Rudolf Kastner
Encyclopedia
Rudolf Israel Kastner was a Jewish-Hungarian journalist and lawyer who became known for facilitating the departure of Jews out of Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israel
i court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.
Kastner was one of the leaders of the Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah —the Aid and Rescue Committee
, or Vaada— a small Jewish group in Budapest who helped Jewish refugees escape from Nazi Europe into Hungary during World War II
, then helped them escape from Hungary after the Nazis
invaded that country too on March 19, 1944. Between May and July 1944, Hungary's Jews were being deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz
at the rate of 12,000 people a day—for "resettlement," as the Nazis said. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann
, a senior SS
officer, to allow 1,685 Jews to leave instead for Switzerland on what became known as the Kastner train
, in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952. In 1953, he was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator, in a pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald
, an amateur writer. The allegation stemmed in part from his relationship with Eichmann, and with Kurt Becher
, another SS officer; and in part from his having given positive character references after the war for Becher and two more 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 two years, and a ruling in 1955 that Kastner had indeed, in the words of Judge Benjamin Halevi, "sold his soul to the devil." 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. The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet.
Kastner resigned his government position and became a virtual recluse, telling reporters he was living with a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell." His wife fell into a depression that left her unable to get out of bed, while his daughter had to endure her school friends throwing stones at her in the street. The Supreme Court of Israel
overturned most of the judgment in January 1958, stating in a 4-1 decision that the lower court had "erred seriously," but not before Kastner had been assassinated. He was shot on March 3, 1957 by Zeev Eckstein, and died of his injuries twelve days later.
, 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, 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.
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. 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
.
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 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
.
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.
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." 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".
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. He joined the Ihud party, later known as Mapai
, a left-wing Zionist party that planned to form a government in the new Jewish state. He married József Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1934, which further cemented his position locally.
, 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
.
On August 30, 1940, Hitler 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.
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. Kastner offered to help, but Krausz wasn't interested. Porter writes that Krausz took an instant dislike to the "forceful, loud, and insistent Kastner."
Kastner's wife joined him in Budapest in July 1941. He tried to persuade József 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.
, 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. The total value of the ransom was estimated by the Jewish community to be 8,600,000 Swiss franc
s, though Becher himself valued it at only 3,000,000 Swiss francs.
Breaking his agreement, Eichmann had the passengers on the train sent to Belsen concentration 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 outstanding intellectuals, scientists, religious leaders and political activists, but also people who were neither rich nor prominent, not least a group of Polish orphans.
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 Kenyermeze and given jobs in factories and fields; and that as a result of this misinformation from their leaders, Hungarian Jewry was brought to Auschwitz.
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."
and other evidence that Hungary's Jews would be sent to their deaths. 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.
It was Kastner's Jewish Agency rival Krausz who eventually sent the report to Switzerland for publication. The resulting international outcry persuaded the Hungarian government to stop the deportations. But by then 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered on arrival.
Kastner's critics also argue that he promised the SS not to warn Hungarian Jews in order not to jeopardize 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. In the interview 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." Further, Rudolf Vrba
wrote, "Kastner paid for those 1,684 lives with his silence."
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. They also argue 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.
Kastner's critics reply that he received SS permission to visit Kolozsvar/Cluj on May 3, 1944, but failed to warn the Jews there despite the fact that Cluj was only 3 miles from the Romanian border and that the 20,000 Jews there were guarded by only 20 Hungarian gendarmes and a single SS officer and could therefore have escaped. They also say that he could have telephoned other Jewish communities but did not, and that timely warnings might have enabled thousands or tens of thousands of Jews to save their lives through "local uprisings, resistances, escapes, hiding, hiding children with Gentiles, forging documents, paying ransom, bribes," and other diverse means.
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 leadership in the hope of obtaining help in recovering stolen Jewish assets and capturing Eichmann in return. Kastner later mis-spoke in court about having testified on Becher's behalf at Nuremberg trials, while he was asked about the affidavit. 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 Juttner
, and there was an appeal that had the potential to deliver Wisliceny from the threat of execution in Slovakia." Wisliceny was hanged in 1948; Juttner'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 in 1995.
