Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
Rudolf
Kasztner THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997 Shamash:
The
Jewish Internet Consortium: Holocaust Home
Page Jim Allens play
Perdition was described as "the most controversial
play of the 1980s", as it accused the Zionist movement of
collaborating with the Nazis in the extermination of over
500,000 Hungarian Jews (The Guardian, 23rd April
1999). The play deals with the collaboration of some of the
Zionist leaders of Hungary's Jews, notably Rudolf Kasztner.
It would be unfair to label the whole Zionist movement as
mere quislings of the Nazi regime: many Zionists fought
heroically as partisans, participating in uprisings such as
the one in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, whilst others in
occupied Europe actively resisted fascism and did what they
could to help people escape the SS extermination squads that
roamed the countryside of Eastern Europe, and the death
camps and gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, in Hungary in
1944, a different picture emerges of the activities of the
Zionists, and the source of the allegations made against
Kasztner comes from Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust,
such as Rabbi
Michael Dov Weissmandel,
Rudolf
Vrba and post-war
writers such as Lenni
Brenner.
They have claimed that the
leadership of the Zionist movement engaged in a shocking
failure to support pleas for rescue, the suppression of news
of the holocaust and for regarding the establishment of a
Zionist state in Palestine of having greater priority than
saving the majority of Europe's Jews from the Nazi death
camps. They are alleged to have ignored messages such as the
following
which came from the 'Jewish National Committee' in Warsaw,
via the Polish underground, on 21st January 1943, and simply
read as follows: Brothers
- the remaining Jews in Poland live with the awareness
that in the most terrible days of our history you did not
come to our aid. Respond, at least in the last days of
our life." (Quoted by Lucy Dawidowicz in The
War Against the Jews 1933-45. (Penguin Books,
Middlesex, 1977, p.403) The Hungarian Jewish refugee
Arthur
Koestler, was
another person attempting to alert people to the fate of
Europe's Jews. According to Martin Gilbert, writing in his
book Auschwitz and the Allies (Michael Joseph,
London, England, 1981), even during the period at the end of
1943 and the beginning of 1944, the stories of German
atrocities were still not fully believed. One of those
concerned by this fact was Koestler, then working as a
journalist and lecturer in Britain. "At present", he wrote
in the New York Times Magazine in January
1944: Gilbert notes that Koestler's
own "emotion and bitterness" arose because he had on his
desk in front of him photographs of the killing of Jews -
photographs, which Koestler noted, people had died to
smuggle out of Poland. Koestler's article
continued: Clearly all this is
becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must
suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas you others are
healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of
maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live
in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way
round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a
sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us,
whereas you are the neurotics who totter about ill a
screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to
face the facts." Unlike the socialist Bund, the
founders of the Zionism movement at the turn of the 20th
century argued that the Jewish "question" in Europe could
only be solved by the Jewwish people leaving the continent
and creating a homeland in Palestine. It would be the rise
of fascism across Europe in the 1930's and the Holocaust
that would see the Bund destroyed as a political movement
and its place as a representative of the Jewish people of
Eastern and Central Europe taken by the Zionists. It is
clear that there is much evdience that the Zionists took
this opportunity not to help the Jewish people as they were
being slowly led to the death camps, or alert the world
about the plans of the Nazis, but to collaborate with them
and use their position to save their own, and not the bulk
of Jewry who being exterminated towards the end of the war.
