The cause we represented in Budapest was first and foremost rescue;
in other words, the saving of human life. That goal was
for us, in the first place, a series of commitments that we endeavored to
fulfill. What should be written about our efforts is the fact that in the
liberated areas of the west alone, more than 200,000 Jews
remained alive, and another ten thousand were freed by the Russians.
REZSŐ KASZTNER, IN A LETTER TO FRIENDS, AUGUST 19451
REZSŐ KASZTNER joined his family in Switzerland on April 19, 1945. His wife, Bogyó, had been extremely anxious about him in the previous few months. She listened to the news about the destruction of Budapest and Vienna and was sure he had been shot, perhaps maimed. Phone lines were no longer functioning in Europe, and his few letters arrived long after the war was over. She spent most of her time in the tiny pension room, waiting for news. Tommy Margittai, only fourteen at the time, spent many afternoons with her, talking and smoking cigarettes—since Bergen-Belsen, she had become a nervous smoker—while he gazed at her adoringly. He thought he was deeply in love with her. “Such a beautiful woman, graceful, elegant, with a low, sexy voice…”2
Bogyó had known that Rezső was traveling with Kurt Becher during those weeks, though she never understood how he accepted the company of an SS officer who could have had him killed without the slightest consequence. Earlier, in December 1944, after she and the second group of passengers on “Kasztner's train” crossed the border, she had tried to persuade him not to leave the safety of Switzerland when he had the chance to stay. But Kasztner had argued that he was needed in Budapest, that the Strasshof “exchange Jews” might not live if he did not return, that he needed to coax Obersturmbannführer Hermann Krumey into collaborating with the Red Cross to provide food and clothing for these people—and, in any case, that Becher, the key person to fulfilling their few remaining hopes, would not deal with anyone else. He believed he had won the SS man's confidence, and, because they were now on first-name terms, that Becher liked him as a friend. Bogyó shuddered at the idea of such a friendship.
Now that the war was almost over, however, she thought they might be able to return to their old lives in Transylvania, which was again under Romanian rule. They would have children and a home of their own, and she hoped they would be able to forget the past. But Kasztner would not even think about returning to their old lives. The only place where he had any desire to live was Palestine, but not yet. He was consumed by memories of the past—a changed man, she thought. His vaunted optimism seemed to be missing.
He was honored at a banquet given in Basel by some of the passengers from the train. There were long speeches about the group's experiences, and professions of eternal gratitude, but Kasztner seemed preoccupied; he barely listened to the gushing words. He sat almost motionless, smiling, picking at his food. At the end, he rose to thank them all and, in a perfunctory kind of way, expressed his hope they would remain forever friends.
With very few exceptions, however, the passengers of the Kasztner train forgot about him once they scattered and began their new lives; they could not wait to wipe the dust and the humiliations of the Holocaust from their feet. “A natural reaction,” Ernő Szilágyi wrote. “We were all victims and deeply ashamed of the fact. We walked about the clean, well-tended streets with no sense of belonging. Even Kasztner, the stadlan [the middleman who negotiates the terms for survival], was at a loss how to live.”3 Here, in tidy, organized Switzerland, there was no call for his talents. Peter Munk's aunt, Eva Speter, said that Kasztner “was a born adventurer.” Switzerland was much too quiet for him.4
On May 8, when the Third Reich surrendered, Kasztner sent a telegram to the Jewish Agency's headquarters in Tel Aviv: “Mission accomplished.” Still the showman, he listed his most important life-saving accomplishments.
Kasztner and Bogyó moved into a pension in Geneva. On a narrow, tree-lined, residential side street, the pension “Sergei” offered inexpensive, comfortable if slightly shabby rooms. But after the first days of freedom and the confidence of being safe, Kasztner grew restless. The welcome he had anticipated was short-lived. The honors he had expected from the Joint, the War Refugee Board, and the Jewish Agency never arrived. He had not been invited to Palestine to relate his experiences, and no new appointments had been offered. There had been no newspaper interviews, no formal acknowledgments. Instead, he lived on a subsistence income. His days in Budapest and Vienna began to haunt him. Some of his acquaintances wrote that they found his talk about his relationships with individual Nazis repulsive. He seemed to be boasting of his status in the Germans’ midst, of the nightclubs in Vienna during the bombardments, his special treatment at the Metropole and the Grand hotels there, the use of Becher's car and driver, the courtesies he had been afforded by men like Becher and Dieter Wisliceny.
