Rudolf Israel Kastner (1906 – 15 March 1957), also known as Rezső Kasztner, was a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and lawyer who became known for having helped Jews escape from occupied Europe during the Holocaust. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.
Kastner was one of the leaders of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee (Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah, or Vaada), which smuggled Jewish refugees into Hungary during World War II, then helped them escape from Hungary when in March 1944 the Nazis invaded that country too.
The Aid and Rescue Committee, or Va'adat Ha-Ezrah ve-ha-Hatzalah be-Budapesht was a small committee of Zionists based in Budapest in 1944-45, who helped Hungarian Jews escape the Holocaust during the German occupation of Hungary. The Committee was also known as the Rescue and Relief Committee, and the Budapest Rescue Committee.
World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
Between May and July 1944, Hungary's Jews were deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz at the rate of 12,000 people a day. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer, to allow 1,684[2] Jews to leave instead for Switzerland on what became known as the Kastner train, in exchange for money, gold and diamonds.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) and administrative headquarters, in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II–Birkenau, a combined concentration/extermination camp three kilometers away in Brzezinka; Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labor camp seven kilometers from Auschwitz I, set up to staff an IG Farben synthetic-rubber factory; and dozens of other subcamps.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. He was captured by the Mossad in Argentina on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicised trial in Jerusalem, Israel. Eichmann was executed by hanging in 1962.
The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. It began with a small guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed and given its final name. Under his direction (1929–45) it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the regime's collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.[3] In 1953 he was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator in a pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald, a freelance writer. The allegation stemmed from his relationship with Eichmann and another SS officer, Kurt Becher, and from his having given positive character references after the war for Becher and two other SS officers, thus allowing Becher to escape prosecution for war crimes. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner's behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted 18 months, and a ruling in 1955 that Kastner had, in the words of Judge Benjamin Halevy, "sold his soul to the devil".[4]
Malchiel Gruenwald (1882–1958) was an Israeli hotelier, amateur journalist and stamp collector, who came to public attention in 1953, when he accused an Israeli government employee, Rudolf Kastner, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was an mid-ranking SS commander who was Commissar of all German concentration camps, and Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary during the German occupation in 1944. He is best known for having traded Jewish lives for money during the Holocaust.
Benjamin Halevy was an Israeli judge and politician.
By saving the Jews on the Kastner train, while failing to warn others that their "resettlement" was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, Kastner had sacrificed the mass of Jewry for a chosen few, the judge said.[4] The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet.[5]
Kastner resigned his government position and became a virtual recluse, telling reporters he was living with a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell".[4] His wife fell into a depression that left her unable to get out of bed, while his daughter's schoolmates threw stones at her in the street.[6]
Kastner was shot on March 3, 1957 by Zeev Eckstein, part of a three-man squad from a group of veterans from the pre-state militia Lehi led by Yosef Menkes and Yaakov Heruti, and died of his injuries twelve days later.[7] The Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment against Kastner in January 1958, stating in a 4–1 decision that the lower court had "erred seriously".[8]
Early life
Childhood
Kastner was born in 1906 in Kolozsvár (Yiddish: קלויזנבורג, Kloiznborg; German: Klausenburg), Austria-Hungary, into a local community of 15,000 Jews. The governance of the city was unstable, moving back and forth between Hungary and Romania. It became Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 1918, was returned to Hungary in 1940, then was restored to Romania by the Treaty of Paris in 1947, after the Soviet and Romanian armies defeated German and Hungarian forces in the winter of 1944–45.
