Randolph Braham, Rudolf Kasztner and the Auschwitz Protocols
Randolf Braham, the historian of the Hungarian
Holocaust, who died on November 25th was the most important historian
of the Holocaust after the late Raul Hilberg. His two volume Politics
of Genocide: The Hungarian Holocaust is a massive and detailed exposition
of the background to and the mechanics of how the Hungarian Holocaust was organised.
He was a consummate historian.
The Hungarian Holocaust in which over a half a
million Jews died, is the catastrophe which could and should have been averted.
It is the tragedy for which the Zionist movement above all bears the blame.
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| Admiral Horthy with Adolf Hitler - according to Netanyahu's good friend Viktor Orban he is an 'exceptional statesman' |
Under the leadership of the Prince Regent, Admiral
Horthy, Hungary joined the Tripartite Alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan in
November 1940. But although Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany it had never
been occupied by the Nazis. Hungary joined the Alliance primarily to retrieve the territories that it had lost through the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, a consequence of Hungary being on the losing side in the first world war.
Although there had been 3 Anti-Jewish
Laws of increasing ferocity beginning in 1938, the Jews had been largely untouched
by the Holocaust until 1944. There had been two massacres of Jews at Kamenetz
Podelsk in August 1941 when 16,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered and in
January 1942 Novi Sad when 700 had died, but this apart Hungary’s 725,000 Jews
had remained untouched.
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| Deportation of the Jews of Budapest to the Ghetto which the Hungarian Nazis (Nyilas/Arrow Cross) set up in November 1944 |
This was to change when on March 19th
1944 Nazi Germany occupied Hungary because it feared that Prime Minister Kallay,
who had refused to deport the Jews, would end the alliance with Germany.
It was around this time that preparations were
made at Auschwitz to receive Hungary’s Jewish population. A ramp at Birkenau,
the main killing centre, had been extended almost to the gas chambers
themselves in order to make the process of killing that much more efficient.
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| Rudolf Vrba - Auschwitz escapee |
Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two Jews who
worked in the Canada section of Auschwitz became aware of these
preparations. They had access to the
trains and were part of the camp resistance.
On April 10th both men escaped,
determined to warn the Jews of Hungary.
On April 24th, after a hair raising journey they reached
Slovakia via Poland. They established contact with the Judenrat (Jewish
Council) and on the following day they both sat down in different rooms and
wrote out a description of what was happening in Auschwitz, including detailed
maps. Vrba and Wexler produced what became known as the Auschwitz
Protocols. [See Vrba’s I
Cannot Forgive]
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| Hungarian Jewish children waiting to board the trains to Auschwitz |
This was the first definitive proof of the
role of Auschwitz in the Holocaust. Up till then Auschwitz had been thought of
as a labour camp only. There had been many clues but since neither the Allies
nor Zionists were looking, these clues were overlooked. [two books on this topic
are Walter Lacquer’s The Terrible Secret
and Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the
Allies.
The Protocols were later translated into
German, Hungarian and other languages from Slovak. On or around April 29th
Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism and the head of the Jewish
Agency Rescue & Relief Committee in Budapest, known as Vaadah, arrived in Bratislava and was given a copy of the
Protocols.
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| Ferenc Szalasi, leader of the Hungarian Nazis (Nyilas/Arrow Cross) on being returned to Hungary after the war. At least 50,000 Jews in Budapest died because of the savage pogroms initiated by the Arrow Cross. Szalasi was executed by the Peoples Committees set up after the Nazis were defeated. |
Kasztner was urged to distribute the Protocols
as soon as possible and to warn Hungarian Jewry as to their fate. Hungarian
Jews were not like the Jews of Poland.
They were largely secular and mixed throughout the country.
Adolf Eichmann’s Judenkommando consisted of less than 300 SS men. They had
relatively little time within which to round up the Jews, not least because the
Soviet Union was beginning its offensive in Romania in April 1944. Romania formally
switched sides in August 1944 with the coup by King Michael but Romania had
become a refuge for Jews much earlier. Eichmann could only carry out the Final
Solution in Hungary if he obtained the collaboration of the Jewish leaders in
Hungary.
Kasztner decided to not to distribute the Protocols because he had reached an
agreement on April 21st with Eichmann that in exchange for his
co-operation in the deportations, a train of 600 Prominents, leaders of the
Zionist and Jewish community, would be allowed to depart on a special train out
of Hungary to safety in Switzerland. This did indeed happen on July 1st
and the numbers on it had expanded to 1,684 Jews, mainly Zionists.
