Partners in Murder

By Steve Rodan

Although born in the same year, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Kastner seem to have come from different sides of the planet. The former was an Austrian Catholic and the latter grew up in a traditional Jewish home in Romania. But in 1944, they became partners in the worst mass murder in modern history -- the killing of some 500,000 Jews in Hungary. Eichmann was an SS officer in charge of rounding up the Jews and putting them on the trains to Auschwitz. Kastner, the head of the Zionist movement in Hungary, was assigned the job of persuading the hapless Jews that they were being taken to a pleasant labor camp where the children could play in the sunshine and the elderly would be taken care of. The money of the doomed would be shared between the Germans and the Zionists.

What Eichmann and Kastner shared was a burning ambition, absolute loyalty to their movement, a nagging feeling of unappreciation and the ability to tell the baldest lie with a straight face. As a sympathetic biographer later acknowledged, Kastner displayed “cunning and the ability to lie without batting an eyelid." Despite their exaggerated sense of importance, neither Eichmann nor Kastner had anything to do with policy. Their job was to follow orders, regardless of how odious. And that they did extremely well.

Kastner’s rise was rapid — from a small town attorney and sports reporter to the Jewish leader who negotiated with the German leadership in Budapest and served as the main liaison of the Jewish Agency in Hungary. Born in 1906 in the Romanian town of Kolozsvar, now Cluj, the unofficial capital of Transylvania, Kastner rejected his Jewish upbringing and embraced Zionism. His brother, Yehoshua, immigrated to Palestine in 1924. Years later, Rudolf served as political editor of a Jewish daily newspaper. Without submitting a thesis, he was awarded a doctorate. [1]

By 1929, Kastner, a member of Ichud, or Mapai, embarked on a career in Jewish politics, joining the executive of the Palestine Office of the Jewish Agency. With the onset of World War II, Kastner found himself excluded from professional life. By 1941, his newspaper, Uj Kelet, Hungarian for “New East,” a Zionist daily since 1920, was shut down by Hungarian authorities. He was also banned from the Chamber of Lawyers. His father-in-law, Josef Fischer, saved Kastner. In December 1940, Fischer, a member of the Romanian parliament as well as a leading Zionist in Hungary, helped Kastner move to Budapest and start a new career. He became a fundraiser for Keren Hayesod.

Some 18 months later, Kastner, despite the efforts of his friends, was conscripted into the Jewish Labor Service, stationed near Cluj. By this time, Kastner was believed to have been working for German intelligence, in search of Jewish collaborators for the Final Solution. In 1941, Abwehr had recruited a leading figure in the Reform movement, who signed a contract to provide information on the Jews. Kastner was perhaps even more valuable. He combined a deep knowledge of the Jewish community with the cover of a journalist. Nazi intelligence protected Kastner, whose labor brigade had been destined for the Eastern Front. There, the Jews would have been ordered to find landmines, a mission that resulted in few survivors. Instead, Kastner served a brief five months in Hungary, and by December 1942 was back in Budapest.

Kastner Joins German Intel

The Abwehr recruitment of Kastner was probably simple. He was desperate for cash. At 22, he had assumed responsibility for the support of his widowed mother. His salary from Keren Hayesod was a pittance. He had also gained a reputation of a braggart and a thief. He borrowed money often and refused to repay. Jewish or Zionist funds entrusted to Kastner usually disappeared. His personality was grating — jealous, egocentric and incapable of tolerating his colleagues.

In 1942, Kastner’s labor brigade was supplied with funds by the Jewish community of Kolozsvar. The money went missing, and the first suspect was Kastner. An investigation was launched. Leading members of the Zionist and Jewish community, including Nison Kahan, Otto Komoly and Samu Stern, submitted complaints that Kastner had used the money to bribe the Hungarians to release him and his friends from forced labor. Then, money disappeared from the Pro-Palestine Association in Budapest. Again, Kastner was questioned. He had been in charge of collecting contributions for that organization. Nobody believed his denials. Eventually, he was dismissed from the association, although he was not found guilty of embezzlement. Kastner’s acquittal was attributed to Fischer. He had chaired the panel that investigated the missing funds from the Pro-Palestine Association.