Kasztner was moody, brooding, impatient. He and Bogyó argued about everything but mainly about the time he had spent in Budapest with Hansi Brand. Kasztner didn’t bother to deny the accusation that he had had a romantic relationship with Hansi. The more disgruntled he became, the more he thought more about Hansi—her generosity, her support for their work, and her tireless efforts to save other lives. The arguments merely added fuel to his desire to be with her. A couple who occupied the floor below the Kasztners complained to the landlord about the loud arguments overhead, the door banging as Rezső walked out on his furious wife.
Amid the general confusion of Europe's displaced millions, a few hundred of the Kasztner train refugees—Szilágyi was one of them—returned to Hungary. They missed their familiar neighborhoods, and they yearned to be “home,” speaking the language they knew. They wanted their houses or apartments, their furniture, and their books back again. They imagined, wrongly, that the postwar government would find ways to compensate them for their losses.
In July, seven hundred people with Palestine certificates, including Bogyó's parents, left for Haifa on a ship via Bari, Italy.
WHEN CARL LUTZ arrived home in Switzerland from Istanbul, he did not expect a hero's welcome, but he thought his government would want to learn of his life-saving work in Budapest. Not only did his government fail to recognize his rescue work in Hungary, but it also ordered a judicial investigation into his activities there. Why had he engaged in saving Hungarian nationals when his consular duties included no such endeavors? Worse, he had failed to obtain due authorization from Bern for all the Swiss identity papers he had handed out—more than fifty thousand Swiss schutzpässe—and illegal operators in Hungary had manufactured at least another fifty thousand. Now thousands of undesirables could claim Swiss citizenship.5
SEVERAL PEOPLE who had given their valuables to Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee—for safekeeping, they claimed—began to seek their return. Kasztner spent much of his time going over the accounts of the committee, wanting to prove to both the Jewish Agency and those looking for their property that he had not, personally, kept anything. He had used it all for bribes, for buying lives. He wrote long, anguished, often angry letters hectoring the complainers: What value did they put on their lives? he asked. Eventually, he stopped going to public functions held by the Jewish community. He avoided people who wanted to talk to him about their own past and those who were determined to find out how the passengers on Kasztner's train had been chosen.
He learned that there were rumors about him. Emil Nussbecher, who now called himself Yoel Palgi, had said some things, and a whispering campaign had begun accusing him of collaborating with the Germans. One story had him handing Palgi and Ferenc Goldstein over to the SS, in exchange for favors. Palgi and Goldstein were the two parachutists who had gone to his office in Budapest the day before the train was due to depart. Palgi's book, first published in 1946 with a title that translated as Behold a Great Wind Came, had immediately become a best-seller in Palestine.6 Although he praised Kasztner there for his leadership of the Rescue Committee, he suggested that he had not done all he could have to save the parachutists’ mission. Yet, when confronted by one of Kasztner's friends, Palgi declared that Kasztner had been both brilliant and fearless in his handling of the negotiations in Hungary—that without him, thousands more would have perished.
Palgi, as he later testified, believed then that Goldstein was still alive and that he owed his life to Kasztner. He did not realize that he was the sole survivor of the ill-conceived foray into Hungary. Goldstein's parents, who had been on the train, claimed they had been reassured by Kasztner that their son was in good hands. They insisted, now, that Kasztner should explain to them what he believed had happened after their son gave himself up to the Nazis. Kasztner did not want to see them. “They don’t understand,” he told Bogyó, “that I could not save everybody.”7 His failures, it seemed, were as painful for him to bear as they were for those who had lost members of their families.
