“I am sorry to bother you about the Jews. I know what a bore this is” (Richard Law to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, March 18th 1943)
DannyD’s history is bad history. It always begins at the wrong end. He’s not interested in understanding the holocaust; he’s interested in proving a case against Israel. Consequently he takes his information from a small number of websites dedicated to his own unshakeable view that Israel is illegitimate. He also takes what he imagines to be Israel’s best argument for existence – that it became a place of refuge for Jews during and after the Nazi genocide – and tries to show how systematically wrong that view is. In his version of history, rather than opposing the Nazis, ‘the Zionists’ are said to have welcomed them and done their bidding and ‘Zionism’ is blamed for collaborating in the destruction of 6 million Jews. According to DannyD, ‘the Zionists’ stymied international efforts to rescue European Jews if that rescue fell short of giving those Jews a home in Palestine. They undermined resistance movements. They struck secret deals with the Nazis that condemned millions of Jews to death in order to get a select few ‘Zionists’ away from the gas chambers and into Palestine. Israel was therefore built on a lie - it received moral support and international backing because of a holocaust that could not have happened without the enthusiastic input of ‘the Zionists’ themselves. Today, the Israeli Jews shed crocodile tears over the victims and throw billions of dollars at historical research to conceal the truth and maintain the lie.
I think those are the main points. You’ll find them all in DannyD’s posts – not as eloquently stated perhaps
, but they are all there.
I have destroyed this vile interpretation before – in this post here:
DannyD couldn’t engage with it. Indeed his considered response was “to bin it”. Then he went to his favourite conspiracy website and started all over again…. with the case of Rudolph Kastner. I’ve already corrected some of this, but out it still pours of DannyD in post after turgid post. Here again, in summary, is what DannyD says about Kastner.
Kastner, a Jewish leader in occupied Budapest, is meant to have committed nearly all of the ‘Zionist’ sins in microcosm. According to DannyD, Kastner “worked with” his “soul mate” Adolf Eichmann to slaughter almost a million Hungarian Jews. In return for a rescue-train containing 1600 elite ‘Zionists’ bound for Palestine, Kastner agreed to help Eichmann not only by keeping Auschwitz a secret from the mass of Hungarian Jews who were about to be deported there, but by actively forcing Auschwitz inmates to send postcards back to their relatives saying “everything was ok and not to worry”.
In this post I shall nail this lie - and many others too. I’ll try and describe what happened in real life. I’m under no illusions that DannyD will change his habits and actually engage with what I say. He’s both immune to the ordinary rules of logic and ideologically programmed to reject historical facts that don’t fit his preconceived idea that Israel is “illegitimate”. So this post is for anyone interested in the story of Kastner and what truthfully happened to the Hungarian Jews.
My aim is not to show, in contradiction to DannyD, that Israel is “legitimate”; still less that all its actions against the Palestinians are justified. My only aim is to rescue the truth of what happened from the ideologically-driven garbage posted by DannyD.
* * *
The Nazis move into HungaryOn 19th March 1944 the Nazis occupied Hungary. They did so with the active support of the right-wing and anti-semitic Hungarian government led by Miklos Horthy. For the first time in the war this put Hungary’s million Jews directly into the Nazi firing line, and some time in early April Adolf Eichmann of the SS was sent to Budapest to coordinate the transportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz. As always, Eichmann summoned the city’s leading Jews.
One of them was Rudolf Kastner. Eichmann understood he was a prominent zionist in the city, but for a year Kastner had also been executive director of the Va’adah, an underground Jewish rescue committee. Since 1943 the Va’adah had helped thousands of Jews escape from occupied Slovakia and Poland into Hungary where they were given papers, jobs and accommodation. In Hungary they stayed. It was difficult to smuggle them out of Hungary for the same reason that it was difficult to smuggle any Jew out of Hungary – the country was surrounded on all sides by Axis powers. It also had a deeply anti-semitic population which was not inclined to provide aid or protection to the Jews. Indeed once the Nazis had withdrawn from Hungary in early 1945, a home grown fascist movement called the Arrow Cross took control of government and murdered up to 30,000 Hungarian Jews without any German help at all. This didn’t make Kastner’s job an easy one. Perhaps even DannyD might recognise that.