During the Second World War,
the main non-Zionist organization in Europe was the
Socialist Bund. Although equipped with few resources, it did
the most to publicize the Holocaust and seek support for
Jewish resistance in Europe. On the other hand, the World
Zionist Organization (WZO) was an international organization
with a large intelligence network. Specifically, it was the
only Jewish international organization which had liaison
offices inside Nazi Europe. It had direct organizational
links with Zionist groups throughout Europe and direct
access to and political influence with the Allied powers. It
was also involved in arms smuggling and financial
operations, but this vast apparatus, which then had illegal
armed forces in Palestine, was not used to publicize the
Holocaust or support beleaguered ghetto fighters or aiding
rescue activities. It was accused of covering up the crimes
of the Nazi regime until the Allied powers decided to
publicize it, not assisting Jewish resistance groups, and
not making attempt to rescue the bulk of European
Jewry. The Zionists did not lead the
resistance in the ghetto, these activities were generally
led by Bundists and Communists. Jews organized resistance
movements and took part in partisan warfare throughout
occupied Europe - usually under Communist leadership, often
under direct command of the Soviet Red Army. These groups
made a substantial contribution to the Allied war effort. It
should be said as well, that many Zionists had no choice but
to fight back against the Nazis, and some fought bravely in
ghetto rebellions and partisan warfare. But in the Warsaw
ghetto, where their contribution was greatest, the majority
of fighters were either Communist, Bundist or unaffiliated.
Furthermore, although many left-wing Zionists and
Revisionists made a substantial contribution to the Warsaw
ghetto rebellion in 1943, the first target of the resistance
fighters was often other Zionists, who were leaders of the
Nazi sponsored Judenrat, the hated ghetto police and the
Jewish Gestapo. This included Dr. Alfred Nossig, who was
shot by the Warsaw ghetto fighters as a Gestapo
agent. Generally, it has been argued
that whatever the role some Zionists played in the
resistance activities, the plain fact is that they got
little or no support from the WZO, whose leadership was too
busy demanding unrestricted immigration to Palestine and the
establishment of a Jewish Army in the country. Furthermore,
the Zionists were engaged in an armed struggle against the
British mandate in Palestine, where they maintained a very
efficient clandestine armed force throughout the war. They
carried out the assassination of the British Minister Lord
Moyne in Cairo in November 1944. They had extensive arms
smuggling operations which substantially depleted British
armories and forced the diversion of British troops away
from the battlefront to guard duty in Palestine. The arms
stolen by the Zionists were not for use against the Nazis,
but were to be used against the British army and the Arab
population. One advocate of not helping the
Jews of Europe was the Zionist leader Yitzhak Greenbaum,
whose son was described in Nazi-Zionist Collaboration
once as a "exceptionally notorious" Kapo (Jewish policeman)
at Auschwitz. Greenbaum was Rudolf
Kasztner's
immediate superior in the Jewish Agency, as head of the
Rescue Committee for European Jewry, and later became a
cabinet minister in Israel's first Government in 1948. In a
speech given in Palestine in 1943, he indicated that buying
land from the Arab population of Palestine was more
important than rescuing Jews in Europe, and, as he admitted
after the war, he had even called for less to be said about
the extermination of the Jews, so as not to distract
attention from buying land in Palestine. It is a shocking
indictment of Zionism and its wartime leaders. Thus, the Zionist policy during
the Holocaust is best summed up in the words of Greenbaum
speaking on 'The Diaspora and the Redemption' at a Tel Aviv
meeting in Palestine during February 1943: This Greenbaum confirmed after
the war: Here we have proof that the
establishment of Zionist state in Palestine was the most
important priority of the Zionists - not saving the Jews of
Europe from extermination. As Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, in his
book The Holocaust Victims Accuse (1977)
commented: Rabbi Shonfeld noted that other
Zionist leaders saw "the shedding of Jewish blood in the
Diaspora" as being "necessary in order for us to demand the
establishment of a 'Jewish' state" in Palestine. The fate of
the Jews of Czechoslovakia was similar to those in Hungary
under Kasztner. Money was sent to save a group of Zionist
'chalutzim' (pioneers), while the remainder of the Czech
Jews "must resign itself to annihilation in the Auschwitz
crematoria." This was effectively the view put forward by
