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 Hidden from History – The Behaviour of the Zionist movement During, Before and After the Nazi Period

Please Give Generously to My Crowdfunder - Don't Let the Zionists Silence the Truth About Their Record

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When Ken Livingstone declared, in April 2016, that Hitler supported Zionism, he was attacked as a ‘Nazi apologist’. This was despite the fact that what Livingstone referred to was a matter of historical fact.

A professor recently remarked to me how strange it is that virtually none of the thousands of books and articles on the Holocaust deal with the relationship between the Zionist movement and the Nazis.

Just one academic, Professor Francis Nicosia has broached the subject. The one other book on this topic, by Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, was published nearly 40 years ago.

Left publishers in Britain such as Pluto Press and Verso have shied away from publishing such a book because, in the words of Max Vickers of Zed Press, ‘the highly inflammatory subject matter.’

The Zionist movement is extremely sensitive to this subject. Books such as Ben Hecht’s Perfidy and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, resulted in vicious attacks on the authors. They were accused of saying that the Jews had killed themselves. This of course assumes that most or all Jews during the Hitler period supported Zionism whereas, in Germany for example just 2% of Jews were Zionists. Such an assumption is also anti-Semitic.

 When researching for my book I came across this letter in the Jewish Chronicle of 5 February 1993 about how the Board of Deputies Zionist President Selig Brodetsky deliberately sabotaged the rescue efforts of Rabbi Schonfeld, the Chair of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee - the Zionists opposed emigration to anywhere but Palestine - which was impossible during the war

The 1987 play Perdition, written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, was cancelled just 36 hours before it was due to begin at the Royal Court Theatre such was the political pressure that was exerted.

For the better part of a decade I have been researching the relations between the Zionist movement and the Nazis. I have now written a book Zionism During the Holocaust. My book examines Zionist historiography and how, through its various holocaust organisations, notably Yad Vashem, the historical record has been manipulated and distorted in order to create a series of myths such as that the notion that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was primarily from the Zionists or that only Jews were victims of the holocaust.

I investigate what happened during the rule of the Military Junta in Argentina (1976-83) when up to 3,000 Jews were murdered yet Israel stayed silent since it considered it more important to sell arms to Argentina’s neo-Nazi  regime. At the same time Israel refused to process visa applications from ‘subversive’ or left-wing Jews.

The Israeli flag flew proudly with the Confederate flag and Auschwitz Was Not Enough T-shirts at Trump's  Capital Hill riot

I researched the Board of Deputies record during WW2 when, under  its President Selig Brodetsky, it actively tried to sabotage attempts to secure entry to Britain of Jewish refugees.

I also ask what collaboration with the Nazis means and in particular the Zionist decision to negotiate a trade pact Ha'avara with the Nazi regime at the same time as most of world Jewry was boycotting Nazi Germany. I also look at the Kasztner Affair, the trial in Israel of Rudolf Kasztner.

Ken Loach who produced Perdition

During WW2 the Zionist movement prioritised achieving a Jewish state over the rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. Even worse it actively sabotaged all rescue attempts that didn’t involve Palestine as the destination.

The subject matter of my book is highly relevant. The ideological congruity of Zionism and Nazism is being played out in the dominance of an openly racist and eugenicist far-Right in Israel today. The alliance between Zionist groups internationally and the neo-Nazi far-Right was witnessed in the hero’s welcome given to Tommy Robinson on this May’s pro-Israel demonstration in London.

My book is nearly 190,000 words including over 3,000 footnotes. It covers some of the key historical debates surrounding the Holocaust such as whether the Nazis’ intention from the start was to wipe out Europe’s Jews. It relies primarily on Jewish and Zionist sources.

I also explore the use by the Zionist movement and the Israeli state of the Holocaust as a political weapon to silence opposition and pursue its geo-political goals. Abba Eban, Israel’s Foreign Minister, compared the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank to ‘Auschwitz borders’. Israeli Professor Edith Zertal wrote that there hadn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the holocaust.’ Israel had mobilised the holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics’.

Unbelievably there were some in the Zionist leadership who actually welcomed the rise of the Nazis. The Zionist national poet, Nahman Bialik stated that ‘Hitler has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’ For David Ben Gurion, ‘The Nazis victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.’

The Zionist movement and Israel have tried to draw a line between the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and Israel’s war against the Palestinians. At the time the Zionist movement berated the ghetto fighters for refusing to abandon the fight against the Nazis and get out.

When the last Commander of the Jewish Fighting  Force (ZOB) Marek Edelman died, he was given a 15 gun salute in Warsaw and the Poland President attended. The Israeli Embassy didn’t even send its lowliest clerk to attend. Why? Because Edelman was a member of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund.

Israel today is a state which inspires admiration amongst anti-Semites, Christian Zionists, White Supremacists and neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer. However this is not new. Anti-Semites have always supported Zionism as a means of getting rid of their Jews. But whereas fascists once chanted ‘Death to the Jews’ in Europe , today Israelis chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ in Jerusalem.