Another part of Kastner’s job at the rescue committee was to look into the possibility of a Jewish armed response to the Nazis. The uprising of the Warsaw ghetto a year before had shown what might be done, even though it had been suppressed. But Hungary was different. It’s a matter of hstorical fact that the best-armed and most militant Jewish groups in central Europe in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s were the socialists and zionists. But both groups were weak in Hungary – the zionists representing less than 5% of the Jews there (Y Bauer,
Jews for Sale? Yale UP 1994 p. 122).
This is what ammunition Va’adah possessed in 1943-44: one hundred revolvers with 20 bullets per revolver, 2 machine-guns, 2 machine-gun belts and 7 rifles. In the town of Munkacs a number Jews had tried to resist a shop being looted by the Nazis in April. The SS had simply turned their guns on them. Twenty-seven people had been executed on the spot (RL Braham,
The destruction of Hungarian Jewry – a documentary account 1963 pp. 906-21). Clearly, an armed uprising was just not possible. The Hungarian Jews could have used their fists and feet, I grant, but nobody sensible has ever claimed they were simply waiting for a lead from people like Kastner so that they could get stuck into the SS and the Hungarian police.
What was known about AuschwitzDannyD wants us to believe, however, that Kastner and ‘the Zionists’ had a secret that only they knew and which, if it had been disseminated, would have resulted in widespread rebellion. Kastner knew that the Hungarian Jews were about to be deported to a certain death in the gas-chambers at Auschwitz. The reason he knew this was because two young Slovakian Jews had just escaped from Auschwitz to tell the tale.
On 10th April 1944 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler had got out of Auschwitz – the first ones to do so. Eleven days later they had managed to cross the border into Slovakia and make contact with members of the Jewish Slovakian underground. The two young fellows were remarkably well informed. They had a detailed knowledge of the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz and they had overheard SS guards looking forward to eating “Hungarian salami” in the coming weeks (many deported Jews brought food on the transports which was always confiscated by the SS on arrival). On the 27th April Vrba and Wetzler dictated everything they knew about the camp to the Slovaks – the document was called ‘The Auschwitz Protocol’. It is one of the great documents of the holocaust. And Vrba (who many may remember from the film
Shoah) was one of the genuine Jewish heroes to emerge from this catastrophe.
Nobody knows for sure when Kastner, in neighbouring Hungary, was given a copy of Vrba’s document. “To this day”, says Saul Friedlander in his recent massive work on the holocaust, “it isn’t exactly clear how long it took to reach the Jewish council in Budapest” (
The years of extermination vol 2, 2007 p. 614). But obviously it would have been a priority amongst the Slovakian Jews to supply their interested friends in Hungary with one. There’s certainly no doubt at all that Kastner knew about Auschwitz by the time he was ordered to report to Eichmann.
A more interesting question – which DannyD has never asked – is whether anyone else in Hungary knew about Auschwitz. Or was Kastner sitting on an amazing secret? In other words, were the Hungarian Jews living in blissful ignorance while Kastner alone held the key to their destruction? Obviously the answer to these questions affects what we think of Kastner’s behaviour in the ensuing weeks.
Here’s some background…..On 15th April 1944, five days after Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz, but while they were still working their way to the Slovakian border, the concentration of Hungary’s provincial Jews began. The Budapest Jews were crowded into buildings near the railyards and factories to deter any Allied bombing of Budapest (we’d call them “human shields” now I suppose). For the provincial Jews, five zones were set up to contain them. They had already been forced to register and wear the yellow star back in March, but now they were forcibly moved into improvised concentration camps. DannyD claims to have read Raul Hilberg’s book,
The Destruction of the European Jews, so no doubt he remembers the description of this April round-up by the SS, the BdS and the Hungarian army (volume 2 pp 830-36) – the mass arrests, the foirced evictions, the selective murder of “dangerous Jews”, the lootings and confiscations. Thousands of Jews were pushed into brickyards in Cluj and Kosice, many hundreds dying there through the sheer inability to move or eat. One person managed to smuggle a letter out of the Kosice brickyard which has survived. “We are suffering beyond description”, it said. “The place is sealed, I do not see a way out..We are so neglected we do not look human anymore… Best greetings to you all, pray for us that we shall die soon” (quoted by David S Wyman,
The Abandonment of the Jews New Press 2007 p. 236). What are the chances that other letters were smuggled out? Or that word got around that people were dying in these camps?
