It is easily said that we should have preferred to engage
in a hopeless struggle rather than to submit to Hitler's demands,
and such a view reads well on paper.
In fact, it is errant nonsense. An individual can commit suicide, a whole nation can not.
MIKLŐS HORTHY, MEMOIRS
ON SUNDAY MORNING, March 19, 1944, the German army marched into Budapest. By nine o’clock, most of the city knew that the Germans had invaded. Radio Budapest kept broadcasting light music, a little Mozart, a few Strauss selections, as if nothing had happened. There were no newspapers. Only the BBC saw fit to announce the occupation of Hungary. SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, the former Reich minister to Hungary, had been named Reich plenipotentiary. He ordered the arrest of prominent intellectuals and public figures, left-leaning members of parliament (at least one of whom resisted and was killed), journalists, writers, several industrialists, and hundreds of Poles, French, and Slovaks. A group of forty Polish officers who had been stationed in a house in Buda offered armed resistance. They were all shot. The Gestapo ransacked the offices of the Smallholders Party, the Social Democratic Party, the editorial offices of newspapers sympathetic to the democratic system, and of trade-union buildings. It occupied the airport and the railway stations.
The thunderous roll of long lines of tanks greeted late risers. Along the great Andrássy Avenue, a few enthusiastic citizens raised their arms in the Hitler salute, but most people stayed in their homes.
Hundreds were detained at railway stations for disobeying a new law, not yet announced, that required Jews to obtain written permission to travel. Some two hundred others were picked, at random, from the telephone book's listing of doctors and lawyers whose names looked to be Jewish.1
The Va’ada, the Aid and Rescue Committee, met that afternoon at the Café Parisette on the Duna Corso, where even that day there were Sunday strollers enjoying the afternoon warmth. The committee members present sat at Sam Springmann's usual table near the back of the stately café. The maître d’ greeted them with his customary deference, though Rezső Kasztner noticed that his hand shook when he placed the menu in front of him.
Hansi Brand, the first to arrive, had already unfurled an old newspaper and was reading about the rising prices, the black-market racketeers, the stockpiling of luxury goods by Jews—the usual pap—but there was no mention of the only news worth mentioning at press time: the German army's impending invasion of its ally. Joel Brand was slumped over his beer, suit rumpled, collar open, his hair unbrushed. The night before, he had been in one of his favorite clubs with a couple of Abwehr agents. He had arrived at the Majestic Hotel at 4 AM with Jozsi Winninger, grabbed the suitcase with cash from Istanbul intended for the refugees, and gone for coffee at the apartment Winninger had rented for “his” ballerina. He had “lent” Winninger some $8,000 in cash and a gold cigarette case to make sure the goods, and Joel himself, would remain safe. Brand was exhausted. He hadn’t slept all night. He reported that Winninger had been very nervous and, when asked what would happen to the Jews, had replied: “A fate worse than for the Polish Jews.”2
Moshe Schweiger did not join the group—Ottó Komoly said he thought he had been arrested. Schweiger had called him the previous day about a message from Palestine: a small force of parachutists would arrive in the next few days to help the local Jewish community. Perhaps someone had overheard the conversation. Perhaps the Germans had known Schweiger was the official representative of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jews in Palestine. Sam Springmann had always suspected that the couriers shared with their Abwehr handlers most of the secret correspondence they carried for the Va’ada.
Springmann himself had disappeared. He had known he would be on the list of those to be arrested first. He told Kasztner: “They have me both ways. I am Polish and I am a Jew.”
The Germans’ sand-colored Mercedes cars had gone to the residence of Ferenc Chorin, the most powerful industrialist in Hungary, president of the Industrialists’ Association, the wealthiest man in the country, a strong Hungarian patriot, and a friend of Regent Horthy. Only a week before, when Kasztner had tried to reach Chorin with an urgent request for funding a family's escape to Yugoslavia, the obsequious secretary had told him that Mr. Chorin would be out all evening, playing bridge with Horthy on Castle Hill. Chorin, as everyone knew, was a rum hand at bridge, a canny bidder, Horthy's favorite partner. Would they dare arrest him?3 And on the night just passed, there had been an elegant party at the Mauthner family's mansion, where all the guests had worn evening dress and their patriotic decorations, champagne flowed, and liveried waiters served fabulous delicacies on silver platters. Ferenc Chorin, Jenő Weiss, and Móric Kornfeld had all been there.4
André Biss, who had gone to the meeting with Hansi, could not believe that Chorin would have stayed in the country. He would, surely, have known of the German occupation long before anyone else did. Biss, a successful businessman, was a cousin of Joel Brand by marriage, and, through his Swabian mother, he had genuine volksdeutsche papers. As a fake German, he had kept his pottery and faience stove factory and even expanded it after other Jewish enterprises had been sold. Now he could afford to help Hansi Brand and the children.