Nathan Schwalb, the representative of the Jewish Agency in
Switzerland, to the Rescue Committee for Czech Jewry also
said: The Zionist leadership not only
kept quiet about the news of the holocaust, they actively
suppressed it. During his libel trial in Israel after the
war, the alleged Nazi collaborator Rudolf Kasztner excused
his own silence about the death camps by telling an Israeli
Court that other Jewish Agency representatives suppressed
the news of the holocaust. Kasztner claimed that he learned
later that representatives of the Jewish Agency and Joint
Distribution Committee in Switzerland did not give out
information to the world press about the extermination of
the Jews. Kasztner says he sent cables Istanbul Rescue
Committee (of the Jewish Agency), which he also found out
were kept secret from the press. The writer Ben Hecht quotes
Kasztner as telling an the Israeli court: The author Ben Hecht found
other examples of the Zionists suppressing the news of the
holocaust. When during Kasztner's libel case, Tamir Aktzin,
the dean of the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, was asked if it was true that the Joint
Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency did suppress
the news of the extermination in the United States up to and
through 1941, he replied: The Zionists, Jewish Agency and
Joint Distribution Committee did refrain from publicizing in
the American press the massacre of Jews. Furthermore, before the war had
ended in 1945, a Jewish survivors from Poland came to the
annual meeting of the World Jewish Congress. They accused
them of two key failures: 2) Of having neglected
practical possibilities of rescue and
help. If this was not enough, one
year earlier in 1944, the Jewish Agency had also received
the letter from Rabbi
Michael Dov Weissmandel,
sent from a cave in Lublin, Poland, warning that the
deportation of the Jews of Hungary had already begun. He
described in immense detail how every day, 12,000 Jews are
taken off in trains and how in 45 days the entire Jewish
population of Hungary will have been taken to the death
camps. Weissmandel told them that the 95% of them were put
to death by cyanide. He added that the dead bodies were
burnt in ovens at the rate of 12 per hour, and that 36 ovens
had been built at Auschwitz. He noted how the SS had
formerly killed the Jews in the forest at Birkenwald (near
Auschwitz), and how the killings were now taking place at
the death camp, of which he supplied a map (probably in the
hope that it assist Allied bombers). He urged the leaders of
the Jewish Agency to tell the Allies not only to bomb the
ovens at Aushwitz, but all the railway lines leading to the
death camps in the area. If the Allies had been passed
this information, than with the figure of 12,000 a day, over
300,000 lives could have been saved if the transport links
to the deaths camps were put out of action. Furthermore
Weissmandel suggested that the Zionist leaders use their
influence to proclaim to the world (via radio broadcasts)
that the extermination of the Jews was being carried out,
and to inform the Pope of this news. Common sense at least would
suggest that radio broadcasts should have been used to at
least warn all so-called "sub-human groups" being targeted
by the Nazis for extermination &endash; the Jews, Roma
(Gipsy) and Slavic peoples that this was happening and to
organise to resist and save lifes and the heroic fighters of
the Warsaw ghetto had done. Imagine if the Nazi's had been
confronted with a thousand rebellions like the Warsaw Ghetto
? This and the bombing of the railway lines to the camps
would have saved thousands of lives. Nothing was
done. In the Kasztner libel case, it
was noted that six weeks after the deportation of the Jews
of Hungary had begun, not "a single authortive word" was
uttered by the Jewish Agency or any Zionist officials, and
already half a million had been killed. It is accepted that
the Jewish Agency had the "best and most exact information"
on the fate of the Hungarian Jews, and crucially, there was
no British censorship of such items, as proven in the
Israeli court. Later, the Zionist leaders
offered as explanation that "it was inadvisable because of
own diplomatic ties with these governments" to publicise the
news of the holocaust. It is widely accepted that the
Zionists refrained from putting sufficient pressure on the
Allies to intervene to rescue the Jews. It is claimed that
they did nnot want to prejudice freindly realtions with the
Allies, and the future establishment of a Jewish State in
Palestine with American and British support. In 1964, Greenbaum again
indicated that this was one of the main wartime policies of
the Zionists and that they could justify their policy of
hiding the facts about the Holocaust. In a speech on 1
January 1964. He said: Tamir Aktzin stated: There is no other
