On quest to clear Kasztner, historian ‘shocked’ to prove Nazi collaboration

Times of Israel

But for British Jewish historian Paul Bogdanor, his ambition to find material defending the controversial wartime Zionist leader, Rudolf Kasztner, was cruelly thwarted.

Bogdanor was “extremely shocked” to find that everything pointed towards Kasztner’s having been “a collaborator” with the Nazis, and a “betrayer of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people.”

Bogdanor’s new book, “Kasztner’s Crime,” published in October, sets out the case against the Jewish leader in damning detail. Even the most devoted defender might have second thoughts after reading his book.

Ironically, Bogdanor set out to work on the book almost a decade ago in a bid “to prove Kasztner’s innocence.” He was tired of seeing Kasztner’s name come up repeatedly in anti-Zionist propaganda.

Kasztner was a leader of a small Zionist grouping in Budapest towards the end of World War II. He led a Jewish rescue committee which, before the Nazis entered Hungary, did succeed in saving the lives of a number of Jews. But once the Nazis arrived, Kasztner, an ambitious lawyer, became embroiled in prolonged negotiations with the Nazi leadership, particularly Adolf Eichmann.

After complex dealings with Eichmann, Kasztner succeeded in getting the Nazis to agree to the deportation of a group of 1,684 Hungarian Jews, the so-called “Kasztner Train,” who eventually ended up in freedom in Switzerland.

But thousands more continued on the doomed path to Auschwitz. Bogdanor says that not only did Kasztner know they were being sent to their deaths, but that he actively kept such information secret from other Jews in Hungary and the wider Jewish world.

Kasztner himself did not get on the train, but survived the war and made his way to Palestine. By 1952 he was a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and a would-be member of Knesset, though he did not succeed in obtaining a place high enough on the Mapai list to become elected.

Nevertheless, when, in 1953, an embittered Hungarian Jew named Malkiel Gruenwald distributed a pamphlet about Kasztner, naming him as a Nazi collaborator, the Israeli government thought highly enough of him to bring a libel suit on his behalf, accusing Gruenwald of defamation.[...]

On March 3, 1957, right-wing extremists shot Kasztner dead. The following year, too late for him, the court verdict was reversed, suggesting that much of what was claimed against him was not correct. Leading the campaign in ensuing years to rehabilitate Kasztner was journalist and political Tommy Lapid, himself a Hungarian Jew and father of Yair Lapid, the leader of today’s Yesh Atid party.

“Kasztner didn’t start out as someone evil,” says Bogdanor. “He started out as someone who wanted to rescue Jews, and before March 1944, he did rescue Jews. But when the Nazis occupied Hungary, he began negotiating with them and, very quickly, I argue, he became a collaborator.” [...]

Bogdanor makes it clear that while the case against Kasztner is damning, the anti-Zionist claim “that Kasztner was part of a Zionist conspiracy with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe, is nonsense.”

“He was not acting on behalf of the Zionist movement, he betrayed it. This is proved in my book by the fact that he was feeding his contacts in the free world Nazi disinformation. If there had been a Zionist conspiracy with the Nazis, Kasztner wouldn’t have been feeding the Zionists Nazi disinformation,” says Bogdanor.

Joel Brand, who traveled to Istanbul, only to be arrested by the British. (Courtesy)

Joel Brand, who traveled to Istanbul, only to be arrested by the British. (Courtesy)

Kasztner was “drawn into this web of collaboration,” says Bogdanor, by degrees. Part of it was his own sense of aggrandizement and vanity that he was the sole conduit for the Nazis to deal with the Jews of Hungary.

Bogdanor notes members of Kasztner’s rescue committee were the only Jews in the country who did not have to wear a yellow star. They were permitted to continue to use their own cars and telephones and Kasztner, within a month of the occupation, was the only Jew allowed to travel from the capital to the provinces.[...]

The central charge made against Kasztner by the surviving Hungarian Jews was, says Bogdanor, “not just that he failed to warn them [of the Nazis’ intention]. It was that Kasztner had instructed local Jewish leadership to mislead them, and to deceive them into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. After Kasztner had visited the local communities, the leadership spread false information — which he had given them — that the Jews were going to be resettled inside Hungary. Agranat and the other judges overlooked this matter of deception.”

Bogdanor admits to being profoundly shocked by the depth and extent of what he found out about Kasztner. It would have been bad enough, he argues, if Kasztner had passively collaborated with the Nazis. But he actively collaborated, he says, taking steps to mislead both Jews inside Hungary and his Jewish contacts in the outside world.[....]

Bogdanor has met Holocaust survivors from Hungary “who are extremely distressed by the campaign to rehabilitate Kasztner. I felt a greater obligation to them to do what I could for them… Kasztner did know that Jews were being exterminated, he knew and he repeatedly admitted it. His defenders have to say he didn’t know, which is contrary to the facts.”

He saw “a tsunami of pro-Kasztner sentiment,” which had spurred him to write the book, and next year playwright Motti Lerner’s eponymous Kasztner is set for a revival production by Israel’s national theater.

Paul Bogdanor says he constantly asked himself during the decade it took him to write the book, “Am I wrong? Am I sure?”

“But yes,” he concludes. “I am as sure as it is possible to be. Kasztner was guilty.”