The Zionist Who Saved Jews

By Steve Rodan

Moshe Krauss was a loner in the Zionist leadership in Hungary. Krauss was modest, pedantic, law-abiding and most of all an observant Jew in a movement that celebrated breaking the shackles of religion.

But this young, ordained rabbi, at the most crucial moment, defied the Zionist leadership and helped save tens of thousands or more Jews toward the end of World War II. Throughout, he faced the wrath of Adolf Eichmann and his Zionist partner Rudolf Kastner.

Unlike Kastner, Krauss moved rapidly up the Zionist ladder. In 1932, at age 24, he was appointed secretary-general of Mizrahi, by far the largest faction in the Zionist movement in Hungary. Two years later, he was named secretary of the Palestine Office in Budapest. and in 1938 became director. Although Hungary contained the second largest Jewish population in Europe, the Zionist leadership, through the Jewish Agency in Palestine, virtually banned immigration from that country throughout the Hitler years. During World War II, Krauss was given no more than 50 entry certificates a month. But by the spring of 1944, Krauss had accumulated 1,500 unused certificates.

Bitter enemies

By 1943, Krauss and Kastner became bitter enemies. Krauss had demanded that Kastner's so-called Rescue Group account for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it was receiving from a range of sources, including rich Jews who paid to rescue their relatives in Poland as well as the American Joint Distribution Committee. Kastner refused to cooperate and instead accused Krauss of withholding certificates.

When Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Kastner became the undisputed leader of the Jewish community. He tried to unseat Krauss and take away his power to distribute entry certificates to Palestine. Despite pressure by Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion Krauss remained director of the Palestine Office but appeared to have no authority in face of the rapid German deportation of the Jews.

In late April, Krauss decided to make the final break from Kastner and the Zionist cooperation with Hitler in the Final Solution. Krauss openly opposed Kastner's relationship with Eichmann, who approved a rescue train for hundreds while hundreds of thousands of others were being sent to Auschwitz. Krauss also opposed the SS mission to send Kastner's partner, Joel Brand, to Turkey to relay an offer to exchange Jews for trucks. Kastner saw these initiatives as nothing more than smokescreens to enable the Germans to annihilate Hungary's nearly one million Jews before the arrival of the Red Army.

Every loophole

To the consternation of Kastner and the SS, Krauss used every loophole for Jewish refuge. His first act was to exploit a 1938 agreement between Britain and Hungary to protect 240 Jewish refugees on an island in the Danube River while they ostensibly awaited immigration to Palestine.

At the same time, Krauss worked with a Swiss diplomat, Charles "Carl" Lutz, appointed vice-consul in Budapest in 1942. Krauss proposed that Lutz issue schutz-pass, or letters of protection, to thousands of Jews. The Hungarian government allowed Lutz to hand out 8,000 such letters to Jews with approval to emigrate. Lutz and Krauss expanded that to 8,000 families, or some 40,000 people, a move recognized by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Many of the recipients were granted haven in a former glass factory known as the Glass House and protected by the Swiss legation in Budapest. The legation then supplied 76 additional buildings that were also given protected status. The Hungarian government said the Swiss documents would provide these Jews with freedom of movement.

Krauss' methods caught on with other Western embassies. Sweden distributed so-called protective passports through Raoul Wallenberg, the emissary of King Gustaf V. The Swedes, including diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte, organized some 30 safe houses for Jews to escape capture and deportation. Soon, Portugal, Spain and the Vatican issued similar protective passes. Thousands of other Jews made do with forged documents.

But all of this was seen as providing no more than a respite from the German killing machine. Krauss arranged trains for Jews with international protection to leave Hungary for Palestine. The trains would begin in Budapest and arrive in Constanza, Romania. From there, the Jews would board ships to Istanbul, Turkey.

Blocking the last phase

Eichmann and the SS were stunned. Krauss' activities threatened to block the last phase of the extermination of Hungary's Jews -- Budapest. Eichmann ordered Kastner to stop Krauss and come up with arguments not to honor the documents that protected the Jews. Meanwhile, the Germans stalled in allowing any Jews to leave.

"The wait [for a German reply] was long, and we didn't know the reason until we found out something very strange," Krauss later recalled. "Someone had informed the German legation that the 7,800 documents applied to individuals, not families. That someone was one of us -- Dr. Kastner."

