You will understand the mental condition in which I am writing this letter.
The dream of the big plan is finished…
REZSŐ KASZTNER, IN A LETTER TO NATHAN SCHWALB1
Don’t believe anything the Germans say! They will promise much and keep
little. If you can, give them money, valuables, maybe you will be
able to get something in return. And give them coffee, they go crazy for coffee.
LEISER LANDAU, A POLISH REFUGEE, SPEAKING TO FÜLÖP VON FREUDIGER2
ON JUNE 28 Rezső Kasztner cabled Menachem Bader,3 the Zionist from Galicia who was now working for the Jewish Agency in Istanbul, to inform him that the SS was willing to meet with a bona fide representative of the Yishuv, the Jews in Palestine. His SS contacts had suggested that Bader or another credible person should travel to Budapest for discussions. He could no longer pretend that Joel Brand was continuing the negotiations. Bader cabled David Ben-Gurion to ask whether he thought this could be a viable plan. Hermann Krumey, whom Kasztner described as “a fair man,” guaranteed Bader's safe return to Istanbul. Two days later in London, Moshe Shertok and Chaim Weizmann, leaders of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, met George Hull of the British Foreign Office. They demanded that Brand be allowed to return to Eichmann with the assurance that the German offer was being discussed in the British war cabinet and that the British were coordinating their efforts with the American government.4 Hull agreed to take the matter to his superiors.
Meanwhile, Brand was being held in a comfortable prison in Cairo. His cell was a large, well-appointed room with a view. The stone floor was washed every day. His bowl of fresh fruit was replenished every day.5 He discovered that Sam Springmann, his Va’ada colleague from Budapest, was also a prisoner there. Springmann told him that he had left Budapest when the Germans marched into the city in March. Although he had a valid emigration certificate for Palestine, he had chosen to remain in Istanbul to help the Yishuv representatives, but they turned out not to want his assistance. And when the Turks had expelled him to Syria, where he was promptly arrested by the British, the Agency's people failed to assist him. As Brand saw it, both of them had been betrayed by the Jewish Agency. Strangely, Brand continued to believe that the Agency could take command of matters regarding the fate of the Jews and that it had a special relationship with both the British and the Americans, but, for reasons unknown to him, it stubbornly failed to meet his expectations. In his deepening depression, he was intensely aware of his own failure and placed the blame on the Agency's men.
The interrogations of Brand continued despite the existence of extensive manila files containing all the information he had already given to the British. As he recalled later, his questioners were now asking him to guess what the Germans’ real motives had been in sending him and Grosz on this crazy errand. He told them that, in his view, the Nazis—not Hitler—were looking for a way to share the blame for the murder of the Jews. “They would be able to say: ‘We wanted to be rid of the Jews, to expel them, but the others wouldn’t accept them, so we had to exterminate them.’ ”6 The British were seeking other reasons. They kept asking how Brand and his group could ever imagine that the Allies would give or grant permission for someone else to give the Germans ten thousand trucks, and whether he ever thought that such a bargain would work.
He was told numerous times that the matter of extracting even a hundred thousand, never mind a million, Jews from Germany was complicated, involved agreements by several countries, and could not be accomplished at the same time as fighting the war. Military action would have to cease while the refugee Jews crossed borders, accommodation would have to be found for them, countries would have to agree to accept them, and, while everyone focused on this humanitarian action, the Germans could gain some military advantages. Brand continued to repeat that winning the war would be of little interest to the Jews if they had all been annihilated before victory was declared.