Just in case you've forgotten how Lansman scabbed against all those expelled and helped bring down Corbyn with his Zionist sympathies

I estimate that this book will be about 550 pages. I envisage that the cost of production and distribution, including launching the book will be of the order of £6,000 and that is why I am appealing to anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians to ensure that the days when Zionism can control the Holocaust narrative is ended.

If you do make a donation please email me your name at tonygreenstein111@gmail.com. This is especially important if you donate to the crowdfunder as I expect the Zionists to try to do their best to have it taken down!

Thank you,

Tony Greenstein 

For those who wish to contribute I have set up a crowdfunder. If you want to avoid them taking 3% it is better to send any donations to the following account. I am not a signatory to the account so please make sure you use the reference ‘BOOK’

Name:                  BHUWC

Sort Code:           09-01-50

Account No:        04094107

Reference:  Book

Or alternatively you can send any donations to my Paypal account

tonygreenstein111@gmail.com

Death of the Historian of the Hungarian Holocaust

Randolph Braham, Rudolf Kasztner and the Auschwitz Protocols

Randolf Braham, the historian of the Hungarian Holocaust, who died on November 25^th 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.

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.

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 19^th 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.

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 10^th both men escaped, determined to warn the Jews of Hungary.  On April 24^th, 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]

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 29^th 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.

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 21^st 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 1^st 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.  

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.

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.

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 29^th 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].

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 16^th. [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

In memoriam: Randolph L. Braham (1922-2018)

by Eva S. Balogh

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 népírtás 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

Randolph Braham, 95, Holocaust Scholar Who Saw a Whitewash, Dies

Israel's Kasztner Trial - The Collaboration with the Nazis that still haunts Zionism

Review of Paul Bogdanor's 'Kasztner’s crimes - Tony Greenstein

Below is the unedited version of my review of Paul Bogdanor's Kasztner's Crimes which appears in the current issue of the Weekly Worker.  I have included a section on the Haganah paratroopers, in particular Hannah Szenes, which was left out of the version published in Weekly Worker for reasons of space.

This is the only critical review I know of, certainly from a socialist and anti-Zionist perspective, of a book that has garnered uncritical reviews.  The primary purpose of Bogdanor's book is to rehabilitate the reputation of the Zionist movement in Hungary by throwing Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of the Zionist movement in Hungary, to the wolves. 

Deportation of Jews from the town Koszeg, Hungary, 1944

It is not surprising that Yad Vashem, the Zionist Holocaust Propaganda Museum, which rehabilitated Kasztner's reputation and defended him to the hilt, has not responded to the book or its criticism of its premier historian, Professor Yehuda Bauer.

When Ken Livingstone was suspended for saying that the Nazis supported Zionism, people seized on the Nazi-Zionist trade agreement Ha'vara, which was agreed in August 1933.  However, although that was the first instance of Zionist-Nazi collaboration, the primary example was that of Rudolf Kasztner's betrayal of Hungary's Jewish population at a time in the war, May 1944, when the Nazis couldn't have carried out a mass deportation but for the collaboration of the Zionist 'Rescue and Relief Committee' which Kasztner headed (officially he was the deputy head).

Tony Greenstein

Paul Bogdanor - son of Vernon Bogdanor, Oxford's dry constitutionalist - dedicated anti-Communist and Zionist - in damning Kasztner he sought to rehabilitate Zionism's reputation during the Nazi era

Zionists persuaded people to take trains to Auschwitz

For years the Zionist movement defended Rudolf Kasztner - the leader of Zionism in Hungary during the Nazi occupation - against charges of collaboration with the Nazis. Yad Vashem, the holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem, gave its stamp of approval to the efforts to rehabilitate him. Tommy Lapid, chairman of its board of directors, is on record as saying: 

“There was no man in the history of the holocaust who saved more Jews and was subjected to more injustice than Israel Kasztner.”¹

At first sight it is somewhat strange that Paul Bogdanor - who combines anti-communism and Zionism in equal measure - has written a book which accepts the long-standing anti-Zionist criticism of Kasztner.  That Kasztner was a Nazi collaborator who deceived Hungary’s Jews into boarding the deportation trains to Auschwitz with false information about being ‘resettled’ in a fictitious placed called Kenyermeze. Why then this about-turn?

Hungarian Jews waiting for the train to Auschwitz - they were misled by Kasztner and the Zionists into believing they were heading for the mythical Kenyermeze or Waldsee

Bogdanor claims that he initially set out to clear Kasztner. He was “tired of seeing Kasztner’s name come up repeatedly in anti-Zionist propaganda”. Bogdanor now argues that “the anti-Zionist claim that ‘Kasztner was part of a Zionist conspiracy with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe’ is nonsense”. He was “not acting on behalf of the Zionist movement: he betrayed it”.²

In the above quotation we can see where Bogdanor is coming from. No anti-Zionist has ever alleged that there was a Zionist conspiracy with the Nazis to exterminate Europe’s Jews - this kind of falsehood is Bogdanor’s trademark. It is a straw man. The Zionist movement did, however, collaborate with the Nazis.

