It is not a pleasant spectacle to see the truth ripped out of a man. A guilty man exposed suffers often more than an innocent one misjudged. I used to note this when I covered murder trials in Chicago -- that guilt was sometimes harder to bear than injustice.
It is odd that a man should be suddenly hurt by something he has known for a long time -- his guilt. There are many reasons for this. One of them is that a man does not feel his guilt deeply until the world sees it, or until he has to pay for it.
Individuals accustomed to private lives are often crushed by becoming visible to others -- as what they are. Not so with public figures.
Guilt does not make a politician outcast -- be he Jewish, British or Nazi. For the politician is never guilty as a wrongdoer; only as a wrong thinker or wrong guesser. Even if his thoughts and guesses set bonfires raging in the world and rain disaster on large areas of it -- he is still immune from guilt in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of his contemporaries. History will sometimes take a look at him, dead in his grave, and give him a bad mark. But the contemporary verdict is nearly always the same -- not guilty by virtue of serving an ideal.
Although shaken and embittered by the continuing revelations in Halevi's court room, the statesmen of Israel offered no visible or audible sign of any suffering.
There's the thing I find most ominous in my day -- the rhinoceros hides that encase politicians' hearts. They will not react to the truth that exposes them any more than to a drop of rain. For they are never exposed. The evils proved against them reveal only that they were devoted servants of an ideal, a party, a national destiny.
Exposed in the Kastner case, the Israel politicians do not need to disprove any of the facts in order to prove themselves not guilty. They need only to flash into the eyes of their constituents the "ideal" they served. Who attacks them, attacks Zionism. Who attacks Zionism attacks the finest development in two thousand unhappy years of Jewish history. Tyrants, dictators, and all power-drunk leaders operate always behind the screen of some Ideal. The Ideal exempts them of any guilt for what they do. More, it magically converts their connivings and wicked deeds into proof of how valorously they served the Ideal.
"I understand Kastner," Eichmann writes in his autobiography, published in Life magazine. "He is an idealist like I am." [120]
CHAIM COHEN "STANDS BEFORE GOD"
The Attorney General of Israel offers a rather brief summary of his admiration of Dr. Rudolf Kastner. It is lyric, sardonic and tempestuous, but it takes only one day. This would be almost a distance record for United States court oratory, but in Israel it is only once around the track. Particularly for so leading a silver tongue as Chaim Cohen.
At the finale of the trial, Judge Halevi's court room is no longer the teapot chamber in which the proceedings began. When Attorney General Cohen took over the case for the Government, the proceedings were moved immediately into Israel's largest court room, with the largest seating capacity. And the government pulled two of its stenographers out of the Knesset to take over the recording.
Now the large court room is jammed. All the top journalists of the land are on the job. The largest assemblage of trial fans ever beheld in a Jerusalem court since the Romans left around 300 A.D. packs the scene.
I cut the day's oration down to its vital statements; but though I cut, what I quote is a literal translation of Chaim Cohen's Hebrew sentences.
Israel's Attorney General speaks as follows:
"Your Honor, I feel like a representative of the public before God. I pray to you that the man I have to defend will not suffer because of my unworthiness. It is presumptuous of me to try, with my dull words, to do justice to these great heroes who stood as a holy guard during the most tragic hour to befall our people."
(The great heroes are Rudolf Kastner, and his co-workers in Budapest.)
"I am not worthy of the task," says Chaim Cohen, "I can only hope Your Honor will not be deaf to my humble efforts. My prosecution today will be more firm and more grave than it ever was before in an Israeli Court."
There follows a ringing affirmation from Attorney General Cohen (and author of the law) that any Jew who collaborated with the Nazis during the extermination deserves to be hanged by the neck until dead. After which, the Attorney General orates: "There is not an iota of proof that Rudolf Kastner became such a collaborator. His honorable intentions never left him to the end.
"My learned friend [Tamir] says that the Germans played a vicious trick, using Kastner to help them induce the masses of Jews to avoid resistance, avoid escape.
"What masses? Escape -- where to? Revolt -- by whom? ... These were Jews behind whom there were many long years of persecution, torture, endless suffering, who had returned from forced labor in the Ukraine -- who saw with their eyes what the Germans had perpetrated there; they were the Jews who were tortured in quizzings for their property, who were jammed in brick factories without a pillow for their head, without food, without dress ... For those and millions of Jews like them there came true the old curse, 'And lo, they were meant but to be taken like sheep for slaughter, for killing, destruction, crushing and shame.'
"These should escape? They had no feet on which to run. They should revolt? They had no hands with which to fight. No spirit was left in them. . . .
"Even the Warsaw ghetto was no exception. The masses in the Warsaw ghetto were in the same condition and the revolt there was waged only by a few extraordinary characters."
(Item: the few extraordinary characters were thirty-three thousand Jews who stood off three hundred fifty thousand Wehrmacht troops and thirty thousand S.S. troops -- their tanks and cannon -- for twenty-seven days in the Warsaw ghetto. None of the Jews surrendered.)
Attorney Cohen makes a small concession. He fails to support Government official Kastner completely in his testimony about Becher: He argues:
"I am willing to assume that Kurt Becher was a vicious criminal, a man not to deal with. Kastner did not lie [about Becher] and there was even no contradiction in what he said. But let us assume for a moment that he did lie.
"Supposing Kastner forgot after a lapse of ten years [it was only six years] to whom he gave the testimony. [The pro-Becher affidavit.] This may justify my learned friend, Tamir, in claiming that Kastner had a weak memory, and that one cannot rely on his testimony.