The government of Miklós Kállay had been dissolved. The prime minister had fled to the Turkish legation and begged for asylum. Most members of parliament had resigned. “They will be on their way to jail by now,” Brand guessed—correctly, as it turned out, though several were taken to Germany instead.
Ottó Komoly said that the first priority must be the thousands of Jews with “unsettled citizenship,” those who had arrived with no documents and were registered with the Central Authority for Alien Control, a notoriously unfriendly department of the Hungarian government with a one-policy-fits-all approach to handling Jewish refugees: intern them. Many had not yet been furnished with identity papers and were still at the mercy of the authorities. Others, who had not registered, were hiding, walking the streets, or lining up at the Jewish Agency's Palestine Office. They needed safe places to stay and a supply of food until the situation became clearer and they learned what their options were.
Biss knew a couple of reasonable policemen who might help bring people out of jails. The wily Peretz Révész had made friends with an expensive gendarme who could be trusted in exchange for the right amounts of money. Joel Brand offered to contact the halutz group at the Palestine Office. He could try phoning Moshe Krausz. Kasztner raised, again, the possibility of armed resistance. They all knew the Germans would focus their attention on the Jews.
It was Hansi Brand who made the suggestion that they try the Bratislava Working Group's Europa Plan: negotiate to buy lives.5 The Germans had shown in Slovakia that they loved bribes. If fighting with 150 handguns was futile, if there was not going to be a mass revolt of thirty Zionists and a few ragtag refugees with kitchen knives, they could at least give the Slovak scheme a chance. Kasztner immediately supported this idea and agreed to ask Jozsi Winninger to arrange a meeting with Dieter Wisliceny, Fleischmann's Nazi contact in Bratislava, if he was already in Budapest. Winninger would know where they stood with the SS.
At the end of the Va’ada gathering, they decided it was too risky to return to their own homes. The Brands and the Kasztners would go, by separate routes, to André Biss's apartment at 15 Semsey Andor Street, a fair distance from the center of Pest and in a safely gentile neighborhood. Hansi, ever the realist, had already moved the children there.
Rezső called Bogyó from the restaurant and urged her to go to Biss's place with everything she could carry of her personal belongings. She should use a streetcar; this service, after a short display of concern, had returned to its usual routes. He had told her of the coming invasion but had not said they might be forced to move. The speed with which the Germans took over had been astonishing.
Kasztner and Brand went to the Palestine Office, only to find it closed, two policemen posted outside, and the street deserted. Krausz had vanished. The pair stopped at the Kasztners’ pension to make sure Bogyó had left, and they collected the leather suitcase full of reports from Palestine, notes from meetings of the Aid and Rescue Committee, and Gizi Fleischmann's and Rabbi Weissmandel's letters from Bratislava. Reviving the Europa Plan seemed the only hope now that the Germans had landed.
REGENT HORTHY, whose train had been held up near Vienna while the Germans occupied Hungary, announced a new government under the “protection of the Reich.” Döme Sztójay was named prime minister. A devout follower of National Socialism, Sztójay was a vocal anti-Semite and an angry man—he seemed to have a grievance he had been nursing for years. He had few friends in parliament, but, while he was Hungary's minister in Berlin, he had formed close friendships with several high-ranking Nazis. The minister of the interior would be Andor Jaross, a strong rightist, another extreme anti-Semite, and an enthusiastic proponent of the National Socialist agenda. He had been a German informer during his tenure in the previous government. He picked, as his state secretaries, László Baky and László Endre.
Baky had served in the Hungarian military and the gendarmerie, from which he had retired (with the rank of major-general) in order to devote himself to politics. He had first joined Ferenc Szálasi's Arrow Cross Party in 1938, then switched to the Hungarian National Socialist Party and used its newspaper, Magyarság (The Hungarian), for his frequent diatribes against the Jews. He had been an informant for the SS. From 1940 on he was, again, a member of the Arrow Cross. At a December get-together of his new party, he had said to Szálasi, “We are going to have some hangings, aren’t we, Ferenc?” Baky was now the political state secretary to Jaross.