Kastner was raised with his two brothers in a two-story brick house in the southern part of the city by his father, Yitzhak, a merchant and a deeply religious man who spent most of his day in the synagogue, and his mother, Helen, who ran the family store.[9]
Education
Helen decided that her sons should attend a regular high school, rather than a religious one, because the curriculum was broader and included languages. By the time Kastner graduated, he spoke eight languages: Hungarian, Romanian, French, German, and Latin, along with Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic.[9]
Anna Porter writes that he became known for his good looks, sharp mind, quick wit, and his intense concentration, as a result of which his mother decided he should study law, though his heart was in politics.[9]
Jewish entry to universities had been limited by the 1920 Numerus Clausus (closed number) Act, which was the first antisemitic legislation in 20th century Europe. The law limited Jewish university places to six percent, reflecting their representation within the population, and although the legislation was allowed to lapse eight years later, it affected Kastner's teenage political orientation, and he decided at the age of 15 to become a Zionist.[10]
He joined a Zionist youth group, Barissa, which trained its members to become citizens of the Land of Israel, becoming its leader within a year. His older brother, Gyula, had already emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz, but Kastner was still at high school and so unable to go with him. He played his part in the Zionist movement by writing articles on British policies in Palestine for the local Jewish newspaper, Új Kelet.[11]
Early career
When Kastner was 22, his father died reading the Torah in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover. He had to put off any ideas about emigrating, because his mother now needed him at home. He went to law school, as she wished, then worked full-time for Új Kelet after graduating, at first working as a sports reporter, though he continued to write about politics. He also became an assistant to Dr. József Fischer, a lawyer, member of Parliament, president of the Jewish Community of Kolozsvár, and leading member of the National Jewish Party. Fischer admired Kastner's writing, and encouraged him to continue working for Új Kelet too.[12]
Porter writes that Fischer may have been the only person whose intelligence Kastner respected. He was known for being unable to suffer fools gladly, dismissing people as stupid or intellectual cowards. "He had no sense of other people's sensitivities, or he didn't care whether he alienated his friends," Dezsö Hermann, one of Kastner's friends at law school, told Porter. "Back then, in Kolozsvár, Jews kept their heads down. Not Rezső."[13]
Ladislaus Löb quotes Kastner's associate Joel Brand as saying that Kastner was the "prototype of the snobbish intellectual" but showed "marvellous courage at critical moments"; the Orthodox leader Fülöp Freudiger called him "dictatorial" but "selfless and always willing to take personal risks". Kastner's daughter, Zsuzsi, described him as "very arrogant, and rightly so, because he was extremely smart and intelligent and handsome and charismatic".[14]
He became known as a political fixer, knowing whom to bribe, how much to pay, whom to flatter. He interviewed leading politicians for Új Kelet, and even antisemitic members of the Iron Guard. He worked hard as a lawyer for his clients, reportedly knowing when to pay off the police so that charges would be dropped.[15] He married József Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1934, which further cemented his position locally.[16]
As the German army moved across Europe, Kastner set up an information center in Kolozsvár/Cluj to help refugees arriving from Austria, Poland, and Slovakia. He arranged temporary accommodation for them and collected clothes and food from local charities. His main concern was to provide Jewish refugees with safe passage, using his ability to bribe and charm to obtain exit visas from the Romanian government. He asked for help from the Jewish Agency's leadership in Tel Aviv, though there was a limit to what they could do because the British had imposed strict quotas on the number of Jewish refugees allowed into Palestine, causing Kastner to attack "Perfidious Albion" in Új Kelet.[17]
On August 30, 1940, The Second Vienna Award returned Kolozsvár to Hungary's control. The city's Jews were happy at first, reasoning that Hungary's Jews had not been subjected to the same random killings experienced by Jews in Romania. Hungarian Jews were patriots, seeing themselves as Hungarians first, Jews second, and Hungary as their homeland, not Eretz Israel. Their jubilation was short-lived. As Germany's influence over Hungarian policies increased, Jews found themselves subjected to antisemitic legislation and violence. In 1941, the Hungarian government closed all Jewish newspapers, including Új Kelet. Kastner, then 36 years old, decided to move to Budapest to look for a job, leaving his wife behind in Kolozsvár.[18]
Move to Budapest
Kastner rented a small, two-room apartment in a pension in Váci Street. He wanted to continue his work helping Jewish refugees in Kolozsvár, and with that in mind, had obtained a letter of introduction from József Fischer to Ottó Komoly, an engineer and president of the Budapest Zionist Association. Komoly directed Kastner to Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, the Jewish Agency's representative in Budapest, who controlled the Palestine entry visas.
Porter writes that Kastner had to wait in line for two hours in the Agency's office on Erzsébet Boulevard, among scores of Jewish refugees desperate to find a way to escape to Palestine. He eventually barged past Krausz's secretaries and into his office. Krausz explained that he was determined not to alienate the British, which meant that every entry visa had to be legitimate and properly processed, which was consuming all his time.[19] Kastner offered to help, but Krausz wasn't interested. Porter writes that Krausz took an instant dislike to the "forceful, loud, and insistent Kastner."[20]
Kastner's wife joined him in Budapest in July 1941. He tried to persuade Dr. Fischer, who had lost his law practice, to join them but he refused, feeling responsible for the Jewish community in Kolozsvár. Komoly continued to introduce Kastner to key figures in the Budapest Zionist movement. One of them was Sam Springmann, who was bribing officials—in part with money from the Jewish Agency—to carry messages and food parcels into Łódź and other ghettos in Poland. It was Springmann who introduced Kastner to Joel Brand, a meeting that was to change both their lives.
During the summer of 1944, Kastner repeatedly met with Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of deporting Hungary's 800,000-strong Jewish community to Auschwitz in occupied Poland.