"The question, therefore, of whether or not Kastner tells the truth or has a reliable memory has no bearing on the accusation at issue here. My friend [Tamir] has asked some of his witnesses, 'Would you give a sworn affidavit in favor of a Nazi?' All of them answered in chorus, 'Amen, we wouldn't have done it.'
"There may well be a divergence of opinion between such people and Dr. Kastner as to what is correct and what is incorrect. And he who thinks it is a national obligation [to help S.S. Colonel Kurt Becher with an affidavit] does not become a worse Jew or a traitor. If Dr. Kastner thought his way was the right way, then it was right for him, and nobody has the right or the authority to say to Dr. Kastner, 'You had no right to testify for a Nazi.' There is no one who can sit in judgment on Dr. Kastner, but Dr. Kastner's own conscience, his sense of values, of duty, and his sense of national responsibility.
"There is nobody who can invent standards by which to measure a man's sense of national responsibility. If my learned friend [Tamir] wants to teach this court or me a lesson in national responsibility, pardon me if I look for a teacher somewhere else.
"My friend attacks Kastner because he did it [the Becher whitewash] in the names of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress. I don't understand the aims of this attack. If it is intended to prove that Kastner pretended to a standing he didn't have, or if it wishes to prove that Kastner used the name of respectable institutions in order to raise himself above anyone's criticism -- be that as it may -- I hold that Dr. Kastner's explanation for his act is reasonable and wise. And I don't want to go into the question of whether he did or did not have such power of attorney.
"But let us assume again that he did not have such power. Since he had power of attorney to negotiate with Kurt Becher in the past [in Budapest] why should he think he has no power to testify for Becher as he did?
"Let us assume that Dr. Kastner was being boastful here [about claiming Jewish Agency backing -- or a Nazi whitewasher?], as he seems often inclined to be, because he likes to pose as a man of high standing. What does it prove -- using the name of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress? I say that as the man who negotiated with Becher in the name of the Jewish Agency, and found out that Becher's reaction was good and beneficial for those Jewish institutions and for the people of Israel, I say Dr. Kastner had the right to do what he did -- was, in fact, bound to do what he did.
"I think that the crime of the Defendant is as grave as actual bloodshed. He took upon himself the right to put a sign of Cain on the forehead of a man on whom neither the Defendant nor his persecution, torture, endless suffering, who had returned from forced labor in the Ukraine -- who saw with their eyes what the Germans had perpetrated there; they were the Jews who were tortured in quizzings for their property, who were jammed in brick factories without a pillow for their head, without food, without dress ... For those and millions of Jews like them there came true the old curse, 'And 10, they were meant but to be taken like sheep for slaughter, for killing, destruction, crushing and shame.'
"These should escape? They had no feet on which to run. They should revolt? They had no hands with which to fight. No spirit was left in them. . . .
"Even the Warsaw ghetto was no exception. The masses in the Warsaw ghetto were in the same condition and the revolt there was waged only by a few extraordinary characters."
(Item: the few extraordinary characters were thirty-three thousand Jews who stood off three hundred fifty thousand Wehrmacht troops and thirty thousand S.S. troops -- their tanks and cannon -- for twenty-seven days in the Warsaw ghetto. None of the Jews surrendered.)
Attorney Cohen makes a small concession. He fails to support Government official Kastner completely in his testimony about Becher: He argues:
"I am willing to assume that Kurt Becher was a vicious criminal, a man not to deal with. Kastner did not lie [about Becher] and there was even no contradiction in what he said. But let us assume for a moment that he did lie.
"Supposing Kastner forgot after a lapse of ten years [it was only six years] to whom he gave the testimony. [The pro-Becher affidavit.] This may justify my learned friend, Tamir, in claiming that Kastner had a weak memory, and that one cannot rely on his testimony.
"The question, therefore, of whether or not Kastner tells the truth or has a reliable memory has no bearing on the accusation at issue here. My friend [Tamir] has asked some of his witnesses, 'Would you give a sworn affidavit in favor of a Nazi?' All of them answered in chorus, 'Amen, we wouldn't have done it.'
"There may well be a divergence of opinion between such people and Dr. Kastner as to what is correct and what is incorrect. And he who thinks it is a national obligation [to help S.S. Colonel Kurt Becher with an affidavit] does not become a worse Jew or a traitor. If Dr. Kastner thought his way was the right way, then it was right for him, and nobody has the right or the authority to say to Dr. Kastner, 'You had no right to testify for a Nazi: There is no one who can sit in judgment on Dr. Kastner, but Dr. Kastner's own conscience, his sense of values, of duty, and his sense of national responsibility.
''There is nobody who can invent standards by which to measure a man's sense of national responsibility. If my learned friend [Tamir] wants to teach this court or me a lesson in national responsibility, pardon me if I look for a teacher somewhere else.
"My friend attacks Kastner because he did it [the Becher whitewash] in the names of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress. I don't understand the aims of this attack. If it is intended to prove that Kastner pretended to a standing he didn't have, or if it wishes to prove that Kastner used the name of respectable institutions in order to raise himself above anyone's criticism -- be that as it may -- I hold that Dr. Kastner's explanation for his act is reasonable and wise. And I don't want to go into the question of whether he did or did not have such power of attorney.
"But let us assume again that he did not have such power. Since he had power of attorney to negotiate with Kurt Becher in the past [in Budapest] why should he think he has no power to testify for Becher as he did?
