When Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz-Birkenau again in 1943, he was able to inspect the realization of his plans. Commandant Rudolf Höss had arranged for a special transport of three thousand Jews to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new systems.
The train arrived, the wagons were emptied, those who were already dead and the bags they had hopefully carried were cleared out by the kapos, prisoners who did certain chores in return for more privileges, and the new arrivals were rushed toward the selection stand by stick-wielding SS guards. Only three were judged fit by the very businesslike SS officer and physician Dr. Josef Mengele. The rest were crowded into the new gas chambers; with their “Keep Clean” notices, they were designed to resemble showers. When the prisoners were pressed together so that no one could move in any direction, the guards threw in the babies and small children over the heads of the adults, then closed and sealed the doors.
About two hours later, when Reichsführer Himmler had finished his leisurely breakfast at Commandant Höss's villa, he returned to see the completion of the process. The SS men on the flat roofs of the gas chamber put on their protective masks, removed the lids from the camouflaged openings, and dropped in the cyanide-based Zyklon B pellets.
Himmler was able to watch the last struggle through the observation windows: children clinging to their mothers, the hoarse cries of the men still trying to open the sealed doors, the hopeless screaming of those clawing for air in the airless chambers. When everyone inside was dead, Höss demonstrated the new lifts that removed the bodies, the quick, efficient work of the kapos in removing gold teeth, hair (used as insulation on torpedo warheads), a few baubles that had been hidden in crevices not already searched, and the final trip to the recently completed crematoria, containing fifteen ovens that could burn three bodies each, at the same time and in less than twenty minutes.
The cremation capacity of the ovens had reached the initial goal of 4,400 human bodies a day, or more than 120,000 people a month.1 Himmler was satisfied. Auschwitz-Birkenau was ready for the Jews of Hungary.2
ON MARCH 13, 1944, six days before the German occupation of Hungary, the Abwehr agent and sometime courier Jozsi Winninger told Rezső Kasztner that, within a short time, the German army would place control of the Jewish camps in the hands of the Red Cross. The couriers would then, he said, be able to take money directly into the Polish camps. The mere formality of a $200,000 deposit in cash would be needed.3
The very next day, Winninger called Kasztner again.4 He had been able to improve his position in the Abwehr because of his dual roles: he reported on the activities of the Rescue Committee to his bosses while, at the same time, he served the Zionists by delivering letters and food packages to work camps and carried official correspondence and money from Istanbul to the Rescue Committee. Now he said he had news for Kasztner and Joel Brand and wished to deliver it in person. He suggested a restaurant on the Buda side of the river, a favorite of his boss, Dr. Josef Schmidt, who ran the Hungarian spy operation reporting to Abwehrstelle III F, the counterespionage unit of the Abwehr military district headquartered in Vienna. Brand had first met Schmidt at his own favorite Budapest spot: the Moulin Rouge nightclub. Kasztner found it amusing that the self-important Schmidt (whose doctorate was, at best, a curiosity) had been a newspaper hawker on the streets of Vienna only months before the Anschluss.
Kasztner and Brand arrived a few minutes before 8 PM. The restaurant, famous for its Viennese specialties, was full, the music muted, and the view over the Danube enchanting. Schmidt, balding, stout, red-faced, had already finished most of a bottle of Szekszárdi Vörös, a full-bodied Hungarian red wine, which he proceeded to compliment in courtly, over-blown German, as if he were talking about the charms of a fleshy woman. He was affable, conciliatory, friendly, presenting himself as a reasonable man in an unreasonable world.
Jozsi Winninger acted the part of the genial host. He recommended another Hungarian wine with the main course. He had, he said, taken the liberty of having it set aside already to breathe. In the two years Winninger had spent in Hungary, his girth had grown; his neck overflowed his impeccably ironed shirt collar, and his tie soon bore traces of the copious hors d’oeuvres the waiters deposited on the table.
