The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (101 page)

As usual in east-central and eastern (non-Soviet) Europe, the main institutions that to a certain degree could have stemmed the anti-Jewish drive were the churches (the great majority of the population was Catholic; a minority was Lutheran). Pius XII did join other leaders in interceding with Horthy to stop the German operation. This first public intervention of the pope in favor of the Jews was sent on June 25, 1944, after the “Auschwitz Protocols” had reached the Vatican via Switzerland.
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Despite full knowledge of the ongoing extermination, even this message was worded in rather hazy terms: “Supplications have been addressed to Us from different sources that we should exert all Our influence to shorten and mitigate the sufferings that have, for so long, been peacefully endured on account of their national or racial origin by a great number of unfortunate people belonging to this noble and chivalrous nation. In accordance with Our service of love, which embraces every human being, Our fatherly heart could not remain insensible to these urgent demands. For this reason we apply to your Serene Highness, appealing to your noble feelings, in the full trust that your Serene Highness will do everything in your power to save many unfortunate people from further pain and sorrow.”
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As historian Randolph Braham noted, the word “Jew” did not appear in Pius’s message, even in these circumstances.
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Neither, it should be added, was there any mention of extermination.

Such lack of pontifical forcefulness did not encourage the head of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal Justinian Seredi, to take any bold step of his own. Seredi was an anti-Semite of the traditional Christian ilk and had voted in favor of the first two anti-Jewish laws of 1938 and 1939.
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The heads of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Hungary knew what the deportations to Germany meant, and some of their main leaders (including Seredi) had apparently received the “Auschwitz Protocol.” Yet, from March to July 1944, the leading Christian dignitaries could not be swayed to take a public stand against the policies of the Sztójay government. Both Seredi and the heads of the Protestant Churches sought, first and foremost, to obtain exemptions for converted Jews, and in this they were partly successful precisely because they abstained from any public protest against the deportations in general.
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Regarding the deportation of the Jews as such, Cardinal Seredi finally drafted a short pastoral note that was read on July 16, a week after Horthy had stopped the transports. In the original pastoral letter—never publicly read—Seredi had stated that one part of Jewry “had had a guilty and subversive influence on the Hungarian economic, social and moral life…[while] the others did not stand up against their coreligionists in this respect.”
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In other words, all Jews were guilty, and Seredi’s position was very close to that of his deputy, Gyula Czapik, archbishop of Eger, who in May 1944 had argued “not to make public what is happening to the Jews; what is happening to the Jews at the present time is nothing but appropriate punishment for their misdeeds in the past.”
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The papal nuncio in Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, was more outspoken than the Holy See itself and tried to sway Seredi toward more active protest; he drew Seredi’s ire, and on two different occasions Rotta’s interventions showed the cardinal’s frustration with the pope’s own abstention. On the first occasion, on June 8, Seredi told the nuncio that it was “deceitful for the Apostolic Holy See to maintain diplomatic relations with the German government which carries out these atrocities.”
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The second occasion was a meeting of representatives of the Christian churches to discuss the possibility of a joint intervention. Apparently an angry Seredi burst out: “If His Holiness the Pope does nothing against Hitler, what can I do in my narrower jurisdiction? Damn it.”
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A few Catholic bishops courageously spoke out in their dioceses but these were lone voices that could not have a major impact on the attitude of the Hungarian population.

IV

As the events in Hungary unfolded with extraordinary speed in the face of the world, two related issues arose that remain highly contentious to this very day: The attempt of some members of the Jewish “Relief and Rescue Committee” (the
Vaadah
—the Committee, in Hebrew) to negotiate with the Germans; and the Allied decision concerning the bombing of the railway line from Budapest to Auschwitz or of the Auschwitz killing installations as such.

The
Vaadah
was established in the Hungarian capital at the beginning of 1943 to help Jewish refugees, mainly from Slovakia and Poland, who had fled to Hungary. Rudolf Kastner, a Zionist journalist from Cluj; Joel Brand, another native from Transylvania and something of an adventurer in politics and otherwise; and an engineer from Budapest, Otto Komoly, became the leading personalities of the
Vaadah
, whose executive committee had been joined by several other Hungarian Jews.

