Eichmann's List: a pact with the devil
Rudolph Kasztner cut a $1.5m deal with the architect of the Holocaust, to allow hundreds of privileged Jews to escape death. But was he a hero or a collaborator?
By Adam LeBor
Wednesday, 23 August 2000
What are these?
In the summer of 1944 in wartime Budapest, two men, a Nazi and a Jew, sat negotiating through a fog of cigarette smoke. One was notorious: Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust. The other was less well known: a Hungarian lawyer and journalist called Rudolf Kasztner, leader of the Zionist Vaad (or Rescue and Relief Committee). The topic of their discussion was a train to be filled with Jews. Not a cattle train, but something more comfortable: a train which would take 1,685 privileged passengers out of the Holocaust to the safety of neutral Switzerland - for a price of $1,000 a head, or a total of more than $1.5m. The money was paid to Himmler's envoy, an SS officer called Kurt Becher. It was a deal which was to haunt Kasztner for the rest of his days; in the end, it cost him his life.
In the summer of 1944 in wartime Budapest, two men, a Nazi and a Jew, sat negotiating through a fog of cigarette smoke. One was notorious: Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust. The other was less well known: a Hungarian lawyer and journalist called Rudolf Kasztner, leader of the Zionist Vaad (or Rescue and Relief Committee). The topic of their discussion was a train to be filled with Jews. Not a cattle train, but something more comfortable: a train which would take 1,685 privileged passengers out of the Holocaust to the safety of neutral Switzerland - for a price of $1,000 a head, or a total of more than $1.5m. The money was paid to Himmler's envoy, an SS officer called Kurt Becher. It was a deal which was to haunt Kasztner for the rest of his days; in the end, it cost him his life.
The VIP train duly left Budapest, on the night of 30 June 1944. All the passengers on board were saved - eventually reaching Switzerland, after a long stop-over in Bergen-Belsen, in a special "VIP" annex. Kasztner helped draw up the passenger list, which included many of his family and friends, as well as community and Zionist leaders. But even as Kasztner and Eichmann agreed their terms, the Hungarian Holocaust still proceeded at a ferocious pace. Every day thousands of Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and their Hungarian accomplices, and sent to Birkenau.
The VIP train truly was a deal with the devil, demanding macabre choices in the darkest of days. Was Kasztner a hero, or a collaborator? A Jewish Schindler or Quisling? Either way, the train's departure exacted a heavy cost. Its ghosts still haunt both Hungary and Israel, where Kasztner settled after the end of the war, and its legacy still bitterly divides Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The Kasztner episode, until now little known in Britain, raises questions - about moral choices, the grey area between compromise and collaboration, and courage in extremis - that are as relevant now as they were 56 years ago.
Why did the Nazis even bother negotiating with a wartime Jewish official? Nazis gave orders usually, Jews followed them. But those were the dog days of the Second World War: the Allies had landed in Normandy, the Russians were advancing from the east. In Berlin, Eichmann's boss Heinrich Himmler plotted behind Hitler's back, spinning crazed schemes to split the Allies and bring about a separate peace between Germany, the United States and Britain.
Rudolf Kasztner was not part of the Jewish Council, the official leadership of the once powerful Hungarian Jewish community. But as head of the tiny, rival Zionist movement (most Jews were not then Zionists), Himmler believed Kasztner could be a conduit to the West to try and negotiate a separate peace in exchange for stopping the Holocaust. Perhaps he was right. In November 1944, the SS officer Kurt Becher travelled to Zurich. There he met Saly Meyer, leader of the Swiss Jewish community, and Roswell McClelland, who represented President Roosevelt on the US War Refugee Board. The discussion was in total contravention of official Allied policy, to demand unconditional surrender.
Kasztner and his colleagues in the Vaad were certainly mavericks, operating outside the usual channels, running courageous rescue missions over the Slovak mountains, bringing Jews in from Poland. Eichmann professed himself quite taken with Kasztner, as an interview he gave, published in Life magazine in 1960, reveals:
"This Dr Kasztner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist... We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement and we trusted each other perfectly. With his great polish and reserve, he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself. As a matter of fact, there was a strong similarity between 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 Kasztner: 'We too are idealists, and we too had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.' I believe that Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand... to achieve his goal."
For some - mostly passengers on the train or their relatives - Kasztner was a hero, a man who repeatedly risked his own life to save hundreds of others. Whatever Eichmann told Life magazine, he and Kasztner were never "equals". We can only imagine the depths of courage on which Kasztner must have drawn to negotiate with a man who could have, at any moment, despatched him to Auschwitz.
For many others though - those who could not get on the train - he was a collaborator. And possibly something even worse, for Eichmann also claimed: "He [Kasztner] 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 to Palestine. It was a good bargain."