When I accused Bogdanor of being a columnist for David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag,³ he denied this, despite being listed as a columnist.⁴ He also contributed an article, ‘Chomsky’s war against Israel’,to The Anti-Chomsky reader,⁵ edited by Horowitz.  Frontpage Mag had previously published Bogdanor’s article, ‘The top 100 Chomsky lies’. Bogdanor has an obsession with Jewish anti-Zionists - myself included.⁶

The reason why anything that Bogdanor writes should be treated with the utmost caution is his political and intellectual dishonesty. Bogdanor would defend the slaughter of the innocents if he thought that King Herod was a Zionist.

Adolf Eichmann - Bogdanor maintained that everything he said couldn't be trusted but nonetheless ended up quoting from his 1956 interviews

An example of Bogdanor’s method is his criticism of Lenni Brenner, whom Ken Livingstone relied on when he said that Hitler supported Zionism. Bogdanor criticised Brenner’s use of an interview with Adolf Eichmann by Wilhelm Sassen, a Dutch Nazi journalist.⁷ Bogdanor described this interview as a “transparently worthless source”.⁸ Of course, just because a quotation is from a Nazi war criminal does not make it invalid, especially given that the interviews were conducted freely, long before his kidnapping.⁹ Otherwise one must eschew all Nazi sources: eg, The Goebbels diaries.

Bogdanor asked if I was unaware that “Nazi mass murderers - and Eichmann above all - were pathological liars”.¹⁰ In reply I asked whether it is a principle that one never quotes or cites what Nazi murderers say? Perhaps one should not quote Nazi documents too? Sometimes even liars tell the truth. Or maybe Bogdanor is an exception to the rule?¹¹ His response was: “Just as citing a Nazi sympathiser comes naturally to one who treats Adolf Eichmann as a truth-teller, so reliance on Stalinists is only to be expected from a writer for the Communist Party of Great Britain.”¹² Imagine my surprise when Bogdanor’s book came out and there was a reference in the footnotes to Eichmann’s interview for Life magazine!¹³

Bogdanor is obviously unaware that the Sassen interview with Eichmann was used extensively by the Israeli prosecution in the Eichmann trial. Eichmann’s Defence of his actions in organising the deportations to the death camps was that he was just following orders. The Prosecution quoted this from his interview: “I thought my orders through and participated in their implementation because I was an idealist.”¹⁴ Eichmann was then cross-examined using the “efficient weapon of the memoir that Eichmann dictated to Sassen”.¹⁵  Presumably the Prosecutor in the Eichmann trial was unaware that he was quoting from a “transparently worthless source”.

The Eichmann trial, which was held in Israel in 1961, was, according to Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, meant to “expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai [Israeli Labour Party] leadership since the Kasztner trial”.¹⁶

Kasztner in the dock

Rudolf Kasztner - head of Hungarian Zionist movement - on the Knesset list of Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) was also a Nazi collaborator

Ever since Kasztner had come to live in Palestine in early 1947, rumours had followed him. An inquiry in 1946 by the Jewish Agency, at the Zionist Congress in Basel, dismissed complaints brought by Moshe Krausz, who headed the Palestine Office in Budapest, for “lack of evidence”.¹⁷

Bogdanor says that the Labour Zionists “felt compelled to issue a statement praising Kasztner’s ‘tremendous work during the war’” (p.264). It is difficult to see why Mapai felt under any such compulsion unless they felt that a failure to defend Kasztner would also rebound on their own record during the holocaust. Nor does Bogdanor explain why “the Jewish Agency had unceremoniously fired Krausz from his post” (p.270).

Kasztner, a senior official in Mapai, brought a libel action, at the insistence of the state, against Malchiel Gruenwald, a Hungarian Jew who had published a newsletter alleging that Kasztner was guilty of collaboration with the Nazis.

The first comprehensive account of what became known as the Kasztner trial was Perfidy by the Hollywood producer and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. Hecht was a supporter of the dissident Zionists, Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe. Bergson and Merlin had incurred the wrath of the US Zionist leadership under Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldman because they insisted on rescuing Jews, whatever the destination, whereas it was a cardinal principle for the Zionist movement that rescue should be centred on Palestine only.

When Hecht’s book came out he was demonised. My copy includes a ‘review’ article, ‘Ben Hecht’s Kampf’, by Shlomo Katz published in Midstream magazine. Hecht was subject to the same personal attacks and denigration as Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem - a book based on her reports of the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker - had touched on exactly those subjects that the trial had been designed to avoid.¹⁸ Arendt described how

… the campaign (was) conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation ... [it was] as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) “came out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy) … the clamour centred on the ‘image’ of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me, but had never occurred to me before.

The evidence accumulated against Kasztner, despite repeated attempts to exonerate him: for example, Gaylen Ross’s film Killing Kasztner: the Jew who dealt with the Nazis¹⁹ or Motti Lerner’s Kasztner,as well as Yechiam Weitz’s The man who was murdered twice and Anna Porter’s semi-fictional Kasztner’s train.