László Endre was another ardent anti-Semite. After his appointment to district magistrate in Gödöllő in 1921, he had initiated raids on Jewish businesses, banned local Jews from public baths, closed Jewish shops, and levied high fines on Jewish-run restaurants for minor infractions. At the time, his rulings were overturned and his behavior curbed by his bosses. Later, as subprefect of Pest County, he had had a free hand. On March 22, only three days after the German invasion, he issued nine anti-Jewish decrees. One of them denied Jews sugar and shortening; another ordered the confiscation of Jewish summer homes and the surrender of radios; yet another banned books by Jewish authors in libraries within his jurisdiction. Now he was appointed state secretary in charge of public administration.
German cars sped like angry wasps from street to street, their back seats occupied by machine-gun-wielding SS men. They stopped in front of houses and apartment buildings, dragged people (some still in their pajamas) from their homes, and took them to the Buda jail or to the Astoria Hotel. Not long before, there had been spring dances in the ballroom of the stately, white Astoria; now the Gestapo had taken over all the floors. Prisoners were held in the basement. Their piercing screams kept pedestrians from the Astoria's sidewalks for the next year.
ON THE DAY of the German occupation, at four o’clock in the afternoon, two German cars stopped in front of the Jewish community's headquarters at 12 Sip Street. A young, uniformed, SS man jumped out of the first car and ran to open the back door of the second. Two SS officers marched into the building. Both men, Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Dieter Wisliceny and Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Hermann Krumey, were members of Adolf Eichmann's Sonderkommando, the Special Action Commando. They demanded to see the president of the Jewish community, but Samuel Stern was not there. They informed a terrified cultural secretary who had been filing papers in an upstairs office that they wished to have a meeting with the heads of all the Jewish organizations in the capital at 10 AM sharp the next day. “Everyone must come,” they told her. “Liberalen und Orthodoxen,” Krumey added, displaying his knowledge of Jewish affairs.6
Wisliceny was polite, but he left no doubt that attending this meeting was by command. Only thirty-two years old when he arrived in Budapest, he was chubby, pink-faced, generally cheerful. After the rigors of provincial Bratislava, he had been looking forward to spring in Budapest. He wore gold-framed spectacles that he pushed up on his head when he wanted to appear casual. Today was not one of those days.
He was born in East Prussia and studied history and theology in preparation for becoming a Protestant minister. Instead, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the SS. Two years later, in 1936, he found himself at Bureau II/112 of the Reich Security Main Office (the Reichssicherheits-hauptamt, or RSHA) in Berlin, specializing in “Jews.” Adolf Eichmann worked in the next office and on the same files. As oberscharführer (first sergeant), Wisliceny had outranked Eichmann, but their relationship was collegial: Wisliceny shared his daily reports on Jewish organizations around the world; Eichmann shared his reports on local groups. Books and diaries, circulars and lists, everything not of obvious value that the Gestapo had seized from Jews passed through Wisliceny's hands. He was convinced, back then, that the solution to the “Jewish problem” was to oblige all German Jews to leave the country, and therefore he advocated German support for the Zionists. As SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler's brother-in-law, he had some influence in high places. He graduated to become Eichmann's eastern European envoy, a man fully versed in all the German tactics for assembling and deporting Jews. Wisliceny completed the deportations from Salonica and of most of the Jews from Slovakia. He had headed the Sonderkommando für Judenangelegenheiten, the Special Commando for Jewish Affairs, with distinction and had been promoted to his current rank.
Hermann Krumey was a pharmacist, then a district gymnastics superintendent, before joining the SS. He was thin and quiet, a man for detail, meticulous, always punctual, excellent at following instructions. Eichmann met him in 1938 in Austria. In 1939, Krumey was sent to Poznan to supervise the eviction of the Poles from the Warthe administrative district set up by the Germans. Later, he described his task as one of organizing “the transport by rail required to carry out the compulsory transfer… of those Poles evicted from their farms… My duties included negotiating with offices in the General Government about the destinations of the trains.”7 In 1942 he was responsible for the “special treatment”8 of eighty-two orphans from Lidice, a Czech village among those chosen to pay after a pair of partisans attacked SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May, causing his death in June. The children lost their parents during the retaliatory execution of 340 inhabitants of the town, who were among 1,331 killed overall. (At his trial in Nuremberg in 1946, Wisliceny would complain that the children created “difficulties” because the Chelmno camp to which they were sent was not set up for unaccompanied youngsters.) Now Krumey was Eichmann's deputy in Hungary, a lieutenant-colonel.
