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Mission to Istanbul

We must make some serious counterproposal so that the negotiations
can continue. Tomorrow I’ll cable Eichmann and tell him that all goes well…

JOEL BRAND, TO THE JEWISH AGENCY IN IS TANBUL1

It is impossible to prepare a list of 600 from 800,000.²

OTTÓ KOMOLY, “THE DIARY OF OTTÓ KOMOLY”

JOEL BRAND and Bandi Grosz left Budapest for Vienna on May 17, 1944, in an SS car. They spent a night in the Austrian capital at the Metropole Hotel, which doubled as the Gestapo's headquarters, and arrived in Istanbul by German courier plane on May 19.

Immediately on his arrival, Brand was arrested by the Turks. He had the wrong kind of Turkish visa (it had been provided by the SD, in the name of Eugen Brand) and all the appearances of a German spy. To make matters worse, he was traveling with Bandi Grosz. The Turks knew Grosz was an agent, but, being neutral, had allowed him in and out of the country on many previous occasions. Naturally, they had always had him followed, but it was more as a formality than in any expectation of gaining useful knowledge. In exchange for his freedom of movement, Grosz provided them with dribbles of information, warnings about the arrivals of new German and Hungarian agents, some troop movements in the Balkans, Jewish refugee ships, and American efforts to recruit and turn agents. He had been posing as a representative of the Danube Navigation Company. That, too, was only a cover for Grosz's smuggling and money-laundering businesses. Despite his unprepossessing appearance, he had attracted a local dancer and rented a fine apartment for the two of them.

While Brand waited for his Jewish contacts to arrive at the airport to claim him, Grosz left in a limousine with a short, well-dressed man. The Turks interrogated Brand, who would say only that he had important business with the Jewish Agency's representatives and they were expecting him. They didn’t arrive. The Turks were on the point of putting Brand on another plane destined for Germany when Grosz returned. He had called Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency and, after bribing the appropriate Turkish officials, Brand was granted a temporary visa. Grosz had already booked a room for him at the Pera Hotel, which was, coincidentally, the headquarters of the Agency's Rescue Committee3 and various Zionist leaders, including Barlas. Grosz was the Agency's most frequently employed emissary/smuggler.

Despite the telegrams from Ottó Komoly and Rezső Kasztner outlining the nature of his mission, Brand got the impression that the Agency's men were surprised to see him. Perhaps, he thought, they did not believe that the SS would send a Jew out of Europe to meet other Jews in a neutral country. In fact, Barlas and his colleagues were somewhat inured to Nazi extortions. They had tried to extract Jewish children from Romania and Hungary; they had sent money to Slovakia (about $200,000 by the end of September 1943 and a further $200,000 in 1944), earmarked for Dov Weissmandel's Europa Plan (which sounded remarkably like Eichmann's blood-for-goods offer),⁴ and they had bribed German officials in Poland, Bulgaria, and France.

Brand, exhausted and furious at what he perceived to be a slight, insisted that Barlas and the other Agency men immediately arrange a meeting in his small, windowless room. He handed over his letters of authorization from Samuel Stern and Fülöp von Freudiger, the map of Auschwitz he had hidden inside his shirt, and Eichmann's list of required goods, and he delivered a detailed verbal account of the deal Eichmann had offered. He told them what he knew about the extermination camps—they had heard of their existence at least two years before—and the situation of the Jews in Hungary. He confirmed what they already knew about the fate of Poland's Jews. He paraphrased what Vrba and Wetzler had reported in the Auschwitz Protocols. Throughout his long speech, his listeners kept interrupting in Hebrew, which he didn’t understand, and in English, which he sometimes did. He yelled at them to stop talking among themselves and to speak a language he knew. They seemed genuinely unable to decide what to do with him, even though he kept repeating that he must send a cable to Eichmann to advise him that the Jewish Agency Executive, or its Rescue Committee, or the Joint had met him and were very interested in the deal—that progress was being made.