Moshe Krausz, Kasztner discovered, had filed a complaint against him with the Jewish Agency Executive and with the Zionist Congress, accusing him of pointlessly hobnobbing with the Nazis while he, Krausz, had found a way to save thousands through hard work with the representatives of the neutral nations. He claimed credit for all those who survived in the “protected houses.” He blamed Kasztner for the failure to gain exit visas for the Jews with immigration certificates for Palestine. He deemed Kasztner's apparent friendship with Becher suspect and described Kasztner as a megalomaniac with only his own personal glory in mind.
Furious, Kasztner wrote to the Jewish Agency's representative in Geneva, asking for an open hearing at which his accusers would state their case and he would be given an opportunity to respond. He became obsessed with the need to clear his name. He filed a complaint against Krausz. He said he had known of Krausz's efforts to discredit the Va’ada and his own dealings with the Sonderkommando. Krausz had made no secret of his personal dislike for him. Kasztner's accusations were bolstered by Rafi Benshalom, one of the former halutz leaders in Budapest (and soon to become Israel's first ambassador to Czechoslovakia), who accused Krausz of mishandling his office and holding up the rescue efforts.
The Agency's Executive held investigative hearings into both complaints and concluded there was no reason to proceed with either of them. But rumors continued to circulate. Kasztner's appointment to a mission in Budapest on behalf of the Agency was vetoed because of suspicions about his relationships with the SS. He heard from a journalist colleague in the city that a petition had been filed with the government, asking for an investigation of his activities during the German occupation. A Mizrachi official from Hungary had filed a complaint against him with the World Jewish Congress, accusing him of keeping part of the money collected to buy lives. In vain, Kasztner insisted that he and his colleagues, some of whom had been murdered by the Nazis or the Arrow Cross, deserved a full hearing. But there would not be a public inquiry. The Agency was satisfied with its investigation and saw no reason for anything more. There were too many other pressing matters to deal with. Millions of the displaced—the disenfranchised, as well as concentration camp survivors, fleeing Nazis, and disarmed soldiers—were roaming Europe, trying to find missing relatives, confiscated homes, new identities, or ways of escape.
Meanwhile, in Palestine, there were armed battles between various political factions of the Jews and between the Yishuv and the British occupying forces. The Revisionists, under Menachem Begin, continued their harassment of the British.8 David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency were at first vehemently opposed to Begin's terrorist tactics, but by October 1945 they, too, committed themselves to forcing the British to return to their islands. Without consulting Chaim Weizmann, Ben-Gurion ordered the Haganah to begin a campaign to drive the British out. However, violent disagreements between the two groups over their approach to the problem remained, as did their mutual distrust and hostility.
When Kasztner saw in the local press that Saly Mayer had been praised for the rescue of thousands of Hungarian Jews and for his selfless efforts on their behalf in Nazi Germany, he was incensed. It seemed to him that Mayer was assuming credit for his own, Kasztner’s, work with the SS. Moreover, Mayer was praised for his courage in entering Nazi Germany to pursue the negotiations, yet it was well known that Mayer had never set foot in Nazi Germany. He had done whatever he did in the secure knowledge of a comfortable bed in neutral Switzerland. Kasztner fired off long, angry memoranda to various officials, including Mayer himself: “All of us who have experienced the prisons of the Gestapo, the police, and the Arrow Cross, in the name of our dead colleagues… we raise our voice in protest… against the bizarre way in which we have been dispossessed of our work, our sacrifice, and our achievements.”9 Saly Mayer did not respond.
Most nights, Kasztner found it impossible to fall asleep. He wandered the streets alone or sat staring out of the darkened window, writing long letters on an old typewriter and working on his reports. He talked with Eliahu Dobkin and Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency's Executive about making plans to reclaim the funds and valuables that had been given to Becher and to Eichmann's deputies in Hungary, as well as the much larger theft of Hungarian Jewish belongings that had been sent by truck and train to Germany in late October 1944. No one was sure what the value of the latter might be, but estimates ran as high as $350 million. Dobkin and Barlas were concerned that these valuables could be viewed as war booty by the Americans or, once returned to Hungary, grabbed by the state.