Brand found the War Refugee Board's delegate, Ira Hirschmann, more sympathetic than his British captors. Hirschmann, a key executive with Bloomingdale's department store in New York, had been chosen by President Roosevelt as the board's man in Turkey. He met Brand on June 22 and, in his report, recommended that the United States not close the door on the blood-for-goods proposal, no matter what the British decided. He considered it likely that Eichmann's deal was just a cover for a larger, more important proposal—that of beginning peace negotiations with the SS.7 When Hirschmann asked Brand whether he thought his not returning to Hungary would risk losing the chance for a deal with the SS, Brand replied that Eichmann had indicated he could take his time if he saw a chance of success.8 During a later meeting, the British minister for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, told Hirschmann that Brand would be taken to London.9
In London the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, after his meeting with Weizmann and Shertok, recommended that Brand be returned to Budapest with an immediate counteroffer for 6,500 children with safe-conduct passes to Palestine. It was a ridiculously small number, but even that proposal seemed unacceptable to the British government. The very idea of negotiating with the enemy, of ransom payments, of wheeling and dealing about lives was abhorrent to the other cabinet ministers, no matter how fervently the Jewish Agency pleaded as the rumors about Auschwitz became established facts.
Around the time that the Kasztner transport arrived in Bergen-Belsen, Eden reported Brand's view that the German plot behind the mission was to blame the Allies for “extreme measures against the Jews.” Privately, several British functionaries expressed the opinion that the Zionists (Joel Brand being one of them) were in cahoots with the Germans and that the expulsion of a million Jews to Palestine would destabilize the Middle East. A strong British force would be required to restore peace there—and that distraction would, in turn, ease the German army's current situation in Europe. On July 11, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Eden a memorandum expressing both his horror at the German actions against the Jews and his decision that there “be no negotiations of any kind on this subject.”10
The American response to the Jewish Agency's pleadings was to consult the Soviet Union over any action they should take.
Brand went on a hunger strike. To restore his appetite, his friendly British guard gave him a letter from the Mossad's Ehud Avriel informing Brand that Shertok was meeting with the appropriate levels of government in London and that their “basic demands have been as good as met.” Avriel said they had also heard from Kasztner that deportations in Hungary were to cease and that Hansi Brand and Joel's children were doing well.11
A COUPLE OF days before the Kasztner train left Budapest, Adolf Eichmann had been replaced in the “business” process by Kurt Becher. It was “Himmler's decision,” Becher said, and, obviously, another “Reich secret.” Eichmann had been told to focus his attention, instead, on the deportations. “They left me the dirty work,” he complained to Kasztner, who pretended sympathy. Kasztner was relieved to be dealing with the calmer, more personable Becher, who was willing to accept all currencies, even declining pengős, as long as the amounts were stated in Swiss francs or American dollars and converted at prevailing black-market rates. Naturally, he preferred foreign currencies, jewelry, gold, diamonds, foreign share certificates, and paintings, but he accepted even soon-to-be-worthless Hungarian stocks and bonds. There was still the matter of the total amounts to be paid for the 1,684 passengers now parked in Bergen-Belsen. Eichmann had originally asked for $200 a head. Becher had suggested $2,000, but he had been prepared to settle for $1,000 each as Heinrich Himmler had specified. “Businessman to businessman,” as Hansi Brand had prompted, they had agreed that the Jews-for-sale account would be kept open and replenished as each side delivered on its promises.
The trick was to agree on the exchange rates to be used. One dollar was worth 4.25 pengős at the bank, but between 30 and 40 pengős on the black market. “Our position was,” Kasztner said later, “that we have already paid more than the full tariff of 1,684,000 dollars.”12 Becher insisted that the original deal had included the trucks, and if trucks were not going to be available, the Va’ada had to substitute other goods of equal value. Freudiger, after all, had offered Wisliceny textiles and medicines worth 10 million francs if he would intervene with Eichmann to stop the deportations immediately. Freudiger claimed he had sources in Spain and Switzerland, though Kasztner doubted they were real. The Orthodox leader had become more and more desperate, and Kasztner thought him capable of inventing foreign associates in a bid to gain valuable time. Kasztner had been able to get 16.5 tons of coffee13 from Istanbul, but Becher discounted 25 percent of the shipment for cleaning the merchandise. At Samuel Stern's suggestion, he offered Becher $20,000 to close the account for the Bergen-Belsen group. If Eichmann stepped in to stop the group's departure, Becher would intercede with Himmler.