As soon as news of the proposed meeting spread, Jewish community leaders rushed to their telephones to try to contact members of parliament and those of their secretaries who had proved useful or sympathetic. Would they have to assemble for the Germans? they asked anxiously. Samuel Stern, who had played poker with Admiral Horthy only days before, now could not get a call back from his secretary. Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a liberal in Horthy's government, could not be reached. There were rumors (which turned out to be true) that he had resisted arrest, had been wounded in the ensuing gunfight, and had been dragged away by the SS.
At 6 AM on March 20, the day of the meeting, a message from Budapest's chief of police confirmed the order: “The Germans’ commands must be obeyed.”
The leaders of Budapest's Jewish community arrived early at 12 Sip Street. The recently arrived Kasztner was, of course, not among them. The men were formally dressed for the occasion. They climbed the fake marble staircase to the third floor and settled on the narrow wooden chairs in the great hall. The hall had always been used for formal events, concerts, book launches, invited speakers from other countries, and a few celebrations. Several of the leaders had brought their wives with them; some carried extra-warm overcoats and small suitcases of essentials in case they were to be deported immediately.
Wisliceny and Krumey drove up at ten sharp. They both wore their SS uniforms, with holstered handguns. They greeted everyone with a polite guten morgen and saluted their future victims. They sat on the podium, under the ornate chandelier, their backs to the massive, hand-carved marble menorah. Incongruously, on either side of the menorah a uniformed SS man stood guard with a machine gun held casually at waist level.
Wisliceny crossed his chubby legs with infinite decorum, gesticulated with his expensive-looking gold cigarette holder, and addressed Stern as “Herr Hofrat,” inviting him to sit with them on the podium, as if this were an ordinary meeting where they might expect to be introduced as guest speakers. While they waited for a German-speaking stenographer to arrive, Wisliceny cracked jokes about there being no reason to prepare for the worst and how all the assembled leaders would be taking their wives and valises home again after the meeting. Krumey, lean and sallow-complexioned, bent forward looking at the floor or stared quietly, expressionless, at the crowd.9
Then Wisliceny opened the meeting with assurances that the occupation would not have to mean extra hardships for the Jews of Budapest. If they behaved responsibly, obeyed orders from the German high command, left their money in the banks, kept calm, and did not go into hiding, all would be well. No harm would come to any Jews in the city. He treated these men with respect, addressed individual Jewish leaders as “doctor”—and he lied.
Only the day before, on March 19, his colleagues had occupied the homes of several wealthy Jews in Buda, appropriated a city synagogue to be used as stables for cavalry horses, and arrested hundreds of people, some of whom were now in the Astoria's basement or had been transferred to the larger prison facilities in Kistarcsa, near Budapest. The Sonderkommando had taken over the old Jewish Rabbinical Seminary on Rökk Szilárd Street. (Most of the students had already left in a hurry when they learned of the occupation, and the few who decided to stay were arrested.) The building was transformed into a prison for both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners—women on the second floor, men on the first. The Germans had also commandeered the old city prison in Buda and were prospecting for houses on Swabian Hill.
Wisliceny instructed the assembled Jews to establish a council whose orders would be obeyed, with no questions asked, by all the Jews in the country. The Germans needed a responsible body to work through, one that could present their “reasonable” requests in future. Members of the council would, they said, be issued with special Gestapo immunity certificates that would exempt them from any measures affecting other, “ordinary” Jews. The Central Jewish Council, as it would be constituted, would have “the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth, and over all Jewish manpower.” As many of those present knew from the Polish and Slovak refugees, the idea of a Jewish council was hardly new. It was a formula that Reinhard Heydrich had devised in 1939 as a first step to the “ultimate goal.” It was specific about the functions and composition of the council, and Wisliceny and Krumey were not about to fiddle with a successful model.
The council members would all be “influential personalities.” Their initial duty would be to prepare a census of all the Jews in the city and be accountable for the housing of those Jews as well as to compile a complete list of real estate owned by Jews and a list of the heads of all Jewish institutions. Wisliceny declared that henceforward all travel by Jews was forbidden except by special permit and that those found traveling without permission might be executed. Once the leaders had made a list of potential council members, they should submit it to Wisliceny for approval. The Jewish newspapers could continue to be published, but they would, “naturally,” have to be shown first to the Gestapo censors for approval. As a first task, the new council must invite Jewish leaders from across the country to an information meeting to be held on March 28—just eight days away. Each leader would be issued a travel permit, good for this single occasion only, and would face the dire, personal consequences should he fail to appear.