The fact is we know that word got out. Even
before the round-up, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva had telegraphed colleagues in America with reports that the Nazis planned to annihilate the Hungarian Jews. This was early April, while Vrba was still in Auschwitz (Wyman,
Abandonment p. 236). The information was passed to the War Refugee Board, the arm of the US government dealing with the fate of Europe’s Jews. They in turn told the International Red Cross, the neutral Swedes and Portuguese, and the Vatican. All were urged by the Allies to increase their physical presence in Budapest and to start putting diplomatic pressure on the Horthy government there. The British were also told about the cable, and in April the BBC started broadcasting warnings to the Hungarians. Auschwitz wasn’t mentioned by name, but “extermination camps in Poland” were (Wyman p. 237). Warnings - including some from the youth wing of Kastner’s zionist group - were also sent to the provincial Jews of Ungvar, Chuszt and Mukacz, but apparently to little avail. Some of those sounding the warning were even treated as agent provocateurs (Y Bauer,
Rethinking the Holocaust pp. 236-7, 306).
Vrba’s and Wetzler’s report on Auschwitz was by far the most detailed that had been produced. But it’s wrong to assume that the world was in ignorance of either the genocide or Auschwitz before 27th April 1944. The British had known of extermination camps in Poland since July 1941. Successful decoding of Gestapo radio messages in occupied Soviet territory had given them the first clues. “The fact that German Police are killing all the Jews that fall into their hands should now be sufficiently well appreciated” ran one British report from September of thast year (Breitman
Official Secrets Hill and Wang 1998 p. 96). In June 1942 the underground socialists of the Polish Bund had managed to send a report to London on the Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor camps which estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed (Y Bauer,
When did they know? Midstream 1986). Then, on August 4th 1942, thanks to a leak by a prominent German businessman, Dr Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva was able to send his famous cable to the West warning that the Nazis had developed “prussic acid” (Zyklon-B) with the aim of killing Jews on an assembly-line basis in Polish extermination camps (Bauer,
Rethinking the Holocaust 219-21).
The name ‘Auschwitz’ did not mean anything yet. But all that changed on 27th November 1942 when a Polish journalist called Chciuk-Celt contacted the Polish government-in-exile (in London) with the news that Jews and Soviet POWS were being shipped there “for the sole purpose of their immediate extermination in gas chambers”. On 23rd March 1943 the Delegatura, a Polish underground group, reported the building of a new crematoria that could dispose of 3000 bodies per day. In May 1943 a Polish intelligence report told the British government that 520,000 Jews had been killed in Auschwitz (D Engel,
Facing the Holocaust Chapel Hill 1993 p. 23; Breitman,
Secrets pp116-17).
Many of these reports found their way on to the BBC which, naturally, was not slow to broadcast them to occupied Europe.
In one respect, at least, the Hungarian Jews were the best informed Jews in eastern Europe. Unlike the former Soviet territories where people – thanks to the Bolsheviks in the 1930s – did not have easy access to the BBC and foreign radio, the Hungarians were in a privileged position. According to British intelligence estimates there were over 800,000 Hungarian radio sets capable of picking up BBC broadcasts in March 1943 (Bauer,
Rethinking p. 226). It is highly likely, to say the least, that some of these sets picked up the broadcasts of 1942-43 describing what was happening to the Jews of Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia and Czechoslovakia.
So why is there the impression that nobody knew about Auschwitz until the spring of 1944? Vrba’s report supplied more detail about the internal workings of the camp than had ever been revealed before. But it’s simply bad history to assume it somehow broke the story – let alone that Kastner then sat on it and therefore effectively buried all news of Auschwitz. Indeed a second report on Auschwitz was smuggled into Switzerland a matter of days before Vrba’s. It came from a Slovakian railway-worker who had contacted the Jewish underground group in Bratislava to warn them that preparations were being made to transport Jews to Auschwitz via the Presov-Zilina-Bohumin line (Braham,
The Politics of Genocide pp. 598-609). Along with the Vrba report, these details were sent immediately to Jewish groups in the West. These were then relayed to the Allied governments who, in turn, relayed them to the press.