The holocaust historians at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official “World Holocaust Memorial Center”, led by Yehuda Bauer, have for years tried to exonerate Kasztner. Bauer wrote that it seems to me there are not many people who [like Kasztner] saved many Jews in the holocaust. There are certainly not many who saved for sure 1,684 Jews and contributed to the rescue of tens or hundreds of thousands.²⁰

Kasztner's trial began on January 1 1954, presided over by Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court: On June 21 Halevi found that 

“when Kasztner received this present [a train out of Hungary for Kasztner’s friends and the Zionist/Jewish elite] from the Nazis, he had sold his soul to the German Satan.”²¹

Krumey - a ruthless mass murderer who learnt his trade in Poland and Austria - organised the deportation of Hungarian Jewry - Eichmann's Deputy - Kasztner testified for him on behalf of the Jewish Agency

Halevi went on:

Eichmann did not want a second Warsaw. For this reason, the Nazis exerted themselves to mislead and bribe the Jewish leaders ...

The Nazi patronage of Kasztner, and their agreement to let him save 600 prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews ... The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism.²² 

On May 2 1944, 13 days before the trains started for Auschwitz, Kasztner had reached an agreement with Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary:

Kasztner possessed at that moment the first news about the preparation of the gas chambers in Auschwitz for Hungary’s Jews … [he could] warn the leaders and the masses about the real danger of the imminent total deportation facing Hungary’s Jews, and immunise them against Nazi deceptions ... The other way opened for Kasztner by Krumey was the method of rescuing Jews by the Nazis themselves, with their help, according to agreement with the heads of the SS ²³

Deceit

On April 24 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Rosenberg, two Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, reached Slovakia. They described to the Jewish Council Auschwitz’s purpose (which previously had been thought of only as a labour camp) and provided details of the gas chambers and crematoria, as well as an estimate of the numbers of those killed. On or around April 29 Kasztner was given a copy of their report - known as The Auschwitz Protocols - and one was sent to his counterpart in Switzerland, Nathan Schwalb. Both Kasztner and Schwalb took a decision to suppress them.  Halevi found that:

… Kasztner understood very well … that the Prominents as a whole and his friends in Kluj in particular would not be rescued from the holocaust if the mass heard a hint about the real purpose of the operation: to save the leaders from the holocaust prepared for the people.

The association with the heads of the SS, on which Kasztner placed the entire fate of the rescue, forced him to withhold his information about the extermination plans from the majority of Hungary’s Jews (p145).²⁴

Once Kasztner had agreed to be a partner of Eichmann, there was no way out: “Kasztner didn’t want to destroy by his left hand what he built with his right …”²⁵

Kasztner took no steps, as leader of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee (Vaada),²⁶ to warn other Jewish communities, despite having access to a telephone and permits with which to travel.²⁷ The evidence given by survivors of the Hungarian holocaust was that Kasztner and his friends went out of their way to deceive the Jews as to the destination of the trains. They were told they were going to be resettled in Kenyermeze.

Hecht quotes Levi Blum, who told of a 1948 celebration for Kasztner in Tel Aviv, given by those on the train, and how he confronted Kasztner:

I yelled at Kasztner, “You were a Quisling! You were a murderer! … I know that you, Kasztner, are to blame for the Jews of Hungary going to Auschwitz. You knew what the Germans were doing to them. And you kept your mouth shut.” Kasztner didn’t answer me. I asked him, “Why did you distribute postcards from Jews supposed to be in Kenyermeze?” ²⁸

Elie Wiesel, the Zionist activist, was deported with his family to Auschwitz. Their non-Jewish servant infiltrated the ghetto and begged them to come with her to a shelter she had prepared: “... we would surely have accepted her offer, had we known that ‘destination unknown’ meant Birkenau” (pp.109-10). Kasztner did not merely suppress the Auschwitz Protocols. He, Vaada and the Jewish Council actively deceived Jews as to their destination. Both the Jewish leaders and the Zionists collaborated in the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish community.

Back to the aftermath of the 1954 trial. The Mapai (Labour Zionist) government submitted an immediate appeal to the supreme court against Halevi’s verdict. Kasztner’s representative, attorney general Chaim Cohen, outlined the basis for the appeal:

If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few ... He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundreds and entitled not to warn the millions. In fact, if that’s how he saw it, rightly or wrongly, that was his duty.

... But what does all this have to do with collaboration? ... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of the many in arranging the immigration to Palestine. Are we therefore to be called traitors?²⁹

In January 1958 the supreme court cleared Kasztner by a majority of four to one. Shimon Agranat gave the leading opinion for the majority. Kasztner “had the right to keep silent”, said Agranat, and his decision to include a high number of Zionists on the train was “perfectly rational”.³⁰

Col. Kurt Becher of the Waffen SS - Kasztner testified on his behalf at Nuremburg on behalf of the Jewish Agency

The supreme court did not challenge the facts found by the lower court. Rather it disagreed with the verdict on political grounds. All five judges upheld Halevi’s verdict on the “criminal and perjurious way” in which Kasztner after the war had saved Nazi war criminal Kurt Becher,³¹ the personal representative of Himmler in Hungary.