Fischer then found a new job for Kastner, helping run a relief committee that would work with Jewish Agency emissaries in Istanbul. At first, Kastner was the least active member of a triumvirate that included Samuel Springmann and Joel Brand. Springmann, a diamond merchant from Poland, was the most experienced and placed in charge of finances. He used his connections with Hungarian and later German intelligence to smuggle money to Jewish ghettos. Brand led rescue efforts, particularly for Jews who sought to flee neighboring Poland. All three Zionist activists maintained contacts with everybody from the SS to the Jewish elite. From the start, the committee practiced selection. Well-off Polish and Czech Jews could buy asylum in Hungary. The three argued over which Zionists should be rescued for free.

What Kastner lacked in wealth, he made up for in intrigue. A political fixer skilled in flattery and bribery, he became a representative of Ichud as well as Keren Hayesod. By December 1942, the Jewish Agency ordered Kastner to take over the relief committee in Budapest. As the committee became prominent, he rose to become its undisputed leader as well as spokesman. The stated aims of the group included the smuggling of Jews from Slovakia and Poland into Hungary “to save them from the threat of the gas chamber,” relaying information on the Nazi killing machine to the Jewish Agency as well as helping Jewish refugees immigrate to Palestine. Kastner also worked with his brother, Ernst, a member of the executive of the World Zionist Organization in Transylvania, and with contacts in Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland.

The Budapest rescue committee strictly followed Zionist policy. It operated upon the expressed consent of the Germans. From the start, Abwehr agents were used as couriers to Poland and neighboring countries. Sometimes the agents and other couriers, such as Polish farmers, took the money given by the rescue panel and disappeared. Still, relations between Abwehr and the committee expanded. In February 1943, Brand, Kastner and Springmann were authorized to use a German military news facility in Budapest. This allowed them to communicate throughout Axis Europe. The Germans also facilitated correspondence between the Zionists, the Jewish Agency in Istanbul and the Zionist rescue committee in neighboring Slovakia.

The German help was not altruistic. Abwehr and the SS soon learned of the routes of Jewish flight and money, their facilitators and the mood among the leadership. Eichmann was also blackmailing Slovak Jews for millions of dollars in exchange for a promise to stop the deportations. To facilitate the ransom scheme, the Germans allowed the Budapest committee to send messages to Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s aide in Slovakia, who eventually arrived with the German occupation in Hungary.

From the start, Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion maintained contact with Kastner. He was seen as absolutely loyal to Mapai and willing to crush Jewish rivals. Even his colleagues acknowledged that he was a cold-blooded opportunist. The head of the Orthodox Jewish community in Hungary, Pinchas [Philip] Freudiger, described Kastner nearly a decade after the German occupation of Hungary: “[He was a] dictator, envied anything done by anybody else, saw everything through the prism of party politics, held an ambition to be the only ruler of a million people [in Hungary].”

In early 1944, Brand and Kastner braced for the arrival of the Germans to Hungary. The two Zionists knew what that meant. Since 1942, they had been tracking the deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz and Treblinka. They also were kept abreast of the negotiations with the SS in Slovakia to suspend the deportations.

Enter Eichmann

Although he blamed Jews for his failures, Eichmann owed them his career and one of his most lasting friendships. [2] In 1933, weeks after Hitler’s government was sworn in, Eichmann, who drifted from job to job, was fired as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Co. He blamed his new Jewish foreman, ostensibly angered by the young Austrian’s involvement with the Nazi Party. Wanted by Austrian police,

Eichmann fled to Berlin and joined the SS. In 1936, Eichmann sought to learn Hebrew and Judaism from a rabbi in Berlin. He would later brag that had he been Jewish, he would have become a “fanatical Zionist.” He memorized entire pages of The History of the Zionist Movement by Adolf Bohm, and would soon demand that the historian devote an entire chapter to the young Nazi bureaucrat. As Eichmann saw it, he, too, was part of Zionist history. He had taken a Zionist newspaper and made it his own. He had helped leading Zionists, whom he praised as “idealists.”