Schmidt, as if indulging in dinnertime small talk, said the war effort would demand more and more of the German army, and the troops needed food and clothing, ammunition, and transport. It had been stupid of Regent Horthy to imagine he could pull Hungary out of the war at this time, when Germany needed support. Had he decided to do his little dance with Hitler before the Italians pulled out, there might have been a small chance the Führer would have overlooked the effrontery. Now he needed reliable forces to the east, and the only forces truly reliable were his own. Edmund Veesenmayer, the corpulent German envoy to Hungary, had been reporting to Hitler that, at best, Hungary was a hesitant and unreliable ally; at worst—and it seemed that the worst was happening on the Eastern Front—Hungary was a liability. Veesenmayer viewed Horthy's effort to bring back what was left of the Hungarian armies as treasonous. At seventy-six, Horthy was befuddled by age. He would have to be swept aside.
Winninger added that Hitler had signed the orders for Operation Margarethe I, the invasion of Hungary, two days earlier. The order, issued to the commander of German forces in the southeast, meant the immediate deployment of troops along the Hungarian border. The German army would occupy Hungary within a few days.
“Wouldn’t the Hungarians resist?” Brand asked.
Winninger laughed.
They could not, Schmidt replied. Most of their better units were still in the Ukraine, and the forces stationed closer to the capital were sympathetic to the Germans. Many of the senior officers were Swabians, Germans at heart. Prime Minister Kállay, like his predecessors, had thought that the Russians were the greater threat. It was the Russians’ participation in the Allied armies that had prevented Kállay from negotiating an unconditional surrender. Now, it was much too late for that.
“Veesenmayer will be made Reich plenipotentiary, and Admiral Horthy's government will cooperate whether they like it or not,” Winninger said. “Hungary will cease to be an independent country.”
Brand and Kasztner stared at the two Abwehr men, both of whom had finished their sizable pork filets and their second bottle of red wine and were examining the dessert menu. Although the Va’ada leaders had grown used to expecting bad news, they were unable for a few moments to absorb the information they had just been given.
“What,” Brand finally asked, “are their plans for the Jews?”
Winninger was sure that Jewish matters would be administered by the SS. The Führer was convinced that there was still too much Jewish influence in Horthy's Buda Castle. Two detachments each of SS and SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Reich Security Office) men would be arriving in Budapest. Himmler's deputy, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who became security chief after Heydrich was assassinated, was already in the city. Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann's special unit had been mobilized and would arrive in the capital a few days later.
Neither Kasztner nor Brand needed to ask how Eichmann's unit was “special.” They knew of his Sonderkommando's genocidal achievements in Poland and the Ukraine.
What Winninger did not realize was that Himmler had already decided to dispense with the services of the Abwehr's intelligence network and that both Winninger and Schmidt would be incarcerated. The Abwehr chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had been fired by Hitler in February, and the Abwehr was to be absorbed into the Security Service and the SS.
Winninger did, however, suggest that, when dealing with the SS, money and valuables might prove to be useful in exchange for something of no value: Jewish lives. That was the first mention of what became known as the “blood for goods” deal.
KASZTNER IMMEDIATELY called Ottó Komoly. Surely the politically savvy president of the Budapest Zionist Association would know what to do with the information. What do you do when you’re told you and your family and friends may have only a few days to live? Brand raced home to warn the people they had been hiding. For this kind of emergency, Peretz Révész and the Polish halutzim had prepared “bunkers,” camouflaged underground hiding places. They had not anticipated a German occupation, but they knew what to expect if the special commando came. Peretz thought of armed resistance, arguing that even if they all were killed, they should at least make it expensive for the Germans.
Moshe Schweiger, the man least likely to fill such a role,5 had been picked by the Haganah6 in Palestine as the most capable person to organize an attack on the German army. He told Kasztner that he had received his commission and instructions in a sealed envelope from Istanbul. In the event of a German invasion or an attempt to deport Hungary's Jews, he was immediately to form a military unit—“here, in Budapest. In full view of the security forces,” he laughed. “They must be mad.” Someone in the Haganah must have confused him with another man, one more inclined to suicide.