On 10th May (13 days after the protocol had been completed, and 5 days before the deportations began) the
New York Times had led with a story about how the Hungarian government “is now preparing for the annihilation of the Hungarian Jews”. Then Allied aircraft dropped leaflets onto Jewish areas in Hungary warning them what was about to happen (Wyman 237-8).
That’s a lot of stuff! But let’s just assume for a moment that nobody in Hungary ever listened to foreign radio or heard of foreign press reports or picked up one of these leaflets. Would they still have had no other means of knowing what was happening in Poland? I’ve already mentioned the fact that thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland were able to make their way to the relative safety of Hungary in 1943 thanks to Kastner’s rescue committee. Presumably they let their Jewish rescuers know why they had taken flight. On top of that the 5000 Hungarian Jews, who had been conscripted as slaves into labour batallions in the Ukraine, came back to Hungary in the summer of 1943. Again, it’s inconceivable that these people didn’t report at least the rumours of what had been happening to Jews in the east (Bauer,
Rethinking pp. 150-51).
Finally, there was the matter of the April 27th-28th advanced deportations. On these two days the Nazis performed a kind of dress-rehearsal for the transport of the Hungarian Jews to Poland. Over 4000 Jews from Kistarcsa were rounded up and stacked into freight trains destined for Auschwitz (Hilberg vol 2 p. 836). By pure coincidence this was the day that Vrba and Wetzler dictated their ‘Auschwitz Protocol’. But could it be that these trains set off without any incident? That’s very unlikley. One of the freights, from the brickyard of Kosice, proved to be something of a PR disaster for the Nazis. The freights had set off in the middle of the day with 70-80 people packed into each car and a single bucket of water between them. It was a hot day and by the time the freight rumbled through the town centre the women and children inside were said to be wailing so loudly that ordinary Hungarians going about their business could hear them. Fearing the secret was out the Nazis ordered that future transports should set off at night when things were less busy (Hilberg vol 2 p. 848).
But the secret
was out. It had been impossible to conceal it. Indeed on May 10th, the very day the major deportations began, the Vatican representative in Budapest was able to write to Horthy and say:
“The whole world knows what deportation means in practice” (the full letter, with its sickening residue of Catholic anti-semitism, is quoted by Hilberg pp. 837-8).
“The whole world” may have been a pardonable exaggeration. But DannyD wants us to believe that
only Kastner knew! It can’t have been so. Once again, as someone who claims to have read Hilberg’s volumes, DannyD is surely aware that as early as April and first week of May thousands of Hungarian Jews had tried to convert to Christianity (a successful tactic until the Hungarian authorities demanded a 3-month probationary period). He’ll also recall the desperate Jewish attempts to purchase forged Hungarian birth certificates and bribe their way into the labour batallions. And how could he forget the stories of Jews walling themselves into buildings and hiding in the earth in the Mukachevo, Oradea and Tizab ghettoes? (Hilberg vol 2 pp. 841-2) All very strange behaviour for people who believed that they were boarding trains destined for ‘model work camps’.
I’m sure he hasn’t read Robert Rozett’s work on ‘Halutz’, the zionist resistance group, so I’ll excuse him that. But if he had he’d also know that Halutz was able to smuggle 2000 Jewish children into Rumania. and to work with the Swedish embassy to forge diplomatic papers to rescue even more (Rozett, ‘Child Rescue in Budapest 1944-45’,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2/1 1987 pp. 49-59; Asher Cohen,
The Halutz Resistance in Hungary 1942-44 1986). Auschwitz may not always have been known by name. But most historians agree that the Hungarian Jews nonetheless knew that it was fatal to board the trains. The problem wasn’t that Kastner hadn’t personally told them. “The problem was that people refused to listen, refused to believe what they did not want to hear was the truth” (Y Bauer, ‘The Holocaust in Hungary’, in D Cesarini ed,
Genocide and Rescue OUP 1977 pp 196-7). The same had been true in Poland and the Ukraine. Now it was true in Hungary.