Eichmann is doubtless being disingenuous here. It is doubtful whether anyone apart from the SS could "keep order in the deportation camps". Kasztner and the Vaad were not well known in the provinces where the deportations were taking place. But it is well documented that by the summer of 1944, both the Vaad and the official Jewish Council knew and understood the reality of Auschwitz, that Jews were being deported to their deaths.
At the end of April, fully two months before the train left, Kasztner had received information about the "Auschwitz Protocol". This was an extremely detailed report, compiled by Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, two prisoners who had escaped from Auschwitz. They had seen the preparations being made for the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry - by then Eastern Europe's last remaining Jewish community - and hoped that once alerted, Hungary's Jewish leadership would organise resistance or encourage Hungary's Jews to flee into the countryside. Yet nothing happened; no national warning was issued.
Kasztner's defenders argue that as he was comparatively unknown, nobody would have listened to him anyway. Paradoxically, they also claim that the Vaad did send emissaries to the provinces, who were ignored. Either way, why 450,000 Hungarian Jews went meekly to their deaths when their leaders knew their coming fate is one of the Holocaust's great mysteries.
Some Hungarian Holocaust survivors charge that the price of Eichmann's agreement to let the VIP train leave was high indeed: that Kasztner and the Vaad would remain silent about Auschwitz and allow a quiescent Jewish population to board the other, non-VIP trains, that led not to Switzerland, but the gas chambers. For Budapest-born Ernest Stein, a fighter in the Zionist resistance now living in Miami, Kasztner was "less than a rat".
"Kasztner received the Auschwitz Protocol," says Stein, "but he never showed it to anybody. I am sure he did a deal with the Nazis... He did everything for that train. For him the rest of the Jews were not important. He figured that if he took out the 1,500 or 2,000 people, the rest can go to hell."
To Kasztner, only the train mattered. When two Hungarian Jewish parachutists arrived in Budapest from Palestine, he refused to help them in their mission of organising armed resistance.
But he was no coward. In early 1945, he travelled to Germany on a bizarre and dangerous mission, in the company of SS Officer Becher. Himmler had ordered Becher to prevent the destruction of the concentration camps as the Allies advanced - partly to construct a humanitarian alibi. Becher had a murky record serving on the Eastern Front, but the two men, the Hungarian Jew and the Nazi, worked well together. After Germany's surrender, Becher was arrested as a suspected war criminal, which he almost certainly was. Kasztner came to his rescue, and testified to his good character, describing him as "cut from a different wood than the professional mass murderers of the political SS". This, even more than negotiating with Eichmann, would taint him forever in the eyes of many Jews. After Kasztner's deposition, Becher was released and became an immensely successful businessman.
As for Kasztner, he settled in Israel, where he worked as a civil servant. Then in 1952, Malchiel Gruenwald, a Hungarian Jew living in Israel, published a newsletter accusing Kasztner of collaboration with the Nazis and stealing the wealth of Hungarian Jews with Becher. Kasztner sued for libel, but the case turned into a trial of his own wartime relationship with Becher. The judge, Benjamin Halevi, accused Kasztner of having "sold his soul to the devil" by negotiating with the Nazis.
In March 1957, Kasztner was shot dead outside his home. His killer, an Israeli with connections to the secret service, was caught and imprisoned. "Kasztner was caught up in events which were so much bigger than an ordinary - or even an extraordinary - person could handle. How can we judge what was right and wrong in such a situation?" said Israeli journalist Uri Avnery. "In the end I must say I tend towards Kasztner. I don't believe he was a traitor."
Whether he was a saviour, a collaborator, or something of both, Rudolf Kasztner would talk no more about the secret deals between Budapest's wartime Zionist leadership and the Nazis.
'Last Train From Budapest', Channel 4, tomorrow at 9pm
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/eichmanns-list-a-pact-with-th e-devil-711468.html
Trying Eichmann, not Jewish Disputes
By: Yehiam Weitz
The 1959-61 Ben-Gurion Government's archive opened to the public last year: "...Another subject that preoccupied the government was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped to Israel from Argentina in May 1960. His trial began in April 1961, and he was hung in Ramle Prison on May 31, 1962, almost exactly two years after the kidnapping. We knew the Israeli government discussed the trial, but only now, when we can peruse the minutes, can we understand to what extent the government, a political body, was involved in an event that was basically a criminal trial."
A few weeks ago, the Israel State Archives opened the minutes of the Ninth Government. This government, which was headed by David Ben-Gurion, served for less than two years, from December 1959 to November 1961, and it was a transition government for a substantial portion of this time. The Ninth Government discussed several topics that continue to fascinate many scholars even today. The main issue that preoccupied the ministers was the Lavon affair, which shook up the country for years. Moreover, there were issues that stirred up the public, like the capture of the spy Israel Bar, who was a close friend of the prime minister, and the removal of the fifth chief of staff, lieutenant general Haim Laskov.