Eichmann felt unappreciated by his superiors in the SS. He was no model for the Aryan nation – short, dark with big ears and sunken cheeks. His laugh was exaggerated and unpleasant. He was plagued by a twitch, made worse by constant alcohol intake. He was regarded as boorish and unimaginative. After more than four years of service, Eichmann, who reported to Gestapo chief Mueller, could not rise above the rank of Hauptfuhrer, the rough equivalent of sergeant.

In June 1937, the SS refused his request to head Himmler’s Scientific Museum for Jewish Affairs. Even at the height of his career, when he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was dismissed as a “low-class, uneducated individual.” But Eichmann was also a quick study. Many of his proposals stemmed from his adjutant, Otto von Bolschwing. In 1937, von Bolschwing wrote a memo that concluded that violence, travel restrictions and economic measures would drive the Jews out of Germany. In subsequent correspondence, he proposed confiscating Jewish money and property, issuing special passports and refusing entry to Jewish exiles.

Eichmann would adopt virtually all of von Bolschwing’s recommendations. In November 1937, Eichmann was ordered to Palestine where he would reside in the German colony north of Tel Aviv, later the site of the headquarters of Israel’s military. His visit marked an opportunity for him to use his knowledge of Zionism and Jews.

Eichmann and Kastner first met as early as 1943. Brand and Kastner had reached out to to the SS officer, which resulted in Eichmann’s consent to spare Zionist activists in Slovakia. Less than a year later, Eichmann and Kastner would see each other on a nearly daily basis during the German occupation of Hungary and the deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz. Eichmann would take his orders from his superiors in the SS; Kastner received his from the Jewish Agency station in Istanbul.

A decade after World War II, Eichmann spoke wistfully of Kastner as a man with whom he could do business, “an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation — and even keep order in the camps — if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine.” Eichmann knew that Jews were escaping – even thousands of them, “some secretly, some with our connivance. It was child’s play for a Jew to reach Romania if he could muster the few pengoes to pay for a railroad ticket or an auto ride to the border.”

Speaking to Nazi sympathizers in Argentina years before his capture by Israel, Eichmann remembered that he and Kastner had reached what he called a “gentleman’s agreement.” “We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement and we trusted each other perfectly... With his great polish and reserve, he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.” Kastner, Eichmann said, would “sacrifice a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his goals...‘You can have the others,’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’”

On trial in Jerusalem in 1960, Eichmann would repeat his affinity for Kastner. Like Eichmann, Kastner was only following orders. The orders weren’t coming from Yitzhak Greenbaum — who never mentioned Kastner in meetings of the Jewish Agency Executive — rather Ben-Gurion and his top aides. It was Moshe Shertok who first reported Kastner’s assignment in Hungary. Kastner and Brand were dealing with the SS in Budapest. Shertok told the Executive of Brand, unknown in Palestine. He didn’t have to do that with Kastner, familiar to most of the agency leadership.

Eichmann would outlive Kastner. In March 1957, after a Jerusalem court determined that Kastner was the leading Nazi collaborator in Hungary, the Mapai politician was gunned down outside his home by a squad that included an Israeli secret police agent. Five years later, Eichmann would be hanged based on his conviction by a three-judge panel, one of whom had presided over the Kastner case. Eichmann was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. By the 1980s, the State of Israel had rehabilitated Kastner and asserted that he was a Zionist hero who had rescued Jews.

Notes

1. In Jewish Blood. Page 286

2. ibid. Page 100

Below: Eichmann and Kastner