Kastner and EichmannThis is the historical context in which Kastner first met Eichmann. DannyD is completely useless on this meeting. He talks about it as if Kastner and Eichmann are equal partners in a joint enterprise. That’s because he’s either an anti-semite and hates Jews or he’s an anti-Zionist and hates Israel. To give him the benefit of the doubt, let’s say it’s the latter - that he hates 'Zionists'. But whatever the reason for his hatred it allows him to say of Kastner: “He walked about as a Nazi, acted like one, and
he had the same control over life and death as them”. Wow. That’s a lot of power! He makes it sound like Kastner could have marched into Eichmann’s office (or did Eichmann used to come to Kastner’s office perhaps?) and say: “Right, I’m calling the whole thing off. There won’t be any more deaths. In fact I’m closing Auschwitz as from this morning. The genocide’s over”. You have to be twisted to believe this. But DannyD does believe it: “Kasztner had it in his hands
to do as he wished”. Like I said, such a wild comment might be interpreted as anti-semitic for the simple reason that it mirrors what classic political anti-semites have always said about the Jews, indeed what the Nazis always said about the Jews – they secretly controlled everything. “They could do as they wished”.
So what did Kastner really do? Before I answer that I want to clear up some errors of DannyD’s so that we can all be sure about what he did not do.
*Kastner never met Vrba
*Kastner never went to Auschwitz. Therefore he never personally selected people in Auschwitz for his rescue-train . Indeed no one at Auschwitz ever stepped on to a rescue-train of any kind.
*Kastner never went to Bergen-Belsen dressed in an SS uniform. Vrba was not an “eyewitness” to this because a) he never saw Kastner in his life b) had never been to Belsen himself.
*Vrba was not written out of holocaust history by the Israelis. Indeed he was given an honorary doctorate by Haifa University. His book
I escaped from Auschwitz is published in Hebrew by Zmora Bitan and Haifa University Press. Vrba also appeared on the most-watched documentary series in the history of Israel –
The Holocaust (1977). Similarly Wetzler’s testimony forms the backbone to Livia Rothkirchen’s study
The Destruction of the Slovakian Jewry, published in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem in 1961.
*The rescue train organised by Kastner never went to Palestine. It went to Switzerland. And from Switzerland it went on to Spain. Eichmann indeed had specified that the refugees must not be allowed to go to Palestine. He didn’t want to upset the Nazi relationship with the Grand Mufti.
*Kastner
did go to Switzerland in 1944, and he
did voluntarily return to Budapest (in order to save more Jews)
*Kastner was not accused of filling the rescue train with “Zionists”. In fact the reverse is true. He was originally accused of
ignoring Zionists and filling it with “Christianised Jews”.
*Kastner did not “get prisoners waiting to go to the gas chambers to send postcards from a ‘model work camp’”.
The last error is a particularly nasty one. It gets repeated a lot by DannyD-types. It’s basis is a confused accusation made by a witness at the orginal libel trial in 1953 – a piece of hearsay, that was never substantiated nor corroborated. Even Judge Halevi, who was very hard on Kastner throughout the trial, declined to include the story in his massive summing-up. My god, even Jim Allen in his hostile and unintentionally hilarious play
Perdition, was persuaded to drop this charge from the published version of the play.
A moment’s thought, if DannyD were capable of such a thing, would show how ludicrous the charge is - especially if you take the DannyD line that no Hungarian Jew knew where they were being deported to. What a risk to get condemned men and women in Auschwitz to write back to their relatives in Hungary! A single clever line could blow the whole game!
I’ll give DannyD a little help though. Look at Hilberg vol 2 p. 836. Maybe this is where the story originates. It concerns the advanced transports from Kistarcsa to Auschwitz on April 27/28th (before Vrba’s Auschwitz Protocol was disseminated). At Auschwitz, according to Hilberg, a number of arrivals were forced by the SS to write “encouraging cards with datelines from ‘Waldsee’ to relatives at home. The notes were brought by SS courier to Budapest, to be distributed there by the Jewish council. Members of the council examining the cards looked for the place on the map and could not find it. Finally one card was spotted that bore the traces of the erased word ‘Auschwitz’. By then, however, the deportations were in full swing”. If anything, this illustrates the
opposite of what DannyD has claimed!