Kasztner was extremely proud that he had rescued the “prominent Jews”.³² There was no doubt that he was aware of the fate of those who were being deported. He boasted that he was the best informed about the perilous situation of the Jews at that time: “We had, as early as 1942, a complete picture of what had happened in the east to the Jews deported to Auschwitz and the other extermination camps.”³³

Chaim Cohen said:

The man Kasztner does not stand here as a private individual. He was a recognised representative, official or non-official, of the Jewish National Institutes in Palestine and of the Zionist Executive; and I come here in this court to defend the representative of our national institutions.³⁴

Bogdanor never explains why, if Kasztner was a lone individual, he was defended so avidly by the Zionist institutions, including its supreme court.

Bogdanor’s motives

When Bogdanor says that his original intention was to write a book exonerating Kasztner we can believe him. The evidence is so damning against Kasztner that the first question to ask is why, for over 60 years, has the Zionist movement defended a war criminal who, Bogdanor admits, was a Nazi agent?

SS General Hans Juttner - former head of the SA - Kasztner testified in his favour on behalf of the Jewish Agency

At the Nuremburg trials Kasztner had not merely given evidence on behalf of Kurt Becher of the Waffen SS, but also on behalf of SS general Hans Juttner and Herman Krumey - Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary, who organised the mechanics of the deportations. Kasztner even tried to save Dieter Wisliceny, the butcher of Slovakian and Salonikan Jewry, from the gallows in Czechoslovakia in 1948.

Bogdanor pretends that Kasztner gave this testimony as a private individual. In fact he represented both the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress. Shoshana Barri concludes in her painstaking dissertation: “It is clear, however, that the Agency did know of the testimony’s existence, since Kasztner’s intervention on behalf of Becher at Nuremburg is mentioned in his July 1948 letter to Kaplan.”³⁵ Kasztner emphasised in his Nuremburg statement of August 4 1947 that “he was testifying not only on his own behalf, but on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress”.³⁶

Dieter Wisliceny - ruthless and cunning member of Eichmann's Judenkommando - he organised the first mass deporations in Slovakia in 1942 before plying his trade in Salonika and then Hungary.  Hanged by the Slovaks after the war, Kasztner testified on his behalf and tried to save his life

Bogdanor argues, citing an interview in Ha’aretz of December 2 1994 (conducted by Gideon Raphael, who helped found Israel’s foreign ministry), that both he and Eliahu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency had strongly objected to Kasztner testifying on behalf of the Jewish Agency. Dobkin, who was a signatory to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, denied at the trial that he had even heard of Becher. Raphael in the same interview accepted that Dobkin’s testimony at the Kasztner trial - i.e., that he had never heard of Becher - was a lie. Barri refers to archival material of the Jewish Agency, which suggests that they both knew of Kasztner’s testimony on behalf of Becher.

Bogdanor asks why Kasztner changed his testimony between September 1945 - when he gave an affidavit condemning Becher, Krumey and company as cold-blooded killers - and January 1946, when he called them rescuers. What Bogdanor fails to mention is why did Kasztner again change his mind when he wrote a 300-page report for the Jewish Agency in the summer of 1946, before giving his testimony at Nuremburg in 1947? 

Bogdanor suggests that Kasztner was coming under pressure from holocaust survivors arriving in Israel, who alleged that he was a collaborator. According to Bogdanor, the way to clear his name was to show that these Nazi war criminals had actually been going around with Kasztner saving Jews from extermination. In other words the best way for Kasztner to prove he was not a collaborator was by testifying in favour of Nazi war criminals!

What this crackpot theory demonstrates is that Bogdanor will go to any lengths in order not to reach the most obvious answers. The reason that the Zionist leadership in Israel had no objection to Kasztner’s testimony was because they knew that they too were equally guilty (pp.254-59). After the war the Israeli state employed Nazi war criminals like Walter Rauff, the inventor of the gas truck, which was used both in the so-called Euthenasia campaign between 1939 and 1941 and then at the end of 1941 was used in the first extermination camp, Chelmno. Clearly there was no principled objection to Kasztner’s testifying on behalf of Nazi war criminals.³⁷

What is remarkable about Bogdanor’s book is that it contains very little that was not already known. The primary evidence against Kasztner came from the survivors of the Hungarian holocaust, who testified that they had been deliberately fed misinformation to persuade them that they should board the trains. Bogdanor tries to exonerate the Zionist movement by pretending that, but for Kasztner, the Zionist resistance and Hehalutz youth movement would have led an uprising and that the deportations would have been foiled. Randolf Braham, the historian of the Hungarian holocaust, quotes Gyula Kádár, the former head of the Hungarian military intelligence service, as saying that “If [Hungary] had had as many ‘resistance fighters’ before March 19 1944 as it had in May 1945 and later, Hitler would not have risked the occupation of the country.”³⁸ According to Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler’s plenipotentiary in Hungary, “a day in Yugoslavia was more dangerous than a year in Hungary”.³⁹

Braham writes that 

‘Like the claims of many other rescuers, the post-war accounts by their leaders are also sometimes self-serving and shrouded in myths.... One cannot possibly determine the exact number of Jews who were actually rescued by the Halutzim. Their rescue and relief operations, however relatively modest, were real. The myths lie in the leaders’ basically self-aggrandizing post-war accounts that exaggerate both the scope and accomplishments of these operations.’