They reached an agreement that some 1,685 Jews would be spared for a ransom of $1,000 per head. Most of the passengers could not raise the funds themselves, so Kastner auctioned off 150 seats to wealthy Jews in order to pay for the others. In addition, SS officer Kurt Becher, Heinrich Himmler's envoy insisted that 50 seats be reserved for the families of individuals who had personally paid him for favors, at an amount of approximately $25,000 per person. Becher wanted to get the price per head increased to $2,000 but Himmler set the price at $1,000.[21] The total value of the ransom was estimated by the Jewish community to be 8,600,000 Swiss francs, though Becher himself valued it at only 3,000,000 Swiss francs.[22]
Breaking his agreement, Eichmann had the passengers on the train sent to Belsenconcentration camp. But in the end the passengers were saved by being transported to neutral Switzerland in two contingents, in August and December 1944 respectively. They included the Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the writer Béla Zsolt, the psychiatrist Leopold Szondi, the opera singer Dezső Ernster, the artist István Irsai, and other intellectuals, scientists, religious leaders and political activists, but also people who were neither rich nor prominent, not least a group of Polish orphans.[23] The passengers were ultimately released after a large ransom payment arranged by Orthodox Swiss Jew Yitzchak Sternbuch, Recha Sternbuch's husband.
Alfréd Wetzler (aka Jozef Lánik) and Rudolf Vrba (born as Walter Rosenberg) escaped from Auschwitz after learning that construction and preparations were being made for the mass arrival of "Hungarian Salami" [citation needed] as those Jews were jokingly called by the camp guards,[24] and wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Auschwitz Protocol, with help from the Bratislava Working Group. It was distributed to many Jewish and other organizations, including the Jewish Agency, in order to warn the Hungarian Jews. The recipients did not publicize the report.
Vrba claimed that Kastner deliberately buried the report, because it would ruin his Blood for Goods plan. Kastner's detractors allege that Kastner and other members of the Aid and Rescue Committee helped the SS encourage Hungarian Jewry to board the trains bound for Auschwitz voluntarily, telling them that they would be brought to Kenyérmező and given jobs in factories and fields; and that as a result of this misinformation from their leaders, Hungarian Jewry was brought to Auschwitz. Professor Eli Reichenthal wrote that Kastner at that stage was actually being blackmailed by the Germans, since his parents, friends and close family were all on the "Kastner train" stranded in the Bergen-Belsen death camp.[25]
Kastner's defenders claim that as a result of his negotiations, an additional 15,000 Hungarian Jews were transferred to labor camps at Strasshof rather than being killed at Auschwitz. But Eichmann testified at his trial that this was an act of deceit on his part: "It is possible that I painted a bright picture for Kastner."[26]
Hannah Szenes and the Jewish paratroopers from Palestine
While negotiations about the first train were continuing, three Jewish Paratroopers from Palestine, Hannah Szenes and two men, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein, landed in Yugoslavia as British officers and attempted to penetrate the Hungarian border. They were caught by the Hungarian underground police. Senesh was taken to prison, interrogated in front of her imprisoned mother, and later killed, while the other two were brought to Kastner, who convinced the two to go to the German Gestapo and inform them that they are Jewish fighters from Palestine who wish to confirm the 'Blood for Goods' deal, but ask that it[clarification needed] reaches Switzerland instead of Palestine.
The two were jailed by the Germans, tortured and sent to Germany, but Palgi jumped the train on the way and escaped.
During the trial Chana Senesh's mother told the court that Kastner deceived her in a way that led to suspicions that he was the man that gave away her daughter's unit in the first place, and had her, the mother imprisoned. Palgi accused him of leading them into a trap.
Shmuel Tamir, Gruenwald's attorney, claimed that this was one of the main reasons he felt that Kastner had been nothing more than a German collaborator, to save his family and perhaps for money. In Kastner's defense, Eli Reichenthal says that at the point when the three paratroopers reached Budapest, what motivated Kastner's decisions were the risk to the deal (which Kastner believed was real and therefore could save many more Jews) and Eichmann's blackmail (having Kastner's family together with the Hungarian Zionist leadership on the train). This was something Kastner could not reveal at the trial; "I had reasons" was his answer to Senesh's mother.