Another subject that preoccupied the government was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped to Israel from Argentina in May 1960. His trial began in April 1961, and he was hung in Ramle Prison on May 31, 1962, almost exactly two years after the kidnapping. We knew the Israeli government discussed the trial, but only now, when we can peruse the minutes, can we understand to what extent the government, a political body, was involved in an event that was basically a criminal trial. The government dealt with such legal questions as the appointment of a defense attorney for Eichmann, the legality of the trial and bringing witnesses to testify.
One issue that was debated was whether Eichmann's defense attorney, German attorney Robert Servatius, should be allowed to speak to his client in private. The issue was raised by justice minister Pinhas Rosen. Isser Harel, head of the security services, who was very powerful, was opposed for security reasons.
Trial for the nation's youth
An important subject revealed in the minutes is the viewpoint of Ben-Gurion. The prime minister did not speak much at the discussions, but fr om his few words we can reach two conclusions. The first is that he felt that the punishment inflicted on Eichmann was less important than the trial itself. In a cabinet meeting on May 29, 1960, Ben-Gurion said: "The main thing is not the punishment, because I do not see any proper punishment for this act. So what if they hang a man who murdered millions of children, women and the elderly? I consider the trial itself important."
Ben-Gurion's aim was to demonstrate to the Israeli public, in particular the younger generation, the tremendous spiritual wealth of the European Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. On December 4, 1960, Ben-Gurion said: "Not only were 6,000,000 murdered, the heart of the Jewish people was murdered, the best of Judaism," and the trial would be "for our nation as well, particularly for our youth - they don't know what happened." These words are likely to change the view that Ben-Gurion was almost a member of the Canaanite movement, which "negated" the Diaspora.
His other goal was to strengthen the Zionist viewpoint. In the cabinet it was actually Gideon Hausner, the attorney general and the prosecutor at the trial, who brought it up. At one of the cabinet meetings Hausner said: "I want to emphasize the existence of the Jewish state, the existence of the settlement in the land. This country is the last and essential refuge, that is the lesson that has to emerge from the trial."
The second conclusion is that Ben-Gurion did not want to involve Germany in the trial. Eichmann was captured about two months after the prime minister's conversation with Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, in which Israel was promised economic assistance in addition to the reparations payments. In order not to undermine the assistance and the relations between the two countries, Ben-Gurion decided that the trial would be the trial of one person, Adolf Eichmann, rather than the trial of the entire German people.
In the cabinet meeting on May 29, 1960, Ben-Gurion made one statement that emphasized this: "Each person will die for his own sin" (when finance minister Levi Eshkol added, "up to the third and fourth generation," Ben-Gurion replied: "It doesn't say that."). His wish was also expressed in a remark about the draft of Hausner's opening address, which he sent to Ben-Gurion for perusal. Ben-Gurion demanded that Hausner make changes. The first was to add the word "Nazi" before the word "Germany," to emphasize the concept that he himself had brought to the world: "the other Germany." "In my opinion, you should say Nazi Germany," he remarked to the attorney general. The second was an emphasis on Adolf Hitler's personal guilt as opposed to the guilt of all the Germans.
Cooperation with the enemy
Another issue that concerned the ministers was how not to turn the Eichmann trial into a second Kastner-Greenwald trial. The Kastner trial was a trial for slander, in which the state sued Malchiel Greenwald. Greenwald wrote in leaflets he himself distributed that Israel Kastner, who tried to save Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary, had done so through negotiations with Eichmann.
The state sued Greenwald for a simple reason: Kastner was a civil servant at the time. The trial began in January 1954 as a small and unimportant event, but turned into a discussion of the role of the leadership of the Zionist movement - which became the leadership of the state - in rescuing Jews in the Holocaust. During the trial Kastner became the active defendant, as symbolized by one paragraph of the decision that stated: "Kastner sold his soul to the devil."
The state appealed the ruling and the Supreme Court in effect acquitted Kastner. He himself did not get to hear the words of the Supreme Court, since he was murdered near his home in Tel Aviv in March 1957. The ministers saw that trial as a trial against the victims, and even more so as an oppositional and subversive event against the Mapai (the forerunner of Labor) establishment.
Preoccupation with this trial was renewed when attorney Shmuel Tamir, who was Greenwald's defense attorney and later the justice minister in the first Begin government, wanted to be the prosecuting attorney in the Eichmann trial. This possibility disturbed the ministers, because Tamir was seen as a symbol of opposition to the government in the Kastner trial, and as someone capable of doing anything to achieve his aims.