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.
His role in negotiating with the SS
in order to save Jewish lives 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.
Gruenwald was sued for libel by the Israeli government on Kastner's behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted two years. His 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 Senesh 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 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 and 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:
But Judge Moshe Silberg disagreed on historical and moral grounds:
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. Judge Silberg summed up the Supreme Court finding on this point:
"Greenwald has proven beyond any reasonable doubt this grave charge."
. He resigned his government position and started working for the Israeli Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet
. On March 3, 1957 he was killed outside his house by Ze'ev Eckstein (who pulled the trigger), Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes. All three were former members of the pre-state right-wing militia Lehi
; Menkes, their leader, had also been a member of the post-independence terrorist group Kingdom of Israel
. Kastner died of his injuries twelve days later. Eckstein, 24, stated he killed Kastner to avenge his activities in conjunction with Nazi figures such as Adolf Eichmann
. During the trial it turned out that Eckstein had been a paid informer of the Israeli General Security Service a few months before the shooting. But the idea that the killing was a government conspiracy has been described as "absolute nonsense" by some because the head of the intelligence service was a close personal friend of Kastner. Kastner's killers were pardoned seven years into their life sentences. In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel
overturned most of the judgment against Kastner, stating that the lower court had "erred seriously".
in 2007. Zsuzsa lectured about her father in Britain in 2008.
was released in Israel and the UK in 2009 and the United States in October 2009. The director of the film is Gaylen Ross
.
Ze'ev Eckstein clearly states that after he fired a blank, Kasztner ran in the dark into the bushes by his apartment. Eckstein fired his two remaining bullets in Kasztner's direction, and then heard a shot by someone else, after which Kasztner cried out in pain.
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.
Kastner was one of the leaders of the Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah —the Aid and Rescue Committee
Aid and Rescue Committee
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 1944-5, who were dedicated to helping Jews escape the Holocaust during the German occupation of Hungary.The main personalities of the Vaada were Dr...
, or Vaada— a small Jewish group in Budapest who helped Jewish refugees escape from Nazi Europe into Hungary during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, then helped them escape from Hungary after the Nazis
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
invaded that country too on March 19, 1944. Between May and July 1944, Hungary's Jews were being deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
at the rate of 12,000 people a day—for "resettlement," as the Nazis said. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
, a senior SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
officer, to allow 1,685 Jews to leave instead for Switzerland on what became known as the Kastner train
Kastner train
The Kastner train was a trainload of almost 1,684 Jews who, on June 30, 1944, escaped from Nazi-controlled Hungary, eventually arrived in Switzerland, while some 450,000 members of the Hungarian Jewish community were deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz....
, in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952. In 1953, he was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator, in a pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald
Malchiel Gruenwald
Malchiel Gruenwald 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.- Biography :Gruenwald was born in Hungary, and...
, an amateur writer. The allegation stemmed in part from his relationship with Eichmann, and with Kurt Becher
Kurt Becher
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was an SS Untersturmführer and later a Standartenführer 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.- SS Background :Becher was born to a wealthy family...
, another SS officer; and in part from his having given positive character references after the war for Becher and two more 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 two years, and a ruling in 1955 that Kastner had indeed, in the words of Judge Benjamin Halevi, "sold his soul to the devil." 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. The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet.
Kastner resigned his government position and became a virtual recluse, telling reporters he was living with a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell." His wife fell into a depression that left her unable to get out of bed, while his daughter had to endure her school friends throwing stones at her in the street. The Supreme Court of Israel
Supreme Court of Israel
The Supreme Court is at the head of the court system and highest judicial instance in Israel. The Supreme Court sits in Jerusalem.The area of its jurisdiction is all of Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories. A ruling of the Supreme Court is binding upon every court, other than the Supreme...
overturned most of the judgment in January 1958, stating in a 4-1 decision that the lower court had "erred seriously," but not before Kastner had been assassinated. He was shot on March 3, 1957 by Zeev Eckstein, and died of his injuries twelve days later.
