Ibid., p.
158.
[(5.)] Ibid., pp.
163-5.
[(6.)] Ibid., pp.
165-6.
[(7.)] Ibid., p.
207.
[(8.)] Ibid., p.
210.
[(9.)] Ibid., pp.
208-9.
[(10)]. Moshe Shonfeld,
The Holocaust Victims Accuse, p. 38.
[(11)]. Michael Dov-Ber
Weissmandel, 'Letters from the Depths' in Lucy Dawidowicz
(ed.),A HolocaustReader, p. 326.
[(12)]. Bernard
Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p.
311.
[(13)]. Ibid., p.
310.
[(14)].
Ibid.
[(15)]. Ibid., p.
311.
[(16)]. Ibid., p.
313.
[(17)]. Meir
Sompolinsky, 'Anglo-Jewish Leadership and the British
Government', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XIII, p.
213.
[(18)]. Ibid., pp.
217-18.
[(19)]. Adolf Eichmann,
'I Transported Them to the Butcher', Life (5 December 1960),
p. 146.
[(20)]. Andre Biss, A
Million Jews to Save, pp. 92~4.
[(21)]. Ben Hecht,
Perfidy, pp. 112-14.
[(22)]. Ibid., p.
118.
[(23)]. Ibid., p.
110.
[(24)].Weissberg,
DesperateMission, pp. 236 47.
[(25)].Hecht, Perfidy,
p. 129.
[(26)]. Ibid., p.
180.
[(27)]. Ibid., pp.
194-5, 268.
[(28)]. Yitzhalc
Heimowitz, 'On the Kastner Case', Middle East and the West
(31 Januarv 1958), p. 3; Mordechai Katz, 'As I See It',
ibid., (24 January 1958), p. 3; Katz, 'On Kastner and his
Assassins', ibid., (7 February 1958), p. 3.
[(29)].Hecht, Perfidy,
pp.27s1.
[(30)]. Ibid., p.
199.
[(31)]. Biss, A Million
Jews to Save, p. 231.
[(32)]. Hecht,Perfidy,
p. 272.
Lenni Brenner: Zionism in
the Age of the Dictators.
Copyright © 1983 Lenni
Brenner. All Rights Reserved.
Reposted here by permission by
of the author. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni
Brenner is presented online for personal use only. No
portions of this book may be reprinted, reposted or
published without written permission from the
author.
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