Braham specifically mentions  Yehudah Bauer’s reliance on ‘self-serving testimonies’ that Joszef Meir, of the left-Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir, was involved “in sabotage and the derailing of trains” commenting caustically that ‘No corroboration for this claim has been found to date.’ 40

Approximately 1,500 Hungarian Jews escaped across the Hungarian-Romanian border, the majority of whom “managed to save themselves without the aid of any rescue groups”.⁴¹ Braham quotes Gyula Kádár: “Had Hungary had as many mass rescuers during the German occupation period as were identified or self-proclaimed after the war, most of the Jews of Hungary would have survived the holocaust.” Braham concludes that “there is a potential danger that the myths of rescue, if left unchallenged, may acquire a life of their own, threatening the integrity of the historical record of the holocaust.”

The problem with Bogdanor’s account of the Kasztner affair is that he has no integrity. His only concern is to exculpate a Zionist movement that even the most assiduous and devoted of Zionist historians - such as Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion’s official biographer, raises serious questions about. Teveth titled the chapter on the holocaust in his biography of Ben Gurion ‘Disaster means strength’, writing that “the war and the holocaust were not in his power to control, but he again resolved to extract the greatest possible benefit from the catastrophe”. Teveth concluded:

“If there was a line in Ben Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.”⁴² 

Such subtleties entirely pass Bogdanor by.

Bogdanor spends some considerable time on the affair of the three Haganah agents, Hannah Senesh, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein who parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined Tito’s partisan fighters in March 1944.  In June they crossed into Hungary.  Szenes was almost immediately arrested.   When the other two parachutists arrived in Budapest Kasztner informed the Gestapo of their arrival and ‘persuaded’ Palgi to hand himself in and forced Goldstein into surrendering.  Despite repeated requests from her mother, Kasztner refused to provide any help to Hannah.  This was brought out clearly when both Kasztner and Hannah’s mother, Katrina, were cross-examined in the Kasztner trial.[43]

Kasztner’s motives are not difficult to discern.  The parachutists were Haganah and British agents.  Given Kasztner’s relationship with the Nazis, the arrival of these agents threatened his cosy relationship with the Nazis.  He therefore abandoned them. All three were tortured by the Hungarian secret police and Szenes was executed on November 7th.  Goldstein was sent to Oranienberg concentration camp where he died. Palgi was the only one who survived, having escaped from a train to Germany.  He later testified in the Kasztner trial. 

Bogdanor adds nothing to what isn’t already known.  Bogdanor alleges that the purpose of the parachutists’ mission was to ‘organize resistance and rescue attempts.’ [44]  This is highly unlikely not least because 32 agents were unlikely to have any effect on the capabilities of the already extant resistance in for example Yugoslavia.  Their true purpose was ‘to reconstruct the crumbling Zionist youth movements there [Europe] after the war’ ^[45]  

Yechiam Weitz explained that although the parachutists ‘outwardly defined theirs as a rescue mission... their primary goal was in effect to influence the survivors to choose Palestine as their ultimate destination.’  In short to rebuild the Zionist infrastructure in Europe.^[46]  As the war was coming to an end, the Zionist leaders became concerned that the survivors of the Holocaust might not choose to go to Palestine.^[47]  As Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, declaimed:

The unfortunate Jews of Europe’s D.P. Camps are helpless hostages for whom [Israeli] statehood has been made the only ransom... why in God’s name should the fate of all these unhappy people be subordinated to the single cry of statehood.’  ^[48]

Vaada, which was formed in January 1943, allegedly gave assistance to refugees from Poland, Vienna and other Nazi-occupied countries. One suspects that it mainly confined its assistance to Zionists. In his first chapter, ‘The underground’, Bogdanor leads us to believe that there was a veritable rescue organisation that saved up to 25,000 Jews. In fact most Jews who escaped to Hungary from Slovakia and other countries did so without any help from Vaada.

Rudolph Vrba gives us an insight into how Vaada operated, when he described how he fled as a boy of 17 across the border from Slovakia to Hungary. In Budapest he went to the headquarters of the Zionist organisation. After having told his story, a stern-faced man in his middle-30s responded:

“You are in Budapest illegally. Is that what you are trying to say?”
“Yes.” “Don’t you know you are breaking the law?” 

I nodded, wondering how a man with such a thick skull could hold down what seemed like a responsible position. 

“And you expect to get work here without documents?” “With false documents.”

At this point Vrba remarks that, if he had torn up the Talmud and jumped on it, I do not think I could have shocked him more ... he roared: 

“Don’t you realise that it’s my duty to hand you over to the police?” 

Now it was my turn to gape. A Zionist handing a Jew over to fascist police? I thought I must be going mad. 

“Get out of here! Get out as fast as a bad wind!” 

I left, utterly bewildered. It was nearly three years before I realised just what [the National Hungarian Jewish Relief Action] and the men inside it represented.

