Rudolf Kasztner

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Rudolf Kasztner (around 1948)

Rudolf Kasztner ( Rezső Kasztner , also: Kastner ; * 1906 in Kolozsvár , Austria-Hungary ; † March 15, 1957 in Tel Aviv ) was a Hungarian-Israeli journalist and lawyer as well as a Zionist leader. He de facto headed the Jewish “Committee for Help and Rescue” in Budapest from 1941 to 1945.

After the Second World War he was accused by the Nazis collaborated and to have enriched themselves personally. To this day, there is heated debate as to whether one should see him as the hero who saved more than 1,600 Jews or a traitor.

Life

Studies and first Zionist engagement

Kasztner studied law and was fluent in five languages. He became a staunch Zionist in his early student days . One of his most important activities in the context of his Zionist engagement was the journalistic activity as a political correspondent for the daily newspaper Új Kelet in the 1920s.

Relocation to Budapest and negotiations with the National Socialists

After the power politics of the Italian fascists and the German National Socialists had given his hometown of Cluj in northern Transylvania to Hungary through the Second Vienna Arbitration , Kasztner moved to Budapest in 1940. There he became deputy chairman of the "Committee for Help and Rescue" ( Waad Haezra veHazala , part of the Zionist movement) in 1943 . This group had contacts with similar committees in Bratislava (Slovakia) and Poland . They also had connections with a group of secret messengers from Palestine in Istanbul .

Even before the occupation of Hungary (code name: Margarethe case ), the committee helped Jewish refugees to secretly come to Hungary from Slovakia and Poland. Kasztner knew about the systematic murders of Jews in Auschwitz and tried to recruit members of his community since April 1944, according to the report by Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (both Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau in mid-April 1944) to inform (there is, however, a controversy). Even in Cluj, where he was known and respected as a lawyer, he and his rescue committee, consisting of respected local citizens, were only able to convince a few Jews that they should escape to Romania, 20 km away.

Consideration was also given to building up armed resistance. However, this idea could not be implemented in Hungary because of the widespread anti-Semitism in the population. In addition, most of the young Jews had already been drafted into the labor service.

With the direct participation of Kasztner, the committee made contact with some people from the Schutzstaffel (SS) who were responsible for the extermination program under Adolf Eichmann . During the occupation of Vienna, the latter had already appointed various members of the Jewish community to be Jewish councils , who were responsible for the selection and preparation for the transports. In Slovakia, similar contacts between municipalities and the SS had led to ransom negotiations. In Budapest, too, large sums of money were collected as well as valuables such as jewelry and other items intended for the SS.

After the occupation of Hungary by Germany (March 1944), Joel Brand von Eichmann was sent to Istanbul in May 1944 in order - according to him - to negotiate the release of up to one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other materials. The proposal came from Heinrich Himmler himself, who commissioned Eichmann to conduct the negotiations.

Kasztner transport and extermination of the Hungarian Jews

Kasztner was convinced that this would herald the end of the murder program , and that transports of Jews to the alleged freedom would follow. At the end of June 1944, for example, a train with 1,685 Jews, who had been selected by a community committee, left Hungary. Kasztner personally played a key role in this selection process and chose rabbis, professors, opera singers, journalists, Zionist leaders, but also nurses and farmers, 252 children, 388 Jews from his hometown, including his family and many of his relatives. It was promised that this train would either go to Switzerland or Spain , instead its passengers arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . Adolf Eichmann had them held hostage for months. Several died there.

In July 1944, SS officer Kurt Becher was commissioned by Himmler to negotiate with Kasztner. Soon afterwards, SS men were also negotiating with the representative of the Jewish aid organization in Switzerland. Even in August 1944, 318 Hungarian Jews came to Switzerland in this way. The original train only reached safe Switzerland in December 1944 with 1,670 passengers. By July 1944, 437,000 of the approximately 800,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in freight trains under the most inhumane conditions , where most were immediately gassed. In response to international pressure, the Horthy regime interrupted the deportations if the ghettoization continued, so that the bulk of Budapest's Jews were initially spared after this first wave of deportations.

On August 21 or August 24, 1944, Himmler's order had been issued to stop the further deportation of Jews from Budapest. This order was supposed to lead to speculation about the role of the Hungarian community in Himmler's attempt to negotiate secretly with the Allies behind Hitler's back. Some of them were taken to Austria on foot and used to build the south-east wall on the border with Hungary .

It was not until December 6, 1944, that Adolf Eichmann gave the go-ahead for the hostages, who had been stuck in Bergen-Belsen, to continue their journey to Switzerland.

Last rescue attempts before the end of the war

In the winter of 1944/45, when Kasztner was already safe in Switzerland, he returned to Germany and drove to Berlin for the last time with Kurt Becher, who had been appointed SS-Standartenführer on January 1, 1945 Attempt to save Jews from concentration camps (KZ). It is possible that his intervention played a decisive role in the fact that the administration of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp finally spared the prisoners and surrendered to the British.

After the Shoah, trial of Kasztner, late partial rehabilitation

After the war, Kasztner witnessed the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , Affidavit D: PS-2605, and made statements in favor of Kurt Becher and Hans Jüttner , chief of the SS leadership main office, and other high-ranking Nazis.

Kasztner emigrated to Israel, where he made a career in the Social Democratic Party ( Mapai ), including as spokesman for the Ministry of Industry. In a newspaper article in late 1952 he was accused of contributing to the deaths of many Jews. Since he was striving for a mandate in the Knesset and therefore had to attach importance to an impeccable reputation, Kasztner initiated a defamation process, which, however, developed into a procedure against himself. The political right in Israel tried to make political capital out of the trial. The leader of the Cherut party and later Prime Minister Menachem Begin said: "Whoever votes for the Mapai votes for Jews who have sold Jews to the Gestapo."