Then, Krauss did something that was even more daring. From the Swiss office in occupied Budapest, he told the world of the genocide in Hungary. For months, he had written to the Zionist leadership of the genocide; virtually, none of his letters were answered. Now, Krauss printed and distributed scores of copies of a report by two fugitives from Auschwitz that detailed the camp and the daily death toll from the gas chambers. The report by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler had concealed by the Zionist leadership.

This time, Krauss turned to the diplomatic community in Budapest. Once the report was publicized in the Western media, protests erupted against Hungary and its leadership grew scared. The Allies began bombing Hungary, and on July 2, heavily damaged the railway station in Budapest meant to take away the remaining Jews. A week later, Hungary's dictator, Miklos Horthy, threatened with being branded a war criminal, ordered the end of the deportation of Jews.

For Eichmann and his boss Heinrich Himmler, this couldn't have come at a worse time. Eichmann had organized 66 trains to transport an estimated 200,000 Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. The Red Army was moving into Hungary and might reach the capital within weeks. Kastner, who promised another rescue train, denounced Krauss at every turn and warned that he was endangering the Jews by not cooperating with the Germans.

Blocked by Hungary, Eichmann was recalled to Germany. He returned in October to restart the deportation machine but soon the Jews revolted in Auschwitz and the gas chambers were abandoned weeks later. Now, the killing in Budapest was conducted through raids by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and German marches of thousands of Jews in the snow. By December, Kastner, who feared the arrival of the Red Army, fled with the SS to Vienna. Krauss stayed with the Jews.

Everybody but Krauss

The State of Israel honored virtually everybody who worked with Krauss. In 1964, Lutz was given the title "Righteous Gentile" by Yad Vashem as well as honorary Israeli citizenship. Wallenberg, who disappeared after the arrival of the Red Army, was also commemorated as a rescuer of Jews. At every ceremony in Israel, Lutz would credit Krauss with the rescue. His words were greeted with silence.

Krauss was turned into a pariah. The process began months after the war, when he was dismissed as Palestine Office director. The Zionist leadership ignored Krauss' complaint against Kastner that he had been the leading tool of the Germans in Hungary. Instead, Kastner became an emissary of Ben-Gurion while Krauss languished in Switzerland.

But Krauss' accusations against Kastner never died. In 1955, Kastner was finally branded a collaborator by a Jerusalem court in a trial that highlighted the Zionist relationship with Hitler. Krauss became a key witness against his Zionist colleague. After the trial, an effort was made to appoint Krauss head of the Aliya Department of the Jewish Agency. The agency, backed by members of Ben-Gurion's ruling Mapai Party, refused. Upon retirement, the agency denied him a pension or back pay.

In 1958, the Supreme Court cleared Kastner of collaboration and several of the judges termed him a misunderstood hero. The exception was Moshe Silberg.

How poor was his [Kastner's] rescue operation, compared to the tens of thousands of sponsorship certificates given by the foreign agencies, especially the Swiss, as a result of the dedicated and wonderful work of Krauss and the pioneers in the months of July-November 1944.

Krauss died in obscurity in 1986 at age 78. Much of his extensive collection of wartime documents had been mysteriously stolen from his home before they could be transferred to Israel's Bar-Ilan University. Israeli academics refused to publish accounts of his rescue during the war. In 2011, a doctoral thesis on Krauss was rejected by Haifa University as unbalanced and unprofessional. Yad Vashem joined in the boycott, and until 1995 there was only document in its archives that named Krauss.

"Krauss is part of a series of silenced voices whose actions threaten the narrative of the Zionist leftist movement and the collective memory, which did not tolerate anything that threatened the Establishment and its people," said Ayala Nedivi, the doctoral student who eventually published a book on Krauss. "It would seem that remembering or forgetting Krauss is a function of the influence of the elite in the areas of law, research, art and communications."

Notes

1. Most of the details in this article stems from "In the Shadow of Kastner," Mordechai Chaimowitz. Maariv. April 15, 2023.

The quote by Nedivi as well as the relationship between Kastner and Krauss come from her eventually published thesis "The Palestine Office in Budapest: Its actions in saving Jews from 1943-1945 and their formulation in the collective memory." Haifa University, January 2009.

Below: Moshe Krauss during World War II. In the background is Auschwitz.