Vrba was forced to make his way back to Slovakia. Caught at the border, he ended up in Majdanek concentration camp and then Auschwitz.⁴⁹

Time and again in his book Bogdanor betrays his primary motivation - to exonerate the Zionist movement at Kasztner’s expense. When he mentions the leaders of the Central Jewish Council he describes these bourgeois worthies - led by Samu Stern, a friend of Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy - as “anti-Zionist personalities”. They were nothing of the kind. Their distinguishing feature was that they were bourgeois politically. As even Bogdanor mentions, Abwehr (Nazi intelligence) agents “offered Kasztner’s committee control over the official Judenrat” (p19).

Bogdanor cites Alex Weissberg when accepting that “in the few days that followed the German invasion we became the leaders of Hungarian Jewry. Even Samu Stern deferred to their decisions” (p.24). Bogdanor cites the testimony of Kasztner at the trial: “The Judenrat body handling the provincial towns was a Zionist body” (p.101). Vaada had immunity passes and were able to use their own cars, had telephones and did not have to wear the yellow star.

Representative of Zionism

What then can be said in favour of Bogdanor’s book? There can be little doubt now as to the role of Kasztner in betraying and deceiving the Jews of Hungary - not least in his home town of Cluj (Kolosvar), which was only two-three miles from the Romanian border. In falsely claiming that it was impossible to cross because the Nazis had increased their patrols, Kasztner actively helped send the Jews of that region to their death. It is a fact that most of those who attempted to cross that border actually succeeded.

Bogdanor’s recounting of the testimony of the Hungarian holocaust survivors in the Kasztner trial and how they were tricked into getting onto the trains is revealing (pp.89-94), although most of this too is in Perfidy. But his suggestion that Kasztner acted as a lone wolf is unsustainable. He was one of a number of members of Vaada and all but one survived the Holocaust (pp. 52-56). The suggestion that “the Jewish Agency was being deceived by Kasztner” has no foundation. By his own account, the Jewish Agency ‘Rescue Committee’ had been transformed into “a client body of the most dangerous Nazis” in the SS (p.59). Even Bogdanor is forced to admit, regarding Palestine, that there was a “disastrous aversion of the Labour Zionists to publicity in matters of rescue” (note 16, p.85).
However, he never asks why this was the case.

Repeatedly the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem refused to take the Nazi threat to Hungarian Jewry seriously. Vanya Pomerantz, a member of the agency’s Istanbul mission, informed them on May 25 1944 that 12,000 Jews a day would be deported, beginning the following week (in fact the deportations had already begun).  On June 11 Gruenbaum was alone in informing his Jewish Agency
colleagues that 12,000 people a day were being transported to their deaths. Yitzhak Gruenbaum was alone in describing the Nazi ‘offer’ as a “satanic provocation”.  On June 18 he noted that the deportations were continuing incessantly. But the public and the world were told nothing.⁵⁰
Bogdanor says that at their meeting of June 11 (and also May 25) Gruenbaum’s colleagues, including Ben Gurion, were “confused” because of Nazi deception.(pp.130-131)

Given that over five million Jews had already been murdered by the Nazis, it was obvious that the Jews of Hungary were in mortal danger. It was not ‘confusion’, but indifference, that led the Jewish Agency executive initially to reject even a call on the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to the camp. They had a more important priority: building their racist state. The fact that it was the Swiss, not the Palestinian, press that broke the news of the deportations, which led to Horthy putting an end to them, speaks volumes. The Jewish Agency was content with private, routine pleas to the Allies. It undertook no propaganda campaign to put pressure on the Horthy regime.

It took the Czech government in exile and the Swiss press, at the end of June, in tandem with Pope Pius XII, King Gustav of Sweden and the American bombing of Budapest on July 2 1944, to halt the deportations to Auschwitz. Despite the Zionist axiom that Jews can only rely on other Jews, it is a fact that it was non-Jews, not the Zionists, who saved a quarter of a million Hungarian Jews. It was the Swedish count, Folke Bernadotte, who was responsible for negotiating with Himmler for the rescue of over 30,000 concentration camps inmates; and Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who was responsible for rescuing thousands of Jews in Budapest. Bernadotte’s reward was to be murdered by pro-Nazi Zionist terrorists of the Stern Gang, with the knowledge and support of the Labour Zionist Haganah, in Jerusalem in September 1948. Wallenberg died at the hands of the Stalinist criminals in Russia.

Bogdanor accepts that Kasztner had been “recruited as a collaborator by the Nazis” (p.71), but this is, of course, exactly what anti-Zionists have maintained for years! And his conclusion - that Kasztner claimed false credit regarding the Jews sent to Strasshoff in Vienna (some 12,000-16,000 of whom survived, because the Nazis needed labour to dig anti-tank ditches) - is also well known. I agree with his conclusion regarding the Nazi offer of one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used against the Russians in the east - the so-called ‘Blood for Trucks’ deal.⁵¹ It was clearly meant to distract from the deportations.

What is abundantly clear from Bogdanor’s book is that the Zionist movement did indeed collaborate with the Nazis during the war and obstructed the rescue attempts of others. This continues to haunt the Zionist movement today, Bogdanor notwithstanding.

Notes

1. Ha’aretz July 23 2007: www.haaretz.com/yad-vashem-hopes-kastner-archive-will-end-vilification-1.226041.

2. www.timesofisrael.com/on-quest-to-clear-kasztner-historian-shocked-to-prove-nazi-collaboration.