explanation. Therefore I said: "Collaboration here,
parallel to collaboration there. But if the collaboration
there has developed under German pressure, here we talk
of men who lived in the free world, whose discretion
could be more balanced, who were in control of good
youth, wonderful youth, which awaited a command. The fact
remains that the moral and historical responsibility, as
far as Jews are concerned, lies first and foremost on
those who lived in the free world. And though I am here
to prove the guilt of Kastner, I say that his
responsibility is lesser than that of the leaders of our
free Jewish world" (Perfidy, p.148) Rabbi Weissmandel may not have
known, but the whole world knew of Hitler's plan for the
extermination of the Jews, Roma and Slavic peoples, after a
formal Allied declaration about the Nazi "Final Solution" in
December 1942. In my opinion, l regard the
greatest moment in the recent history of the Jewish people
as being the heroic resistance shown by the fighters of the
Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising in 1943. I always wondered
after seeing Steven Speilberg's controversial movie
Schindler's List why he had hadn't used the story of the
Warsaw Ghetto as the background subject to the Nazi "Final
Solution". After all, it shows the Jews fighting back rather
than going meekly to the death camps at the behest of the
Nazi-sponsored Judenrat (Jewish Councils) - many of who were
shot by the resistance fighters in Warsaw as Nazi
collaborators, such as Dr. Alfred Nossig. As for resistance, take, for
example, the message to Yugoslavia's
Jews from Tito's Communist
Partisans at the start of the Nazi occupation: Surely the least the Zionist
leaders based in Switzerland and the USA could have done was
to encourage resistance rather than collaboration ? The
example of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto showed that
large numbers of German troops could be tied down by such
actions. This could easily have been done in Hungary to stop
the deportations. It would have diverted away from both the
Western and Eastern fronts, valaubale German rsesources at a
critical point of the war. Instead, it is alleged, Hungary's
Zionist leaders, led by Kasztner, collaborated with the
Nazi's. Who was Oskar Schindler ? a
Nazi industrialist who saved "good Jews" from the death
camps to work in his factories which supplied the German war
machine with ammunition. These Jews, it could be argued,
were themselves collaborators - Schindler's List would let
us believe that they were also Zionists, which if true,
would possibly account for the why Schindler was prepared to
use them as his workers. That Schindler had met another
alleged Nazi collaborator - Rudolf Kasztner - is of
considerable interest to those researching the shameful
collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazi regime. Like
Schindler, Kasztner also had his list, and is alleged to
have saved his fellow Zionists and their families from the
holocaust so they could build the "promised land" in
Palestine. In his case, 1600 Hungarian Jews were saved as
476,000 went to extermination in the death camps.
It is claimed that the first
goal of the Zionists was the establishment of the state of
Israel &endash; not the saving of the great mass of Jewish
lives from the holocaust - or even using their privileged
position to urge the Allies to bomb the death camps and all
the railways leading to them - as 12,000 people a day were
being wiped out. This was indicated by the
Zionist leader Yitzhak Greenbaum, who said in a speech in
Tel Aviv, Palestine, on February 18th, 1943 that 'One should
resist this wave to push Zionist activities to secondary
importance'. He also said 'One cow in Palestine is more
important than all the European Jews'. The motto of the
Zionists was Rak B'Dam (Only by blood will we get the
land). This supports the allegation
made by holocuast survivors such as Weissmandel and Vrba,
writers such as Brenner and contained in the play
Perdition,
that the Zionists scarificed all principles in their attempt
to get the Jewish homeland established after the war. Our
aim in this section is to look at all the allegations
surrounding Rudolf Kasztner and the wider background into
Jim Allen's play, Perdition. Nazi-Zionist
Collaboration, pamphlet published in 1981 by BAZO-PS -
British Anti-Zionist Organization/Palestine Solidarity,
London; © 1999
From
the front page of the British newspaper, The
People, 17th October 1943. Proof of a systematic
campaign to wipe out the Jews of Europe had reached the
Zionists some ten months earlier:
Brothers - the
remaining Jews in Poland live with the awareness that
in the most terrible days of our history you did not
come to our aid. Respond, at least in the last days of
our life - message via the Polish Underground from the
Jewish
National Committee
in Warsaw, January 1943.