Kasztner and his ‘rescue’ Committee together
with the Jewish Council worked closely with the Nazis to the extent of compiling lists of Jews, helping
with the round ups , ordering them to gather in the building yards prior
to deportation and reassuring them that they were going to fictitious places
such as Kenyermeze and Waldsee.
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| Jews on the Kasztner Train take a break - they were the lucky ones who got out of Hungary at the expense of half a million others |
Thus what the Nazis were unable to achieve by
themselves they were able to achieve with the help of the Zionist leaders, in
particular Kasztner. After the war, those who had survived Auschwitz charged
that Kasztner, who was now a senior official in the Israeli Labour Party (Mapai)
was a collaborator with the Nazis. Kasztner sued his accuser, Malchiel
Greenwald for libel and thus took place the Kasztner Trial from 1954-58. The trial in the Jerusalem District Court, in
which the Prosecutor for Kasztner was Attorney General Chaim Cohen did not go
to plan. Kasztner quickly became in
effect the Defendant rather than the Plaintiff. The Judge, Benjamin Halevi
upheld the allegations of collaboration and the government of Moshe Shertok
fell in 1955.
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| Munkaks Ghetto in which 24,000 Jews were deported from May 11th to 24th |
Kasztner meanwhile was soon assassinated. The
Supreme Court reversed the original verdict on legal and political grounds but
they didn’t challenge the facts as found by the lower court and in particular
they upheld the charge of collaboration in respect of the testimony that
Kasztner gave at Nuremburg on behalf of Col. Becher, Himmler’s personal
representative in Germany. It later turned out that Kasztner had given
testimony on behalf of 7 Nazis including Hermann Krumey, who had been in charge
of organising the Holocaust in Hungary and Dieter Wisliceny, who had presided
over the deportations in Slovakia and Greece.
The details of this trial were first published
in the book Perfidy
by Revisionist Zionist Ben Hecht in 1961. He was, of course, attacked as an
anti-Semite. Yad Vashem, Israel’s propaganda Holocaust museum, under Professor Yehuda Bauer defended Kasztner and rehabilitated
him.
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| How the Mail treated Bogdanor's book - previously it had screamed 'antisemitism' when the play Perdition directed by Ken Loach was staged |
However even such arch-Zionists as Paul
Bogdanor have been forced by the weight of evidence to accept what
anti-Zionists have long maintained, that Kasztner was a collaborator with the
Nazis, although Bogdanor pretends that Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian
Zionism, acted without the knowledge of the Jewish Agency. [Kasztner’s
Crime, see my review Collaboration
that haunts Zionism]
Although Braham was a Zionist he was not an
uncritical one. He criticised Yehuda Bauer, the main Zionist professor of the
Holocaust, for his partisan historiography. Braham was very critical of the
role of Kasztner and found the failure to distribute the Protocols as soon
as they were written (April 25) as ‘one
of the most baffling enigmas requiring elucidation if one is to understand the
extent of the catastrophe in Hungary.’.[Politics of
Genocide p. 632]
‘Why’ did the Jewish leaders in Hungary,
Switzerland, and elsewhere not distribute and publicise the Protocols
immediately after they had received copies of them in late April or early May
1944? Why did the Vaada leaders who
continued to maintain contact with the
Jewish leaders in Switzerland... fail to include copies of the Protocols in
their lengthy reports on the conditions in Hungary and the status of their
negotiations with the SS? Why did the leaders of the AJDC, Jewish Agency, and Hehalutz, for example, fail to publicise
the reports they had received from the Vaada leaders in Bratislava and
Budapest, including the Weissmandel reports?. [Braham pp. 718-9] Why was the
report on Hitler’s resolution to bring about the Final Solution handled as a
top secret diplomatic communication? .... Even after June 19, the initiative
was taken by a non-establishment Jew, George Mantello....’ [Braham p. 715]
The
explanation was simple as even Yad Vashem historian, Professor Israel Gutman
eventually conceded. Kasztner received a copy of the Protocols on 29th
April but he had already made a decision, with other Jewish leaders, ‘not to disseminate the report in order not
to harm the negotiations with the Nazis.’ [Ruth Linn, p. 72, Escaping
Auschwitz, A Culture of Forgetting].
