The conversation between Himmler, Eichmann and me took place
in Himmler's command carriage in the Black Forest, near Freiburg. Himmler
talked to Eichmann in a manner I would call both kindly and angry…
He shouted at him something like, “If until now you have exterminated Jews,
from now on, if I order you, as I do now, you must be a fosterer of Jews.”
KURT BECHER, TESTIFYING AT NUREMBERG
REZSŐ KASZTNER had still hoped to return to Budapest in March, but, with the war raging across western Hungary, he had no choice but to remain in Vienna.
On April 5, as the Wehrmacht's last battles for Vienna began, Standartenführer Kurt Becher—he had been promoted to full colonel in January—told Kasztner that Himmler had appointed him to be the officer in charge of several concentration camps, or as he put it, “Reichssonderkommissar für sämtliche Konzentrationslager.”1 He asked Kasztner to travel with him to Bergen-Belsen and perhaps later also to the Neuengamme, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Theresienstadt, and Mauthausen camps to deliver Himmler's authorization to stop the slaughter.2 When the SS driver called for Kasztner the next morning at his hotel, Becher showed him the orders. Given that the SS Reichsführer had previously been totally committed to the extermination of Jews, this document was truly extraordinary. “By this order, which becomes immediately effective,” it read, “I forbid any extermination of Jews and order that, on the contrary, care should be given to weak and sick persons. I hold you personally responsible even if this order should not be strictly adhered to by subordinate officers.”3
Becher had already delivered copies of the order to both Ernst Kaltenbrunner and the chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl.4 Now, he said, his task was to make certain that Reichsführer Himmler's commands were obeyed. These orders would supersede whatever previous orders had been given to the camp commandants, including Himmler's own decrees. Becher revealed that Kaltenbrunner had become vociferous in his attacks on Himmler's softening position toward the concentration camp inmates and had threatened to go directly to Hitler again. This time, however, Becher was not overly concerned. The Führer had dug himself into a bunker somewhere near the Reichstag in Berlin and was no longer in touch with the outside world. He seemed not to care what happened to the German people; one of his recent orders, for instance, had been to destroy all the country's military and industrial complexes. All communications installations were also to be blown up. “The Führer,” Becher told Kasztner, “rather than hand Germany over to the enemy, would turn it into a wasteland. He has been raving about betrayals and reprisals. He is hysterical, in a constant rage. He wanted all Germans to converge on Berlin. On foot. Without food or water. He wants us all to go down with his ship.” Becher was close to tears.
“Will they obey these orders?”
“Who? The people?”
“No. The camp commandants.”
Becher shrugged. “Some will.”
By then, of course, it was already too late for six million Jews and the almost six million Soviet prisoners of war. Himmler had been one of the most ardent supporters of the program of murder by gas, starvation, execution, exposure, and disease, and he had carried out his task with cold determination. Germany, he said earlier, should not feed and clothe sub-humans. They were a drain on resources. Yet now it was this same man who sent Becher on his mission to save the inmates at Bergen-Belsen.
The sight of the camp and its survivors was so horrific that Kasztner would never be able to speak of it again. There was mud and excrement, and dead bodies piled up next to the living. In the barracks, people slept ten or twelve to each narrow wooden shelf. Mere skeletons of men and women were staggering about or crawling, most of them dreadfully wounded, disfigured, maimed, afflicted with diseases, infested with lice, neither talking nor hearing. The last arrivals were lying outside in the mud—all young women, all dead.5
Yet the storehouse contained mountains of Red Cross food parcels, medication, and clothing; none of it had been distributed to the inmates. Years later, when an Israeli interviewer asked Becher why he had not commanded that food and clothing be distributed immediately, he stared into space and asked that the question be repeated. It was, but he still did not have an answer.
Becher negotiated with the commandant, SS Captain Josef Kramer, in his office for two days while Kasztner waited. On the second day, a filthy old woman in rags, her head shaved, her hands arthritic claws, shambled up to him where he stood, erect in his clean suit and tie. In a hoarse voice, she begged for bread for her daughter.
When he did not respond, she asked: “Don’t you know me, Rezső?”6
Just at this moment, Becher came out of Kramer's office, and the two of them resumed their guarded walk through the camp. Suddenly Kasztner realized that the “old” woman was Joel Brand's sister Hanna. To his everlasting horror and shame, he did not return to try to find her.
All attempts at camp administration had already collapsed. The SS units guarding prisoners from outside the barbed-wire fences paid no attention to what was going on inside; their job was to prevent escapes. Becher had to persuade Kramer and the commanders of the nearby Wehrmacht units not to massacre the surviving inmates. His argument, according to later testimonies, was that the typhoid epidemic in the camp would spread to the soldiers.
