Mission Impossible

By Steve Rodan

Sometimes you see a document, read it and file it away and -- forget about it. Only years later do you make a connection with a different document that tackles the same issue, but from a different angle.

In November 2021, we presented U.S. military documents that reported an investigation of Rudolf Kastner, the chief Zionist emissary in Hungary who worked with the SS in the deportation of more than 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. The U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps probe determined that Kastner handed over eight million Swiss francs that he had obtained from Hungarian Jews to SS Col. Kurt Becher. Becher, preparing to be captured by the Allies, then relayed the money and valuables to Moshe Schweiger, a leading Zionist representative who had been imprisoned in Mauthausen throughout 1944 and early 1945. Schweiger was said to have surrendered the loot to the U.S. Army in Austria. From the end of World War II, the Jewish Agency would lobby ceaselessly to obtain the money deposited by Schweiger. In the end, the military acknowledged that it could not find an inventory of the funds deposited by Schweiger or any statement by him. This would prove crucial over the next two years when the Jewish Agency claimed that Becher had handed over no more than $55,000 to Schweiger.

Here is an abbreviated version of the money trail by Kastner himself. It is in a telegram sent by Kastner to his Jewish Agency handler Melech Neustadt, a leading official in the Jewish Agency-led Rescue Committee in Istanbul as well as the Histadrut labor federation in Palestine. The war has just ended and Kastner reports on his activities over the last few weeks: He had transported Jews from Bratislava to Switzerland, including Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, a leading critic of the Zionist leadership.

And then, Kastner gets to the point: The mission to send Schweiger to transfer the Jewish loot to Switzerland failed. Kastner's words are vague until one puts it together with the later CIC investigation.

"Quick defeat made impossible prepared tiyul for Moshe Schweiger."

The Hebrew word "tiyul" was used in Zionist correspondence during the war to denote a mission of either escape or smuggling goods. The term "quick defeat" was a reference to the sudden collapse of Germany, which prevented Schweiger from reaching Switzerland with the money he had received from Becher.

In his May 9, 1945 telegram, that is all Kastner writes regarding Schweiger. But at the end of his message, Kastner requests instructions from the Jewish Agency on how to deal with the American Joint Distribution Committee, involved in paying or promising to pay millions of dollars to Kastner-Becher during the last months of the war. He also stresses that his telegram must reach the Zionist leadership.

"Please inform Gruenbaum, Dobkin, Barlas..."

The Kastner telegram establishes several uncomfortable facts covered up in the official Zionist narrative of Kastner and his mission in Hungary. 1. The Schweiger mission was coordinated and approved by the Zionist leadership. 2. Schweiger was meant to bring the Jewish ransoms and fees obtained by Kastner/Becher to the Jewish Agency in Switzerland. 3. The Becher-Kastner partnership and its aftermath was known to the Jewish Agency Executive. "Gruenbaum" was a reference to Yitzhak Greenbaum, head of the Rescue Committee in Palestine; Eliyahu Dobkin was responsible for immigration to Palestine; Haim Barlas was head of the Jewish Agency office in Istanbul, which communicated with leading Zionists in occupied Europe. All of them reported to David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the agency.

During the criminal libel trial of Malchiel Grunwald in 1954, all of these people would deny working with Kastner, let alone approving his activities with Becher and the SS. The documents that told of the money trail from Hungary to Switzerland were never submitted to the Jerusalem District Court.