"Let us assume that Dr. Kastner was being boastful here [about claiming Jewish Agency backing -- or a Nazi whitewasher?], as he seems often inclined to be, because he likes to pose as a man of high standing. What does it prove -- using the name of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress? I say that as the man who negotiated with Becher in the name of the Jewish Agency, and found out that Becher's reaction was good and beneficial for those Jewish institutions and for the people of Israel, I say Dr. Kastner had the right to do what he did -- was, in fact, bound to do what he did.
"I think that the crime of the Defendant is as grave as actual bloodshed. He took upon himself the right to put a sign of Cain onhe forehead of a man on whom neither the Defendant nor his lawyer is authorized or able to express any legitimate opinion whatsoever." [121]
Such is the gist of Chaim Cohen's address to Judge Halevi. It re-affirms the Israeli Government's contention that Dr. Kastner did the correct thing in not warning the twenty thousand Jews of his native Kluj, when there were only 21 guards to keep them from escaping the ash barrels of Auschwitz.
But I'll let Tamir make the rebuttal.
THE DEFENSE SUMS UP
I offer a longer account of the Defense Summation, since it takes seven days to deliver.
Another reason is: the Defense Summation is a fine mark for Israel. It is a denunciation of the Government of Israel, made in an Israeli Court room, by a citizen of that new land. When such a denunciation as this one is tolerated by a government and given ear to by a judge, it is a bright proof of a people's honest soul.
Tamir addressing the District Court of Jerusalem is more than a Jewish voice. He is the voice of an individual who can still assail the sins of the State in which he lives. This voice sounds the difference between government's triumph over man, and man's non-defeat by government.
Tamir begins:
"Your Honor, a cruel and inevitable duty was imposed on us in the trial. Every step taken had to be made through Jewish blood. And now a great human, moral and historic task commands me. Our nation raises its eyes to the high seat of justice and waits the sound of truth from it. [122]
"From the great butchery of Jews until a year ago our land was given to forgetfulness and perfidy.
"The bones of the slain millions of Auschwitz had been plowed into German soil as fertilizer. And these plowmen had regained their freedom and become leaders of the new Germany. The murderers and their collaborators had returned to the bosom of human society.
"In payment for Jewish blood, money has been offered and accepted [123] by the state of Israel. And memorial forests were planted in our land in honor of the exterminated Jews of Europe.
"But memorial forests did not silence the voices of the slaughtered. The voices entered finally a court room in Jerusalem and compelled us to open the book of extermination, and study it, and see its truth.
"I heard the Attorney General's cry in this court room, 'Who are we and what are we to judge public officials who worked in that Hell of death?'
"I heard that question. I ask another. Who are we and what are we who dare avoid facing the truth in our souls -- the truth of why and how catastrophe came to our people? Out of all the shames and agonies which smote us during the slaughter of Jews, there is one shame we can remove today -- the shame of hiding the truth.
"The Attorney General said, 'Nothing is proven -- not a single fact -- it is all a baseless series of charges -- all whipped up for political reasons: Your Honor, if our charges were so groundless, why the great anxiety which seized the Attorney General, and those he represents? Why did he rush to take over the prosecution from his assistant? Why did he start pleading for long recesses to bring witnesses from abroad? [124]
"And why did important public figures like Avriel, Danzig, Bader, Rafael, [125] Palgi, appear here and make themselves a laughing-stock in their efforts to conceal what they knew?
"Was all this due to the mud-slinging tactics of some irresponsible lawyer? And did this court allow us to waste its time with that sort of chicanery?
"If the case of the Attorney General is so pure, why is it so dirty? He cries out the dirt is in my accusations. The dirt is not in them, Your Honor, but in what they have exposed.
"I have heard it said, 'Even if it is true, why expose it? Can it restore the dead? It can only damage us. We are all in a very small boat in a stormy sea. Exploring these matters can only damage all the Jews of Israel and of the world.'
"There is a factor more important than any temporary damage that may be done by exposing the truth. There is a young generation in Israel that must know the full story of what happened to its brothers, its fathers, its kith and kin. This young generation must know the full truth in order that it may have a true scale for its judgements.
"I shall not insist that Rudolf Kastner is a born criminal, or a man entirely black. I shall not say, 'Death to Kastner!' [126]
Footnote 126. Attorney General Chaim Cohen said in his summation, "Either Kastner should be sentenced to death, if the allegations are true, or -- if they are not -- Greenwald should die by the hand of God."
"I say this: just as Kastner's brothers were exterminated bodily in Auschwitz, his soul was destroyed there. He, too, was a Hitler victim -- a victim who became a wild danger to the Jews of Europe -- but a victim nevertheless.
"I shall try to show Your Honor how an idealistic, Zionist youth like Kastner, owning a few flaws, but full of talent, deteriorated into a trusted chum of the Nazi leaders in 1945.
"In explaining Kastner's activities I shall offer many facts in his defense. But how dare anyone stand in this court and say we are not to judge Kastner? And who says it? The Attorney General of Israel -- four years after our parliament has enacted the law against Nazis and their collaborators, the same law under which this same Attorney General prosecuted scores of offenders in our courts.
"And whom did this Attorney General bring to justice? Little people, always. A Jewish policeman who had beaten a woman in a concentration camp in order to save his own life. The whole force of the state of Israel was mobilized against such small, pathetic offenders. And the Attorney General thundered for conviction.
"Are the legal nets of our country only for the catching of little fish? Are there big holes specially left in them for the escape of the big sharks?