The Jewish Agency, representing the six million murdered Jews of Europe, had been attempting to gain status at the planned trials of war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany. It failed. Kasztner, however, succeeded. He volunteered to help the Allied prosecutors of war crimes in their quest to determine the guilt or innocence of the various Nazi officers and officials he had come to know. At the Jewish Agency's expense, he flew to London in early September 1945 and submitted two sworn affidavits before the American Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes, a series of hearings that preceded the trials of the war criminals. His first statement dealt with the destruction of Jews in Hungary, mentioning also Slovakia, Poland, and Austria.10 He detailed the role played by the Sonderkommando and, in particular, its murderous chief, Adolf Eichmann. He mentioned Krumey's tireless execution of Eichmann's plans in Hungary. His second affidavit outlined the roles of Becher and Wisliceny in Hungary, as well as the role he and the Va’ada played in preserving human lives. In these statements, Kasztner left no doubt that those who had cooperated with him in the final months before Germany's inevitable defeat did so purely to save their own skins.11
When Moshe Schweiger arrived in Switzerland in mid-October 1945, he thought his friend was pale, dispirited, listless; his vaunted sense of self-confidence had vanished. Traces of the former Kasztner surfaced only when the two of them worked on their detailed report about the Becher Treasure and Kasztner's own report about the work of the Jewish Rescue Committee. Kasztner had estimated the total amounts paid to Becher before December 7, 1944, at $2.1 million, or close to nine million Swiss francs, including the additional amounts Becher received from his small group of favored “clients”—not the three million francs Becher had mentioned when he presented the suitcases to Schweiger. The originally approved number of train passengers was 1,300, or $1.3 million at $1,000 a head. The final number on arrival at Bergen-Belsen was 1,684. Becher had demanded and received the additional payments. Passengers on the train estimated the true value of the two Becher Treasures to be 8.7 million Swiss francs.12 Kasztner and Schweiger were not yet aware of the existence of the second Becher Treasure, but Kasztner was already determined to seek a meeting with Becher.
Their report to the Jewish Agency recommended that it immediately claim the Becher Treasure from the Americans. There was a danger, Kasztner feared, that the Americans would view any valuables as their own.13
When Joel Brand arrived from Palestine, Kasztner met him at the Geneva railway station. After a moment's hesitation, they embraced—two old friends with a shared past. So much to talk about, Joel thought, so much to explain. He had traveled to Switzerland with his two sons to be reunited with his wife. He had picked up the boys in Bratislava from Peretz Révész, who was still helping to move small groups of Jewish children to safety. Joel had known about Hansi's affair with Kasztner, but he hoped that their relationship would be over. Hansi had been in Switzerland since early May, but already Joel suspected, rightly, that she had been with Kasztner again. All three of them were nervous about one another, careful of what they said. When they did get together, there were long silences, whole areas of experience each of them kept private.
It was not until Joel saw Bogyó again that he knew Hansi would not leave him for Kasztner. Bogyó was obviously and joyously pregnant, and she had regained her confidence. She had told Rezső to stop seeing Hansi if he wanted to have their baby. He had agreed.14 Hansi told Rezső that whatever had been between them, it was over. In her heart, it ended when Joel's niece, Margit, told her what had happened in Bergen-Belsen. She could not forgive him for leaving Joel's mother to die.15 As she told the story years later to a friend, Eva Carmeli, once she knew that Bogyó was pregnant, she broke off the relationship with Rezső. It no longer made sense to her.16 In Budapest, when they were alone and facing the likelihood of death, he had promised to stay with her if they survived. There had been no question then of his renewing his marriage. And yet, now Bogyó was pregnant. The facts spoke for themselves.
When Joel went to Hansi's small, rented apartment, he was determined not to talk about her affair. But in the end, of course, he did. He accused her of having become Rezső's mistress. She reminded him that their marriage had been a sham, an arrangement, and that they—especially Joel—had never expected to keep their vows. She was in no mood to deny her affair or even to apologize. She accused him of cowardice. He should have returned to Budapest, no matter the risks and no matter what the Jewish Agency wanted. His continued absence had destroyed the one sure bargaining chip she and Rezső had held with Eichmann. Rezső, she told him, had saved all their lives.