Childhood
Kastner was born in 1906 in Kolozsvár, Austria-HungaryAustria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
, into a local community of 15,000 Jews. The governance of the city was unstable, moving back and forth between Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
and Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
. It became Cluj, Romania
Cluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca , commonly known as Cluj, is the fourth most populous city in Romania and the seat of Cluj County in the northwestern part of the country. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest , Budapest and Belgrade...
in 1918, was returned to Hungary in 1940, then was restored to Romania by the Treaty of Paris
Paris Peace Treaties, 1947
The Paris Peace Conference resulted in the Paris Peace Treaties signed on February 10, 1947. The victorious wartime Allied powers negotiated the details of treaties with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland .The...
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.
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 five languages: Hungarian, Romanian, French, German, and Latin.Anna Porter
Anna Porter
Anna Maria Porter, OC, O.Ont is a Canadian publisher and novelist.Born Anna Szigethy in Budapest, she emigrated to New Zealand in 1956 to escape the Soviet presence in Hungary. She received a Bachelor degree and Master of Arts degree from the University of Canterbury. She started at McClelland &...
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. 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
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
.
He joined a Zionist youth group, Barissa, which trained its members to become citizens of the Land of Israel
Land of Israel
The Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
, becoming its leader within a year. His older brother, Gyula, had already emigrated to Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz
Kibbutz
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...
, 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
Új Kelet
Új Kelet is a Zionist Jewish newspaper in the Hungarian language which first appeared in Kolozsvár in Transylvania, Romania, and was later revived in Israel,in Tel Aviv....
.
Early career
When Kastner was 22, his father died reading the TorahTorah
Torah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five books of the bible—Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , Numbers and Deuteronomy Torah- A scroll containing the first five books of the BibleThe Torah , is name given by Jews to the first five...
in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover
Passover
Passover is a Jewish holiday and festival. It commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt...
. 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
Új Kelet
Új Kelet is a Zionist Jewish newspaper in the Hungarian language which first appeared in Kolozsvár in Transylvania, Romania, and was later revived in Israel,in Tel Aviv....
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.
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." Ladislaus Löb quotes Kastner’s associate Joel Brand
Joel Brand
Joel Brand was a Hungarian sailor and odd-job man who became known for his role during the Holocaust in trying to save the Hungarian-Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp....
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".
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
Iron Guard
The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II. The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist, fascist, anti-communist, and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith...
. He worked hard as a lawyer for his clients, reportedly knowing when to pay off the police so that charges would be dropped. He joined the Ihud party, later known as Mapai
Mapai
Mapai was a left-wing political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968...
, a left-wing Zionist party that planned to form a government in the new Jewish state. He married József Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1934, which further cemented his position locally.
The rise of Nazism
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 AvivTel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
, 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
Perfidious Albion
'Perfidious Albion' is a pejorative phrase used within the context of international relations and diplomacy to refer to acts of duplicity, treachery and hence infidelity by monarchs or governments of Britain in their pursuit of self-interest and the requirements of...
" in Új Kelet
Új Kelet
Új Kelet is a Zionist Jewish newspaper in the Hungarian language which first appeared in Kolozsvár in Transylvania, Romania, and was later revived in Israel,in Tel Aviv....
.
On August 30, 1940, Hitler 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
Új Kelet
Új Kelet is a Zionist Jewish newspaper in the Hungarian language which first appeared in Kolozsvár in Transylvania, Romania, and was later revived in Israel,in Tel Aviv....
. Kastner, then 36 years old, decided to move to Budapest to look for a job, leaving his wife behind in Kolozsvár.
Move to Budapest
Kastner rented a small, two-room apartment in a pensionPension (lodging)
A pensione is a family-owned guest house or boarding house. This term is typically used in Portugal, France, Spain, Italy, other Continental European countries, in areas of North Africa and the Middle East that formerly had large European expatriate populations, and in some parts of South America...