"... The Attorney General's words shocked my heart. Because it was not a privately hired lawyer who orated here. It was the representative of the government of Israel.
"I charge, Your Honor, that his whole speech from beginning to end, was an oratorical screen to cover evils that were exposed.
"And when they wish to cover up any of their own actions, they are willing to defame all of Jewry. It is about one million Hungarian Jews that the Attorney General said, 'revolt' -- by whom? They had no hands. They had no feet. There was no spirit in them.'
"Moshe Sharett is o.k., Rudolf Kastner is o.k., Hillel Danzig is o.k., but the Jewish masses in Kluj, Nodvarod, Budapest -- they had no spirit, no hands. They were without courage and reason. Therefore they had to be slaughtered. It was heaven's decision, said this Attorney General of Israel, a decision not to be altered that they must go like sheep to the slaughter pens.
"The Attorney General said, 'Who is he and what is he who dares defame public officials who worked in the Hell of Death?' [Kastner et al.]
"And I say: Who is he and what is he who dares defame our own good Jewry which was so badly smeared by the Prosecution witnesses in this trial? Who is he and what is he who dares utter this defamation of the Jewry of Herzl, Nordau, Dov Gruner, Jacob Weiss, Hanna Senesh -- and all the heroes and martyrs who sacrificed their souls?
"The Defense in this trial defends not the accused alone. It defends all Jewry that has been berated and cursed by ruthless men -- it defends the Jews who have been called dust, called 'Jews without spirit or hands,' called 'the frozen hearts,' called non-Zionists.
"I call upon Your Honor to decide that, in the choice between Hungarian Jews and Kastner and his clique, it was Hungarian Jewry that was fine, great and tragic.
"But in their tragic hour they had no true honorable leaders -- only little egoists, self-seeking and narrow-minded -- who aided in their destruction.
"I call on Your Honor to agree -- that there was no reason on earth for these men, women and children of Hungary to go like sheep to the German butchers.
"It is a sin against God and against Jewish pride and human dignity to say that these near million Jews had to go to their deaths the way they went -- and that it was impossible for them to do other than they did -- that a man had to go with his wife, children and parents like an animal to butchery by the Germans.
"Guilty for their deaths are first the German murderers. Next, the criminality of the nations who aided the murders, actively or passively -- Hungary on the one hand and England on the other. Guilty next are the other great civilized nations, whose acquiescence and indifference spurred on the slaughter.
"But guilty also is the small-souled, criminal leadership and cowardice of our own Jewish leaders. They knew only how to grab power. Courage and ability and decision were beyond them.
"All these apologetic chants. about Jews having to go to their deaths without protest, these hymns of acquiescence for the death-industry of Auschwitz, we had to hear from an Attorney General of Israel.
"No, Your Honor, this is not the morale of Jewry -- the sacrificing of the many to save the few.
"Chaim Weizmann in 1937 said that the Jews of Europe are '... economic and moral dust in a cruel world ...'
"True, they were not wanted. And so they remained the dust to be scattered. Now the Attorney General continues this point of view, he endorses it.
"Who is this Attorney General representing the citizens of our state or the private interests of some officials of the state? It is not too difficult a question to answer.
"The Attorney General is not alone in covering up for Kastner. Many institutions have done the same covering-up before him. In 1946 the Zionist Congress in Basel, [127] ...
Footnote 127. Testimony was brought in the trial of an official complaint filed against Kastner at the Zionist Congress of Basel in 1946. After a few hours hearing, the inquiry, which was conducted by members of the Mapai party, was stopped in the middle and an official communique declared Kastner exonerated.
... the Haganah trial in the case of the parachutists, [128] ...
Footnote 128. During the same session of the Zionist Congress, Kastner was interrogated secretly by a special Haganah court, but no verdict was reached, publicly.
... and the Israeli police in 1951, all took a look at Kastner's activities -- and covered up what they saw.
"And when all the Jewish leaders and all the powers of government had covered up for Kastner, one old man steps forward to reveal the truth.
"And why did all the powerful government institutions leave this truth-telling to Malchiel Greenwald? Why did they knowingly cover up the collaboration of Kastner with the Nazis? There is only one answer. They had no choice. They had to protect Kastner for fear he would reveal all the facts known to him about another collaboration -- the Jewish Agency collaboration with the British -- which sabotaged the rescue of Europe's Jews and contributed to their annihilation.
"That's how this 'show' happened in this court -- a government and all its leaders did not act towards this man, Kastner, as any decent society would have done.
"After seven days of cross-examination, Kastner's lies and villainies were clear to all. Instead of abandoning the protection of such a creature and handing him over to the court saying, 'Let's look into this nightmare ourselves: they throw all their great authority, all the prestige and cunning of their officials into the case to save him. And all these Israeli government officials came here, one pulling the other, all conspiring to conceal from this court and from the nation the truth of how the catastrophe befell the Jews of Hungary.
"I charge that all the witnesses for the prosecution lied to this court. I can say, with a clean conscience, that none of the witnesses for the defense lied knowingly.
"There was no relation between our witnesses. They had no thought of 'helping each other.' They were workingmen, clerks, refugees, people from all parties, the people of our land.
"The other side offered a united group of public figures -- all culled from one party and clique.
"There you have the two sides -- the ruling clique of Israel and the people of Israel."
Tamir continues about Kluj.
"Our charge against Kastner is this -- a community of twenty thousand Jews, one of the finest in Hungary, of which a great part could have been rescued, was sacrificed in order to save 380 of his own friends and relatives.