Becher reported to Himmler that typhoid was killing the inmates faster even than starvation and the lack of water. The camp was overcrowded. Too many prisoners from other camps, including Auschwitz, had been brought to Bergen-Belsen on senseless, long marches when Poland was abandoned to the Russians.
Himmler issued another order—also shown at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials before the International Military Tribunal—that the SS should fight the epidemic “with everything at your disposal… Do not spare doctors and medication. The prisoners are under special protection.” It was an order few saw and no one obeyed. Waffen-SS units around the camp (their members included an ethnic German detachment from Hungary) were given the opportunity to shoot any häftlings they wished “just for the fun of it.”7
Kasztner later credited Becher with saving the last sixty thousand of Bergen-Belsen's prisoners. The photographs and film footage taken there by the Americans still, even after all the carnage of war, had the power to shock the world. The liberators found seventeen thousand unburied corpses, and thousands of the skeletal survivors died within days of the surrender of the camp. The soldiers ordered a contingent of local villagers to dig trenches and help bulldoze the corpses into the mass graves. The British commander said there were no words, no pictures, that could adequately describe the horror they saw.
JOEL BRAND’S mother, two sisters, and his niece, Margit, were ordered into a train on April 9 just before the camp was taken by the British. The train was directed to Theresienstadt, but it never arrived at its destination. It was shunted in and out of bombed-out stations, its doors sealed tight and with no food or water for the people inside. It stopped when planes strafed the engine, but the guards allowed the prisoners out only once in the six-or seven-day journey.8 The Russians finally opened the doors of “the lost train” near Frankfurt an der Oder. The villagers of Troeditz, accustomed as they were to horrific sights, had never seen anything like the few, emaciated survivors who stumbled from that train. Brand's mother had died during the journey, but his other relatives survived.
BECHER WAS not as successful at Neuengamme, where the commandant ignored his demand that the camp be handed over to the Swedish Red Cross.
At Becher's behest, Hermann Krumey, Otto Hunsche, Dieter Wisliceny,9 and Kasztner traveled to Theresienstadt to deliver Himmler's orders to surrender the camp. On the way, Krumey, unaware of the revulsion his words would elicit, boasted to Kasztner that he had been able to save 115,000 reichsmarks from the payments he received for work done by the Strasshof Jews.10 He was proud of his modest contribution to the German war effort. He had no idea that these significant savings meant he had not purchased the food and medication intended for the Strasshof Jews, as had been agreed with Kasztner. Vienna was taken by the Soviets on April 13.
On April 20, Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday, all his faithful chiefs went to visit him once more: Hermann Göring, Josef Goebbels, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Martin Bormann, and, of course, Heinrich Himmler. However, at least three of the men had made concerted efforts to be picked as Hitler's successor and to lead Germany in negotiations with the British and Americans. They all disliked one another intensely.
Kurt Becher had not been invited to the celebration. Instead, he drove to the Mauthausen concentration camp, near Linz, with Himmler's orders.
SS Colonel Franz Ziereis, the commandant of Mauthausen, had received orders from Kaltenbrunner to kill at least a thousand people a day. Time permitting, he planned to send a few thousand down the Danube in barges to the Wels subcamp. He was determined not to hand a single live prisoner over to the Russians. As a finale to his reign of terror, Ziereis intended to collect the remaining inmates in the underground Bergkristall tunnels where they had worked and blow the whole place up.11 When Ziereis questioned his authority, Becher phoned Kaltenbrunner in Ziereis's presence to inform him of Himmler's wishes. He hoped that Kaltenbrunner did not know that his appointment to supervise sämtliche—selected—concentration camps did not include Mauthausen, and that the appointment had, in any event, been subsequently rescinded.12 The two senior SS officers got into a heated argument. The Reich Security Office chief was unconvinced but did not dare to countermand an order, if indeed such an order existed. In the end, Becher had to agree to go to Kaltenbrunner's Salzburg headquarters to review the nature of his appointment and Himmler's orders. Meanwhile, Ziereis reluctantly postponed the killings and evacuation. He also agreed to do a personal favor for Becher—to free Moshe Schweiger.