Their initial reaction to the blood-for-goods proposal was one of genuine astonishment. The British, they were certain, would never go along with giving the Germans trucks. The Germans would surely realize that. Why, then, send Brand, and why with Grosz?

When Brand demanded to see Chaim Weizmann or Moshe Shertok, the Agency members told him it was not easy for either of these men to gain entry to Turkey from Palestine. Moreover, they explained, their own situation in Turkey was precarious.

Brand was incoherent with rage and fatigue. How could they worry about their own situation in Turkey when hundreds of thousands of Jews were being murdered? Did they not understand that the delivery of trucks was not the point? That this mission was simply about starting negotiations that could, and would, drag out for months and that, while they were negotiating, lives would be saved? That Eichmann would not destroy the Jews if he thought a deal was imminent? Brand was certain that if either of the well-known Jewish leaders Weizmann or Shertok were seen in Istanbul in the next twenty-four hours, German agents would let Eichmann know that his offer was being considered at the highest levels.

Venia Pomerantz, one of the Agency's Rescue Committee emissaries, flew to Jerusalem with a typed summary of Eichmann's proposal hidden in a tube of shaving cream and reported on Brand's mission to David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok, as well as to a hastily called emergency meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive. “We had no illusions about the German offer,” Pomerantz recalled in his memoirs. “We knew that half of Hungary's Jews had been deported, but we had to try…”5

Barlas cabled Shertok and Ben-Gurion,⁶ both of the Jewish Agency at the time and both later to become prime ministers of the new State of Israel. He asked whether Shertok could come and listen to Brand's incredible story. Shertok immediately applied for a Turkish visa. Ehud Avriel, who worked for the Agency's Rescue Committee, went to see Harold Gibson, the head of British Intelligence in Turkey, to inform him about Brand's mission and to gauge his reaction. Avriel recalled later that Gibson had been “ice cold”; he refused even to consider the possibility of pretending to negotiate to gain time. Perhaps he feared that the Russians would find out and suspect the British of double-crossing them. It was not something the British would be willing to risk.7

Two days later, Eichmann summoned Hansi Brand to the Majestic Hotel. She felt it was strange arriving in her former refuge now that it had become the stronghold of the enemy. She remembered lazy summer afternoons in the gardens, listening to the three-man band play the popular tunes of the day while she fed her children or played cards on the terrace in the cool shade of the acacia trees.

Eichmann seemed cheerful, lounging in his chair, his gray officer's jacket flung over the back of another chair and a glass of wine on the table to the side. He was smoking a short Turkish cigarette, his head angled at her. White sheer curtains fluttered in the warm breeze, and Eichmann seemed to be enjoying the morning sunshine. Still, he did not invite her to sit with him.

“Mrs. Brand,” he said, “we have not heard from your husband.”

“It's been only two days,” Hansi replied, “a difficult time to gather all the right people who can make the kinds of decisions you need here, Herr Obersturmbannführer.” She had walked the hundred yards or more from the cable-car station in her uncomfortable, white high-heeled shoes. She had wanted him to see her confident and composed. She stood very straight, her shoulders back, feet together.⁸

Eichmann took a long sip of his wine and smacked his lips. “Not bad for a shit-nation. Not bad at all.” He glanced up at her. “You may cable your husband, Mrs. Brand, that if he doesn’t come back at once and bring me news, he’ll have no family to come back to. You understand, Mrs. Brand? He is on thin ice.”

Hansi glanced at the photograph on Eichmann's desk. “You have children, too, Obersturmbannführer—”

“Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”⁹ he shouted as he leaped to his feet and slammed his fist on the table.

Hansi fled the room and ran down the steps, where at first the guards stopped her, then let her go. They were used to Eichmann's rages. She moved her children from André Biss's apartment and took them to that of a gentile acquaintance who had offered to hide them in exchange for reasonable compensation.

