From Ghetto to Gas Chamber

By Steve Rodan

Within days of the German occupation of Hungary, the extermination machine was revved up. The first task in what was meant to be a rapid process was to assemble a quisling council of Jews prepared to do anything for personal survival. With Zionist help, that was pretty easy. Each member of the council clinged to the hope that cooperation would mean exemption for themselves and their families.

The next step was to ensure Hungarian cooperation in the Final Solution. In other words, anything the SS would decree would be enforced by the Hungarian police. That took no more than a few days. On April 7, the Hungarians drafted regulations that stripped Jews of their rights, forced them to register their valuables and ordered those outside Budapest to move to German-controlled cities.

Then came the harder part: The collusion of the nearly one million Jews in Hungary. This required complete obedience to the flow of German orders meant to isolate, confine and then transport the Jews to Auschwitz. The goal was to expel all the Jews before the arrival of the Red Army.

The first test

The first test came in April 5, 1944. The SS, through the Judenrat, ordered all Jews to wear the yellow star of David, the symbol used in every ghetto in occupied Europe. The badge had to be exact -- four inches and wore on the outer clothing. The hardest part was to convince the assimilated that they were no exception. Everybody classified as Jewish would have to wear this identifying badge -- even most of the members of the Judenrat. 

The superrich had the means to become the exception: In May, the Herzog and Weiss families agreed to hand over their vast holdings. The Herzog family gave up one of the most splendid art collections in Europe, inspected and selected by SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, who sent them to Germany. In exchange, several dozen family members were flown to neutral Portugal and from there to the United States. [1]

By late April, the ghettos were ready, usually consisting of nothing more than the premises of a school or factory. Within days, thousands of Jews would be starving. Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist leader and head of the so-called rescue committee in Budapest, visited what remained of the Jewish communities. He would urge the Jews to cooperate with the SS. When the order comes, the Jews must board the trains waiting to take them to a transit camp where they would be fed and well-treated.

Postcards

Kastner's aides, most of them aligned with the Mapai faction of the Zionist movement, would distribute postcards from those they claimed had already arrived in a camp called Waldsee. There was no place on the map called Waldsee. Virtually all of the postcards contained the same message: "Things are not bad. We feel well. We are working here."

One of the postcards showed signs of having been erased. A Judenrat member Philip Freudiger, took out his magnifying glass and saw the letters "itz." Freudiger was certain that this was what remained of the word "Auschwitz." [2]

At the same time, Kastner and his aides sought to lay their hands on the last assets of the Jews. After assuring the Jews that they were in no danger, the Zionist emissaries would add that money could improve their chances of survival.

Kastner's biggest challenge was persuading the Jews of Cluj to cooperate. He had been an editor at the leading Jewish newspaper in the Northern Transylvania city. On March 27, the first German units arrived by train to Cluj, and tanks took up positions in the main park. The military was followed by the Gestapo, which established its headquarters in the Hotel New York, and with help from the Judenrat immediately began to compile lists of Jews and arresting many of them. Some were accused of being communist sympathizers, others with working with the partisans. [3]

On April 15, the roundup of Jews reached its peak. At first, some 18,000 Jews were confined to a brickyard in the northern part of the city. The Hungarians kept one of the buildings for a torture chamber to extract the whereabouts of Jewish assets. Husbands would be beaten in front of their wives and children.

Kastner's father-in-law, Josef Fischer, was the head of the regional Judenrat. Fischer's colleague, Andrew Balash, urged the Jews to sign up for the train that was supposedly heading for the idyllic and fictitious labor camp at Kenyermeze. They and many of their colleagues would be taken to Budapest upon Kastner's intervention with Eichmann. Within days, the rest of the Jews were taken from Cluj and forced to march to a soccer stadium seven kilometers away. Thousands of Jews wasted away with little food or water and without sanitary facilities. 

Money for rescue

A Kastner representative soon arrived and said he was raising money to bribe the Hungarians and Germans to stop or at least slow down the deportations from Transylvania. The representative said that while any contribution would be welcome, a large amount of money could assure rescue. The representative said Kastner maintained extremely close ties with the SS command. A generous donation might even get a Jew into Switzerland. [4]

The search for money marked a key element in the Zionist cooperation with the Reich. Eichmann and later his colleague Kurt Becher were responsible for robbing the Jews before they were sent to Auschwitz. The Germans did not plan on maintaining the ghettos: After only two weeks, the SS and Hungarian police began emptying the ghettos and packing the Jews into the trains for the three-day journey to the death camp. Within six weeks, the Jews outside Budapest were gone. The Hungarian capital would be the last stage of the extermination plan.

This was no surprise to the West as well as Jewish communal leaders. In April 1944, the World Jewish Congress sent a memorandum from Geneva, Switzerland that Germany was planning to kill all of the Jews in Hungary within six months. The document asserted that the SS planned the extermination in three stages. The first step was to register the Jews and force them to wear the yellow star. This would be followed by arrest and deportation. Hungary would be divided into six zones, with Budapest designated the final area of expulsion.

Leland Harrison, the U.S. minister in Switzerland, urged his superiors in Washington to publicize the SS plan and call on the Jews to run. At the same time, U.S. intelligence was organizing a rebellion in Hungary that would halt train service to German troops headed for the Eastern Front.

"It is proposed that these [Nazi] plans should be denounced by radio repeatedly and vigorously and that the Jews should be told to seek shelter in all ways conceivable inside or outside Hungary, or if possible, to join the partisans. The Jews should be warned not to commit the same mistake as the Jews in The Netherlands and Poland but to avoid registration and destroy in time all relevant lists of communities." [5]

There was no radio broadcast to the Jews of Hungary. Instead, there was Kastner and his colleagues urging their coreligionists to board the trains.

Notes

1. "de Csepel v. Republic of Hungary." Civil Action No. 10–1261 (ESH). Sept. 1, 2011. de Csepel v. Republic of Hungary, 808 F. Supp. 2d 113 | Casetext Search + Citator

2. Freudiger testimony at Eichmann trial. May 25, 1961

3. "The German Occupation of Cluj-Kolozsvar and its Consequences on the History of the City in 1944." Kristof Janos Muradin. Central European Papers, March 2014.

4. The 186 Stairs: The Story of a Jewish Boy in Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk and Ebensee. Alexander Marton. Pages 40-41. Yad Vashem, 1999.

5. Telegram from Harrison to the State Department, April 4, 1944. War Refugee Board Documents. "Jews in Hungary" 84D.1

Below: A ghetto in Northern Transylvania.