"We charge that these 380 people (we are all happy they remained alive) were not an achievement but the price for sacrificing the many thousands.
"We charge that this cost was reckoned and this price paid with the same lack of conscience that the Attorney General described with such enthusiasm when he declared that the sacrificed Jews were 'without hands or spirits.' And we charge that Kastner deliberately decided it was best to rescue the 'prominents.' "I said Kastner was not a born criminal, and not all black. It is foolish to say that he was even a bloodthirsty man.
"We have never said Kastner was a traitor who did what he did simply to receive money from the Nazis. He did not start with treason. He started with collaboration -- which the Nazis preferred.
"The traitor is not the most efficient instrument for an enemy. A traitor hands over his regiment, his information, and his job is finished. The traitor's way is one act of surrender.
"Collaboration is a more effective technique. You take an important figure from the other side. And you help him play the drama in which he stars as the leader of his people. You help him show success and triumphs (little ones). But the cost of these successes to the people is their destruction.
"Kastner, the collaborator, was worse than any Petain or Quisling. Because Kastner's collaboration didn't sacrifice honor and freedom alone. It accomplished the complete extermination of the people themselves -- after which nothing remains.
"It is only human for a man to save himself and his family first. Had it been an ordinary man, exploiting his connections and running away with his family, who would dare to criticize him? Who knows if any of us would behave differently?
"But this is not the case of Kastner. We deal here with a leader, a leader of rescue, a man who became a national leader. This is another story.
"And is this the motto our Attorney General wishes to give to every officer in the Israeli Army and Navy, 'When danger comes, run away first and save yourself and your own.'
"Let us grant further that even a National Leader can make mistakes -- pull strings to save his own skin. It is not nice, but one can sometimes understand or forgive.
"But at what a cost! Here we don't speak of a man who runs away, who, under great pressure, deserts his people. With Kastner, it is not the running away. It is the terrible price in the blood of his people that he is willing to pay. Out of his sickly ambition to be considered a big shot, a leader of Jews, his blindness, his lies, and his terrible crimes, increase and increase.
"This is a collaboration for which there is not the routine apology, 'Other days will come and the situation will be changed.'
"No, I don't say traitor. I say collaborator. And a collaborator needs studying.
"Of course in the beginning he is trapped by the German Satan. Eichmann tells him -- 'Everything is lost. Your accursed Jews must all die. There is no way out. No matter what you do, they will all be annihilated.' Then he adds, 'But perhaps you can save a few. But in return for such a favor, you have to help me!'
"And here the list of train-people appears. And Kastner, the little journalist from Kluj, never too choosey a fellow -- allows his sickly ambition to confuse his values. His eagerness to be a somebody outwits his conscience. He grabs at the Eichmann proposal. He hopes, he trusts, he deceives, until he is hooked on the wheel and into the mill he goes for grinding.
"The 380 prominent Jews are quartered outside the Kluj ghetto. And they will be kept there until all the twenty thousand Jews have ridden off to Auschwitz.
"Their function is to soothe these doomed ones, to keep them calm and hopeful. And this they do, until the last Jew is sealed and delivered to the gas chamber. Not until Kluj is empty of Jews and their lullaby task is done, do they get their reward. In special trains they ride through the barren ghetto, through the empty streets, and leave for Budapest.
"Until May, 1944, Kastner was a man of honest intention. He was a self-seeking, slippery fellow, but basically his intentions were to save Jews.
"From mid-May on, his entanglement deepens, his crime grows. He performs in a whirlpool of blood.
"No wonder that he will never return to his home town of Kluj when the war is over. No wonder that on October 15th all the survivors who trickled back to Kluj-Zionists, Social Democrats, Communists, Jews of every sort try him in absentia in a people's court and pronounce him a war criminal.
"Kastner tells us that at the beginning the Germans talked to him about money he must pay them. But soon Kastner finds out the Germans have no financial interest in Jews. When every other Jewish group had to give money to the Germans, Kastner alone gives no great sum. He has something better to give the Germans. He gives Jews.
"And who are the Germans who help Dr. Kastner? He mentions Becher, Krumey, Wisliczeny -- the killers of the Jews of Poland, Greece, Hungary. He mentions Hunshe and Novak, two of Eichmann's chief assistants.
"And Kastner has an in also with Hungarian Nazis. He meets Ferenczi, chief of the Hungarian gendarmes. He even meets Baky, who, according to all testimonies, was even more eager to 'eat Jews' than Eichmann. And he is in contact with Gerzoli, head of Hungarian anti-espionage.
"It is of Garzoli and Gestapo chief Klages that Kastner said, They were among those who wanted to help me.'
"Who, then, wanted to exterminate Jews? They all wanted to help, says Kastner-Klages, Garzoli, Krumey, Becher, all wanted to help. And Himmler 'helped.' Who then exterminated the Jews?
"And what was Kastner doing in Berlin?
"The Attorney General says, 'His solemn and noble duty.'
"Does the Attorney General claim seriously that there was such a close mutual interest between the Third Reich and our Jews? When hundreds of thousands were rotting in the camps, being murdered daily by the thousands, and used in laboratories for inhuman experiments -- was it then there bloomed this mutual interest?
"In the last, most crucial four months of war, the Jew Kastner parades in Vienna or Berlin -- among the highest Nazi chieftains. And his Nazi chums speed him goodbye as he hustles off at the climax of the war. He will arrive in Switzerland in time to meet the American representative, McClelland, there, and be able to supply McClelland with all he knows of the Nazi crimes. [129]
"Is there a deeper trust that Kastner's Nazi friends could show than this? What else do I have to prove in this case -- but this alone? The Nazis would never put such trust in an Englishman or American. But they put their faith in the representative of the Jewish Agency who witnessed their worst crimes.