Failure to warn Jews
By the beginning of May 1944, Kastner and many other Jewish leaders had received the Vrba-Wetzler report and other evidence that Hungary's Jews would be sent to their deaths.[citation needed] The report was released to the leaders of Jewish organizations in the hope that Hungarian Jews would be warned that they were being deported to a death camp and were not being resettled, as they had been led to believe. However, the report was not made public by the Jewish Council in Hungary or by Kastner.[27]
It was Kastner's Jewish Agency rival Mosher Krausz who eventually sent the report to Switzerland for publication.[28]George Mantello (George Mandel), an Orthodox Jew from Hungary-Rumania and first secretary of the El Salvador mission to Switzerland, sent a diplomat from Romania, Florian Manoliu, to Rumania, to find out what was happening to his family, who by then had been murdered. Manoliu stopped over in Budapest at risk to himself, obtained the abridged Auschwitz Protocols reports from Krausz on 19 June 1944 and immediately returned with the reports to Geneva.[29] Mantello publicized the details within a day of receiving them.[30] This led to demonstrations, over 400 headlines in the Swiss press deploring Europe's barbarism toward Jews (against censorship rules), sermons in Swiss churches and the publication of "Am I my Brother's Keeper?" by Paul Vogt, Switzerland's leading theologian. The resulting international outcry was one of the main reasons that the Hungarian government stopped the deportations. By then, 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been taken to Auschwitz, most being murdered on arrival.
Kastner's critics also argue that he promised the SS not to warn Hungarian Jews to avoid jeopardizing negotiations to save the Jews who escaped on the Kastner train. In 1960, an interview with Eichmann, made by the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen in Argentina, was published in Life Magazine. Eichmann said that Kastner "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".[31]Rudolf Vrba wrote, "Kastner paid for those 1,684 lives with his silence".[32]
Kastner's supporters argue that the agreement over the train was part of a much larger rescue effort, involving negotiations to save all Hungarian Jews and that he could not have saved Jews by warning them anyway. Löb argues, "with no access to the media and limited opportunities to travel, under constant observation by German and Hungarian secret police, he could hardly have raised the alarm in an effective way" and even if he had, the Jews, "surrounded by enemies, stripped of their rights and possessions, having neither the arms nor the experience", were unable to organise either resistance or mass escapes.[33]
Kastner's critics reply that he received SS permission to visit Kolozsvár/Cluj on May 3, 1944 but failed to warn the Jews there despite the fact that Cluj was only 3 miles (4.8km) from the Romanian border and that the 20,000 Jews there were guarded by only 20 Hungarian gendarmes and an SS officer and could have escaped. They also say that he could have telephoned other Jewish communities but did not and that warnings might have enabled Jews to save their lives through "local uprisings, resistances, escapes, hiding, hiding children with Gentiles, forging documents, paying ransom, bribes" and other means.[34]
From 1943, the BBC Polish Service had been broadcasting about the exterminations but the BBC Hungarian Service had not mentioned Jews. After the German invasion in March 1944, the Hungarian Service did broadcast warnings but by then it was too late. According to Cesarani and Götz Aly, although Jews who survived the deportations claimed that they had not been informed by their leaders, that no one had told them, there is plenty of evidence that Hungarian Jews could have known.[35][36]
Reaction
The consequences of the meetings between Kastner and Eichmann had long-lasting repercussions in the Israeli and Hungarian Jewish communities that are still felt. Part of these repercussions revolve around the fact that Kastner helped to draw up the list of who was going to be among the Jews who were chosen to be saved and allowed to leave on a train. According to some sources, many of the Jews who were saved were Kastner's relatives, rich Hungarian Jews who subsidized those on the train who couldn't pay, friends of Kastner as well as "community and Zionist leaders". The passengers included orphans, students, workmen, teachers and nurses.[37]
Defense of Kurt Becher and other SS officers
In early 1945, Kastner traveled to Germany with Becher, who had received the money and valuables paid to save the Jewish lives on the train. Himmler had ordered Becher to attempt to stop further exterminations at the concentration camps as the Allies gained further ground in the closing days of World War II. Even though Kastner was a Hungarian Jew and Becher was head of the Economic Department of the SS, Kastner and Becher worked well together. This 1945 action is credited by some for saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives [Ref. Anna Porter, "Kastner Train"]. Others consider Kastner to have been a collaborator.
At the conclusion of the war, Becher was arrested and investigated at Nuremberg as a war criminal. Kastner intervened on his behalf and sent an affidavit to his de-Nazification hearing, stating that "[Becher is] cut from a different wood than the professional mass murderers of the political SS". It is possible that he did so with the knowledge of the Jewish Agency (Zionist leadership in Palestine, the Yishuv) in the hope of obtaining help in recovering stolen Jewish assets and capturing Eichmann in return.[38] Kastner later lied in court about having testified on Becher's behalf at Nuremberg trials, while he was asked about the affidavit.[39] This defense of an SS officer angered the Jewish public as much as the original negotiations with Eichmann.