Schweiger, one of Kasztner's earliest Va’ada associates, had been deported to Mauthausen a few days after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. He would later recall that when he was summoned to the camp commandant's quarters in April 1945, he was convinced it would be his last hour. He had been very ill and hoped the end would be quick. There was a tall, handsome man in Ziereis's outer office. He introduced himself with extraordinary politeness, called him “Dr. Schweiger,” and offered him a glass of wine and a sandwich of thinly sliced beef on white bread—the first meat and real bread Schweiger had seen since his incarceration. Schweiger declined the proffered wine because he was afraid he would not survive the first sip. He could barely walk and, courtesy of the Reich, had lost over thirty pounds as well as all his hair and fingernails. SS Colonel Becher ordered the camp's Jewish tailor to measure Schweiger for a suit of civilian clothes.
“You are my gift to Dr. Kasztner,” Becher told him. He explained that Schweiger would be transferred to an area of the camp where prisoners were fed and given medical treatment. He did not think that Schweiger should travel in his present condition. He said he would be back in a few days and hoped Schweiger would be well enough to accompany him. Becher then drove to Salzburg for the meeting with Kaltenbrunner. On the road to Flossenbürg, he was spotted by American troops and, according to his own account, was lightly wounded in the ensuing skirmish. He was awarded the Black Wounded Badge for his bravery.13 Despite the wound, he stoically carried on toward Salzburg.
There are two completely different versions of what took place at the Reich Security office that day, Kaltenbrunner's and Becher’s. The security chief claimed that the only concentration camp they discussed was Dachau. The Americans were close to Munich and could reach Dachau within a couple of days. The camp commandant, SS Captain Eduard Weiter, had received written orders from Himmler, dated April 4, instructing him that “no prisoner must fall into the hands of the enemy.” Despite that instruction, Becher claimed in his account that he had managed to bluff his way to an agreement whereby both Dachau and Mauthausen would be handed over to the Allies and no more prisoners would be killed.
Becher returned to Mauthausen on the morning of April 27, the day that Weiter began to evacuate Dachau. When the prisoners there resisted, the commandant phoned Himmler, who ordered that he execute them all immediately. Only the arrival of American forces prevented Weiter's successful compliance with these orders.
Meanwhile, in Mauthausen, Schweiger had responded well to the food and medication. The camp tailor had fitted him for a pair of trousers and a jacket, cut from a dead prisoner's suit. When Becher was ready to depart, an SS chauffeur sprang out of the car to open the back door for Schweiger. Becher chatted amiably with him all the way to a hunting lodge near the town of Bad Ischl.
According to Schweiger, Becher spent much of their three-hour journey explaining how Himmler had been misunderstood by so many people. The Reichsführer's orders had saved many thousands of lives, yet few seemed to appreciate how much he had risked over the past several months. Schweiger, who had never anticipated such a discussion with an SS officer about the man who had ordered the extermination of all Jews, just hoped he would never have to make Himmler's acquaintance.
After two days of food and music—the SS officer favored Mozart—Becher presented Schweiger with six suitcases that he said contained the gold and other valuables Kasztner had given to him in Budapest. Becher claimed the valuables were worth around three million Swiss francs. He maintained that he had always planned to return them once the war was over—and the war was, clearly, at an end. He asked Schweiger to hand the cases over to the Jewish Agency, and also to sign a document attesting to Becher's innocence. The paper stated that Becher had been instrumental in saving Jewish lives in Budapest, and that he had guaranteed the peaceful surrender of Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, Mauthausen, and There-sienstadt, though, of course, Schweiger would not have known about all these good deeds from his own personal experience. Schweiger, however, was happy to sign.
ON APRIL 29 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were formally married in Hitler's bunker, under the junction of Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden. The bride wore a simple, cream-colored gown; the groom was dressed in a formal suit. They both attested to having no known health problems and to their being “of complete Aryan descent.” After the wedding breakfast, Hitler dictated his last will and testament, a long, rambling document that laid the blame for the millions of dead on everyone except himself and exhorted all Germans to continue murdering Jews. He expressed his hopes for the future. “Centuries will go by, but from the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew. They are the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its helpers.” After ordering poison for his favorite dog, Blondi (his two other dogs were shot), he made his farewells to his remaining staff and retired with his bride to his private apartments. Hitler shot himself at 3:30 PM on April 30. Eva took poison to join her groom.
The Thousand Year Reich survived him by only one week.
American troops reached the Mauthausen camp on May 3, a sunny spring day, and they found a mass grave with more than ten thousand people. Ziereis was shot while trying to escape. In his deathbed testimony, he admitted that Kaltenbrunner had reinstated the order to kill one thousand prisoners a day. Ziereis had not had time to blow up the tunnels. His testimony was entered in evidence against Kaltenbrunner at the Nuremberg Trials.
All told, Becher claimed credit for the survival of around eighty thousand prisoners at the concentration camps he had been ordered to supervise.