In the early afternoon, though, when they all gathered at the Pilvax Café, Schweiger was there studying an old copy of The Science of Military Strategy. He now revealed to the group that an expeditionary force of high-level Yishuv operatives, supported by the British army,7 would be dropped into Hungary. He did not know when or how, but the committee needed to be ready and prepared to join the soldiers when they arrived.
Kasztner listed the weapons and ammunition they could round up. “A hundred and fifty pistols, forty hand grenades, three rifles of World War I vintage, some bags of ammunition. Perhaps we could add a few kitchen knives?” He started to laugh as he came to the end of the list. “Gallows humor,” he said. “Shouldn’t a man at the end of the rope be allowed a last laugh?”
Hansi suggested that the women, leaning from their balconies, could pour boiling oil over the tanks, a modern version of what the heroic women of Eger Castle in northern Hungary did when the occupying Turks advanced on their stronghold in an earlier century.8 More practically, she moved the children to the Majestic Hotel. It offered reassuringly familiar surroundings, and some of their friends had rooms there, too. They would be safer there, she thought, than in the crowded apartment.
Komoly cabled the Jewish Agency's people in Istanbul and the Joint's men in Geneva to alert the British and the Americans that Hungary was in danger. The Americans’ War Refugee Board had to be informed immediately, he said. He asked that Chaim Barlas, then the Jewish Agency's immigration officer in Istanbul, send more Palestine entry permits, more cash.
A Hungarian counterintelligence officer took a package to Istanbul for the Va’ada on March 17. It was written in Hebrew and contained some of the more nightmarish accounts of German atrocities against Jews in Poland. It also included the news of the imminent German invasion.
At a late-night meeting at Samuel Stern's home in Buda, everyone agreed to wait and see. They reviewed what they knew of the war. Their main source, the BBC, had been broadcasting hopeful news of British victories. The British and Americans had conquered southern Italy, and General Bernard Montgomery's forces were driving up the coast. The Italian army had given up on East Africa and Greece and had proved to be hopeless even on its own turf; on September 8, 1943, it had surrendered to the Allies. The ceaseless bombardment of German cities had reduced many of them to rubble, and no longer was there any doubt about Allied superiority in the air. In Cologne, for example, only the cathedral was spared. Hamburg and much of its population had been destroyed in a massive conflagration caused by intensive bombing. Darmstadt, Würzburg, and Kassel had been burned to the ground. The Royal Air Force had bombed Berlin in a daylight raid that showed its mastery of the skies over Germany. The Allies had bombed factories and railway lines, and Germany was running short of oil. The once mighty German air force, the Luftwaffe, according to the BBC was mighty no more. German submarines had been all but blown out of the oceans. Hitler should be preoccupied with trying to break the Allied blockade and with urging his generals on to greater effort in the east, not worrying about the Jews of Hungary. In January, the Germans had abandoned their attack on Leningrad. More German soldiers had escaped from the horrors of the Soviet front, and dozens of deserters were hiding in Budapest. Some members of the Nazi Party's paramilitary youth group, Hitler Jugend, as young as sixteen, were now enrolled as fighting men.
Despite what the Abwehr men had said, the group meeting at Stern's house concluded that indeed the Reich had greater problems than the Jews. If Horthy was still in power, Stern believed, they would still be safe. There must be no hint of disloyalty to Hungary. The Hungarians would not abandon their Jewish citizens. “We have lived here for a thousand years,” he reminded his friends.
As for resistance, they would certainly all be murdered if they tried that route. In 1942 in Minsk, when the Jews organized resistance against continuing German occupation of the Belarusian city, the German army retaliated with a full-scale military attack and executed everybody.
A strange, fatalistic calm descended on the gathering.