Rudolf Kasztner: The 3 Opinions

New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  Regarding Rudolf Kasztner’s role in Adolf Eichmann’s deception in the extermination of Hungarian Jewry -there are three positions:  1] He was a hero who saved the day. 2] He wanted to be a hero, but was duped by Eichmann and his crew until the end and it ended up causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews 3] He wanted to be a hero, was deceived at the first meeting with the Nazis, but was no longer a hero after he continued following Nazi instructions when he knew that the Nazis had lied to him but now that his own family was held hostage, he felt he had to do so. 

The overwhelming and undeniable evidence is that the third position is the correct one.  Assertions that it has been disproven are just plain false.  It is also true that Sir Martin Gilbert believed in position #2. What follows are 19  pieces of evidence that position #3 is the correct one.  No one has ever refuted them. Nor are they quoted out of context. 

In the Jewish Chronicle of June 19, 2009, the late Sir Martin Gilbert offered a defense of Kasztner that has since been reprinted and repeated many times: Kasztner, on this account, was not a villain but a victim, a man deceived by Adolf Eichmann rather than an accomplice in the deception of his own people.

Sir Martin died in 2015, a year before the appearance of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Routledge, 2016), a study built almost entirely on the transcripts of the 1954 Kasztner Trial, the wartime cables, Kasztner’s own postwar Bericht, and the testimony of Auschwitz survivors from his home city. Because Sir Martin never had the chance to weigh that material, what follows is not a quarrel with the man but a reply to the argument, tested claim by claim against the record Bogdanor assembled.

Each of Sir Martin’s assertions is quoted below in italics and answered from that record. The disagreement is stark: where Sir Martin sees a dupe who trusted Eichmann’s promises, the documents show a negotiator who transmitted those promises onward after he had personal proof they were false.

1. The charge Sir Martin sets out to refute

“Was Rudolf Kasztner a traitor to the Jewish people, who saved a few friends while allowing more than 400,000 Jews to be deported to Auschwitz, knowing their fate, but refusing to warn them? … The truth is very different. Kasztner was not a villain, but a victim, who was cruelly deceived by the mastermind of mass murder, Adolf Eichmann.”

Reply. Sir Martin passed away before he was able to examine the devastating evidence that Kasztner had already known that Eichmann had deceived them.  The evidence is also found in Kasztner’s own words and the survivors’ testimony. The framing of “a few friends” understates the case against Kasztner and, paradoxically, understates the deception too: the passengers on the rescue train were not delivered to freedom at all. They were taken to a concentration camp in the Third Reich — Bergen-Belsen — and held there as hostages, which is why “the slightest deviation from total obedience to the Nazis risked … the execution of the hostages.”  The question is not whether Kasztner was deceived at the first meeting — everyone was — but what he did once the deception was exposed to him, in writing and in person, while the trains were still rolling.

2. “On April 25, the very day their report reached the Zionist leaders … an intercepted copy also reached Eichmann”

“On 7 April 1944 two Slovak Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz … On April 25, the very day their report reached the Zionist leaders in the Slovak capital Bratislava, an intercepted copy also reached Eichmann … Eichmann realised that Kasztner … would learn the truth the moment Kasztner went to Bratislava.”

Reply. This timeline — the heart of Sir Martin’s exoneration — casts Kasztner as a man about to discover the truth, whom Eichmann raced to neutralize. The record points the other way. The Slovak Zionist who compiled the report, Oskar Krasniansky, wrote that at the end of April he personally handed a copy to a Hungarian visitor: Kasztner himself; Vrba confirmed that Krasniansky told the escapees their report was already in Kasztner’s hands.  Kasztner never admitted receiving it. But independent of the report, he acknowledged receiving a warning message from Bratislava describing the renovation of the gas chambers and crematoria, the reinforcement of camp personnel, and an SS man’s remark that “soon we’ll eat fine Hungarian salami” — a reference to the provisions the arriving Jews would carry. Reacting to this, he demanded an emergency meeting with Krumey on April 28.

So the far end of Sir Martin’s own timeline is where the problem begins, not where it is resolved. Kasztner did not need to travel to Bratislava to “learn the truth” at some later date; by his own account he already possessed it by April 28. Whether he received the full report in person or only the warning message, he knew of the plan to gas Hungary’s Jews before the mass deportations began on May 15.

3. “Eichmann acted without delay … realising that Kasztner and his officials would then alert the Jews of Hungary”

“Realising that Kasztner and his officials would then alert the Jews of Hungary, Eichmann acted without delay, summoning … Joel Brand.”