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| Hungarian Jews were marched down Wesselenyi Street in the heart of Budapest's Jewish Quarter, |
Krasniansky
of the Jewish Council, aware of Kasztner’s forthcoming visit to Bratislava, had
quickly translated the German version of the original Report into Hungarian. He
stated that he personally handed the translation to Kasztner toward the end of
April. [Linn, p.27. Braham p. 712]. Braham cites Eric Kulka as
claiming that Kasztner frequently quoted from the Protocols without divulging
the source, fn. 81 p. 729. ‘Auschwitz
Condoned’ The Wiener Library Bulletin,
London, 23, no. 1 (Winter 1968-9] In another version, he recounted
how the Protocols were sent to Budapest within 2 weeks. According to Bauer, the
report arrived in Budapest ‘perhaps
through Kasztner’ at the end of April and were then handed over to the
leading members of the Judenrat.’ Bauer, Jews
for Sale, pp. 156-7]
In
1946 Kasztner wrote a 300 page Report for the JA, Der Kasztner-Bericht, on his and Vaadah’s activities. It was described
by Braham as ‘self-serving’ Kasztner was silent about the failure to inform Hungarian Jewry.’[Braham p. 706] Braham
outlined the facts as he saw them:
i. Vrba
and Wetzler told their story of Auschwitz to the Slovakian Jewish Council
leaders on April 25-6 1944.
ii.
Freudiger
[Chief Rabbi of Hungary] admitted receiving the Protocols between May 5 and 10
1944.
iii.
Kasztner admitted
that he knew of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry at Auschwitz.
iv.
The Hungarian
Jews were not informed as to their fate.
v.
The
deportation of the Jews began in Northern Transylvania and Carpatho-Ruthenia on
May 15 and lasted till July 7 1944, though one train left on April 16th.
[Braham p.539]
vi.
The Hungarian
Jewish leaders were still translating and duplicating the Protocols on June
14-16 and didn’t distribute them until the latter half of June. [Yahil L, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945
(New York: OUP, 1990) Yahil suggests
that it was only during the second half of June that the Hungarian Jewish
leaders started disseminating copies of the report to the Hungarian authorities
and Swiss representatives].
vii.
The Hungarian
Jewish leaders completely ignored the Protocols in their post-war memoirs and
statements. [Braham pp. 718-9]
Braham advances a number of ‘plausible and to a considerable extent convincing’ claims:
·
Oscar
Krasniansky’s contention in 1964 that he handed a copy of the Protocols to
Kasztner during his visit to Bratislava in late April 1944.
·
Oscar
Neumann’s contention that the Protocols were sent to Hungary, Switzerland and
the Vatican ‘shortly ‘ after completion.
·
Vrba’s claim
that he was told by Neumann and Krasniansky that the Protocols were handed to
Kasztner on April 26th.
·
Kasztner
deliberately remained silent in accordance with an agreement with Eichmann
which allowed him to save a few thousand ‘prominent’ Jews, including his own
family and friends. [Braham p. 719]
Braham was horrified by the current regime
under Viktor Orban in Hungary. A regime
which openly uses anti-Semitism in its attacks on George Soros and which is
seeking to rehabilitate Admiral Horthy, who presided over the deportation of
over 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz.
As is noted below in 2014 Braham resigned from
the Hungarian Order of Merit which was awarded to him in 2011. He also
instructed that his name not be associated with the Holocaust Memorial Center
in Budapest in protest at the rewriting of the history of the Holocaust by Orban’s government. However this rewriting
of the Holocaust, which involved Orban declaring that Admiral Horthy was an ‘exceptional
stateman’ has not prevented a close political friendship between Orban and
Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism is no obstacle to the Zionist
regime in Tel Aviv. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is only of concern to the Israeli government
when opposition to Zionism and Israeli racism is on the agenda. See Netanyahu and Orban: An Illiberal Bromance Spanning From D.C. to Jerusalem
Below is an obituary in the Hungarian Spectrum
and beneath that is a link to the obituary in the New York Times.
Tony Greenstein
Professor Randolph L. Braham, the preeminent
historian of the Hungarian Holocaust, died this morning. He is perhaps best
known for his two-volume The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in
Hungary, a monumental work of historical scholarship, the result of 20
years of work, which covered the unfolding story in minute detail.