She and Joel fought tirelessly, sometimes all night, about what had happened in Istanbul, about how she and Rezső had struggled for each one of those Joel had left behind, and why Joel had not returned to Hungary. He had known his wife and children were in danger of Eichmann's wrath. As for his heroic role in drawing the world's attention to what was happening in Hungary, Hansi said, he had failed even in that.
Zsuzsi Kasztner was born in Switzerland on December 26, 1945. There is a photograph of the proud parents grinning at the camera, the tiny bundle held between them. They seem hopeful, happy as parents usually are when they welcome a newborn.
Bogyó agreed to go to Palestine. Her parents had settled in Tel Aviv. She was sure her father's ill health would improve with her presence, and baby Zsuzsi would benefit from having adoring grandparents around her. But Rezső was still not ready to go to what would soon become the State of Israel.
KASZTNER PRESENTED The Report of the Jewish Rescue Committee of Budapest, 1942–194517 to the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress in Basel in December 1946. It was the first postwar Zionist congress—the saddest and loneliest of conferences, because so many of Europe's Zionist leaders had been murdered. David Ben-Gurion compared it to sitting shivah, observing a seven-day mourning period, for all your best friends at once, all the brilliant, argumentative men from Poland, Slovakia, Russia, the Ukraine, Holland, and France, those familiar faces all gone up in the smoke of the Nazi annihilation machines.
Although Kasztner, unlike Moshe Krausz, was not given official status at the congress—he attended as a journalist representing a Budapest newspaper—his report caused a considerable stir among the delegates.18 Hansi was also there, though she stayed in the lobby of the conference center. She went to the restaurant at mealtimes, hoping to see a few people she had known in Budapest. But she could neither understand what was being said by the delegates nor speak to them. “I didn’t know Hebrew or their kind of Yiddish,” she said. “And no one was interested in hearing from me.” A stringer for one of the Palestine Jewish newspapers approached to talk to her but discovered they did not have a language in common. “After all the work we had done, it was strange,” she said. “No one was interested.”19
While she found her own situation ironic, she felt sorry for Rezső. They had risked their lives every day, and she was surprised by the lack of recognition for them both. She told Rezső it was only a matter of time. The horrors were too recent. As for the rumors, there would always be those who felt wronged. She and Rezső had known from the beginning that not everyone would make it. Look at what had happened to the Polish Jews—despite the grand, heroic gesture of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, how many lives did it save? None.
No one knows for sure how Kasztner came to change his attitude toward Kurt Becher. Only a few facts are certain: he and members of the Jewish Agency Executive were anxious to talk to Becher about the bribes he had accepted and about the confiscated wealth of Hungarian Jews; they were eager to locate Adolf Eichmann, who had disappeared only days before his offices at 116 Kurfürstenstrasse in Berlin were destroyed by the Russians, and they believed that Dieter Wisliceny and Hans Jüttner, and perhaps Hermann Krumey, could shed light on these matters. Even before Kasztner appeared at the investigations before the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg, there was a marked alteration in his view of Becher.20 In January 1946 he and Schweiger issued a statement in Geneva about Becher's courageous humanitarian activities.21 They asserted that the “Becher Deposit” belonged to the Jews of Hungary and outlined how it had ended up with the American army. Their statement was delivered to the United States Embassy in Switzerland. Unfortunately, when the Americans checked with Saly Mayer about the credibility of Rezső Kasztner, they noted that Mayer—still the Joint's representative in Switzerland—had nothing positive to say.22
When Becher, who had been jailed by the Americans, sought Kasztner's help to prove he was innocent of war crimes, Kasztner volunteered to be an expert witness on Hungarian matters at the Nuremberg Trials, which had begun on November 20, 1945. He also offered to speak in the same capacity at any of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials.23 Once the trials began, a statement by Becher was read into the record and used against his fellow SS officer General Kaltenbrunner.