Reply. The premise is that Kasztner’s instinct was to alert the Jews of Hungary, and that Eichmann’s scheme was designed to forestall it. The evidence is that Kasztner did the opposite. He did not warn the provincial ghettos; when a courier, Hannah Ganz, made dangerous trips from Budapest to Kolozsvár to warn people, Kasztner had given her no specific information, so she “knew nothing of the Nazi plans to deport Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz.” Under cross-examination, the Kolozsvár leader Hillel Danzig confirmed she told them only that “the situation was severe” and “didn’t know what would happen.” Kasztner’s own postwar words undercut the picture of a would-be warner. In mid-July 1944, a week after the provincial deportations ended, he mused to the SS officer Becher: “I’ve wondered many times whether, instead of the negotiations, it wouldn’t have been better to call on the Zionist youth and rally the people to active resistance.”[1]not done so — the remark is a confession of the road not taken, not a description of what he did.

4. “I am prepared to sell you all the Jews … there would be no killing until the answer was received”

“‘I am prepared to sell you all the Jews,’ Eichmann said. ‘I am also prepared to have them annihilated …’ … The deportation of Hungary’s Jews would still take place, Eichmann said, ‘but there would be no killing until the answer was received.’”

Reply. Sir Martin’s source for these quotations is Brand’s postwar testimony. Bogdanor shows that Brand’s account changed dramatically over time, and that the wartime record does not support the dramatic promises. In his original 1944 interrogations by the Jewish Agency and the Allies, Brand said nothing about an offer to stop the deportations and nothing about the immediate release of 100,000 Jews. He said only that “a certain number would be allowed to cross the frontier … as a token of goodwill, but no specific number was mentioned.”[2]

On the specific promise that “there would be no killing until the answer was received,” the wartime Brand said the reverse: the offer depended on deportation, because the Nazis “would first have to convert the Jews into Reichs-chattels” — that is, deport them into German territory before treating them as merchandise. “Not until January 1945 did Brand mention a Nazi promise to halt the deportations if his mission succeeded.”[3] The promise Sir Martin quotes as fact is a later reconstruction, not a wartime one.

5. Arendt, Vrba and “as though they were corrupt”

“Hannah Arendt commented: ‘Eichmann’s cleverest trick … was to see to it that his men acted as though they were corrupt.’ … Rudolf Vrba … later called Eichmann’s deception ‘a clever ruse to neutralise the potential resistance of a million people.’”

Reply. Bogdanor does not dispute that the Goods for Blood offer was a Nazi ruse; he insists on it, and marshals more evidence for it than Sir Martin does. Under Nuremberg interrogation, Kurt Becher — the SS officer who supervised Brand’s first meeting with Eichmann — revealed Himmler’s mandate: “Take what you can get from the Jews. Promise them what you like. What we keep is another matter.” Becher conceded the deal “was not meant as a serious proposal,” and in a 1994 interview flatly denied he had ever believed Hitler would release a million Jews.[4]

But Vrba’s phrase — “a clever ruse to neutralise the potential resistance of a million people” — cuts against Kasztner, not for him. The ruse could only neutralize resistance if the intended victims were kept ignorant, and it is on exactly that point that the survivors indict Kasztner. Vrba himself escaped Auschwitz to issue a warning; his lifelong grievance was that the warning was buried in Hungary for weeks. Invoking Vrba to defend the man who, on Vrba’s own account, sat on his report is a considerable irony.

6. “Kasztner and his colleagues had no option but to send Brand … they were therefore confident that no harm would befall the deportees”

“Kasztner and his colleagues had no option but to send Brand to negotiate … When the deportations began on May 15, they were therefore confident that no harm would befall the deportees.”

Reply. This is the load-bearing claim of Sir Martin’s defense: that Kasztner was confident no harm would befall the deportees. The evidence is that Kasztner knew harm was befalling them and said otherwise. On May 20 he met Eichmann himself, who “made it clear that nothing would induce him to stop the deportations.”[5] Emerging from that meeting, Kasztner (or Hansi Brand at his behest) cabled Istanbul. Using a pre-arranged signature code — a message signed with a surname only meant its literal sense had to be reversed — the cable was engineered to tell Brand that “the deportations had stopped altogether,” when in fact thousands were being sent to Auschwitz daily.[6]

Far from being a confident but honest man, Kasztner was the source of the disinformation that persuaded the Jewish Agency — and through it the British — that the massacre had been deferred. On May 26 the Agency told the British High Commissioner that the deportations to Poland had “presumably … been deferred pending negotiations,” at a moment when nearly 139,000 Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz.[7]

7. “As proof that he could be trusted … a train with 1,684 Hungarian Jews to safety in Switzerland”

“Eichmann offered … to send a train with 1,684 Hungarian Jews to safety in Switzerland. A few were Kasztner’s friends, most were not. They left Budapest on June 30. Eichmann’s word, it seemed, was good as his bond.”

