Béla Berend

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Béla Berend , also Adalbert Berend , later Albert Bruce Belton (born January 12, 1911 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died June 24, 1984 in New York City ) was a Hungarian-American rabbi during World War II.

Life

Béla (Adalbert) Berend was a son of Adolf Presser and Regina Màriàs. He studied, received his doctorate and trained as a rabbi. He was a supporter of Zionism . Berend was chief rabbi in the small town of Szigetvár .

After the Germans marched into his war ally Hungary in March 1944, he cooperated with Zoltán Boznyák, who had received the Jewish department from Interior Minister László Endre in the Interior Ministry of the Szotay government and who became head of the Hungarian Institute for Research into the Jewish Question. In a letter dated April 1, 1944, he suggested to Endre that the Hungarian Jews should not be allowed to emigrate until after the end of the war, and he offered his support. The Szotay government, on the other hand, participated in the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp demanded by the Eichmann Command .

On May 15, 1944, at pressure from Endre, Berend was appointed to the reorganized National Jewish Council as representative of the provincial Jews. Berend and Boznyák formulated the draft government decree according to which the nine-member National Jewish Council should work. Berend's leadership circles distrusted Berend, especially since Berend did nothing to develop a common stance against the Jewish measures of the German SS and the Hungarian gendarmerie .

However, Berend's supposedly good relations with the Ministry of the Interior and his interview on July 29, 1944 in Boznyák's fascist weekly Harc had no effect; 440,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces had been deported to Auschwitz by July 1944, before Reich Administrator Miklós Horthy imposed a moratorium on international pressure ordered. On the contrary, Berend's statements on the Jewishness of Jews who converted to Christian religions made them even more dangerous.

In October 1944, Horthy was overthrown, and the Arrow Cross government established by the Germans under Ferenc Szálasi exercised a regime of terror against the Jews in the part of Hungary that had not yet been liberated by the Red Army , together with the Eichmann Command, which is now again Jews deported and sent on marches west. At the instigation of László Ferenczy, Berend remained a member of the National Jewish Council, which, however, lost its functions due to the terror carried out against its members. During this time he continued to work in public as a rabbi and tried to help in the Budapest forced ghetto set up by the Arrow Cross regime alongside Miksa Domonkos and Lajos Stöckler in individual cases, where his acquaintance with Boznyák helped him.

After the end of the war, Berend was arrested on May 18, 1945, and a trial was being prepared for betraying individual Jewish citizens to the Arrow Cross members, for property offenses and for collaborating with the Arrow Cross members. In his defense, Berend explained his plan at the time to "Zionize" the anti-Semitic politicians of Hungary, saying that Zionism and anti-Semitic fascism had the same goal, namely to make European societies "free of Jews" through segregation.

On November 25, 1946, the Hungarian People's Court sentenced Berend to ten years in prison for cooperating with the Arrow Cross members in their raids in the ghetto and for the statements in the magazine. At the appeal hearing in April 1947, he was acquitted of these charges, possibly under political pressure from the communist government, which did not want a rabbi to be a martyr.

Berend emigrated to the USA in 1948, where he took the name Albert Bruce Belton. Afterwards, too, he was attacked by surviving members of the former National Jewish Council for his activities in Hungary. At the Eichmann trial in 1961, the Israeli public prosecutor obtained a written testimony from him. The behavior of the Jewish leaders in Hungary was critically questioned by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann trial report in Jerusalem .

Rabbi Belton now began litigating to defend his reputation, which he believed to have been restored by his acquittal in 1947. He defended himself, albeit unsuccessfully, in a court in Hungary against the author György Moldova , who had published the story A Szent Imre-induló in the literary magazine Kortárs in 1975 , in which Berend's relationship with Interior Minister Imre Endre was clearly discussed. Moldova then wrote another story, Bíróság előtt, about the course of the trial.

In 1979 Belton sued the Hungarian Jewish Studies series of publications by the Holocaust researcher Randolph L. Braham , in which members of the Hungarian Jewish Council at the time recalled Berend's (now Belton) willingness to collaborate. The $ 10 million lawsuit went unsuccessfully through multiple instances that also weighed questions of freedom of research against actual or alleged defamation. In 1982 he wrote a letter to the editor to the literary magazine New York Review of Books in which he made two points in Braham's investigation The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary corrected: the question of whether an exception was made in Hungary in April 1944 for the heads of the national Jewish council (Kozponti Zsido Tanacs) Charles Wilhelm, Ernö Petö, Samu Stern to wear the Jewish star (according to Berend no). And about the extent of the collaboration between the Jewish community representatives in the province (none, according to Berend).

Shortly before his death, Belton was still litigated because of an interview that Braham had granted to the Hungarian literary magazine Élet és Irodalom in 1984

Fonts

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 452
  2. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, pp. 448f.
  3. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 454
  4. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, pp. 448f.
  5. ↑ Harc corresponds to the German National Socialist newspaper Der Stürmer
  6. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 456
  7. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 469
  8. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, pp. 457, 865
  9. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 931
  10. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, pp. 457ff.
  11. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, p. 461
  12. ↑ Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide , 1981, pp. 460f.
  13. ↑ György Moldova: előtt Bíróság in: Új Tükör, Budapest, October 1983
personal data
SURNAME Berend, Béla
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berend, Adalbert; Belton, Albert Bruce
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-American rabbi in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH June 24, 1984
Place of death New York City