During these first two days that Joel Brand was away, 23,363 Hungarians were deported. By May 19, the number had increased to 62,644.10

Kasztner begged Hermann Krumey to arrange for him to meet Eichmann. He knew that every day, every hour, mattered, that he had to convince Eichmann that Brand's silence was caused only by wartime communications problems. Kasztner wanted to introduce himself as the leader of the Va’ada, to set up a line of communication, to claim that he could produce whatever the Germans needed—anything to slow the pace of the deportations. In the end it was Hansi who called Eichmann's adjutant and requested that the obersturmbannführer see “Dr. Kasztner, the executive director of the Rescue Committee.” She accompanied him to the Majestic.

During that first meeting,¹¹ Eichmann suddenly leaned forward in his square-backed club chair and asked Kasztner, “Do you know who I am?” Not waiting for the answer, he continued: “I am the commissar of World Jewry. I decide how many Jews will live and how many will not. I am charged with cleaning the streets of Europe of Jews.”

Kasztner stood transfixed in the doorway. He would always remember the fog of cigarette smoke, the blue-and-white wallpaper, the dutiful adjutant, the shadows in the summer light lingering around Eichmann. “We knew we were facing the main stage manager of the Jewish destruction,” he wrote later.

He noticed a copy of Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State on one corner of Eichmann's otherwise bare desk. “Fascinating book, don’t you agree?” Eichmann inquired. “You Zionists want a territory where you can live in peace. That's what we National Socialists want—for you to have your own territory. Far away from ours. I wanted nothing less than firm ground under your feet!” he shouted. “Loved that book! Like you, I am, at heart, a romantic. It appealed to that side of my nature. Love the mountains, rivers, woods. Amazing that a Jew could write so well.”

Eichmann indicated a couple of chairs for Hansi and Kasztner, more or less across the desk from himself but much farther back than his. Kasztner recalled similar configurations with his schoolmaster in Kolozsvár when he had done something wrong. Eichmann lit another cigarette.

“I speak fluent Hebrew,” he said, his hand fluttering over the ashtray, “more than most of you do. Our Jews in Germany spoke only Yiddish, a bastardized German. They never learned their own language.”

Eichmann was still proud of Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring's original Europa Plan, a fantastic notion of resettling Jews in the southeastern area of Poland where the local population had been eliminated. To make sure that the Jews would learn to fend for themselves, existing houses had been bulldozed, crops ploughed under, and wells poisoned. “They would learn to build, to plant, to drill for water,” Eichmann told Kasztner. “Work. We found the perfect place in Nisko on the San River. You know, I even sent some Jews to look the place over. Big territory, I thought to myself, why not resettle the Poles and move the Jews here? [Security chief Reinhard] Heydrich approved the plan! But then ‘Polish Frank’12 got into the act. That dumb bastard had just been appointed to head the General Government and, would you believe, he didn’t want my Jews. He had his own!” Eichmann laughed, a loud, mirthless explosion of a laugh, his mouth open, his eyes squinting shut. Polish Frank had complained to Hitler that the new deportation policy would use the General Government as a “racial dustbin.”¹³

But Eichmann had not given up, he told Kasztner, his cigarette waving frantically as he punctuated each point. He had thought of Madagascar. “Didn’t Herzl himself consider Madagascar?” That is, if Palestine was not available? “I went to see your Palestine, once. Wanted to make sure there was room for the Jews from Germany. And from Austria—not Poland, not the Polish Jews. Vermin like the people they lived among.” But once the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem arrived in Berlin, seeking refuge from the British,¹⁴ it had become impossible to promote further immigration to Palestine. Surely the Jewish leaders here were aware of the British blockade of the area? And surely they knew of the United States’ resistance to more Jewish immigrants? “The Bermuda Conference was so much shit!” he shouted. “The Reichsführer himself had been ready to let you go, but there were no takers.”¹⁵

“You and I,” he told Kasztner expansively, “are idealists. We want the same things, and we just have somewhat different approaches.”