Kastner also intervened on behalf of SS officers Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny, who had negotiated with him before his meetings with Eichmann. In all, "there was a total of seven interventions by Kastner on behalf of Nazi war criminals. Three testimonies were on behalf of Becher, two were on behalf of Krumey, one was on behalf of Hans Jüttner, and there was an appeal that had the potential to deliver Wisliceny from the threat of execution in Slovakia."[40] Wisliceny was hanged in 1948; Jüttner's 10-year prison sentence was changed to 4 years in 1949. He died in 1965; Krumey was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969. He died in 1981; Becher died a wealthy man in 1995.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, and became active in the Mapai party. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the first and second elections, and became the spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.[3]
His role in collaborating with the SS made headlines in 1953, when he was accused in a self-published pamphlet produced by Malchiel Gruenwald of collaborating with the Nazis, enabling the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry, partnership with Nazi officer Kurt Becher in theft of Jewish assets, and saving Becher from punishment after the war.[3]
Gruenwald was sued for libel by the Israeli government on Kastner's behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted two years. Gruenwald's attorney, Shmuel Tamir, was a former Irgun member and supporter of the opposition Herut Party led by Menachem Begin. Tamir turned the libel case against his client into a political trial of Kastner and, by implication, the Labor Party. The mother of wartime heroine Hannah Szenes had also accused Kastner of betraying her daughter to her death and spoke out against him during the trial.
In his ruling, Judge Benjamin Halevi (later also a Herut member of the Knesset) acquitted Gruenwald of libel on the first, second and fourth counts. He wrote:
The temptation was great. Kastner was given the actual possibility of rescuing, for the time being, 600 souls from the imminent holocaust, with some chance of somewhat increasing their numbers by payment or further negotiations. Not just any 600 souls, but those he considered, for any reason, most prominent and suitable for rescue...
But timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts). By accepting this present Kastner had sold his soul to the devil... The success of the rescue agreement depended until the last minute on the Nazi goodwill, and the last minute didn't arrive until long after the end of the extermination of the Jews in the provincial towns.[41]
The Israeli government's decision to appeal on Kastner's behalf led to its collapse, as Prime Minister Moshe Sharett resigned when the General Zionists, a member of his coalition, refused to abstain from voting on a no-confidence motion filed by Herut and Maki. Kastner became a hate figure in Israel, and compared the verdict against him to the Dreyfus affair. He resigned his government position and started working for the Israeli Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet. He was assassinated in 1957 (see below).
The Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment against Kastner in 1958. The judges overturned the first count by 3–2 and the second count by 5–0. The longest majority decision was written by Judge Shimon Agranat, who said:
During that period Kastner was motivated by the sole motive of saving Hungary's Jews as a whole, that is, the largest possible number under the circumstances of time and place as he estimated could be saved.
This motive fitted the moral duty of rescue to which he was subordinated as a leader of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest.
Influenced by this motive he adopted the method of financial or economic negotiation with the Nazis.
Kastner's behavior stands the test of plausibility and reasonableness.
His behavior during his visit to Cluj (on May 3) and afterwards, both its active aspect (the plan of the "prominents") and its passive aspect (withholding the "Auschwitz news" and lack of encouragement for acts of resistance and escape on a large scale)—is in line with his loyalty to the method which he considered, at all important times, to be the only chance of rescue.
Therefore, one cannot find a moral fault in his behavior, one cannot discover a causal connection between it and the easing of the concentration and deportation, one cannot see it as becoming a collaboration with the Nazis.[42]
But Judge Moshe Silberg disagreed on historical and moral grounds:
We can sum up with these three facts:
That the Nazis didn't want to have a great revolt—"Second Warsaw"—nor small revolts, and their passion was to have the extermination machine working smoothly without resistance. This fact was known to Kastner from the very best source—Eichmann himself ...
That the most efficient means to paralyze the resistance wheel or the escape of a victim is to conceal from him the plot of the coming murder ...
That he, Kastner, in order to carry out the rescue plan for the few prominents, fulfilled knowingly and without good faith the said desire of the Nazis, thus expediting the work of exterminating the masses.[43]
All five Supreme Court Judges upheld Judge Halevi's verdict on the "criminal and perjurious way" in which Kastner after the war had saved Nazi war criminal Becher.[44] Judge Silberg summed up the Supreme Court finding on this point: "Greenwald has proven beyond any reasonable doubt this grave charge."[45]
Assassination
Minutes after midnight on March 4, 1957, Kastner was shot as he arrived at his Tel Aviv home. The attack was carried out by a three-man squad from a group of veterans from the pre-state right-wing militia Lehi led by Yosef Menkes and Yaakov Heruti. Menkes had also been a member of the post-independence terrorist group Kingdom of Israel.[46] The assassination squad consisted of Menkes (the leader), Ze'ev Eckstein (the shooter), and Dan Shemer (the driver). The three men had waited in a jeep parked outside Kastner's house. Eckstein disembarked and approached Kastner as he locked his car, and asked him if he was Rudolf Kastner. When Kastner confirmed, Eckstein pulled out a handgun and fired three times. The first shot was a spent bullet, the second hit the car door, and the third hit Kastner in the upper body, critically wounding him. Kastner attempted to escape, but died of his injuries on March 15.[7][47]
In Gaylen Ross' 2008 film "Killing Kasztner", Ze'ev Eckstein presented a very different sequence of events and implied that someone else fired a fatal third bullet. See section "Documentary" below.