In late March or early April 1944 Kastner and Brand met in Budapest with the ubiquitous Wisliceny, on Weissmandel’s recommendation and following contacts established by some SD officers. Eichmann’s envoy was offered a substantial amount of money (two million dollars) to avoid the deportation of the Jews of Hungary. But as it became clear that the
Vaadah
could not come up with such an amount, Eichmann summoned Brand sometime in mid or late April, and made several offers that ultimately became the notorious exchange of the lives of 800,000 Hungarian Jews against the delivery by the Western Allies of 10,000 winterized trucks to be used solely on the Eastern Front. The SS would allow Brand to travel to Istanbul, in the company of Bandi Grosz, a multiple agent and a shady figure by all accounts, on whom Himmler’s men were relying, at least so it seemed, to establish contacts with the West.
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Eichmann’s proposal should be interpreted in relation to a cable sent by Veesenmayer to Berlin on April 3. The Reich plenipotentiary advised Ribbentrop that Allied bombings of the Hungarian capital had exacerbated anti-Jewish feelings; the possibility of executing one hundred Jews for each Hungarian killed had been evoked. Veesenmayer was not sure whether such a large-scale retaliation was practical, but before considering any concrete steps, he wanted to know whether another track, apparently suggested to Hitler by Ribbentrop, remained an option; if the answer was in the affirmative, mass executions would of course be excluded: “In reference to the suggestions made by Herr Reichsaussen-minister to the Führer about offering the Jews [of Hungary] as a gift to Roosevelt and Churchill, I would like to be informed whether this idea is still being pursued.”
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Veesenmayer’s cable indicates that the kind of barter suggested by Eichmann had been discussed between Hitler and Ribbentrop, and that its implementation was taken over by Himmler’s men, almost certainly with Hitler’s agreement. Of course there was no intention to free any substantial number of Hungarian Jews. The unparalleled rapidity and scale of the deportations and of the exterminations is the best indication of what, at that stage, the Germans really meant. The intent behind the contacts with the naive Jewish representatives was grossly simple: If the Allies rejected the German offer, they could be saddled with the responsibility for contributing to the extermination of the Hungarian Jews; as after the Evian conference of July 1938, the Germans could proclaim once again: “Nobody wants them!” If by chance, however, due to Jewish pressure (as seen from Berlin), the Allies were to start any kind of negotiations, Stalin would be apprised of it and the rift in the Grand Alliance, which Hitler impatiently awaited, would follow. The rationale behind Grosz’s mission was most probably identical: If the West accepted the idea of separate negotiations, the Soviets would be informed and the end result would be the same.
⁷⁴