As for DannyD’s stupid idea that Eichmann and Kastner negotiated as equals, I don’t quite know what to say. You’d have to have read something about the power of the SS and the helplessness of the European Jews to appreciate that this could not have been so. “You seem extremely tense Kastner”, Eichmann is reputed to have said to him at one point during their meeting. “I am sending you to Theresienstadt for recovery. Or would you prefer Auschwitz?” (this was cited by Judge Agranat of the Israeli Supreme Court to dramatically illustrate how “unequal” the two men were). Eichmann and the SS had a million Hungarian Jews held as hostages. Kastner was trying to get something out of the situation - to save as many Jews as possible. This is not “collaboration” anymore than it is collaboration when a policeman tries to talk an armed gunman out of a school full of defencless schoolchildren.
Blood for Trucks? When Judge Halevi came to pronounce on Kastner he made a controversial ruling that helped condemn him. He ruled that the story of Joel Brand and the so-called ‘trucks for blood’ offer was not germane to the case. No honest person now agrees. One cannot understand Kastner’s negotiations with Eichmann if one fails to also consider the simultaneous and much bigger negotiation conducted with Eichmann by Kastner’s colleague, Joel Brand. DannyD hasn’t mentioned this, which doesn’t surprise me at all.
On 8th May 1944 Brand, a senior member of the rescue committee, was ordered to Eichmann’s office where he was told that the Nazis would be prepared to release one million Hungarian Jews. Yes, one million! In return, Eichmann wanted Brand to secure for the Nazis ten thousand winterised trucks (the aim being to motorize the 8th and 22nd SS Cavalry divisions in Hungary). To achieve this Brand would be allowed to travel to Istanbul and link up with the Jewish Agency and the British consul. “You can assure the Allies that these trucks will never be used in the West” said Eichmann. As soon as Brand returned from Istanbul with a favourable answer Eichmann said he would release the first 100,000 Jews. The rest would follow as the trucks began to arrive – 100 Jews for every truck. When Brand asked how he could trust Eichmann’s word, Eichmann said “You think we are all crooks. You hold
us for what
you are”. This was a full week before the deportations to Auschwitz began. They met again on 15th May – the day the deportations to Auschwitz began. This time Eichmann said that if Brand were successful the Nazis would blow up Auschwitz.
What should Brand have done? He said later that he knew the Germans were desperately short of war material and that he believed that, at the very least, he might be able to buy time (the Red Army was pressing on Hungary’s borders). What, in any case, was the alternative? On 19th May Brand went to Istanbul.
This is where Kastner’s rescue-train came in. It was part of a ‘goodwill gesture’ agreed to by Eichmann – to show that his ‘blood for trucks’ offer was genuine. The train would contain 600 (later boosted to 1,684) Jews and would be allowed free passage to Switzerland and then Spain. In addition Kastner would pay Eichmann $1000 for each person allowed on the rescue-train.
Kastner’s first idea was to pack the train with children but the SS vetoed this believing it would cause too much publicity among the Hungarians (who were emphatically not the people Eichmann was trying to impress) as it passed through the various towns. ”. Many children were ultimately chosen, the majority Polish and Hungarian orphans (S Szita,
Trading lives? Operations of the Jewish relief and rescue committee in Budapest, 2005 p. 91). But in the end 10 classifications of people were decided upon, including ‘Orthodox’, ‘Zionist’, ‘Prominent’, ‘Children’, ‘Refugees’, ‘Revisionists’, ‘Paying Persons’ (Hilberg vol 2 p. 844). A contemporaneous letter written by Kastner to his sister has recently been published which confirms this selection policy. In it Kastner says that “quotas” of “Chalutzim”, “Orthodox” and “Zionist” must be chosen (Ladislaus Lob,
Dealing with Satan 2008 pp. 162-3). The result was, as one of the rescued said in Laurence Rees’s recent BBC documentary
Auschwitz, a kind of “Noah’s Ark”.
This is the way that Ladislaus Lob remembers it too in a book that was published in Britain last week (and which julio mentions above). Lob and his father, who was also on the train, were neither zionists nor prominent, “just lucky” (
Dealing with Satan p. 270). DannyD wants us to believe that Kastner had confined his selection to “prominent Zionists” because that fits his conspiracy theory. Well, now’s his big chance to put the record straight. Ladislaus Lob, the escapee, is speaking at the ICA on 27 February at 1.00pm. You should come down DannyD and put him right!