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
Ottó Komoly
Otto Komoly was a Hungarian Jewish engineer, officer, zionist, and humanitarian leader in Hungary. He is credited with saving thousands of children during the German occupation of Budapest in World War II....
, 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. Kastner offered to help, but Krausz wasn't interested. Porter writes that Krausz took an instant dislike to the "forceful, loud, and insistent Kastner."
Kastner's wife joined him in Budapest in July 1941. He tried to persuade József 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
Joel Brand
Joel Brand was a Hungarian sailor and odd-job man who became known for his role during the Holocaust in trying to save the Hungarian-Jewish community from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp....
, a meeting that was to change both their lives.
Negotiations
During the summer of 1944, Kastner repeatedly met with Adolf EichmannAdolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
, who was in charge of deporting Hungary's 800,000-strong Jewish community to Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
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
Kurt Becher
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was an SS Untersturmführer and later a Standartenführer 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.- SS Background :Becher was born to a wealthy family...
, Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
'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. The total value of the ransom was estimated by the Jewish community to be 8,600,000 Swiss franc
Swiss franc
The franc is the currency and legal tender of Switzerland and Liechtenstein; it is also legal tender in the Italian exclave Campione d'Italia. Although not formally legal tender in the German exclave Büsingen , it is in wide daily use there...
s, though Becher himself valued it at only 3,000,000 Swiss francs.
Breaking his agreement, Eichmann had the passengers on the train sent to Belsen concentration 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
Joel Teitelbaum
Joel Teitelbaum, known as Reb Yoelish or the Satmar Rav , was a prominent Hungarian Hasidic rebbe and Talmudic scholar. He was probably the best known Haredi opponent of all forms of modern political Zionism...
, the writer Béla Zsolt
Béla Zsolt
Béla Zsolt was the Hungarian author of one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, Nine Suitcases translated into English by Ladislaus Lob. Zsolt was born on 1 August 1895 in Komárom and died on 2 June 1949 in Budapest...
, the psychiatrist Leopold Szondi
Léopold Szondi
Léopold Szondi was a Hungarian psychiatrist, born in present day Slovakia and raised in a a German and Slovak speaking family. He is known for the psychological tool that bears his name, the Szondi test. He developed a form of depth psychology that had some prominence in Europe in the mid-20th...
, the opera singer Dezső Ernster
Dezső Ernster
Dezső Ernster was a Hungarian opera singer who sang leading bass roles with the New York Metropolitan Opera from 1946 to 1963. In 1929, he created the role of Baron d'Houdoux in Hindemith's Neues vom Tage.-Biography:...
, the artist István Irsai, and other outstanding intellectuals, scientists, religious leaders and political activists, but also people who were neither rich nor prominent, not least a group of Polish orphans.
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 Kenyermeze and given jobs in factories and fields; and that as a result of this misinformation from their leaders, Hungarian Jewry was brought to Auschwitz.
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."
Failure to warn Jews
By the beginning of May 1944, Kastner and many other Jewish leaders had received the Vrba-Wetzler reportVrba-Wetzler report
The Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Vrba-Wetzler statement, the Auschwitz Protocols, and the Auschwitz notebook, is a 32-page document about the German Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland during the Holocaust...
and other evidence that Hungary's Jews would be sent to their deaths. 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.
It was Kastner's Jewish Agency rival Krausz who eventually sent the report to Switzerland for publication. The resulting international outcry persuaded the Hungarian government to stop the deportations. But by then 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered on arrival.
Kastner's critics also argue that he promised the SS not to warn Hungarian Jews in order not to jeopardize negotiations to save the Jews who escaped on the Kastner train
Kastner train
The Kastner train was a trainload of almost 1,684 Jews who, on June 30, 1944, escaped from Nazi-controlled Hungary, eventually arrived in Switzerland, while some 450,000 members of the Hungarian Jewish community were deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz....