About an hour after the shooting, Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service) opened an investigation, focusing its efforts on the Lehi veterans group led by Menkes and Heruti. The group had been linked to various murder incidents and various actions against Kastner, and it was suspected that Menkes bore personal responsibility. In addition, Kastner delivered a description of the assassins at the hospital. After a lengthy investigation, Shin Bet identified Eckstein, Shemer and Menkes as the assassins. Shemer was the first to confess his role, and implicated Eckstein, who subsequently confessed and implicated Menkes. In addition, police tracked down the jeep used by the assassins, which was found to contain the murder weapon and fingerprints belonging to Shemer. Subsequently, twenty members of their organization were arrested, including Heruti, and two weapons caches belonging to the group were discovered.[47]
Eckstein, then 24, stated that he tried to kill Kastner to avenge his activities in conjunction with Nazi figures such as Adolf Eichmann.[7]
During the trial it turned out that Eckstein had been a paid informer of Shin Bet a few months before the shooting.[48] The idea that the killing was a government conspiracy has been described by Elliott Jager as "absolute nonsense", because the head of the intelligence service was a close personal friend of Kastner.[49] There are others who feel otherwise. At that time Kastner, a high ranking government official, became a liability to the government and the trial led to collapse of the cabinet.
Kastner's killers were given life sentences, but were pardoned after seven years.[50] In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment against Kastner, stating that the lower court had "erred seriously" in putting the emphasis on Kastner's moral conduct, leaving that "For history to judge".[51]
In January 2015 Haaretz began publishing newly released documents relating to the assassination and its aftermath. Haaretz claims that the documents confirm the Shin Bet knew Kastner was targeted and could back the conjecture "that the Shin Bet security service was involved in the murder of Kastner."[52]
In an open letter by Tamir to the Tel Aviv municipality, who were planning to name a street after Dr. Kastner, he stated that "Kastner was never given exoneration", but rather that it was merely unproven whether his actions—which during the court case had been unanimously agreed upon as being despicable—had caused the murder or the failure to escape from Hungary of close to half a million Jews, deported and killed in the last months of the war. The court, he said, left that and only that to history.
Descendants
Kastner's daughter Zsuzsa lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a hospital nurse. She has three daughters, including Merav Michaeli, a well-known radio and television presenter in Israel, and as of 2013 a member of the 19th Knesset. In her inaugural speech to the Knesset Michaeli described her grandfather as a man who saved "tens of thousands of Jews" by negotiating with Eichmann. Zsuzsa Kastner and Michaeli attended the formal presentation of the Kastner archive to Yad Vashem in 2007, and the former lectured about her father in Britain in 2008.[53][54]
Documentary
The feature-length theatrical documentary Killing Kasztner was released in Israel and the UK in 2009 and the United States in October 2009. The director of the film is Gaylen Ross.
In the documentary, Ze'ev Eckstein states that after he fired a blank, Kastner ran in the dark into the bushes by his apartment. Eckstein fired his two remaining bullets in Kastner's direction, and then heard a shot by someone else, after which Kastner cried out in pain. Eckstein implies he wasn't the one who fired the fatal shot, rather Kastner was killed by a "professional" whose purpose on the scene was "confirmation of the kill".[55][56]
Michael Dov Weissmandl was an Orthodox rabbi who became known for his efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia from extermination at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. He was one of the leaders of the Bratislava Working Group, an underground organization that attempted to save Slovak Jews and other European Jews from deportation to death camps.
Jews have a long history in Hungary, with some records even predating the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 CE by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and it is even assumed that several sections of the heterogeneous Hungarian tribes practiced Judaism. Jewish officials served the king during the early 13th century reign of Andrew II. From the second part of the 13th century, the general religious tolerance decreased and Hungary's policies became similar to the treatment of the Jewish population in Western Europe.
The Kastner train consisted of 35 cattle trucks that left Budapest on 30 June 1944, during the German occupation of Hungary, carrying over 1,600 Jews to safety in Switzerland.
Siegfried Seidl was an Austrian career officer and World War II Commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp located in the present-day Czech Republic. He also was commandant of the Bergen-Belsen, and later served as staff officer to Adolf Eichmann. After the war, in 1947, he was tried in Austria and convicted as a war criminal; sentenced to death, he was executed by hanging.