Kasztner had been well aware of the Nazis’ old Europa Plan: the confiscation of Jewish property in exchange for exit visas to Palestine. After an hour's uninterrupted lecture, Eichmann stopped and waited to see what Kasztner had to say.

First, he tried to convince Eichmann that he, Kasztner, represented that mythical World Jewry in which Hitler so fervently believed. “World Jewry,” Kasztner said, would step in and save the Jews if given a chance. He begged for the deportations to stop while Brand negotiated with World Jewry's “leaders” in Istanbul. Kasztner claimed that he had talked with the American Joint Distribution Committee in Switzerland and had its instructions to make deals. The truth was that Saly Mayer had told Brand that his coffers were bare: he had received less than us$10,000 for 1940 and 1941, and nothing for the next year and a half while the Swiss banks pondered how to deal with American charitable donations. At one point, Mayer had suggested that eastern European Jews tended to panic too easily. He still did not believe the reports of systematic killing camps.

Kasztner asked about the terrible cruelties in the ghettos and the packed boxcars from Carpathian Ruthenia.

“If there were more than ninety people in a wagon from the northeast,” Eichmann said, “it's only because these are small people. Jews in that region have lots of children, and children don’t need much room, as you know.”

Kasztner asked if Eichmann would stop the deportations while Brand negotiated for the trucks and other goods that Eichmann wanted.

“I will not stop the trains!” Eichmann shouted. “Do you all think I am stupid?” If he slowed the deportations, World Jewry would imagine they had won a reprieve. They wouldn’t bother to negotiate.

Kasztner reminded him of his offer to Brand to send ten thousand Jews, 10 percent of the one million offered, to the border for emigration to prove that he would honor the blood-for-goods deal. Eichmann said he remembered the number as maybe a few hundred.

Kasztner pointed out that it would be impossible for Brand to prove that the SS would keep its promise in the deal if, at a minimum, half of the six hundred he had discussed with Krumey were not sent to Budapest from the eastern provinces now, before they were all deported.

“I have not seen your list,” Eichmann replied.

And so the bargaining began. Eichmann offered lives he was unwilling to give; Kasztner offered goods he didn’t have. It was a high-stakes poker game in which one player had nothing to offer but his own life, and the other had nothing to lose but face.

As Kasztner was leaving the meeting, his face set in a grimace of panic, he ran into an anxious Carl Lutz at the entrance to the Majestic. Lutz was still hopeful that at least a small portion of the seven thousand children and young people the Hungarian government and later Eichmann had agreed could leave the country would be allowed to go. Lutz told Kasztner and Hansi that he had finally received his ambassador's support for sending a copy of the Auschwitz Protocols to Switzerland, so long as the Nazis could not find a connection to the Swiss Consulate.

Hansi was silent most of the way down the hill. She and Rezső were the only Jews in the cable car, and she was sure the other passengers could tell they were Jews even without their distinguishing stars. Jews were no longer allowed to ride in these cars. Rezső admitted to her that he had been terrified of Eichmann. The man “ruled over life and death” in Hungary, and he had, in fact, made them no promises. He thought Eichmann had treated him dismissively, and, if that was so, how could he hope to appear as a negotiating partner? Although Eichmann kept up his chain-smoking, he had never offered Kasztner even one from his fancy cigarette case. Hansi laughed. “Next time, take your own cigarettes,” she advised. Once home, she taught him how to chain-smoke heavily scented cigarettes, to match Eichmann's habit but primarily to show himself unafraid.16 “In a game of chicken, Rezső,” she cautioned, “you must not seem to be the one with the ruffled feathers.”

Kasztner cabled the Istanbul Jewish Agency office that the deportations would continue. Each day was another day in the martyrdom of the Jews. Surely they would understand the urgency now.

There was no reply.