" -- I therefore say to this court what the defendant Greenwald did not say in his pamphlet. I say that, in the last months of the war, Kastner became the agent for the whole Nazi gang -- the most effective Jewish agent in their ranks. For he was now one of them, their trusted ally and apologist."
Tamir takes up Becher and Kastner's affidavit:
"Who is Kurt Becher? The head of the Economic Department of the S.S. The Economic Department meant concentration camps, gold teeth, bones for fertilizer, clothes, and above all -- Jewish fat for soap. These were the functions of the Economic Department. And it was for this crime that the Americans held Becher in custody from 1945 to 1948.
"All the witnesses have testified that General Kurt Becher had always the last word, that he was responsible only to Himmler himself.
"Becher was also involved in the extermination of Slovakian Jews. He decided who would be deported in the notorious death march. He decided even what women should go to their deaths. And Kastner dares to make depositions at Nuremberg declaring that Becher saved Jews in Budapest. The same Kastner who wrote in a report that Becher was among the chief Nazi criminals who worked actively in the extermination of six million European Jews.
"Sir, he who says Becher saved Jews, says Himmler saved them. He who says Becher was an honorable man says Himmler was an honorable man. There is no escape from the facts. I will go one step further and say he who says Kastner was an honorable man says the S.S. leaders Becher and Himmler were honorable men.
"Sir, the learned Attorney General had the gall to deny even Kastner's proven lies. If there were ever malicious and willful lies -- perjury in a court case -- admitted and corroborated -- they are the lies told by Kastner.
"At least let the Attorney General keep silent, and not deny they were lies.
"I say that Kastner cold-bloodedly stood in the witness box for days and lied to this court and to the Israeli nation. And our Attorney General of the Government of Israel overflows with pathos and tells us he feels 'with all modesty and humility' his great privilege of defending the glory of this man, Rudolf Kastner.
"The Attorney General allowed himself to define the testimony of the twenty concentration camp survivors as a chorus of amens against a Nazi officer. Thus he describes the cry of agony of an exterminated people.
"But I speak no more of the time of extermination. I will speak of the years 1947 and 1953. I speak of a Kastner not under Nazi pressure, not in the dread atmosphere of the ghetto or in occupied Budapest.
"I speak of the action of a man in the free world, after he was saved from doom -- of a man who knows everything -- a man whose honor the state of Israel has stepped forth to vindicate -- the man in whose behalf all the legal apparatus of Israel has been mobilized -- while all their might was hurled against the one who dared attack this man.
"This man, Kastner, contemptuous of court and public, has brazenly tried here to cover up his own crime in delivering Kurt Becher, one of the arch-killers, from judgment in Nuremberg.
"Sir, if this is how he behaves after the war, in an atmosphere of freedom, when no danger threatens, when he has become one of the pillars of the government of Israel -- how did he behave then, in a climate of terror, under the Nazis, when scores of thousands were in his keeping? If this is his morality now, what could it have been then?
"Sir, today I am allowed and am bound to call upon Your Honor not only to acquit the Defendant, not only to lay down that the Complainant and chief witness, Dr. Kastner, perjured himself maliciously in this court, not only to lay down that he and his colleagues conspired together to conceal from this court and from the whole world the historical truth -- but also to recommend that this Dr. Kastner be put to trial by the Israeli Government in accordance with the law against Nazis and their collaborators.
". . . Sir, I am convinced that neither the rhetoric of the Attorney General nor the backing of the whole Israeli government will overcome the truth. Nor will they be able to make a free Israeli court exonerate even partially the enormity of the collaboration with Nazi killers that was reached by Dr. Kastner, Rudolf Kastner, the biggest Jewish agent in the service of the Germans." [130]
Footnote 130. Protocol, C.C. 124/53 in the D.C. Jerusalem.
After the war, S.S. General Walter Schellenberg, Chief of Himmler's Intelligence, stated in a special document, now in the custody of Mr. Hillel Storch of the World Jewish Congress in Stockholm, that Kastner had served throughout the war as an agent of the German S.S. among the Jews in Hungary.
THE SOUL OF A JUDGE
There is a likeness between Justice of the Jerusalem District Court, Benjamin Halevi, and the girl, Hanna Senesh. They serve different causes -- Hanna, the cause of human love; Judge Halevi, the cause of human justice -- but they serve them in the same way -- with their entire souls.
The enemy Halevi had to face and vanquish is sometimes a tougher foe than the one Hanna met in Budapest. It is the enemy of a man's own perspectives and prejudices. Halevi has to sit in judgment objectively not only on Greenwald and Kastner, but on his own complex humanity, which includes his life's dedication to Jewry and to the State of Israel.
Two men were never more apart as Jews and patriots than Tamir and Halevi at the start of the trial. Tamir was a child of revolt. He loved his country completely. But Tamir's country did not consist only of the righteous few who ran it. To the contrary, these men had offended his patriotism and embarrassed his soul since childhood. Tamir considered most of the government men in power as unproud and unworthy Jews who had come into their power through the courage and vision of others -- a courage and vision they had usurped after it was safe and profitable to echo them.
Not so, Halevi. To Halevi, most of the factotums who took over the running of the new land of Israel were, often, friends, and men and women of upright character.