The Vrba–Wetzler report, also known as the Auschwitz Protocols, the Auschwitz Report and the Auschwitz notebook, is a 40-page document about the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust.
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He became known for having escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and for having co-written a detailed report about the mass murder that was taking place there. Distribution of the report by George Mantello in Switzerland is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.
Joel Brand was a leading member of the Aid and Rescue Committee, an underground Zionist group in Budapest, Hungary, that smuggled Jews out of German-occupied Europe during the Holocaust to the relative safety of Hungary. When Germany invaded that country too in March 1944, Brand became known for his efforts to save the Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
Perdition is a 1987 stage play by Jim Allen. Its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London was abandoned, after protests, because of the controversial and tendentious claims it contains.
Killing Kasztner: The Jew who Dealt with the Nazis is a feature-length theatrical documentary about Rudolf Kastner and directed by Gaylen Ross.
Perfidy is a book written by Ben Hecht in 1961. The book describes the events surrounding the 1954–1955 Kastner trial in Jerusalem.
Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein was an SS officer of the 1930s and 1940s who is remembered as a leader of the Nazi Party's support during the 1930s for some of the aims of Zionism.
Ladislaus Löb is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Sussex in England. He is the author of From Lessing to Hauptmann: Studies in German Drama (1974) and Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1996).
The Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Malchiel Gruenwald, commonly known as the Kastner trial, was a libel case in Jerusalem, Israel. Hearings were held from 1 January to October 1954 in the District Court of Jerusalem before Judge Benjamin Halevi (1910–1996), who published his decision on 22 June 1955.
Hajnalka "Hansi" Brand was a Hungarian-born Zionist activist who was involved, as a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, in efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.
The Working Group was an underground Jewish organization in the Axis-aligned Slovak State during World War II. Led by Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, the Working Group rescued Jews from the Holocaust by gathering and disseminating information on the Holocaust in Poland, bribing and negotiating with German and Slovak officials, and smuggling valuables to Jews deported to Poland.
Pinchas Freudiger, also Fülöp Freudiger, Philip von Freudiger was a Hungarian-Israeli manufacturer and Jewish community leader.
↑ Israeli Supreme Court Judge Moshe Silberg, quoted in Akiva Orr, "The Kastner Case, Jerusalem, 1955" in Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, 1994, pp. 108–109.
↑ Mike Thomson (13 November 2012). "Could the BBC have done more to help Hungarian Jews?". BBC (British broadcasting service). the BBC broadcast every day, giving updates on the war, general news and opinion pieces on Hungarian politics. But among all these broadcasts, there were crucial things that were not being said, things that might have warned thousands of Hungarian Jews of the horrors to come in the event of a German occupation. A memo setting out policy for the BBC Hungarian Service in 1942 states: "We shouldn't mention the Jews at all." By 1943, the BBC Polish Service was broadcasting about the exterminations and yet its policy of silence on the Jews was followed right up until the German invasion in March 1944. After the tanks rolled in, the Hungarian Service did then broadcast warnings. But by then it was too late—"Many Hungarian Jews who survived the deportations claimed that they had not been informed by their leaders, that no one had told them. But there's plenty of evidence that they could have known," said David Cesarani, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
↑ Kathryn Berman and Asaf Tal. ""The Uneasy Closeness to Ourselves" Interview with Dr. Götz Aly, German Historian and Journalist". Yad Vashem, The International School for Holocaust Studies. the Hungarian Jews in 1944 knew all about it. They had a lot of information because there were Jewish refugees coming to Hungary, in 1942 and 1943, giving reports about what was happening in Poland, and what was the reaction from the Jews? “This is Hungary. This might be happening in Galicia to Polish Jews, but this can’t happen in our very cultivated Hungarian state." It is impossible that even early in 1944, the Jewish leadership there didn’t have some information about what was happening. There were people escaping from the extermination camps just 80 km from the Hungarian border and there were letters and reports and of course the BBC. I think part of the problem of the Holocaust was that potential victims couldn’t believe the information. The idea that something so atrocious would come from Germany and from European civilized environment was so unimaginable that they didn’t take it for real, even when they received overwhelming reports from the death camps.
Barri, Shoshana (1997). "The Question of Kastner's Testimonies on behalf of Nazi War Criminals," The Journal of Israeli History, vol 18, issue 2–3, pp.139–165.
Gilbert, Martin (1981). Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler's Mass Murder. First published 1981, this edition Holt Paperbacks 1990. ISBN0-8050-1462-4
Kadar, Gabor, and Vagi, Zoltan (2004). Self-financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case, and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews. Central European University Press. ISBN963-9241-53-9
Kranzler, David (2000). The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz. Syracuse University Press.