3. ‘Why Ken Livingstone got it right over Nazi support for Zionism’, June 17 2016: http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/why-ken-livingstone-got-it-right-over.html.

4. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/bioAuthor.aspx?AUTHID=3012.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anti-Chomsky_Reader.

6. ‘Tony Greenstein and the Nazi apologists’: www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/nazi.html.

7. Reprinted on the Nizkor site, which is dedicated to rebutting holocaust denial: www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/esg/trials/profiles/confession.html.

8. http://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis.

9. http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/why-ken-livingstone-got-it-right-over.html.

10. ‘Tony Greenstein’s house of cards’: www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/tonygreenstein.pdf.

11. ‘Paul Bogdanor and the Zionist three-card trick - why Ken Livingstone was right’ (part 2): http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/paul-bogdanor-and-zionist-three-card.html.

12. ‘Tony Greenstein’s sleight of hand‘: www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/tonygreensteinreply.pdf.

13. Bogdanor, p27, note 1.

14. S Minerbi The Eichmann trial diary New York 2011, p144.

15. Ibid p152.

16. T Segev The seventh million New York 1993, p328.

17. Ibid p258.

18. New Yorker February 16 1963 and subsequent issues: www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/02/16/eichmann-in-jerusalem-i.

19. http://forward.com/culture/116718/kasztner-hero-or-devil.

20. ‘Israel Kasztner vs Hannah Szenes: who was really the hero during the holocaust?’: www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.557024.

21. B Hecht Perfidy New London 1997, p180.

22. Ibid pp179-80.

23. Part of Akiva Orr’s contribution to Jim Allen’s book, Perdition: a play in two acts (London 1987), pp88-89.

24. Ibid pp91-92. In fact that information was sent to Schwalb almost immediately. See F Baron, ‘The “myth” and reality of rescue from the holocaust: the Karski-Koestler and Vrba-Wetzler reports’ The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies No2 (2000), pp171-208.

25. A Orr, p90.

26. Porter confirms that Kasztner’s job was co-funded by the US-based Joint Distribution Committee, a non-Zionist Jewish charity, along with the Jewish Agency. The latter had sought to set up a Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, only to find that one had already been established (A Porter Kasztner’s train London 2009, p61). Akiva Orr describes Kasztner’s Relief Committee as “affiliated” to the Jewish Agency Relief Committee in Palestine (in J Allen Perdition: a play in two acts London 1987, p81). Krausz was a member of the religious Zionist Mizrahi, whereas the Jewish Agency was controlled by Mapai. Randolf Braham says: “The Rescue Committee of Budapest was established early in 1942, under the auspices of the Rescue Department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine” (Patterns of Jewish leadership in Nazi Europe 1933-1945 p281, Jerusalem 1979).

27. B Hecht Perfidy New London 1997, pp113-15.

28. Ibid p109-10.

29. B Hecht Perfidy New London 1997, p195.

30. Lob p280.

31. B Hecht Perfidy New London 1997, p247.

32. H Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem Old Saybrook 2011, p132; RL Braham The politics of genocide - holocaust in Hungary Hilberg 1981, p134.

33. RL Braham The politics of genocide - holocaust in Hungary Hilberg 1981, p881.

34. B Hecht Perfidy New London 1997, p268, note 159.

35. Kaplan was the Jewish Agency treasurer, as well as being Israel’s first finance minister and deputy prime minister.

36. S Barri (Ishoni), ‘The question of Kasztner’s testimonies on behalf of Nazi war criminals’ Journal of Israeli History 18: 2, 144 (1997).

37. www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/in-the-service-of-the-jewish-state-1.216923.

38. RL Braham, ‘Rescue operations in Hungary: myths and realities’ East European Quarterly Vol 38, summer 2004, p173.

39. Ibid p990.

40. Ibid pp37-39.

41. Bauer estimates that up to 5,000 escaped - Y Bauer Jews for sale? Yale 1996, p160.

42. S Teveth The burning ground 1886-1948 Boston 1987, pp854, 851.

43   Ben Hecht, Perfidy, pp. 127-132.

44    Bogdanor, p. 159.

45 What Did Really Happen in Hungary? Review of "Into the Inferno: The Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper Behind

       Nazi Lines" by Yoel Palgi, Rutgers University Press. Judith Baumel, Ha’aretz 13.6.03.

  http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/what-did-really-happen-in-hungary-1.91153

46     Even anti-Zionist author Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983, p. 260, Croom Helm, London, described the purpose of the Haganah parachutists as to ‘organise Jewish resistance and rescue’.

47      Yechiam Weitz, Jewish Refugees and Zionist Policy during the Holocaust, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 359.

48      New York Times, 27.10.46. cited in Tom Suarez, State of Terror – How terrorism created modern Israel, 2016.

49.      R Vrba I cannot forgive London 1964, pp.27-28.

50.     Shabtai Beit Zvi, p.316.   Minutes of Jewish Agency 11.6.44.

51.      Tony Greenstein, ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration and the holocaust: a historical aberration? Lenni Brenner revisited’ Holy Land Studies 13.2 (2014), p.208.