With 90 percent of the world's Jewry, Halevi believed in these new rulers as he believed in the great kings and prophets of ancient Judea. They, the new ones, were anointed by the long travail of the Jews. The long Jewish dream was a halo over their heads. [131]
It takes Halevi nine months to write his verdict. He does it in the loneliness of his study. He reads and re-reads the protocol of the trial. Halevi is not a slow-witted man. His mind has been long aware of the lies and villainies in the case. Then why so long at his chore? Were there doubts he must resolve? Was it clarity and logic on which he labored? Perhaps. But there was more than fastidiousness that slowed down the writing of his verdict.
I did not interview Judge Halevi in his study any more. than I did Hanna Senesh in her cell. And neither of them made report on what went on in their dolorous days. Their deeds, only, speak for them.
Judge Halevi's deed is under his arm as he enters his Jerusalem court room after the nine months. It is a thick manuscript. His verdict is in it.
The court room is filled, and the land of Israel holds its breath. In the court room old Malchiel Greenwald sits staring grimly. He has been well-behaved throughout the trial, contenting himself with derogatory grunts and salty mutterings. Tamir sits beside him.
Kastner is not present. Also missing is Attorney General Chaim Cohen.
Judge Halevi reads his verdict in a low voice that is almost a whisper. But under his quiet tone, a storm is audible. Pale, burning-eyed, and half whispering, Judge Halevi reads for fourteen hours.
Said Tamir, "A nation raises its eyes to the high seat of justice and awaits the sound of truth from it."
The nation hears that sound now. I quote only the vital fragments of Judge Halevi's verdict:
The masses of Jews from Hungary's ghettos obediently boarded the deportation trains without knowing their fate. They were full of confidence in the false information that they were being transferred to Kenyermeze.
The Nazis could not have misled the masses of Jews so conclusively had they not spread their false information through Jewish channels.
The Jews of the ghettos would not have trusted the Nazi or Hungarian rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish leaders. Eichmann and others used this known fact as part of their calculated plan to mislead the Jews. They were able to deport the Jews to their extermination by the help of Jewish leaders.
The false information was spread by the Jewish leaders. The local leaders of the Jews of Kluj and Nodvarod knew that other leaders were spreading such false information and did not protest.
Those of the Jews who tried to warn their friends of the truth were persecuted by the Jewish leaders in charge of the local "rescue work."
The trust of the Jews in the misleading information and their lack of knowledge that their wives, children and themselves were about to be deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz led the victims to remain quiescent in their ghettos. It seduced them into not resisting or hampering the deportation orders.
Dozens of thousands of Jews were guarded in their ghettos by a few dozen police. Yet even vigorous young Jews made no attempt to overpower these few guards and escape to nearby Rumania. No resistance activities to the deportations were organized in these ghettos.
And the Jewish leaders did everything in their power to soothe the Jews in the ghettos and to prevent such resistance activities.
The same Jews who spread in Kluj and Nodvarod the false rumor of Kenyermeze, or confirmed it, the same public leaders who did not warn their own people against the misleading statements, the same Jewish leaders who did not organize any resistance or any sabotage of deportations, . . . these same leaders did not join the people of their community in their ride to Auschwitz, but were all included in the Rescue train.
The Nazi organizers of extermination and the perpetrators of extermination permitted Rudolf Kastner and the members of the Jewish Council in Budapest to save themselves, their relatives, and friends. The Nazis did this as a means of making the local Jewish leaders, whom they favored, dependent on the Nazi regime, dependent on its good will during the time of its fatal deportation schedule. In short, the Nazis succeeded in bringing the Jewish leaders into collaboration with the Nazis at the time of the catastrophe.
The Nazi chiefs knew that the Zionists were a most vital element in Jewry and the most trusted by the Jews.
The Nazis drew a lesson from the Warsaw ghetto and other belligerent ghettos. They learned that Jews were able to sell their lives very expensively if honorably guided.
Eichmann did not want a second Warsaw. For this reason, the Nazis exerted themselves to mislead and bribe the Jewish leaders.
The personality of Rudolph Kastner made him a convenient catspaw for Eichmann and his clique, to draw into collaboration and make their task easier.
The question here is not, as stated by the Attorney General in his summation, whether members of the Jewish Rescue Committee were or were not capable of fulfilling their duty without the patronage of the S.S. chiefs. It is obvious that without such S.S. Nazi patronage the Jewish Rescue Committee could not have existed, and could have acted only as an underground.
The question is, as put by the lawyer for the defense, why were the Nazis interested in the existence of the Rescue Committee? Why did the S.S. chiefs make every effort to encourage the existence of the Jewish Rescue Committee? Did the exterminators turn into rescuers?
The same question rises concerning the rescue of prominent Jews by these German killers of Jews. Was the rescue of such Jews a part of the extermination plan of the killers?
The support given by the extermination leaders to Kastner's Rescue Committee proves that indeed there was a place for Kastner and his friends in their Final Solution for the Jews of Hungary -- their total annihilation.
The Nazi's patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews. Kastner was given a chance to add a few more to that number. The bait attracted him. 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. It was a success that would also justify his conduct -- his political negotiation with Nazis and the Nazi patronage of his committee.
When Kastner received this present from the Nazis, Kastner sold his soul to the German Satan.
The sacrifice of the vital interests of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents, was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps; a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand. An imperative condition for the rescue of the first camp by the Nazis was that Kastner will not interfere in the action of the Nazis against the other camp and will not hamper them in its extermination. Kastner fulfilled this condition. He concentrated his efforts in the rescue of the prominents and treated the camp of the doomed as if they had already been wiped out from the book of the living.