On May 19, 1944, Brand and Grosz landed in Istanbul. While Grosz went on his separate “mission,” Brand conveyed the SS proposal to the Yishuv’s delegates in Istanbul. A series of quickly unfolding events followed. One of the Yishuv envoys in Istanbul, Venia Pomeranz, traveled to Jerusalem to inform Ben-Gurion of the German proposal. The Jewish Agency Executive, convened by Ben-Gurion, decided to intervene immediately with the Allies, even if the chances of a deal with the Germans were generally seen as very slim. The British high commissioner in Palestine, informed by Ben-Gurion, agreed that Moshe Shertok, in charge of foreign affairs in the Executive Council of the Jewish Agency, be allowed to travel to Istanbul to meet with Brand. While Shertok’s departure was delayed, Brand himself had to leave Turkey. Thus it was in Aleppo (Syria), where he was kept under British arrest, that the envoy from Budapest met with Shertok, on June 11.
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Brand repeated the gist of the German message to Shertok. The issue became further complicated, at least on the face of it, by a German offer to invite one of the Jewish Agency delegates in Istanbul, Menachem Bader, to travel to Budapest—even to Berlin—and negotiate directly there. The Germans even seemed ready to relinquish their demand for trucks and return to the initial idea of an adequate financial offer. According to postwar testimony, Eichmann promised to liberate 5,000 to 10,000 Jews, upon reception of the first positive answer from the West and in exchange for German POWs.
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Although the leadership of the Yishuv soon understood that Grosz’s mission was the main German ploy and Brand’s a mere accessory and additional bait, Shertok and Weizmann nonetheless interceded with Eden in London for some gesture that would allow time to be gained and eventually save part of Hungarian Jewry. On July 15 they were told that the German “offer” was rejected. Churchill himself, in a letter to Eden of July 11, estimated that the German proposal was not serious, as it was a “plan broached through the most doubtful channel…and is itself of a most doubtful character.”
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In the meantime Brand had been transferred from Aleppo to Cairo, where he remained under British interrogation. At that point his mission came to an abrupt end. It seems that before his death in 1964, Brand himself reached the conclusion that his mission had essentially been a German maneuver meant to undermine the alliance between the Soviets and the West.
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For the Yishuv leadership the failure of this rescue attempt, as flimsy as its chances had been, represented a serious setback. The hope of saving hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews disappeared. For Ben-Gurion, moreover, the crucial question surfaced once again: Who would build the Jewish state in Eretz Israel? “We are now on the brink of the end of the war,” he declared in September 1944, “with most of the Jews destroyed. Everyone wonders: Where will we find the people for Palestine?” Later he wrote: “Hitler harmed more than the Jewish people whom he knew and hated: he caused damage to the Jewish state, whose coming he did not foresee. The state appeared and did not find the nation that awaited it.”
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On July 10 Ribbentrop informed Veesenmayer that Hitler had agreed to the demands addressed to Horthy by the United States, Sweden, and Switzerland to repatriate their Jewish nationals from Budapest to their home countries. But, Ribbentrop added, “We can agree to this accommodation only under the condition that the deportation of Jews to the Reich, temporarily stopped by the Regent, be immediately resumed and brought to its conclusion.”
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On July 17 the foreign minister demanded that Veesenmayer inform the regent of the following, in Hitler’s name: “The Führer expects that now the measures against the Jews of Budapest be taken without any further delay, with the exceptions…granted to the Hungarian government. However, no delay in the implementation of the general Jewish measures [
Judenmassnahmen
] should occur as a result of these exceptions. Otherwise, the Führer’s acceptance of these exceptions will have to be withdrawn.”
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As for the Reichsführer, he met Hitler on July 15 for a discussion of the “Jewish question” in Hungary and indicated Hitler’s approval of his proposals with a check.
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A few days later Himmler boasted in a letter to
Gauleiter
Martin Mutschmann about the 450,000 Hungarian Jews he had already sent to Auschwitz and assured him that, despite some difficulties encountered elsewhere—in France, for example—in Hungary the task would be completed. “Be assured,” Himmler concluded, “that particularly at this decisive moment of the war, I do possess the necessary hardness, as before.”
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It remains hard to believe that the shrewd Kastner had high hopes regarding the success of Brand’s mission. Whatever the case may be, he must soon have understood that SS officers of Wisliceny’s ilk—and the whole Budapest group—were also ready for more limited deals that could be explained away as ransoming operations for the Reich. And such operations could also be highly lucrative for some of the SS participants. Thus, in a series of negotiations that lasted from April to June 1944, Kastner convinced Wisliceny, Eichmann, and Himmler’s underling (whose function at the time was supplying horses to the SS), Kurt Becher, to allow a train with (ultimately) 1,684 Jews to leave Budapest for Switzerland, as a sign of German goodwill, in the framework of the wider “exchange negotiations.” The price was one thousand dollars per Jew, and Becher, who negotiated the final arrangement, managed to have some of the lucky passengers pay twice.
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On June 30 the train left, first—and unexpectedly—for Bergen-Belsen: The Kastner Jews nonetheless reached Switzerland in two transports, one in the early fall; the second, several weeks later. Although Kastner was not alone in choosing the passengers, his influence on the selection committee was considerable; it led to postwar accusations of nepotism and to two court cases in Israel; eventually it cost Kastner his life.
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