In fairness I should add that Kastner ensured that many members of his family got on the rescue-train. I don’t know what to think about that. Does anyone? But, according to the Israeli Supreme Court, over 100 of his family members also did not make the train. What, surely, can be said, is that no selection could have been right. It was ‘Sophie’s choice’ writ large.
The rescue-train wasn’t Kastner’s only success. The other concession he extracted from Eichmann was on 7th June and involved the transfer of 18,000 Hungarian Jews to Vienna where the SS had alerted Eichmann to a shortage of slave labour. Once again, Kastner had somehow to raise the money to buy their ‘release’ (among other things he promised Swiss tractors which never arrived). Many of the Jews died in the factories, others died in Belsen, but the majority did survive (Hilberg vol 2 pp 846-47)
But in the larger scheme of things Kastner failed. That much is bloody obvious. He hoped that the train would be the first of several. It wasn’t. But he failed because the Brand mission failed. Brand met up with British officials in Aleppo and Cairo in early June. But by the end he was banging his head against the wall in total despair. The Allies would not agree to the ‘blood for trucks’ deal for several reasons, not least the belief that it would jeopardise the Soviet alliance (as, indeed, it was meant to). Shamefully, a second reason why the Allies would not accept the “stunt” was (in the words of a British official) that it a successful exchange might “lead to an offer to unload an even greater number of Jews on our hands”. And the British had absolutely no intention of letting any Jewish refugees into Palestine (B Wasserstein,
Britain and the European Jews pp. 249-53; Martin Gilbert,
Auschwitz and the Allies p. 214).
The 240,000 Budapest Jews were eventually saved from Auschwitz – and Vrba and Wetzler had much to do with that in the end. On 4th July Horthy announced that the deportations would stop. He had come under enormous pressure from neutral governments and the International Red Cross, and he was also rocked by the Allied bombing of Budapest two days before. The international outcry that forced his change of mind had come because of the wide publicity given to Vrba’s ‘Auschwitz Protocol’.
But Kastner failed. He failed to follow up the rescue-train with any more. He failed to stop the deportations to Auschwitz. But so did the Allies. Throughout May Kastner’s rescue committee – along with the Slovak Jews – were able to telegraph in code to Isaac Sternbuch, the Va’adah representative in Switzerland. What they were demanding was that the Allies bombed “the death halls in Auschwitz” and the single line of railway track that connected Kosice and Presov (Wyman,
Abandonment 289-90). It was a demand that Weizmann at the Jewish Agency repeated in person to Churchill and Roosevelt in June and July. The Allies said it was logistically impossible (see my other post).
To sum upThe Jews of Hungary were murdered not because they were ignorant of what awaited them, but because they were powerless to resist and they had no help. They were also murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators. They were not murdered by ‘Zionist’ Jews.
Kastner was faced with an unenviable task. He tried to negotiate with Eichmann because he believed that negotiations might save a million Jewish lives. Had the Brand mission succeeded we would, doubtless, be calling him a hero. That it failed was nothing to do with him. Hindsight showed that he had been wrong. But only a fool would use hindsight to condemn a man in court. This is why the Supreme Court exonerated him (posthumously, of course, because by then he had been murdered by an ultra-right wing Israeli avenger). Raul Hilberg sums it up perfectly when he says that Kastner’s rescue committee “had little reason to rejoice. Considering the impotence of Hungarian Jewry and the lack of outside support its success was remarkable. But weighed against the magnitude of the disaster, its accomplishment was little. When one must save lives, failure mans death”. A humane judgment in my opinion.
The Kastner case must finally be understood against the background of Israeli society in the 1950s, and the great coming to terms with what had happened ten years before in Europe. Yehudi Bauer, the author of the book
Jews for Sale?, blames “the trauma of the Holocaust” for the “baseless accusations” against people like Kastner. Their origin, he says, “lay in the despair and anger over the loss of so many. The fury was directed at those who tried to save lives”.
DannyD of course isn’t traumatised by the holocaust. His fury isn’t particularly directed at Rudolf Kastner, to whom I imagine he is supremely indifferent. All he wants to do is use the holocaust as a stick to beat ‘Zionism’. He’s quite prepared to drive a juggernaut through the facts to do this. That’s why his posts on this matter are rubbish.