The two men were now sufficiently friendly that Becher would casually invite Kasztner to dine with him at the Weiss mansion, and sometimes they went to the casino for a late-night drink and a short game of roulette. Kasztner was grateful that the pit boss knew Becher well enough to make sure the SS officer always won. The train was still in Bergen-Belsen and, as Eichmann had threatened, it could easily be transferred to Auschwitz. The Strasshof families, “the Jews on ice,” were in even greater danger. Though he was repeatedly reassured by Becher and Krumey that they had been kept together and alive, Kasztner knew how tenuous such promises could be.
Hansi encouraged Rezső to act as Becher's social equal. They both spoke faultless, classy hoch (high) German. Although Kasztner had read more broadly, Becher had a better understanding of military strategy, including historically brilliant strategists such as Napoleon. Hansi suggested that Rezső present the obersturmbannführer with tickets to the opera, give him volumes of classic German poetry, and listen spellbound to his revelations about the tactics of Roman warfare.
On July 7, when the long-awaited draft agreement finally arrived from the Jewish Agency in Istanbul, Becher could be assured of substantial topups in Western currencies, and the issue of trucks could be raised again. Becher suggested that he or Fritz Laufer, the former Abwehr agent, would go to Lisbon if the Jewish Agency could not send someone to Budapest to sign the formal agreements. Kasztner cabled another urgent request for funds.
The sudden presence of large numbers of cock-feathered, fully armed gendarmes in the capital, Stern told Kasztner, was a prelude to the attempt by the two Hungarian state secretaries, László Baky and László Endre, to take over the government from the Nazi administration. The Sip Street building was filled with panicked men and women who feared that the Hungarian gendarmes, who had so effectively and mercilessly driven the Jews out of the provinces, would now do the same in Budapest. Many still had a few hidden valuables that they drew out of their pockets and flashed before Stern, begging to be included in the next train to Palestine.
In the Zionists’ Information Office, the noise was so loud, the cries of the women so shrill that Kasztner avoided going there. When he did, the people who recognized him tugged at his sleeves or grabbed his arms as he passed. Stern tried valiantly to calm everyone. He still believed in Regent Miklós Horthy's ability to intervene, and he knew that a few members of the Crown Council were now ready to back Horthy when he took a stand against the Nazi invaders. In no event, Stern reasoned, would the Regent allow Baky and Endre to take over the government. Stern had been able to get a long-awaited audience with Mihály Arnothy-Jungerth, the deputy foreign minister, who said he had been opposed to the deportations from the beginning. “Not because he was sympathetic to us,” Stern hastened to add, “but because he thought these measures were extreme and could do irreparable harm to Hungary's foreign relations.”
Kasztner arranged a meeting with Ottó Komoly and the Swiss consul, Carl Lutz, at the former American embassy in Szabadság Square. On his way there, he was twice asked to identify himself. Some of the main streets were so bomb cratered that he had to take a detour along Rákóczy Avenue. By the Franciscan Church, streetcar tracks had buckled, and fire-fighters and volunteers were removing a burning streetcar to make way for repairs. The three men wanted to discuss how each of them had fared in the previous few days. The embassy building, even its stairwells, corridors, and bathrooms, were filled with the destitute who had lost their homes during the bombardments and had not been able to find relatives to allow them into their crowded apartments. Many of them had lived there for weeks.
Lutz admitted that his efforts to rescue more of the people who held entry permits for Palestine had not been successful. He talked about his several meetings with German plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer, with Admiral Horthy, and with Prime Minister Döme Sztójay; the latter had been ill over the previous few days. Lutz's main concern now was that the government should respect his visas. Veesenmayer was bent on the total destruction of Hungary's Jews and stressed that the time for emigration was over. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, condemned to death in absentia by the British, had dined with Hitler in Berlin and had assured the Führer of Arab assistance in the Middle East, but only if he could be sure of no further Jewish immigration.
