The Little Man vs the State

By Steve Rodan

Malchiel Grunwald was the most unlikely of threats to the Zionist regime. At most, he was a pest -- somebody who wrote vitriolic articles in publications that were hardly read. But the running battle between this tummler and David Ben-Gurion started in the early 1930s when Grunwald, who founded the Mizrahi chapter in Hungary, used his newspaper to brand Zionist leaders "Reds."

"This guy, a Hungarian yeshiva student who got old," replied Ben-Gurion's mouthpiece Davar in 1934, "a rabbi who never received ordination, a bitter man mired in his disappointment in that the world never recognized him, destined to spew his poison. He seesaws in his attacks from Right to Left, mainly, of course, against the Left."

Nearly, 20 years later, the State of Israel decided to finally shut up Grunwald. In January 1954, the state oversaw the prosecution of Grunwald in a trial that would rock the nation and, despite all efforts, stain the Zionist leadership with collaboration with Germany during the Final Solution.

Rock bottom

The scandal began when Grunwald hit rock bottom, boycotted by the Israeli media as somebody who garnered libel suits by everybody from his neighbor to his grocer. He was even sued by his newspaper. By 1951, he was reduced to printing a German-language mimeographed sheet that he handed out free around the coffee houses of Jerusalem. But what Grunwald had wrote Ben Gurion could not ignore.

The subject of Grunwald's rant was Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist emissary to Hungary in 1944. Grunwald wrote that Kastner worked with the SS to exterminate the Jews of Hungary while saving his relatives and friends as well as receiving millions from those who tried to escape Budapest. After the war, Kastner helped his Nazi partner, Kurt Becher, escape prosecution at Nuremberg. Ben-Gurion rewarded Kastner by appointing him spokesman for the Trade and Industry Minister, making him a prominent commentator in the state-sponsored media and placing him on the list of candidates for the Knesset.

"Kastner's actions in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews!" Grunwald wrote in the 51st edition of his newsletter "Letters to Friends in the Mizrahi," in August 1952. "We demand an impartial public investigation committee. Kastner must be removed from the politics and society of this land. We shall continue our agenda until the end of this evil."

For a while, Grunwald's story was ignored by the media, but not by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's secret police, known as the Shin Bet. As the months passed, opposition newspapers began to quote from the newsletter without naming Kastner. The Herut daily challenged Kastner to come forward and defend himself. Later, the Haolem Hazeh weekly,the most popular magazine in the country and the bane of Ben-Gurion, published excerpts of Grunwald's article without naming Kastner.

Ben-Gurion 'worked with Hitler'

Instead, Ben-Gurion was accused of working with Hitler to kill the six million Jews during World War II. The article was written by Shmuel Tamir, a leading member of the Herut movement and a fierce opponent of the recent reparations deal with West Germany, which would soon result in hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to the coffers of the ruling Mapai Party. In 1953, the prime minister ordered an investigation and prosecution of Grunwald.

Ben-Gurion assigned the job to Attorney General Haim Cohen, a former yeshiva student who just three years earlier drafted legislation that called for the execution of convicted Nazi collaborators. Cohen ordered reluctant Kastner, who knew Ben-Gurion, to sue Grunwald for criminal libel. If Kastner refused, he would be fired from his government job and investigated on his alleged Nazi past. That meant the end of Kastner's hopes to become a leading Mapai politician, maybe even foreign minister. Friends and relatives urged Kastner to say no. They argued that there were too many survivors who remembered Kastner in Hungary. Kastner insisted that he had no choice.

The trial of Grunwald was set for January 1954. But weeks before Cohen appeared to have a change of heart. Ben-Gurion had resigned in December 1953, and his successor, Moshe Sharett, did not want a trial that might shine a light on what he and the Zionist leadership had done during World War II. Cohen pressured Grunwald to confess to libel. The elderly man refused. He was enjoying the limelight and responded with another newsletter that repeated his accusations against Kastner. He gave interviews to Israeli newspapers in which he called Kastner a war criminal. It was too late for Ben-Gurion or the state to turn back without Grunwald's accusations accepted as truth.