Kasztner could not bear to make the selection for the list of six hundred people he had previously discussed with Krumey. He was unable even to contemplate the names that would not be on it. The thought that all they would save was a few hundred lives was unbearable. He asked the Rescue Committee's Ernő Szilágyi and Ottó Komoly to meet Fülöp von Freudiger and Samuel Stern to compile the list. They would try to be fair to all factions, keeping in mind the plight of the refugees and the hopes of those who had been lifelong Zionists, community leaders, and rabbis, Jews in the capital and in the provinces alike. The selection group had to act now, before the daily transports took them all.

The next meeting with Eichmann was booked for May 22. Before he even sat down that day, Kasztner removed his first cigarette from the elegant, gold-plated cigarette case Hansi had given him, tapped it lightly on the lid, and lit up. Again he reminded Eichmann about the million-lives-for-trucks deal that he had discussed with Joel Brand. If Eichmann did not act soon, he warned, World Jewry would not negotiate. What would be the point of negotiating with the world's Jews after all of the European Jews were gone?

Eichmann, in jackboots, his legs apart for additional balance (Kasztner thought he had been drinking), his hand casually resting on his pistol, shouted a string of obscenities. “What do you take me for, Kasztner? One of your stupid Hungarians? Don’t forget I know you for the schweinhund you are. I am not interested in your whining. If I weaken, you people will think you’ve won. I am not slowing down the deportations. Rather, I am going to speed them up. One hundred people to a wagon? Hell, those wagons can take more than a hundred!”

“Have you read Der Stürmer, Kasztner?” Eichmann continued.17 “Thou-sands on thousands of our people believe that magazine. It gives you no chance at all, did you know? None.” He was pacing again, making abrupt turns in the corners of the room, his cigarette wedged between his lips. “Me, I am willing to give you one last chance!”

Kasztner handed him a list of six hundred selected Jewish families—not individuals—and showed him the earlier cable from the Agency about the ship in Constanta.

Eichmann declared, just as Krumey had done, that Constanta was out of the question. He could not permit emigration to Palestine. Didn’t Kasztner know of the Führer's close relationship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem? The SS would never be a party to breaking the Führer's promises to an ally. The group would have to travel through Germany, France, and Spain, then on to Africa.

The formerly lovely grounds around the Majestic Hotel and the Little Majestic were in the process of being dug up to create bunkers for further expected Allied air attacks. Eichmann's men had requisitioned a group of boys, too young for the labor battalions, too old to be considered children, for the task. While Eichmann yelled and Kasztner listened inside the hotel, the boys, in their midteens, dug in the field between the two buildings. They were supervised by a man called Slavik, who wore overalls over his bare chest. He seemed to delight in beating the boys with his thin, leather truncheon whenever he thought they were slowing down.

As Kasztner was leaving the compound, Slavik grabbed a tall, thin, dark-haired kid and accused him of stealing cherries off the trees. Eichmann came out onto the veranda, ordered the boy into the toolshed at the end of the garden, and he and Slavik followed, as the youngster kept screaming that he had done nothing wrong.

Weeks later, Kasztner found out that Eichmann and Slavik had beaten the boy to death.18

AT THE CENTRAL Information Office on Sip Street, a cable had arrived from Joel Brand saying the discussions in Istanbul were going well. Delegates from the Joint, along with senior Jewish officials, were on their way to meet him.

Meanwhile, the ghettoization in the provinces north of the capital, in Zone III, had begun, even as the trains kept coming from the east. Four trains a day, every day, seven days a week. A railway engineer from Munkács went to Sip Street with the news.¹⁹ When he began to talk about the last day of the Munkács ghetto, he could not stop wiping his eyes. He described the way the men and women were rushed to the station and beaten with whips and rifle butts, the babies wrenched from their mothers’ arms. As a final humiliation, people were ordered to undress and step away from their clothes. Many of them were infected with typhus and could barely stand. Policemen ransacked their clothes and tore up their identity papers while they stood naked. Then they were pushed into the wagons of the train.