The issue came up at the cabinet meeting of May 29, 1960, several days after the kidnapping of Eichmann (the prime minister informed the Knesset about it on May 23). Transportation minister Yitzhak Ben-Aharon of Ahdut Ha'avoda related that one of the newspapers had conducted a poll the day after the prime minister's announcement, and that one of the interviewees was Shmuel Tamir. "All he had to say at the first moment was that there would be additional material at the trial about the affair of cooperation with the enemy," Ben-Aharon emphasized.
Ben-Aharon said of Tamir, referring to the Kastner trial: "There is a Jewish pathology even on this point - we have already witnessed it. When conducting a trial we have to know to what extent to direct the investigation so it won't get into all kinds of very serious internal Jewish moral corruption, so that we don't fail in that respect. In fact we already failed once." The cabinet opposed Tamir's request, and the justice minister decided that the law recognized "only one prosecutor, the prosecutor general of the State of Israel."
In July 1960, after Tamir discovered that he would not be joining the prosecution against Eichmann, he suggested another idea, so as to be involved in the trial: He proposed that the Kastner trial be reviewed in light of the kidnapping of Eichmann, in order to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.
Total attack
Toward the end of 1960, Tamir tried to renew the Kastner trial. The excuse was a 1957 interview with Eichmann, which was published in the American weekly Life in November 1960, in which Eichmann claimed Kastner had helped him with the extermination process in Hungary. Tamir demanded that the attorney general interrogate Eichmann in order to reopen the case. Hausner politely refused.
It was the justice minister, Pinhas Rosen, who responded harshly to Tamir. During a cabinet meeting on January 29, 1961, he told his fellow ministers that Tamir "wants to see Eichmann once again, to hear from him matters of importance to him, to find grounds for his request on the Kastner-Greenwald issue. It's a strange idea to bring Eichmann now as a witness against Kastner. The honorable people of Herut now want Eichmann to be a witness against Kastner."
The desire to prevent the Eichmann trial from becoming a second Kastner trial was presented to the cabinet by Hausner, who often consulted with it on legal issues related to the trial. On February 26, 1961, Hausner explained to the ministers that it was supposed to be the trial of the murderer and not a trial about Jewish disputes. He told the ministers that he had spoken informally to the editors of the major newspapers and asked them "not to bring up internal debates as to how people should have behaved in Budapest, in Lodz and in Warsaw - if someone thinks that they should or should not have behaved like Kastner."
Criticizing Justice Benjamin Halevy, the judge at the Kastner trial, who was also a judge at the Eichmann trial, Hausner explained his stand: "Although it is easy to sit in the Russian Compound (the seat of the Jerusalem District Court) and to say how Kastner should have behaved in Budapest, it's an internal Jewish matter, it is not a subject for discussion at the Eichmann trial." Later he said something similar to what Ben-Gurion had said earlier: "I don't know how I would have behaved in the lion's jaw, when there was a need to save Jews on the one hand, and on the other hand to conduct negotiations with the destroyer of the Jewish people, negotiations with the hangman. This is not the place for that debate."
Hausner made a strange request: "I ask the government to allow me not to bring the Kastner-Tamir affair into this trial. I want to avoid this debate. I don't want to defend the Jewish Agency in our claims against the Nazis. There is no room for defense, this is one attack, from the moment we finished the kidnapping affair. From that moment on we are going over to a total attack against the defendant. We will prove at an appropriate opportunity that we acted properly to the degree that we acted properly." He summed up his words in a short and pithy sentence: "We must not turn this trial into a trial of the Jewish people, especially when we have no viewpoint. To defend the Jewish Agency in the Eichmann trial, I would consider that a mistake."
He also explained his tactics as a prosecutor. For example, on the question of whether to invite Joel Brand, who flew to Istanbul in 1944 with the famous proposal "goods in exchange for blood," to testify for the prosecution. He told the ministers that "there is a witness whom I prefer to call as a witness for the prosecution - otherwise Servatius will call him - and that is Joel Brand." He was afraid that the defense attorney would bring up "the entire affair of that transaction, the affair that Eichmann is bringing in his favor," and therefore invited him as a witness.
There are two parts to the cabinet discussions of the trial. The first part, relating to Ben-Gurion's views, does not reveal anything new, and reinforces the commonly held view of the trial. The second part is new and even surprising: the cabinet preoccupation with legal questions and the strong desire to make the Eichmann trial entirely different from the Kastner trial, and even to atone for the previous trial. I myself have written extensively about this motif, but I was unaware of how deeply ingrained it was among the leaders of the state. Awareness of substantial involvement of the Israeli government in shaping the Eichmann trial adds another dimension to our understanding of the trial, an event whose influence on our attitude to the Holocaust and on this particular history of our society is hard to exaggerate.
http://www.hagshama.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=2278