I, Kurt Becher, former standartenführer, born 12 September 1909, at Hamburg, declare under oath:
Between the middle of September and the middle of October 1944, I caused the Reichsführer-SS Himmler to issue the following order, which I received in two originals, one each for SS Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner and [Obergruppenführer Oswald] Pohl, and a copy for myself: “By this order, which becomes immediately effective, I forbid any extermination of Jews and order that, on the contrary, care should be given to weak and sick persons. I hold you [Kaltenbrunner and Pohl] personally responsible even if this order should not be strictly adhered to by subordinate officers.”
I took Pohl's copy to him in his office in Berlin and left a copy for Kaltenbrunner at his office in Berlin. Therefore, in my opinion Kaltenbrunner and Pohl bear the responsibility after this date of any further killings of Jewish prisoners.
When visiting Mauthausen concentration camp on 27 April 1945 at 0900 hours, I was told in the strictest secrecy by the commandant, SS Standartenführer Ziereis, that “Kaltenbrunner gave me the order that at least a thousand persons would still have to die at Mauthausen each day.”
The facts mentioned above are true…
In his own testimony of April 12, 1947, Kaltenbrunner confirmed some of Becher's statements, at least as far as the timing of Becher's meetings with Himmler. He said that Himmler had been forced to issue an order in September or October 1944 to stop the murder apparatus. He was not very helpful, however, about Himmler's appointment of Becher to oversee the handover of concentration camps to the Allies. He recalled no such order.
When Kasztner received an invitation to testify, it was courtesy of Joel Brand's niece Margit, who had survived the horrors of Bergen-Belsen and found a job with the war-crimes tribunal.
After the Russians found the passengers of “the lost train” from Bergen-Belsen in Troeditz, Margit Fendrich, who spoke English, had claimed she was an American. The Russian army driver took her, along with her mother and aunt, to the American POW camp. The staff there sent her on to Reims in an American ambulance. She recovered in an American hospital filled with other English-speaking refugees. An extraordinarily beautiful, well-spoken young woman with large, wide-set brown eyes, long eyelashes, and a soft, pink complexion, she got a job first with the U.S. military and then applied for a position with the International Military Tribunal that was to conduct the trials at Nuremberg. “They were looking for people who could handle languages,” she said. Fluent in German, English, Hungarian, and French, she was hired as office help and as an interpreter. She remembered that Kasztner was eager to participate. He called her as soon as he discovered where she was and, because he had dealt, personally, with several of those charged, insisted that his testimony would be vital—“being Rezső, what he had to say was always vital,” she chuckled.24
Had she forgiven him for that walk through Bergen-Belsen when he had failed to recognize her mother and done nothing to repair the damage? Perhaps.
“We all did so many things in those days, just to survive,” Hansi recalled. “Rezső was braver than most, but he was always afraid of Becher. He should have helped Joel's family, and he should not have testified at Nuremberg.” Joel's mother had died about ten days after that visit to the camp. Years later in Israel, when an interviewer asked Hansi how that scene would have played had it been Joel with Becher and Kasztner's mother asking for a piece of bread, she replied, “How can anyone know what he or she would do in such a situation?” But her answer rings hollow. Clearly, Hansi had expected more of Rezső.
IN JANUARY 1947, when the U.S. State Department released the “Becher Deposits” to the Jewish Agency, the contents of the twenty-nine bags were a painful disappointment. Once an inventory of all the items had been made, the total value was put at only $65,000. The inventory of items handed to the Agency's representative, however, matched the one made when Schweiger handed over the suitcases to the U.S. military. In July 1947 most of the items were sold by the Jewish Agency, and the proceeds were split with the Joint.25 The difference between this paltry sum and the bribes that he had paid to Becher was so great that Kasztner remained convinced there were further amounts to be found.