Komoly reported that Friedrich Born, on behalf of the International Red Cross, had formally appointed him to be in charge of its Section A, international affairs, allowing him to gather refugees in the Swiss Consulate and other “safe houses” should the need arise. The Red Cross had delivered a strongly worded letter to Horthy, urging him to obtain transit visas for would-be emigrants to Palestine.14
Kasztner reported on the “German line.” He told them about his meetings with Becher and his conviction that the SS lieutenant-colonel was more interested in cash rewards than in deportations. He was driven by greed rather than ideology, and, in the end, he might turn into a reluctant ally of the Jews. Lutz offered Kasztner a Swiss protective passport, in case his meetings with the Germans came to a dead end, but he declined. In this game of roulette, if he bet on the wrong number he would be dead before he could reach for a new identity.
Komoly said that he and Moshe Krausz had also been pursuing the “Hungarian line.” They had not given up on Horthy's ability to step in. The old man might be ineffectual, but he seemed to have made up his mind this time now that he had the backing of the pope's plea to him to intervene. And there was now the added encouragement of Endre's and Baky's plans to oust him.
Kasztner begged Lutz to use his influence with Krausz to speed the production of Palestine entry certificates. If Horthy made a decisive move, it would not matter what Veesenmayer had decided. There would be a chance to send maybe forty thousand or fifty thousand people to safety. The seven thousand certificates would, as Lutz had assured Kasztner, be stretched to seven thousand families, and some families would be enlarged with additional children. A couple could have seven, even eight children, and parents as well as aunts and uncles. He offered his help, along with Hansi’s, to make sure that all the papers were in order, if only Krausz could be persuaded not to follow the rules so mulishly.
On his way to Krausz's office, Kasztner was stopped by several Slovak halutzim involved in the rescue of Jewish families. Lutz had given all of them Swiss papers and fake jobs as emigration officials. Krausz, they complained, would not allow them to help. He had thrown Rafi Benshalom out of his office and insisted that he would tell Lutz not to provide protection for people who kept disrupting his work.
In the basement, behind the door of the Emigration Department, Krausz sat over piles of paper, his floor littered with boxes filled with more documents. Each piece of paper represented a person begging to be allowed out of this hell and into Palestine. Krausz was still typing each letter himself on his old typewriter, its worn ribbon constantly getting tangled with the keys.
When Kasztner offered Krausz his personal assistance with the forms, Krausz merely glanced up from his letters and laughed. “You go back to your Germans,” he sneered. “You’re not needed here.” He had already contacted Chaim Barlas in the Jewish Agency office in Istanbul, he said, asking for Turkish ships to transport the new emigrants from Constanta.
On the morning of July 8, one day after the last of the Jews from western and southwestern Hungary had been transported, Admiral Horthy demanded an immediate stop to the deportation of the Jews. He accused Baky and Endre of misinforming the government about the handling of the “Jewish problem.” Horthy already knew that Baky planned to have him arrested and that he had ordered László Ferenczy's gendarmerie to the capital to make sure that the coup was successful. Horthy countered with an order for the Hungarian army's Esztergom Armored Regiment to stand by in case it was needed.15 If it came to a conflict, Horthy would not lose. The gendarmes might be battle hardened against unarmed civilians, but they were not trained military men.
When the gendarmes buckled under and left the capital, Stern informed the Jewish Council that the Regent had, finally, stepped in to stop the Germans. Within an hour, the Sip Street building was almost deserted. It was a warm, sunny day, and Stern told Kasztner he was going home to enjoy an afternoon sleep.
By July 1, 1944, according to Wisliceny, 475,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.16 Eichmann was disappointed at the total; he had set his sights on a minimum of half a million people by that date. Ferenczy gave the number as 434,351 human beings, who left for the Birkenau ramp in 147 trains.17 Three-quarters of them were murdered within an hour of their arrival.