Reply. Three points in this single sentence do not survive the record. First, the train did not go “to safety in Switzerland.” It went to Bergen-Belsen, where the passengers were held as hostages; one group of 318 reached Switzerland in August and the remainder not until December, after further payments and negotiations.[8] “Eichmann’s word” was therefore not “good as his bond”; the hostages’ release was extracted piecemeal under continuing duress.

Second, on the composition of the train, the survivors of Kasztner’s own city tell a darker story than “a few were his friends.” The Kolozsvár contingent was assembled while the rest of that ghetto’s 18,000 Jews were told they were being resettled to a fictitious Hungarian labor colony called “Kenyérmező.” The ghetto leaders who spread that story — among them Kasztner’s father-in-law’s relative, the ghetto commander Balázs — rode to the West on the train while their neighbors rode to Auschwitz.[9]

Third, and most damaging to the “victim” thesis, is Kasztner’s own explanation of why the train’s purpose had to be concealed. In the 1946 Bericht he records Eichmann’s demand that there be “no fuss” in the ghetto, and then writes: “Only a few people in Klausenburg knew how and why they came to be in a special transport. The ‘rescue secret’ had to be kept.”[10] As Bogdanor observes, keeping the rescue secret meant keeping the extermination secret: one could not tell the few they were being saved without the many realizing they were being killed. The deception “had to be total.”

8. “There had been no holding camp” — but the victims were told there was

“Eichmann told Brand that … the Jews of Hungary would be taken to a special holding camp, and housed and fed … There had been no holding camp and no exchange of Jews for goods and money.”

Reply. Sir Martin is right that there was no holding camp — and this is exactly the fiction that the Kolozsvár survivors say Kasztner’s circle sold to them under the name “Kenyérmező.” The victims boarded the trains without resistance because they were told they were bound for a Hungarian internment village where families would stay together. Yechiel Shmueli testified that a ghetto leader announced: “The Hungarian government has decided to evacuate the population … to Kenyérmező … accept it calmly, because you’ll be living together with your family.”[11] David Rosner gave up a chance to slip back to his labor unit — and to safety — because “I told the policeman that we were allowed to go to Kenyérmező, and so I returned to the wagon.”[12]

The cruelty of the fiction is captured in a single exchange. Dr. Elkes, a physician, told a fellow inmate in the ghetto that he had to be on the first train because “we’re preparing the health system in Kenyérmező and the first to go will get the best places.” As they were dressing in prison uniforms at Auschwitz, Rosner reminded him of it. Elkes answered: “We were deceived.”[13] When a typhus quarantine briefly halted the trains, the ghetto leader Balázs successfully lobbied the Hungarians to lift it — because the Kasztner group “can’t proceed with our journey before that.”[14] “The prerequisite for boarding the Kasztner Train was the smooth evacuation of the ghetto population on the ‘Kenyérmező’ trains.”

9. “It was only in the first week of July 1944 that details … reached the West”

“It was only in the first week of July 1944 that details of the actual murder of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz reached the West, brought by two further Jewish escapees, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin.”

Reply.  The West’s ignorance until July is thus due in part to Kasztner himself.

The Vrba–Wetzler report existed from late April, and Kasztner had its substance by April 28. Yet Kasztner “made no effort to communicate the truth to the outside world.” Worse, he sent affirmative disinformation. On June 13 — the same day Eichmann admitted to his face that the deportees were dead — Kasztner wrote to the JDC’s Joseph Schwartz that the able-bodied had been taken to “Waldsee near Ludwigshafen,” from which “about 750,000 postcards have come.”[15]

Kasztner knew “Waldsee” was a fiction. Back on May 2 he had told Krumey to his face, of the same cover-story, “there’s no point in playing hide-and-seek.”[16] Meanwhile Moshe Krausz’s accurate summary — that all of Hungary’s Jews were being sent to perish in Auschwitz — was reaching the free world through other channels, so the information was available; Kasztner’s contribution was to muddy it. If the West learned the truth only in July, that delay was not something done to Kasztner. He was part of its cause.

10. “Not a crime by Kasztner, but Eichmann’s cruel deception plan”

“Of the 437,000 Hungarian deportees, more than 350,000 had been killed … Not a crime by Kasztner, but Eichmann’s cruel deception plan, had led to the death of the majority of Hungarian Jews.”