. In 1960 an interview with Eichmann made by the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen
Willem Sassen
Wilhelmus Antonius Sassen was a Dutch collaborator, Nazi journalist and a member of the Waffen-SS, where he had the rank of Untersturmführer corresponding to lieutenant. He became widely known around 1960 as the interviewer of Adolf Eichmann.- Private biography, family :Willem Sassen was born in...
in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
was published in Life Magazine. In the interview 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." Further, Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, who came to public attention during the Second World War when, in April 1944, he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland with the first...
wrote, "Kastner paid for those 1,684 lives with his silence."
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. They also argue 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.
Kastner's critics reply that he received SS permission to visit Kolozsvar/Cluj on May 3, 1944, but failed to warn the Jews there despite the fact that Cluj was only 3 miles from the Romanian border and that the 20,000 Jews there were guarded by only 20 Hungarian gendarmes and a single SS officer and could therefore have escaped. They also say that he could have telephoned other Jewish communities but did not, and that timely warnings might have enabled thousands or tens of thousands of Jews to save their lives through "local uprisings, resistances, escapes, hiding, hiding children with Gentiles, forging documents, paying ransom, bribes," and other diverse means.
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 today. 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, real personal friends of Kastner as well as "community and Zionist leaders." The passengers included orphans, students, workmen, teachers, and nurses.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 the destruction of 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 an SS officer, Kastner and Becher worked well together.At the conclusion of the war, Becher was arrested and investigated at Nuremberg
Nuremberg
Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
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 leadership in the hope of obtaining help in recovering stolen Jewish assets and capturing Eichmann in return. Kastner later mis-spoke in court about having testified on Becher's behalf at Nuremberg trials, while he was asked about the affidavit. 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
Dieter Wisliceny
Dieter Wisliceny was a member of the Nazi SS, and a key executioner in the final phase of the Holocaust.Wisliceny studied theology without obtaining a degree...
, 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 Juttner
Hans Jüttner
Hans Jüttner was head of the SS's Main Leadership Office and also an SS Obergruppenführer.-Early life and career:...
, and there was an appeal that had the potential to deliver Wisliceny from the threat of execution in Slovakia." Wisliceny was hanged in 1948; Juttner'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 in 1995.
The libel trial
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, and became active in the MapaiMapai
Mapai was a left-wing political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968...
party. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the first
Israeli legislative election, 1949
Elections for the Constituent Assembly were held in newly independent Israel on 25 January 1949. Voter turnout was 86.9%. Two days after its first meeting on 14 February 1949, legislators voted to change the name of the body to the Knesset...
and second elections
Israeli legislative election, 1951
Elections for the second Knesset were held in Israel on 30 July 1951. Voter turnout was 75.1%.-Results:¹ Rostam Bastuni, Avraham Berman and Moshe Sneh left Mapam and set up the Left Faction. Bastuni later returned to Mapam whilst Berman and Sneh joined Maki. Hannah Lamdan and David Livschitz left...
, and became the spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.
His role in negotiating with the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
in order to save Jewish lives made headlines in 1953, when he was accused in a self-published pamphlet produced by Malchiel Gruenwald
Malchiel Gruenwald
Malchiel Gruenwald 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.- Biography :Gruenwald was born in Hungary, and...
of collaborating with the Nazis, enabling the mass murder of Hungarian Jewry, partnership with Nazi officer Kurt Becher
Kurt Becher
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was an SS Untersturmführer and later a Standartenführer 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.- SS Background :Becher was born to a wealthy family...
in theft of Jewish assets, and saving Becher from punishment after the war.
Gruenwald was sued for libel by the Israeli government on Kastner's behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted two years. His attorney, Shmuel Tamir
Shmuel Tamir
Shmuel M. Tamir was a prominent Israeli independence fighter, lawyer, Knesset member from 1965 to 1980, and Minister of Justice in the government of Menachem Begin from 1977 until 1980-Irgun:...