Aronson, Shlomo & Breitman, Richard. "The End of the Final Solution? Nazi Plans to Ransom Jews in 1944," Central European History, vol 25, issue 2, pp.177–203.
Bauer, Yehuda. "The Negotiations between Saly Mayer and the Representatives of the SS in 1944–1945," Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference – April 1974, Yad Vashem, 1977, pp.5–45.
Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945. Wayne State University Press, 1981.
Bauer, Yehuda (1994). Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945. Yale University Press, 1994.
Biss, Andre. A Million Jews to Save: Check to the Final Solution. Hutchinson & Co, 1973.
Bower, Tom. Nazi Gold. HarperCollins, 1997 (particularly pp. 61–62, 161, 229–230, 236, 257, 288, 290–293, 312, and 320).
Cale, Ruth. "The Kastner Case Closed," Congress Weekly, March 3, 1958, pp.5–7 (reports on the appeal).
Conway, John S. "The Holocaust in Hungary: Recent Controversies and Reconsiderations," in Braham, Randolph L. The Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry: Essays, Documents, Depositions. Columbia University Press, 1986, pp.1–48.
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. "Ben Hecht's Perfidy," Commentary, March 1982, pp.260–265.
Dean, Gideon. "The Kastner Affair," The Reconstructionist, January 27, 1956, pp.9–15 (the first of two reports on the first trial).
Dean, Gideon. "The Kastner Affair II," The Reconstructionist, February 10, 1956, pp.13–19.
Gilroy, Harry. "Israeli Cabinet Asked to Resign: Sharett to Force the Action Today in a Dispute over Handling of Libel Suit," The New York Times, June 29, 1955, p.5.
Gilroy, Harry. "Kastner's Case Embitters Israel's Party Struggles: Outcome of Election Will Be Influenced By Split in the Government Coalition," The New York Times, July 3, 1955, p.5.
Kasztner, Rezso. "Report of Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest," 1942–1945. T/37(237) Submitted during the course of the Adolf Eichmann trial and marked T/1113 (BO6-900, Vol. II, pp.908–910); also cited as:
Kastner, Israel. "Report of the Rescue Committee in Budapest," 1942–1945 (submitted to the Zionist Congress), 108 [Hebrew]. Cited by Judge Halevi, Cr.C. (Jm.) 124/53 Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 44 P.M. (1965) 3, at 115 [translated by Leora Bilsky].
Kastner, Rezso. Der Bericht des judischen Rettungskomitees aus Budapest, 1942–1945 (mimeo ms); later published as Der Kasztner-Bericht ueber Eichmanns Menschenhandel in Ungarn. Kindler, 1946, 1961.
"No Reason to Repent: Eichmann's Doctored Version of the Kastner Affair," Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, December 9, 1960.
New York Times articles:
"Zionist Ex-Leader Accused of Perjury," July 8, 1955.
"Israeli Case Revived: Perjury Trial of Dr. Kastner Moved to Jerusalem," August 1, 1955.
"Israel Libel Appeal Due: Decision in Nazi Collaboration Case to Be Challenged," August 22, 1955.
"Perjury Charged to Israel Ex-Aide: Case Part of Legal Drama Against Former Official Called Nazi Collaborator," February 6, 1956.
"Key Israeli Case Takes New Turn: Jurist Drops Perjury Count Against Kastner, Branded a Nazi Collaborator," March 16, 1956.
"Israeli Court Frees Kastner of Perjury," March 17, 1956.
"Israeli Shot in Street: Kastner, Libel Case Figure, Wounded by Assailant," March 4, 1957.
"Israel Holds Four in Kastner Attack," March 5, 1957.
"Two Confess Shooting: Israeli Police Link Extremists to Attack on Dr. Kastner," March 15, 1957.
"Israeli Quisling. Dead of Wounds: Dr. Kastner, Branded a Nazi Collaborator, Succumbs to an Assassin's Bullets," March 18, 1957.
"U.S. Urges Israel Use Restraint In Stand on Gaza: Extremists Rounded Up," March 18, 1957.
"Israel Will Try Three In Murder: Terrorists Are Said to Have Plotted Against Premier After Several Slayings," May 23, 1957.
"Israeli Trial Opens: Three Men Plead Innocent in Kastner Slaying," July 3, 1957.
"3 Israelis Get Life In Kastner Slaying," January 8, 1958.
"Kastner Cleared By Israeli Court: Supreme Tribunal Reverses Ruling He Sacrificed Jews in Hungary to Nazis," January 16, 1958.
"Chief Judge Backs Kastner Clearing," January 17, 1958.
"Accuser Found Guilty of Libel; An Israeli Court Clears Kastner: Majority Decision of Supreme Tribunal Rules Man Charged With Aid to Nazis Risked Life for Jews in Hungary," January 18, 1958.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