Reply. Sir Martin presents a false alternative: either Eichmann’s deception or Kasztner’s crime. Bogdanor’s answer is that Eichmann’s deception worked through Kasztner — that the two are not competing explanations but a single mechanism. Eichmann had only 150 to 200 SS men to deport three-quarters of a million people at lightning speed, and Himmler’s overriding fear was a repetition of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. What made the operation possible was the prevention of panic, and that required the cooperation, witting or not, of the Jewish leadership.[17]

Describing the Brand Mission’s effect, Gilbert had written that as a result of a “brilliantly successful” Nazi deception plan, “the faith that negotiations might succeed in saving all Hungarian Jewry coincided with the destruction of more than half of the Jews of greater Hungary.”[18] The deception’s success and Kasztner’s transmission of it are, on the evidence assembled after Sir Martin’s death, two descriptions of one event.

CONCLUSION

Sir Martin Gilbert was among the greatest chroniclers of the Holocaust, and his instinct — to resist the easy condemnation of a Jew who dealt with the Nazis under impossible pressure — was a humane one. Duress is real, and Bogdanor grants it fully to the ghetto functionaries of Kolozsvár, men forced to choose between their families and their community. But he denies that same mitigation to Kasztner, and the distinction is the crux: “If Kasztner’s men in Kolozsvár were under duress, he was the vehicle for the duress.”[19]

The case Sir Martin could not answer, because it was published after he was gone, rests both on documents Kasztner himself wrote and on the sworn recollections of those who survived the trains: that Kasztner knew of Auschwitz by the end of April, transmitted Eichmann’s false assurances after he had personal proof they were false, withheld the warning from the ghettos, and told the outside world that the murdered were alive at “Waldsee.” Whether that amounts to the “treachery” of the original charge or to something for which our language has no adequate word, it is not the innocence of a mere victim.

On the evidence now available, the verdict Sir Martin sought to overturn stands.

[1]Kasztner–Becher minutes, July 15, 1944, Dinur Archive.

[2]Brand-JAE2, para. 31; cf. Brand-SIME1, para. 100. The figure of 100,000 does not appear until Brand’s 1954 Kasztner Trial testimony; the wartime figure was five to ten thousand.

[3]Brand-JAE1, 5; Shertok Report, 6; Brand Report, 23.

[4]Becher’s Nuremberg interrogation, March 2, 1948; Eichmann Trial testimony, June 20, 1961, para. 59; Channel 2 interview, December 22, 1994.

[5]Cited in Bogdanor, ch. 6, “The Brand Mission,” on the May 20 Kasztner–Eichmann meeting.

[6]The cable read: “750 not granted permit. Deportation not interrupted. Large camps have been arranged …” but, signed with Hansi Brand’s surname only, was to be reversed. “Only two people in Budapest knew this code: Kasztner and Hansi Brand … Kasztner himself took responsibility for the message in his Bericht.”

[7]Jewish Agency memorandum to Sir Harold MacMichael, May 26, 1944; deportation total from Braham. Pomerantz had told the JAE on May 25 that only 8,000 had been deported.

[8]The passengers were “delivered, not to freedom, but to a concentration camp in the Third Reich.” The final group did not leave German-controlled territory until the night of December 6–7, 1944.

[9]Kasztner Trial testimony of Yechiel Shmueli (June 13, 1954), David Rosner (June 18, 1954), Jacob Freifeld (June 28, 1954), Paul Gross (June 21, 1954), and others.

[10]Kasztner, Bericht, 46, quoted in Bogdanor, ch. 7. Bogdanor calls this “the smoking gun that proves Kasztner’s complicity in the deception of the Jewish population of Kolozsvár.”

[11]Yechiel Shmueli, Kasztner Trial testimony, June 13, 1954.

[12]David Rosner, Kasztner Trial testimony, June 18, 1954.

[13]David Rosner, Kasztner Trial testimony, June 18, 1954.

[14]Paul Gross, Kasztner Trial testimony, June 21, 1954, “The trains must go on, since we can’t proceed with our journey before that.”

[15]See Kasztner’s letter of June 13, 1944. Waldsee was a known Nazi cover-name for Auschwitz; the postcards were written by victims before they were gassed.

[16] Kasztner–Krumey exchange of May 2, 1944. “He had seen that … Waldsee was a Nazi fiction designed to conceal deportation to Auschwitz.”

[17]See size of the Eichmann-Kommando (Braham, Vol. 1, 415) and Himmler’s fear of an uprising (Eichmann Trial testimony, July 21, 1961).

[18]Martin Gilbert, quoted in Bogdanor, ch. 6, n. 28. The deception’s success and Kasztner’s role in transmitting it are, on the evidence, the same story.

[19]See Bogdanor, ch. 7, “The Rescue Leader’s Collaboration.”