During the Kádár regime little time was spent
on Holocaust research. It was only after the arrival of the political change in
1990 that serious research began. In 1997 The Politics of Genocide was
translated into Hungarian under the title A népÃrtás politikája: A holocaust
Magyarországon. Between 2001 and 2014 Professor Braham published seven volumes
in a Hungarian-language series, Tanulmányok a holokausztról (Studies on the
Holocaust). In 2007 he, in conjunction with Zoltán Tibori Szabó, professor at
Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj/Kolozsvár in Romania, began another major,
three-volume undertaking, A magyarországi holokauszt földrajzi
enciklopédiája, which came out in English in 2013 under the title The
Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary.
In March 2014 I was greatly honored when
Professor Braham offered me
his latest article, “Hungary: The Assault on the Historical Memory
of the Holocaust.” Randy Braham, as his friends called him, was a regular
reader and supporter of Hungarian Spectrum and found it a worthy place to share
his research. A Hungarian translation of that article was eventually published
in A holokauszt Magyarországon: hetven év múltán in 2016. As you may gather
from the title of the article, it was a description of the assault by Hungarian
politicians on the historical memory of the Holocaust, from the immediate
post-war years to our days. A large portion of the article was devoted to the
Orbán governments, during both the 1998-2002 and the post-2010 periods.
As a reaction to the wholesale falsification
of history that was taking place in Hungary, Professor Braham returned all his
medals he received and resigned from the Order of Merit of the Republic of
Hungary awarded to him by the Orbán government in 2011. He also forbade having
his name used in connection with the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest,
whose leadership and activities had been greatly interfered with by the Orbán
government.
On a personal note. In the past few years
Professor Braham and I became close friends. I appreciated his unassuming
manner and his sense of humor. I greatly admired his total devotion to the
truth and his stand when that truth was assaulted by politicians and
pseudo-historians. I’m one of the many who find his death a personal loss.
András Heisler: The
Victim Returns: Survival and History
Randolph L. Braham, author of the ultimate
historical narrative of the Hungarian Holocaust, is a survivor of the Shoa. As
a young Hungarian Jew from Northern Transylvania he lived through the horrors
in hiding and in 1945, as a twenty-year-old, he started out for the free world.
He left behind the land of the Holocaust, Europe, and Hungary, yet he spent the
rest of his long life studying the history of the Hungarian Holocaust. He
documented in the most precise detail what happened to his country, his family,
and himself.
He believed in the strength of narration and
awareness. He owed it not only to the dead but especially to the living to
chronicle the story. He knew that something that could happen once could take
place again at anytime and anywhere. He believed that if we know the story, if
we understand what led to the Holocaust, aware of every little detail of its
genesis, if we learn the truth, we will have a chance of guarding against a
similar tragedy. He believed in the power of truth. May God grant truth to his
belief.
He always raised his voice when one had to
speak up. He did it gently but firmly. He spoke when Romanian
nationalists misrepresented the history of their Holocaust, and he took a stand
when the enemies of truth did the same in Hungary.
The enemies of truth claim that they are the
friends of Hungary, but it isn’t so. Braham was the real friend of
Hungary, one of the greatest Hungarian historians. He was a patriot for whom
the mother tongue of truth, the Hungarian language, was his most important
working tool and weapon. He offered the truth to his compatriots as the only
real healing agent since assessing the past is the only real chance. He knew
that only those who take a hard look at the past and who accept and draw
lessons from it can have an opportunity to live a meaningful and responsible
life.
Last year, at the age of 95, he paid a visit
to Hungary. Before his lecture in Goldmark Hall he visited me in my office,
where he recited by heart perhaps the most famous love poem of Sándor Petőfi,
the great Hungarian national poet. He loved Hungary, and he wanted to shield us
against the resurrection of our darkest demons.
The truth by now is known. It is in Randolph
L. Braham’s exhaustive works. Never again can we say that we are not familiar
with it, that we don’t know about it. Thanks to Professor Braham, we will never
be able to free ourselves from the truth. May the time come when every
Hungarian will be grateful for that. A few weeks ago he wrote me an open letter
in which he asked us to defend “the historical integrity of the Hungarian
chapter of the Holocaust.” Dear Braham, I promise that it will be done.
András Heisler, President of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities
(MAZSIHISZ)
November 25, 2018
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