The Israeli Regime on Trial

Sixty-eight years ago, Israel presided over a trial that exposed Zionist collaboration with Hitler during the last year of World War II. The criminal libel trial of Malchiel Grunwald turned into the condemnation of his accuser, Rudolf Kastner, a senior member of the ruling Mapai Party who represented the Zionist movement in cooperating with the SS in the extermination of some 500,000 Jews in Hungary between April and July 1944.

For the first two weeks of the trial, Kastner lauded his heroism, his brilliant manipulation of the Germans and his success in saving the Zionist elite. Then, came the cross-examination by defense attorney Shmuel Tamir and Kastner's story fell apart. Painfully, Kastner admitted his collaboration with the German exterminators on orders of the Zionist leadership. He said he didn't try to warn the Jews that they would be sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

By June 1954, Tamir moved into a new stage of attack: trying to establish a direct link between Kastner's collaboration and Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion.

In Jewish Blood: The Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963

Excerpt from the chapter, The First Crack. Page 474.

Soon, Tamir went beyond Kastner’s relationship with the SS. Now, the defense counsel wanted to prove that Kastner had been directed by Ben-Gurion and senior Jewish Agency officials whose loyalty was to Britain rather than the Jewish people. Tamir named Sharett as well as Kollek and tried to lure them into testifying. Several senior officials were summoned to appear and they disassociated themselves from Kastner. Dobkin, who handled Kastner during and after the war, denied any knowledge of Becher. He even denied that Kastner had been working for the Jewish Agency Executive when the latter testified for the Nazis at Nuremberg. Kastner sent a letter to Halevi that Dobkin was covering up. In November 1945, Kastner had sent a report to the Jewish Agency Executive on Becher, copies of which were forwarded to Ben-Gurion and Shertok. Cohen, promising to investigate, demanded Kastner’s letter to the judge.

Tamir cross-examined other members of the Mapai regime. The witnesses erected a wall of denials. Ehud Avriel acknowledged that he had been in constant contact with Kastner in Budapest. But he denied knowing of Kastner’s relationship with the SS in Berlin and Vienna during the last months of the war. He also pleaded ignorance of the British assignment to lure Brand from Turkey into British custody in Syria. Avriel’s words sparked peals of laughter throughout the courtroom.

Menachem Bader said he couldn’t remember receiving a letter from Weissmandel on the killing of 12,000 Jews per day in Auschwitz. Bader did admit that Ben-Gurion stopped him from traveling to Berlin to negotiate the freedom of the Jews during the last 10 months of the war.

Tamir quoted Greenbaum, who refused to transfer money from contributions raised abroad to save the Jews in Europe. The defense attorney argued that Jewish Agency leaders were more culpable than Kastner, who for the most part had been stranded in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

“The fact remains that the moral and historical responsibility, as far as Jews are concerned, lies first and foremost on those who lived in the free world. And though I am here to prove the guilt of Kastner, I say that this responsibility is lesser than that of the leaders of our free Jewish world.”

On July 11, 1954, Tamir summoned an Israeli journalist to detail Becher’s vast fortune and his dealings with the Ben-Gurion and Sharett governments. In late 1953, Raphael Ben-Shoshan had written a five-part series on the German reparations agreement with Israel titled “How Not to Purchase.” On the witness stand, Ben-Shoshan identified Becher as the former SS officer who was selling grain to Israel. Soon after his series was published in Haaretz, the newspaper was threatened with prosecution. But under questioning from Tamir, the journalist refused to retract or revise his story.

Ben-Shoshan asserted that Becher had played a leading role in Israel’s recent purchase of 43,000 tons of wheat from Turkey. The $3.5 million deal had been financed by German reparations to Israel. He testified that Becher had maintained close ties with one of the two German companies that engineered the sale.

Ben-Shoshan said Becher’s involvement was confirmed during the journalist’s visit to Germany, where he managed to enter the ex-Nazi’s office in Cologne. He said Becher’s role in the wheat deal angered Jews who had been advising the Israeli purchasing delegation in Cologne. Two prominent German Jewish businessmen resigned in protest from the advisory panel, furious that the Israeli delegation was dealing with Nazis. The defense witness then described Becher’s position in German society: He was a leading businessman in West Germany, close to the Adenauer regime.30 Tamir concluded that the Jewish Agency and Israel never stopped dealing with Becher. Instead, he became a major supplier to the Jewish state.