Next it was time for the Jews of Zone IV, southeastern Hungary. They were driven into ghettos and their homes and belongings confiscated. In each ghetto, rooms or cellars designated as “the mint” became torture chambers where affluent Jews were tormented until they gave some information about their hidden valuables. They were beaten with rubber hoses, and women had electric wires inserted into their uteruses in front of their families. Between sessions, some people took the opportunity to commit suicide. Dieter Wisliceny, who served as a German adviser in two of the districts, claimed later that he was shocked by the savagery of the Hungarian gendarmes.

Although Samuel Stern had written several letters to State Secretary László Endre about the terrible situation in the ghettos, he had not received any answer. At long last he received a cursory reply. Endre had visited the ghettos, he said, and he found them rather like “sanatoria.” Accommodation and food were better there than for soldiers at the front. When Stern arranged a brief audience at the Majestic, Eichmann sneered that, in his opinion, “the open air would only be good for the Jews.”20 As

for deportations, these tales were “malevolent distortions and alarmist propaganda,” he said. The Russian armies were approaching the borders, and the Jews simply had to be removed from what could become “military operational territory.”

Stern's heart had been giving him trouble, and he had lost weight, yet he dragged himself up to the fifth floor of the Sip Street building every day and withstood the tears and accusations of his former admirers.

FOR DAYS THERE had been rumors in the city about the amazing deal Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Becher had made with Ferenc Chorin. Becher had been given legal rights to the Chorin-Weiss-Kornfeld-Mauthner assets, and the families had left the country for Spain or Portugal on May 18. Now the Hungarian minister of finance was raising questions in parliament and demanded an investigation. Jewish assets were frozen and deemed to be the property of Hungary. The industrial complex in the Csepel District of Budapest, and the aircraft and munitions factory, had been among the big plums on the Hungarians’ platter. To have it snatched by the SS was an insult. (The real investigation, of course, did not happen until long after the end of the war.)

Kasztner became convinced that he needed a private meeting with Kurt Becher. He wanted a new negotiating partner, one who might live up to his promises. Becher, after all, had allowed the Chorin group to leave for a neutral country, and he had been sent to Budapest in the first place by Himmler. Eichmann, in contrast, was not even acknowledging the original bribes the Va’ada had paid to Wisliceny, Hunsche, and Krumey. Wisliceny claimed that the full amount had been deposited with the appropriate Reich ministry and that he had withheld nothing for himself. He mentioned that additional payments would be necessary if Kasztner's six hundred “sample Jews” were to be sent out of the country, but he was unwilling or unable to suggest the amount. He did not know exactly how much the Chorins had paid, but he was happy to divulge that the totals—even if you ignored the current value of the factories—were well beyond the sums deposited by Kasztner's group.

Eichmann, Wisliceny told Kasztner, would not spare a single Jew if such decisions were up to him alone. The Master was not interested in deals, and he “endeavored to wreck all negotiations.” Becher had a very different approach to the Jewish question, and, unlike Eichmann, he had a direct line to Reichsführer Himmler.21 Eichmann reported to Heinrich Müller and, if he needed additional backup, to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, but he rarely had occasion to see Himmler.

At first Jozsi Winninger agreed to make the contact with Becher, for a modest fee, but then he changed his mind. Now he recommended that Kasztner stay away from Becher. “Bad for your health,” he advised. Eichmann would not like it. Himmler, Winninger said, had deliberately set up rivalries among his officers, to make sure that everyone did his best in the ensuing competition. And there was a natural rivalry between Eichmann and Becher, to the point where they actively disliked each other.

There are several accounts of the way Kasztner managed to arrange the meeting he wanted. Becher himself gave two versions during his testimonies at Nuremberg.²² It is also probable that Becher, having known of the blood-for-goods proposition, tracked down the Va’ada himself. He had an unerring sense for finding good sources of money.