"We
notify you of the greatest crime of all times, about the
murder of millions of Jews in Poland. Poised at the brink
of the annihilation of the still surviving Jews, we ask
you:
"We have the mania
of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam,
mass-electrocution and live burial, of the total Jewish
population of Europe. So far three million have died. It
is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it
goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of
your watch."
"I have been
lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their
attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration
camps, they don't believe in the starved children of
Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the
mass-graves of Poland ; they have never heard of Lidice.
Treblinka or Belzac you can convince them for in hour,
then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence
begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has
returned like reflex temporarily weakened by a
shock.
For the rescue of
the Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our
excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have.
When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the
masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land -
I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of
the land. The more said about the slaughter of our
people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to
strengthen and promote the Hebraization of the land. If
there would be a possibility today of buying packages of
food with the money of the 'Keren Hayesod' (United Jewish
Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a
thing? No! And once again No!"
When they asked me,
couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal
funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and
I say again 'NO!' . . . one should resist this wave which
pushes the Zionist activities to secondary
importance."
The rescue
committee of the Jewish Agency falsely bore the name
'rescue'. It would be more appropriate to call it the
Committee for Covering Up, Ignoring and Silencing . . .
the thoughts of Zionist officials and especially the
chairman, Greenbaum, were steeped in plots and schemes to
use the holocaust and its consequences to build up the
national home and to realize the demands for establishing
a Jewish State.
Since we have the
opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group
that they must always remember that matter which is the
most important, which is the main issue that must always
be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be
victorious. After the victory, they will once again
divide up the world between the nations as they did at
the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for
the first step and now, as the war ends, we must do
everything so that Eretz Yisroel should become a Jewish
state. Important steps have already been taken in this
matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we
must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are
spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices,
with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table
when they make the distribution of nations and
territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and
impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is
being spilled in order to protect our own blood. Because
'rak b'dam tihyu lanu haaretz' (only through blood will
the land be ours). As to yourselves - members of the
group - you will get out, and for this purpose we are
providing you with funds by this courier.
I informed them
almost daily by cables about the pace of the
extermination. My cables were never published
anywhere."(Hecht, Ben: Perfidy, Julian Messner, New York,
USA, 1961, p.91).
1) Not publicizing
to the Allies and the world that the Jews were being
exterminated.
Whoever is building
the homeland and is battling for the very existence of
the homeland, is excused from knowing; for he has
another, greater obligation." (Shonfeld, p.79)
Why this
suppression of the dreadful news by Ben-Gurion, Sharett,
Weizmann and all the official leaders of Jewry? Because,
had the masses in Palestine known then what was happening
in Hungary, and known then the stony hearts of their
leaders, a storm would have risen in our land. Power
would have fallen out of their hands. And this, it seems,
was more important to them.
"You will probably
die. The only real choice is how. Take a gun and share
our lives in the mountains or await betrayal and the
journey to the death camps" (cited in Perfidy in the
Balkans: The Rape of Yugoslavia by Arnold Sherman.
Psichogios Publications, Athens, Greece, 1993)
References
Perfidy, Hecht, Ben. Julian Messner, New York, USA,
1961;
Auschwitz and the Allies: How the Allies responded to the
news of Hitler's Final Solution. Martin Gilbert,
published by Michael Joseph, London, England,
1981.