By this time, Sharett was convinced that Tamir was using the trial to end Mapai rule. The prime minister was even more vulnerable than Ben-Gurion as the former was openly involved in the Brand mission. Early in the trial, Sharett called Kastner to discuss strategy. They agreed that Kastner’s credibility must be restored. One idea was that the prosecution would call witnesses who could attest to Kastner’s heroism during the war. Hansi Brand was assigned to find Zionist activists in Hungary prepared to testify for Kastner. Another decision was that Cohen would supervise Tel.

As Sharett saw it, Cohen, more than anybody else, was responsible for the debacle. He had been warned by leading officials, including Justice Minister Rosen and State Attorney Erwin Shomron, not to intervene in what could have been a simple libel case. Cohen had selected the inexperienced Tel for what had become the most explosive trial in Israel’s brief history. The attorney general had been ignorant of the political consequences of such a trial.

Sharett sought to marginalize Cohen. Sharett relied on Amos Manor, head of the Shin Bet, now assigned to neutralize Tamir. Soon, defense witnesses were refusing to appear in the Jerusalem courtroom. Two journalists from Davar, Friedrich Mond and Zrubavel Gilad, did not respond to a subpoena. Philip Freudiger, the representative of the Orthodox Jews in Hungary during the war, sent a note from his physician that he had taken ill. At one point, the trial adjourned because there were no longer any witnesses available to Tamir.

One of those threatened by the Shin Bet was Catherine Senesh. Senesh was warned that she would lose her job as a housemother of a girls’ school if she told the court of how Kastner ignored her appeals to save her daughter, Hanna. One of 17 Jews trained by the British to parachute into Hungary in 1944, Hanna was not only an emissary of the Jewish Agency but a British officer. Ordered to help save the Jewish community, she was caught with a radio transmitter as soon as she entered Hungary. Although Kastner had access to Hungarian prisons, he refused to visit Hanna or send her food. She was eventually executed.

At the trial, Kastner blamed Hansi Brand for denouncing two other parachutists who had arrived in Budapest. Later, Kastner changed his mind and claimed it was another member of the rescue committee, treasurer Sandor Offenbach. Kastner’s testimony was so full of discrepancies that it became obvious to the court that he had done nothing to help Hanna Senesh.

With Sharett unable to control the trial, there was only one person who could help Kastner. He traveled for hours through the desert to Ben-Gurion’s house in Kibbutz Sde Boker to beg for guidance if not a halt to the trial. During their 1954 meeting in Sde Boker, Ben-Gurion was polite but evasive. He refused to help Kastner but promised that he would eventually help clear his name. Later, Kastner’s brother, Gyula, urged Ben-Gurion to issue a statement about Kastner’s work during World War II. Again, Ben-Gurion declined, saying this was not the right time to rehabilitate Kastner. With Kastner’s brother, Ben-Gurion pleaded ignorance and said other members of the Jewish Agency Executive were “better informed” about rescue efforts during the war.

Sharett was also threatened by the arrival of diplomats and other foreigners who had been in Budapest in 1944. He ordered the Shin Bet to stop them from testifying for the defense. The visitors were pressured to board flights home on the day of their scheduled appearance in court.

On July 12, 1954, two foreign diplomats left Israel under direct pressure from Sharett. One of them was George Mantello, a Jew born in Transylvania who worked in the El Salvador consulate in Geneva from 1942 to 1945 and publicized a report on the deportation of Hungarian Jews in mid-1944. Mantello, who knew Kastner and worked with Krauss, had been credited with saving thousands of Jews by supplying fictitious citizenship from El Salvador.

In Switzerland, Mantello had braved arrest and deportation in printing the citizenship papers and smuggling them to Hungary. The Zionists and some of the Jewish organizations did not cooperate with Mantello, but asked him for false papers anyway. Mantello also claimed a role in Himmler’s release of 318 Jews from Bergen-Belsen in August 1944. His testimony was potentially devastating to the prosecution.

Just before he was to be called to the witness stand in Jerusalem, Mantello was contacted by Sharett. The prime minister said the diplomat’s testimony could destroy the Israeli political establishment at a time when it needed to settle Jews from the Diaspora. On the morning of his scheduled courtroom appearance, Mantello flew back to Switzerland.

Below: Shmuel Tamir