Still, Cohen did his best to separate himself from the trial, which began on Jan. 1. He did not attend the proceedings and instead assigned the case to an assistant. Amnon Tel had meager trial experience and knew little about libel law. Even his Hebrew was poor. Facing Tel was Tamir, regarded as a brilliant trial attorney and who represented Grunwald for free.

On Feb. 18, 1954, Kastner took the stand and hypnotized the court with his detailed claims of having saved Jews before and during the German occupation of Hungary. He spoke of his meetings with Adolf Eichmann and told of the opulent life of the SS chiefs in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna -- their affairs, homosexuality, love of horses and music. All the while, Kastner stressed that his dealings with the SS were coordinated with the Jewish Agency. After the war, he said, Ben-Gurion approved his trip to Nuremberg. Kastner said under oath that he had never testified for Kurt Becher, the SS colonel whose job was to grab the money of the Jews before sent to Auschwitz.

The letter

Finally, Tamir stepped up to cross-examine Kastner. On the first day, Tamir flattered Kastner and lobbed soft questions meant to inflate his narrative of rescue and resistance. But the following day Tamir stopped smiling. He picked up a folder stamped "Exhibit 22," a letter by Kastner to Jewish Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan. Incredibly, the letter had been introduced into evidence by prosecutor Tel. The letter, dated July 26, 1948, reviewed the deals Kastner had made with Becher and Eichmann. The defense attorney, however, focused on Kastner's trips to Nuremberg where Becher had been held as a suspected war criminal.

"Kurt Becher," Kastner wrote, "was an ex-SS colonel and served as a liaison officer between me and Himmler during our rescue work. He was released from prison in Nuremberg by the occupation forces of the Allies owing to my personal intervention."

The court, including Judge Binyamin Halevy, was stunned. Kastner's letter had erased all of his testimony of being a savior and now portrayed him as a collaborator. Halevy, president of the Jerusalem District Court, then took over and asked who authorized Kastner to defend Becher at Nuremberg. Kastner replied by naming names, all of them aides or allies of Ben-Gurion and Sharett.

"Dobkin and Barlas gave me permission to speak in the name of the Jewish Agency," Kastner said. "And Mr. Perlzweig, chief of the political department at the World Jewish Congress, and Mr. Riegner, European representative of the World Jewish Congress, gave me permission."

Halevy: Did they permit you to intervene for Becher and recommend leniency?

Kastner: From my talks with their officials, I understood I was permitted to make the statements.

'A nightmare'

The trial lasted another eight months, but the verdict was sealed with this 30-second exchange. Grunwald's accusations, supported by more than a score of witnesses, were correct: Kastner had been a collaborator who helped slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jews during the war and then, authorized by the Zionist leadership, defended the SS killers at Nuremberg. During the war, Kastner, again with Zionist approval, made deals with Heinrich Himmler that exchanged Jews for money.

On June 22, 1955, Halevy released his decision that confirmed Kastner's role as a leading collaborator of the Third Reich. Ben-Gurion kept quiet but Sharett was in a panic. The man who a year later would be forced out of government convened meeting after meeting with the head of the secret police as well as Zionist agents during the war.

"A nightmare," Sharett wrote in his diary on the same day, "a horror. What did the judge take upon himself!"

Sharett ordered the state to immediately appeal Halevy's decision. Kastner's fate was another matter. He was fired from his government job and urged to leave Israel. The only country that might be willing to take Kastner was West Germany, now an ally of Ben-Gurion. Kastner refused and insisted that he would stay and clear his name.

In March 1957, as the Supreme Court was mulling the state's appeal, Kastner was assassinated outside his Tel Aviv apartment. The man accused of shooting Kastner was identified as an agent of the secret police. A few years later, Ben-Gurion would commute the sentences of Kastner's convicted killers. The court would declare Kastner a misunderstood hero, a claim echoed in Israeli schools, media and the state-sponsored Yad Vashem.

Problem solved.

Below: Malchiel Grunwald enters the Jerusalem District Court in January 1954.