, was a former Irgun
Irgun
The Irgun , or Irgun Zevai Leumi to give it its full title , was a Zionist paramilitary group that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was an offshoot of the earlier and larger Jewish paramilitary organization haHaganah...
member and supporter of the opposition Herut
Herut
Herut was the major right-wing political party in Israel from the 1940s until its formal merger into Likud in 1988, and an adherent of Revisionist Zionism.-History:...
Party led by Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin
' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...
. 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 Senesh 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.
The Israeli government
Fifth government of Israel
The fifth government of Israel was formed by Moshe Sharett during the second Knesset on 26 January 1954, and was the first government not led by David Ben-Gurion. Sharett kept the same coalition partners as during the fourth government, i.e...
's decision to appeal on Kastner's behalf led to its collapse, as Prime Minister
Prime Minister of Israel
The Prime Minister of Israel is the head of the Israeli government and the most powerful political figure in Israel . The prime minister is the country's chief executive. The official residence of the prime minister, Beit Rosh Hamemshala is in Jerusalem...
Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett on 15 October 1894, died 7 July 1965) was the second Prime Minister of Israel , serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms.-Early life:...
resigned when the General Zionists
General Zionists
The General Zionists were centrists within the Zionist movement and a political party in Israel. Their political arm is an ancestor of the modern-day Likud.-History:...
, a member of his coalition, refused to abstain from voting on a no-confidence motion filed by Herut
Herut
Herut was the major right-wing political party in Israel from the 1940s until its formal merger into Likud in 1988, and an adherent of Revisionist Zionism.-History:...
and Maki
Maki (historical political party)
Maki was a communist political party in Israel. It is not the same party as the modern day Maki, which split from it during the 1960s and later assumed its name.-History:...
. Kastner became a hate figure and was assassinated in 1957 (see below).
The Supreme Court of Israel
Supreme Court of Israel
The Supreme Court is at the head of the court system and highest judicial instance in Israel. The Supreme Court sits in Jerusalem.The area of its jurisdiction is all of Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories. A ruling of the Supreme Court is binding upon every court, other than the Supreme...
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 ClujCluj-NapocaCluj-Napoca , commonly known as Cluj, is the fourth most populous city in Romania and the seat of Cluj County in the northwestern part of the country. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest , Budapest and Belgrade...
(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 casual connection between it and the easing of the concentration and deportation, one cannot see it as becoming a collaboration with the Nazis.
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.
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. Judge Silberg summed up the Supreme Court finding on this point:
"Greenwald has proven beyond any reasonable doubt this grave charge."
Assassination
Kastner compared the verdict against him to the Dreyfus affairDreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...
. He resigned his government position and started working for the Israeli Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet
Új Kelet
Új Kelet is a Zionist Jewish newspaper in the Hungarian language which first appeared in Kolozsvár in Transylvania, Romania, and was later revived in Israel,in Tel Aviv....
. On March 3, 1957 he was killed outside his house by Ze'ev Eckstein (who pulled the trigger), Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes. All three were former members of the pre-state right-wing militia Lehi
Lehi (group)
Lehi , commonly referred to in English as the Stern Group or Stern Gang, was a militant Zionist group founded by Avraham Stern in the British Mandate of Palestine...
; Menkes, their leader, had also been a member of the post-independence terrorist group Kingdom of Israel
Kingdom of Israel (group)
The Kingdom of Israel , or Tzrifin Underground, was a violent political group active in Israel in the 1950s."Kingdom of Israel," was the name used by the group's members but it was better known to the Israeli public as the "Tzrifin Underground", after the Tzrifin military base, where its members...
. Kastner died of his injuries twelve days later. Eckstein, 24, stated he killed Kastner to avenge his activities in conjunction with Nazi figures such as Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
. During the trial it turned out that Eckstein had been a paid informer of the Israeli General Security Service a few months before the shooting. But the idea that the killing was a government conspiracy has been described as "absolute nonsense" by some because the head of the intelligence service was a close personal friend of Kastner. Kastner's killers were pardoned seven years into their life sentences. In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel
Supreme Court of Israel
The Supreme Court is at the head of the court system and highest judicial instance in Israel. The Supreme Court sits in Jerusalem.The area of its jurisdiction is all of Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories. A ruling of the Supreme Court is binding upon every court, other than the Supreme...
overturned most of the judgment against Kastner, stating that the lower court had "erred seriously".