One cannot estimate the damage caused by Kastner's collaboration and put down the number of victims which it cost Hungarian Jews. These are not only the thousands of Jews in Kluj alone, but also the thousands of Jews in Nodvarod or any other community in the border area; Jews who could escape through the border, had the chief of the rescue committee fulfilled his duty toward them.
All of Kastner's answers in his final testimony were a constant effort to evade this truth.
Kastner has tried to escape through every crack he could find in the wall of evidence. When one crack was sealed in his face, he darted quickly to another.
Judge Halevi reverts to the meeting of Kastner, Becher, and Rudolf Hoess, at the time when the "new line" of rescuing Jews was revealed by Hoess. He says:
From this gathering in Budapest, it is obvious that the. "new line" stretched from Himmler to Hoess, from Jutner [132] to Becher and Krumey.Footnote 132. S.S. General Jutner, Chief of the Waffen S.S. on the Eastern Front, who accompanied Hoess on the visit to Budapest; who had always been met by Kastner according to the latter's testimony.
According to Kastner, however, these Nazis were all active in rescuing Jews.
This meeting of these important German guests in Budapest exposes the "rescue" work of Becher in its true light. It reveals also the extent of Kastner's involvement in the inner circle of the chief German war criminals.
Just as the Nazi war criminals knew they needed an alibi and hoped to achieve it by the rescue of a few Jews at the eleventh hour, so Kastner also needed an alibi for himself. Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the Exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner's duties were part and parcel of the general duties of the S.S.
In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.
All these extermination, robbery and rescue activities of the S.S. were coordinated under the management of Heinrich Himmler.
Judge Halevi continues:
Kastner perjured himself knowingly in his testimony before this court when he denied he had interceded in Becher's behalf. Moreover, he concealed the important fact that he interceded for Becher in the name of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress. [133]
As to the contents of Kastner's affidavit, it was enough for the defense to prove Becher was a war criminal. It was up to the prosecution to remove Becher from this status, if they wished to negate the affidavit.
The Attorney General admitted in his summation that Becher was a war criminal.
The lies in the contents of Kastner's affidavit, the lies in his testimony concerning the document, and Kastner's knowing participation in the activities of Nazi war criminals, and his participation in the last minute fake rescue activities -- all these combine to show one overwhelming truth -- that this affidavit was not given in good faith. [134]Footnote 134. Statement by Richard H. Gutman, January 1, 1961:
"From the summer of 1945 to the summer of 1946 I was stationed as an intelligence and interrogation officer of the U.S. Army in Oberursel, Germany .... One of the men I interrogated was Standartenfuhrer (S.S. Colonel) Kurt Becher. ... At the time of the attack against Poland he was under the leadership of Fegelein, a member of the Reiter S.S. which committed the worst excesses in occupied Warsaw. I remember that during the interrogation it came out that Becher had contracted a venereal disease during the Polish campaign. . . . Undoubtedly Becher knew much more than he was willing to tell and was directly involved in many different aspects of the "final solution" to the Jewish problem as envisaged by Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, etc., than he would ever be willing to admit. But his constant reference to the fact that he was a "friend" of the Jews and that he knew they would vouch for him was too much for me to take. I put him in solitary confinement for which he loudly thanked me because, as he put it, 'it gave me a chance to reflect on all the terrible things that had happened.' I finally escorted him by jeep to Nuremberg where I delivered him to the prison authorities.
"Shortly after I had delivered Kurt Becher, war criminal and leading S.S. officer on Himmler's staff, I found that due to the intercession of Mr. Rudolf Kastner, Becher was enjoying a comfortable existence in the witness wing of the Nuremberg prison.... I was shocked and couldn't believe it and went to see Kastner. . . . When I said to Kastner that I didn't understand his loyalty and concern for a man like Becher he answered me, with a sentimental and far-away look in his eye, that when he once went into an S.S. office, he saw their belts hanging on the clothes rack. And on the belt buckles was inscribed the motto, 'Meine Ehre ist True' -- My Honor is Loyalty."
Kastner knew well, as he himself testified, that Becher had never stood up against the stream of Jewish extermination, as Kastner had declared in the affidavit.
The aims of Becher and his superior, Rimmler, were not to save Jews but to serve the Nazi regime with full compliance. There is no truth and no good faith in Kastner's testimony, "I never doubted for one moment the good intention of good Becher."
It is clear that the positive recommendation by Kastner, not only in his own name but also in the name of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish World Congress was of decisive importance for Becher. Kastner did not exaggerate when he said that Becher was released by the Allies because of his personal intervention. The lies in the affidavit of Kastner and the contradictions and various pretexts, which were proven to be lies, were sufficient to annul the value of his statements and to prove that there was no good faith in his testimony in favor of this German war criminal. Kastner's affidavit in favor of Becher was a willfully false affidavit given in favor of a war criminal to save him from trial and punishment in Nuremberg.
Therefore, the defendant, Malchiel Greenwald, was correct in his accusations against Rudolf Kastner in the first, second, and fourth of his statements. [135]
Judge Halevi's verdict found Malchiel Greenwald generally innocent of libel against Kastner, but fined him one Israeli pound (fifty cents) for the one unproven accusation -- that Kastner had actually collected money from his Nazi partners for his aide to their slaughter program. The judge also ordered the Government of Israel to pay Greenwald two hundred pounds (one hundred dollars) as court costs.