The Budapest Jewish leaders were impressed with the politeness and the respect Wisliceny and Krumey had shown them. They called their friends and relatives after the meeting to reassure them that, as usual, the horror stories had been exaggerated. These Germans, unlike the Hungarian Arrow Cross riffraff they had seen on the streets, were gentlemen.
The two SS officers repaired to the Astoria bar, equally satisfied with the results of the meeting. Their job, unbeknownst to the assembled Jewish leaders, was to annihilate every one of them as well as every other Jew in Hungary. They wished to do so expeditiously, cleanly, and without the unpleasantness of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The plan called for calming Budapest Jews through regular communication with their Jewish Council.
Samuel Stern, who was already president of the Jewish Community of Pest and of the National Bureau of Hungarian Jews, set about nominating members of the Jewish Council. He would, of course, be president. Doctors Ernő Boda, Ernő Pető, Samu Csobádi, and Károly Wilhelm would represent the Neolog, or Reform, communities; Samuel Frankl and Baron Fülöp von Freudiger would represent the Orthodox; Dr. Nison Kahan would be the Zionist representative. Wisliceny accepted all eight names without question.
The only member of the Rescue Committee who had been invited to the meeting was Ottó Komoly. “You won’t believe what one of them told me today,” he said to Joel Brand about the leaders’ reaction. “Zionist predictions have been wrong. Unfortunate things have happened in Poland, and in the east, but it will not be so bad here. All we have to do is make sure nobody undermines discipline.”10
During the week following the German occupation, more than ten thousand people were arrested. About a third of them were Jews. After making the arrests, the Gestapo loaded documents and valuables, including furniture, paintings, and carpets, into trucks and transported them to Germany.
They arrested the leaders of the Polish community in exile. Some of them were shot where they were apprehended; others were taken to the prison in Buda, where they were tortured by both SS and Swabian guards. Prominent Hungarians who had voiced opposition to the war were also beaten in the Buda jail. The guards devised methods of sleep deprivation and personal humiliation that usually caused prisoners to reveal whatever and whomever they knew. One of the guards’ favorite pastimes was to force naked prisoners to do frog jumps or make swimming motions on the stone floors while they hosed them down with cold water. The SS selected other prisoners for “protective custody” in Vienna. There the men were immediately separated from the women, and they were all questioned for several days while they were deprived of food and clothing. Then they were transported to Oberlanzendorf, a village not far from Vienna, where they were crowded into small, dank cells. After a few weeks in this prison, apart from their families, beaten and tortured by sadistic guards, several committed suicide. The local townspeople complained of the horrific noises, the shrieks and howls that interrupted their sleep during the night. Some of the prisoners were transported to larger prison camps in Germany and Poland.
Leaders of Jewish communities throughout Hungary followed the Budapest example and organized themselves into councils for the Nazis’ convenience. Stern sent a telegram marked “Urgent” to all Jewish leaders, asking them to come to a meeting at 11 AM on March 28 at 12 Sip Street: “I expect your presence at this most important national meeting. If for some extraordinary reason you cannot be here, send a telegram by return with the name of your proposed substitute.” He went on to alert all the recipients that the Budapest Jewish Council had been in meetings with the German command and that the command considered it of vital importance that there should be no panic. He sent each delegate a personal travel permit and warned that it could not be given to anyone other than the person named.
Members of the new Central Jewish Council rushed to comply with the Germans’ every wish, just as other Jewish leaders had done in Poland and Slovakia, Latvia and Austria. Demands for goods and for services such as gardening or cellar-digging arrived daily, then several times a day. They were mindful of every detail on their lists: three hundred mattresses, six hundred blankets, plus gold watches, binoculars, silk stockings, boxes of chocolates, antique furniture, eighteenth-century paintings, all to be delivered to specified addresses. They vied with one another in their eagerness to provide faster, better goods, whatever luxuries the Germans desired, even their own villas in Buda and their summer houses on Lake Balaton. Orders for the evacuation of buildings, including places of worship, required by the Germans were met the same day. In response to a request by Hauptsturmführer Otto Hunsche for a piano, they supplied eight instruments in all. The officer replied graciously, “But gentlemen, I just want to play a bit of music, I don’t want to open a piano store.”11
Adolf Eichmann's Sonderkommando had begun to implement the dejewification of Hungary.