Kasztner received letters from Krumey's wife, asking for help. Her husband was in jail, awaiting trial, and she was living in strained circumstances. In February 1947 Kasztner wrote to Krumey, addressing him as “sehr geherte Doktor Krumey” (Krumey had been a pharmacist before the war) and asking how he could assist. He wanted Krumey to know that he had not forgotten how helpful Krumey had been during the last months of the war. He offered to testify at Krumey's trial, just as he had promised he would when the lives of the Strasshof prisoners were at stake.
Kasztner was not present at the interrogation of Dieter Wisliceny before the International Military Tribunal on January 3, 1946. However, he filed an intervention on the former Nazi captain's behalf after Wisliceny was transferred to Slovakia to stand trial for his role in the murder of the Slovak Jews. Kasztner made an appeal for his return to American custody, no doubt believing that Eichmann's former colleague could shed light on “the Master’s” whereabouts. He was, after all, the last person to have seen Eichmann, in the vestibule of 116 Kurfürstenstrasse in February 1945, when Eichmann told him that he would gladly jump into the grave happy because he had killed five million Jews. “That gives me great satisfaction and gratification,” Eichmann had said.26 The Master, of course, had not jumped into his grave. Instead, he disappeared, and the Jewish Agency was eager to find him.
In August 1947 Kasztner stated in the presence of Major Warren Farr of the United States Army, assistant trial counsel at Nuremberg, that he had survived only because “SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher extended his protection to me, albeit to prepare an alibi for himself. After the autumn of 1944 he definitely tried to demonstrate that he condemned the deportations and the extermination of Jews and he was tireless in his efforts to supply me with proof of his having saved Jews.” Kasztner filed a sworn declaration before a Denazification Court, testifying that Becher was one of the few good Germans: “There can be no doubt that Becher belongs to the very few SS leaders having the courage to oppose the program of annihilation of the Jews and trying to rescue human lives… In my opinion when this case is judged by Allied or German authorities, Kurt Becher deserves the fullest possible consideration.” He signed this statement, rather grandly, “not only in my name but also on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress,” and added, for good measure, that he was the “former chairman of the Zionist Organization in Hungary, 1943–45, representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Budapest.”27
Walter Rapp, assistant to the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, remembered how Kasztner had approached members of his team in his “official capacity” representing some world Jewish organization: “I can state that Becher, until the arrival of Kasztner,” he said, “was merely one of many suspects and it seemed probable that if put on trial, he would be convicted. He has Kasztner to thank for his freedom.”
Kasztner was granted special status to question Becher directly in the presence of the U.S. prosecutor, and he gave Becher every opportunity to clear himself. During one of these interviews, he asked Becher about his role in the survival of the 85,000 Jews trapped in the Budapest ghetto. At first Becher appeared not to recall his part in this act of mercy, but, after repeated prompts by Kasztner, he modestly claimed the proffered credit.28
Through several interviews with U.S. personnel and in statements for the court proceedings, Becher claimed to have joined the SS only because of his keen interest in horseback riding. He rose quickly in the ranks (unlike Eichmann, who never got his heart's desire), reaching standartenführer (colonel) in January 1945, just before Hungary was liberated by the Russians. The only medal he seemed to be proud of was the one he received for a firefight with American soldiers after his life-saving visit to Mauthausen. He took credit for freeing the Weiss-Chorin-Kornfeld families, for letting the Kasztner train leave the Reich, and for other assorted good deeds. As reichssonderkommissar (special Reich commissioner) for concentration camps during the last few weeks of the war, he claimed to have been able to prevent the murder of the last prisoners at several concentration camps.
Becher testified to having been an enemy of Eichmann and all that Eichmann stood for. He claimed responsibility for stopping the foot marches from Budapest to the Austrian border by intervening directly with Himmler. He produced the document that Schweiger had signed at Bad Ischl.
Margit, who took shorthand notes during this testimony, remembered Becher looking up during one of his statements and staring directly at her. He appeared not to be embarrassed by their changed positions; rather, he seemed mildly amused. When he was released from the internment camp in December 1947, Becher stayed on in Nuremberg to testify at further proceedings against some of his former colleagues. One afternoon, he went to Margit's first-floor office in the courthouse and inquired whether she could obtain six pairs of nylon stockings for him.