At midnight on May 8–9, 1945, Germany surrendered. The Second World War in Europe was over.
SCHWEIGER TRIED, unsuccessfully, to reach the Jewish Agency in Istanbul and the Joint in Switzerland. He knew it was too risky to keep the valuables under his bed in Bad Ischl. Anyone found with Nazi loot risked execution, and he was afraid to leave the boxes unguarded; they could easily have been stolen. He made a careful inventory of the contents, then delivered them to the 215th Detachment of the American Counter Intelligence Corps in Bad Ischl on May 30. They were booked in as “Becher Treasure i” and were later united with “Becher Treasure II”—two more suitcases (containing 18.7 pounds of gold and 4.4 pounds of platinum) that were found in Weissenbach Castle.14 Becher explained that he had been keeping it all for return to the Jewish Agency. The Americans arrested Becher on May 24. He told them he had been scheduled to meet Roswell McClelland and Saly Mayer regarding more transports for the Jews he was saving—as though it had all been a mutually agreed process and the war not already lost. If they doubted his word, he said, they should go to Switzerland and ask Mayer of the American Joint Distribution Committee. For additional proof of his goodwill and honesty, he showed them the letter Schweiger had signed.
The total Becher Treasure was packed into twenty-nine bags. The first fifteen were deposited in the National Bank of Austria, the rest in the Bank für Oberösterreich in Salzburg.15
SS REICHSFÜHRER Heinrich Himmler had been dismissed from the government of what was left of the Reich on April 29 for his efforts to negotiate Germany's capitulation. Hitler had found out that Himmler had met twice with Count Folke Bernadotte and had asked the Swedish diplomat to act as a middleman with the Allies. In exchange, Himmler had agreed to allow all Scandinavian women and children still alive in the camps to be sent to Sweden and, later, he agreed that all the women from the Ravensbrück camp could join the exodus.16 Somehow, despite his isolation, Hitler had learned the news from a Reuters dispatch. Becher's hero to the last, Himmler shaved off his mustache, stuck a black patch over one eye, and tried to escape in a Wehrmacht uniform. On May 23 he was captured by the British and committed suicide by biting down on a hidden cyanide capsule.
For many weeks after the end of hostilities, some Soviet soldiers raped and even killed Jewish women they encountered as these former concentration camp prisoners made their way back to their homes along the broken roads of Europe. In one account of a survivor, a mother and daughter, straggling home from Ravensbrück, were raped ten times before reaching Budapest. In another, a group of women had their clothes stolen and were left standing naked on the side of the road. Grandmothers in their eighties were raped while trying to gather firewood. In Hungary, homes were looted, churches vandalized, domestic animals butchered. Whatever could be carried off (and had been left behind by the Germans) was taken—furniture, carpets, curtains, clothing, even pianos. Soldiers ordered people to undress in the street if they wanted their coats. They consumed all the alcohol they found, even rubbing alcohol and bottles of perfume. What they could not consume or take, they burned.
As if to signal the next era of murky persecutions and fake charges, the Soviet secret service arrested Raoul Wallenberg17 and took him to the Soviet Union, where, many years later, he died in prison. The officers were probably aware that Wallenberg had had discussions with the U.S. intelligence service before he went to Hungary and, despite the appearance of friendly relations between the two countries, the Soviet government did not trust the Americans. Perhaps, as Yehuda Bauer suggests, to the Soviets “the moral imperatives of a wealthy banker to endanger his life in order to save some Jews must have seemed incomprehensible and suspicious.”18
Both the Swedish and the Swiss embassies were looted, some of their staff were killed, and others vanished into the Soviet Union. Carl Lutz, the man who had given his protection to thousands in the former American embassy and the Glass House, was sent out of the country in a third-class compartment of a train to Bucharest. He and his wife, Gertrud, shared the compartment with Angelo Rotta from the Vatican and Friedrich Born of the Swiss Red Cross. Miksa Domonkos was not so lucky. The courageous commander of the ghetto, having fooled the Germans, failed to convince the Russians that he was neither a German stooge nor an Arrow Cross recruit. He was tortured to death in February 1945.
SAMUEL STERN died in 1946, a year after the end of the war. He left behind three large notebooks about his own activities and the work of the Jewish Council from March 1944 to January 1945. Maria Schmidt, a historian and political activist, prepared them for publication in 2004. The museum she helped to found, the House of Terror, detailing both the German and the Communist regimes in Hungary, occupies the building on Andrássy Avenue that was once the headquarters for the Arrow Cross and, later, the state security officers of the Communist Party.