The court accepted the evidence against Kasztner. According to the judge, Kasztner “sold his soul to the devil”. Kasztner was also found guilty of protecting Nazis in the Nuremberg war crimes trial. During this process, the public first learned of the contacts between Zionist organizations and the Nazi regime.

Rudolf Kasztner, who has called himself Israel Kasztner since immigrating to Israel , was shot in front of his apartment in Tel Aviv on March 3, 1957 and died of his injuries on March 15, 1957. The three assassins were sentenced to life sentences, but pardoned after three years on personal intervention by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion .

In a court case after his death (1958), the Israeli Supreme Court exonerated Kasztner of the allegations made against him, with the exception of the allegation that he had helped individual National Socialists evade legal prosecution.

reception

In July 2007, Kasztner's private archive was handed over to Yad Vashem . Kasztner's relatives hope "that the extensive material - including three boxes of relevant correspondence - will at least permanently rid his memory of the allegations attached to him." In the late summer of 2010, the professor emeritus for German studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton, Ladislaus Löb , published his book Business with the Devil. The tragedy of the savior of the Jews Rezsö Kasztner in Germany. Löb, born in 1933, is a contemporary witness of the Kasztner Action and was one of the rescued Jews from Cluj in 1944 at the age of eleven . In his report of a survivor , the subtitle of the book, the now seventy-seven-year-old tried to draw a multi-layered, fact-rich picture of Kasztner on the basis of personal experience and scientific investigations and to do justice to his work from a distance of 65 years.

The life of Kasztner was filmed in 2008 as a docu-drama under the title Killing Kasztner by Gaylen Ross , who had previously researched the case intensively for eight years . In the film, Kasztner's murderer Zeev Eckstein is confronted with Kasztner's daughter Zsuzsa, who are both still alive.

Arie Shapira's Kasztner opera received the 1995 Israel Prize .

See also

literature

  • Report of Jewish Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest 1942–1945. by Dr. Rezsoe Kasztner. T / 37 (237) Submitted during the course of the Adolf Eichmann trial and marked T / 1113 (BO6-900, Vol. II, p. 908-910); also cited as:
    • Israel Kastner: Report of the Rescue Committee in Budapest. 1942–1945 (submitted to the Zionist Congress), 108 [Hebrew]. Quoted by Judge Halevi, Cr.C. (Jm.) 124/53 Public Prosecutor v. Gruenvald, 44 PM (1965) 3, at 115 [translation: Leora Bilsky].
  • Tom Segev : The Seventh Million. The Holocaust and Israel's Politics of Remembrance. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995 ISBN 3498062441 (after the 1st reprint: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994 ISBN 0809015706 ).
    • 2. Reprint The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust. Owl Books Holt, 2000, ISBN 0-8050-6660-8 .
  • Yehuda Bauer : Free ransom from Jews? Negotiations between National Socialist Germany and Jewish representatives from 1933 to 1945. Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-633-54107-1 .
  • Jörg von Uthmann: Assassination. Murder with a clear conscience. Berlin 1996, pp. 142–149 ( Swap trucks for Jews: Rudolf Kastner ).
  • Asher Maoz: Historical Adjudication: Courts of Law, Commissions of Inquiry, and "Historical Truth" ( Memento of March 25, 2003 in the Internet Archive ). Law and History Review , University of Illinois Press, Vol. 18. No. 3, autumn 2000. (English)
  • Raul Hilberg : The destruction of the European Jews . Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 2003, ISBN 0-300-09557-0 .
  • Baruch Kimmerling : Israel's Culture of Martyrdom. , The Nation , January 10, 2005
  • Hanna Zweig-Strauss : Saly Mayer (1882-1950). A savior of Jewish life during the Holocaust. Böhlau, Cologne 2007, ISBN 3412200530 .
  • Anna Porter: Kasztner's Train . The True Story of Rezső Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver / Toronto 2007, ISBN 978-1-55365-222-9 (English).
  • Ladislaus Löb : Business with the devil. The tragedy of the rescuer Rezsö Kasztner. Report from a survivor. Böhlau, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20389-4 .

Movie

  • Hanna Marton is a survivor from the train that brought her to Switzerland. Claude Lanzmann interviewed her in the early 1980s. In 2017 he used this film material to assemble part of the interview documentation with four women - four sisters .

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Kasztner  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yehuda Bauer : "Onkel Saly" - the negotiations of Saly Mayer for the rescue of the Jews 1944/45 (PDF; 6.2 MB), in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , volume 25 (1977), issue 2, p. 190.
  2. ↑ Stephen Tree: Rudolf Kasztner and his daring rescue operation In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of December 7, 2019.
  3. ↑ "A Noah's Ark". Kasztner Transport and Switzerland On: infoclio.ch
  4. ↑ Uthmann 2001, p. 148.
  5. ^ Kasztner's private archive goes to Yad Vashem. - Please call July 23, 2007 to read! ( Memento of the original from August 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nlarchiv.israel.de
  6. ↑ s. also the interview with Kasztner that was conducted with him in 2011 on the fringes of the Third Holocaust Conference in Berlin. Printed on the homepage of the Federal Agency for Political Education. [1]
personal data
SURNAME Kasztner, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kasztner, Rezső; Kastner, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-Israeli journalist and lawyer as well as a Zionist leader
DATE OF BIRTH 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Kolozsvár , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1957
Place of death Tel Aviv