Descendents
His 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. Zsuzsa and Merav attended the formal presentation of the Kastner archive to Yad VashemYad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
in 2007. Zsuzsa lectured about her father in Britain in 2008.
Documentary
The feature-length theatrical documentary Killing KasztnerKilling Kasztner
Killing Kasztner is a feature-length theatrical documentary directed by Gaylen Ross. The film features the director and her search for the truth about Rezso Kasztner. The director first heard about Kasztner from a Hungarian woman while working on another documentary, Blood Money: Switzerland's Nazi...
was released in Israel and the UK in 2009 and the United States in October 2009. The director of the film is Gaylen Ross
Gaylen Ross
Gaylen Ross is an American actress, writer, producer and director.Ross starred in George A. Romero's 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead and later in Creepshow – and in the 1982 horror film Madman under the pseudonym 'Alexis Dubin'...
.
Ze'ev Eckstein clearly states that after he fired a blank, Kasztner ran in the dark into the bushes by his apartment. Eckstein fired his two remaining bullets in Kasztner's direction, and then heard a shot by someone else, after which Kasztner cried out in pain.
See also
- History of IsraelHistory of IsraelThe State of Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948 after almost two millennia of Jewish dispersal and persecution around the Mediterranean. From the late 19th century the Zionist movement worked towards the goal of recreating a homeland for the Jewish people...
- History of the Jews in HungaryHistory of the Jews in HungaryHungarian Jews have existed since at least the 11th century. After struggling against discrimination throughout the Middle Ages, by the early 20th century the community grew to be 5% of Hungary's population , and were prominent in science, the arts and business...
- Neolog Judaism
- Satmar (Hasidic dynasty)Satmar (Hasidic dynasty)Satmar is a Hasidic movement comprising mostly Hungarian and Romanian Hasidic Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants. It was founded and led by the late Hungarian-born Grand Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum , who was the rabbi of Szatmárnémeti, Hungary...
- Kastner trainKastner trainThe Kastner train was a trainload of almost 1,684 Jews who, on June 30, 1944, escaped from Nazi-controlled Hungary, eventually arrived in Switzerland, while some 450,000 members of the Hungarian Jewish community were deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz....
Further reading
- Kasztner Memorial
- 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.
- Baruch Kimmerling. "Israel's Culture of Martyrdom", The Nation, January 10, 2005.
- 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 Hungarians Jews: 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.
- Hilberg, RaulRaul HilbergRaul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
. The Destruction of the European JewsThe Destruction of the European JewsThe Destruction of the European Jews is a book published in 1961 by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R...
, first published in 1961, this edition Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-300-09557-0 - Kasztner, Resző Rudolf at Library of Congress Authorities.
- 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, p. 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.
- Katz, Shlomo. "Ben Hecht's Kampf," Midstream, Winter 1962, pp. 92–101.
- Laqueur, Walter Z. "The Kastner Case: Aftermath of the Catastrophe," Commentary, vol 20, issue 6, pp. 500–511.
- Maoz, Asher. Historical Adjudication: Courts of Law, Commissions of Inquiry, and "Historical Truth", Law and History Review, University of Illinois Press, Vol. 18. No. 3, Fall 2000.
- "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," Feb 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.
- Segev, TomTom SegevTom Segev is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives.-Early life:Segev was born in Jerusalem in 1945...
. "The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust", Owl Books edition, 2000, ISBN 0-8050-6660-8 - Sloan, Jacob. "From the Trial of Rudolf Kastner," The Reconstructionist, December 26, 1958, pp. 29–31.
- Warburg, Gustav. "The Strange Case of Joel Brand," Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, 1954, vol. 3.