| Rudolf Kastner | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1906 Cluj, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | March 15, 1957 Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Residence | Budapest, Hungary; Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Nationality | Hungarian, Israeli |
| Other names | Rezső Kasztner, Israel or Yisrael Kasztner. |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Education | Law degree |
| Occupation | Lawyer, journalist with Új Kelet in Budapest; civil servant in Israel |
| Known for | Saving 1,684 Jews on the Kastner train, who were otherwise destined for Auschwitz |
| Political party | Mapai |
| Spouse | Elizabeth, née Fischer |
| Children | Zsuzsi |
| Parents | Yitzhak and Helen Kastner |
Rudolf Israel Kastner[1] (1906–March 15, 1957) 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 Israeli 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.[2] 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."[3] 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.[3] The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet.[4]
Kastner resigned his government position and became a virtual recluse, telling reporters he was living with a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell."[3] 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.[5] 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.[4] He was shot on March 3, 1957 by Zeev Eckstein, and died of his injuries twelve days later.[6]
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Kastner was born in 1906 in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary, into a local community of 15,000 Jews. The governance of the city was unstable, moving back and forth between Hungary and Romania. It became Cluj, 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.[7]
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.[7]
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.[7] 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.[8]
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.[9]
When Kastner was 22, his father died reading the Torah in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover. He had to put off any ideas about emigrating, because his mother now needed him at home. He went to law school, as she wished, then worked full-time for Új Kelet after graduating, at first working as a sports reporter, though he continued to write about politics. He also became an assistant to Dr. József Fischer, a lawyer, member of Parliament, president of the Jewish Community of Kolozsvár, and leading member of the National Jewish Party. Fischer admired Kastner's writing, and encouraged him to continue working for Új Kelet too.[10]
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."[11] 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".[12]
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.[13] 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.[14]
As the German army moved across Europe, Kastner set up an information center in Kolozsvár/Cluj to help refugees arriving from Austria, Poland, and Slovakia. He arranged temporary accommodation for them and collected clothes and food from local charities. His main concern was to provide Jewish refugees with safe passage, using his ability to bribe and charm to obtain exit visas from the Romanian government. He asked for help from the Jewish Agency's leadership in Tel Aviv, though there was a limit to what they could do because the British had imposed strict quotas on the number of Jewish refugees allowed into Palestine, causing Kastner to attack "Perfidious Albion" in Új Kelet.[15]
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.[16]
Kastner rented a small, two-room apartment in a pension in Váci Street. He wanted to continue his work helping Jewish refugees in Kolozsvár, and with that in mind, had obtained a letter of introduction from József Fischer to Ottó Komoly, an engineer and president of the Budapest Zionist Association. Komoly directed Kastner to Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, the Jewish Agency's representative in Budapest, who controlled the Palestine entry visas.
Porter writes that Kastner had to wait in line for two hours in the Agency's office on Erzsébet Boulevard, among scores of Jewish refugees desperate to find a way to escape to Palestine. He eventually barged past Krausz's secretaries and into his office. Krausz explained that he was determined not to alienate the British, which meant that every entry visa had to be legitimate and properly processed, which was consuming all his time.[17] Kastner offered to help, but Krausz wasn't interested. Porter writes that Krausz took an instant dislike to the "forceful, loud, and insistent Kastner."[18]
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.
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During the summer of 1944, Kastner repeatedly met with Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of deporting Hungary's 800,000-strong Jewish community to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. They reached an agreement that some 1,685 Jews would be spared for a ransom of $1,000 per head. Most of the passengers could not raise the funds themselves, so Kastner auctioned off 150 seats to wealthy Jews in order to pay for the others. In addition, SS officer Kurt Becher, Heinrich Himmler's envoy insisted that 50 seats be reserved for the families of individuals who had personally paid him for favors, at an amount of approximately $25,000 per person. Becher wanted to get the price per head increased to $2,000 but Himmler set the price at $1,000.[19] The total value of the ransom was estimated by the Jewish community to be 8,600,000 Swiss francs, though Becher himself valued it at only 3,000,000 Swiss francs.[20]
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.[21]
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." [22]
By the beginning of May 1944, Kastner and many other Jewish leaders had received the Vrba-Wetzler report and other evidence that Hungary's Jews would be sent to their deaths. 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.[23]
It was Kastner's Jewish Agency rival Krausz who eventually sent the report to Switzerland for publication.[24] 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."[25] Further, Rudolf Vrba wrote, "Kastner paid for those 1,684 lives with his silence."[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
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.[29]
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 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.[30] Kastner later mis-spoke in court about having testified on Becher's behalf at Nuremberg trials, while he was asked about the affidavit.[31] 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."[32] 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.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, and became active in the Mapai party. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the first and second elections, and became the spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.[2]
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.[2]
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 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.[33]
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.[36] Judge Silberg summed up the Supreme Court finding on this point: "Greenwald has proven beyond any reasonable doubt this grave charge."[37]
Kastner compared the verdict against him to the Dreyfus affair. He resigned his government position and started working for the Israeli Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet. 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.[38] Kastner died of his injuries twelve days later.[6] Eckstein, 24, stated he killed Kastner to avenge his activities in conjunction with Nazi figures such as Adolf Eichmann.[6] 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.[39] 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.[40] Kastner's killers were pardoned seven years into their life sentences.[41] In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment against Kastner, stating that the lower court had "erred seriously".[4]
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 Vashem in 2007. Zsuzsa lectured about her father in Britain in 2008.[42][43]
The feature-length theatrical documentary Killing Kasztner was released in Israel and the UK in 2009 and the United States in October 2009. The director of the film is Gaylen Ross.
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.