Kastner train passengers from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland, 1944
Natan Sharansky's story had a happy ending. After risking his life by refusing to negotiate with the KGB, he won his freedom and was celebrated as a hero.
Rudolf Kasztner made the opposite decision. As a Jewish leader in Nazi- occupied Hungary during World War II, he chose to bargain with Nazi devils—including SS colonel Adolf Eichmann—in an effort to save Jewish lives. Kasztner's negotiations succeeded in saving some lives, but his story is infinitely more complicated than Sharansky's and presents some of the most difficult questions in this book. Were Kasztner's decisions wise?
~~~
Rudolf (Rezsö) Kasztner was born in 1906 in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, a proud, cosmopolitan city of sixty thousand. The city was part of the kingdom of Hungary and had a significant Jewish community. Kasztner's parents were successful merchants. Kasztner, educated at the elite Jewish gymnasium, was a gifted student with a facility for languages.
In addition to his native Magyar (Hungarian), he learned to speak German, French, Latin, and Romanian, the last of which became essential.
Before he graduated from high school, his hometown became part of Romania—a less hospitable country for Jews—and was known as Cluj.
The young Kasztner also showed other talents, including a knack for maneuvering himself quickly onto center stage. At the age of fifteen, he joined a Zionist youth movement. Within a year, he was the leader of his group. After finishing high school and collecting a law degree (to please his mother), he turned to his real passions: politics, journalism, and Zionism. He took a job with a Jewish newspaper in Cluj and began to write bold political commentary, which alienated some readers but brought him to the attention of Dr. Joseph Fischer, one of the city's wealthiest and most respected Jews. Indeed, Fischer stood at the very apex of Jewish society in Cluj: he was the president of the city's Jewish Community and a member of Parliament—and thus a national spokesman for Romania's seven hundred thousand Jews. It did not take long for Kasztner to become Fischer's assistant, protégé, and eventually son-in-law (when Kasztner married Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth). The two men developed a strong bond.
The Kasztner of those years was already demonstrating the strengths of character that would also become his weaknesses. “Not only was Kasztner smarter and better read than others, but he also let everyone know that he was superior in wit and knowledge. … Kasztner often dismissed people as stupid, incompetent, or intellectually cowardly.” A law school friend recalled: “He had no sense of other people's sensitivities, or he didn't care whether he alienated his friends.” A member of his Zionist youth group recalls him as “sharp-witted and shrewd” but unreliable: “he often made promises he couldn't keep.”
But he was dedicated to helping Jews in trouble. His fellow citizens were often harassed by Romanian authorities, and Kasztner “was one of the few who could deal with the authorities as an equal,” writes Anna Porter.
In local government, Kasztner was remembered as a “fixer,” a man others trusted to solve their problems, but he was too smart to be much loved even by those he had helped. Still, he was sought out. The Jews of [Cluj] needed someone like Kasztner to help them survive the difficult years after Transylvania was ceded to the Romanians. …
Kasztner managed to keep in touch with bureaucrats and gentile functionaries of all political stripes. He knew whom to bribe and how much to offer, whom to flatter and how.
By the late 1930s, Kasztner was also helping Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe and ended up in Cluj. He raised money for them, organized food and shelter, and helped them obtain safe passage to Palestine, which was then controlled by the British. Some of this work waslegal—for example, obtaining exit visas from the Romanian government— but much of it was not. The British kept strict control over entry visas to Palestine, so getting Jews aboard ships often required the liberal use of bribes. This was Kasztner's forte. He worked closely with the Jewish Agency in Palestine, which encouraged illegal immigration. Anna Porter provides a vivid portrait of the Kasztner of this period: Kasztner was outspoken, brash, unafraid. He could be seen striding toward government offices and into police headquarters, a pale, muscular, slender man, his dark hair swept back, his well-tailored black suit stark even during the summer heat, his tie loosened over his white shirt, the collar perfectly starched. He was confident, in a hurry, his briefcase casually swinging from one hand, the other ready to wave to all his acquaintances.
~~~
In 1940, Kasztner moved to Budapest, where his skills as a fixer would soon be needed. Kasztner's hometown of Cluj had once again become part of Hungary, and Kasztner was now a Hungarian citizen. By this time Jewish refugees had begun pouring into Budapest from Nazi-occupied Poland and Slovakia, telling of Nazi atrocities. Hungary and Nazi Germany became wartime allies in that year but Hungary retained its autonomy. In comparison to Nazi-occupied Europe or Germany itself, Hungary seemed like a safe haven for Jews.
The Budapest Jewish establishment was wealthy, cultured, and among the most assimilated in Europe. Its members had dominated Hungarian industry, finance, and the professions. Some socialized with Hungarian aristocracy and had political influence. Unlike Kasztner, they considered themselves Hungarians first, and Jews second. Few in the establishment would have dreamed of moving to Palestine. Indeed, you couldn't have gotten them out of Budapest with a crowbar—a fact that was soon to contribute to their downfall. Moreover, the Jewish establishment was utterly unprepared for the needy horde of terrified Jewish refugees flooding into Hungary. Where would the refugees go? They didn't even speak Hungarian.
Kasztner, however, had grown up in the harsher climate of Romania, where Jews did not dine with the local aristocracy. He knew exactly what to do—and much of it was illegal.
Kasztner and about a dozen other “Zionist mavericks” got together and formed a Relief and Rescue Committee, later known by its He-brew name,
Va'ada. The Relief and Rescue Committee's core mission became the hiding and transport of Jews. Between 1941 and 1944, the committee fed and clothed refugees, obtained emigration documents (both genuine and forged), smuggled people across borders, and of course, paid bribes.
This work was made possible by an outstanding network of un- derground contacts—not only Zionists in other cities, but diplomats, couriers, smugglers, petty criminals, and bribable officials of every stripe— who kept them informed of what was happening to Jews elsewhere. One of the best-connected Relief and Rescue Committee founders, and a key player in this story, was Joel Brand, who in many ways was Kasztner's opposite.
Where Kasztner was widely seen as an intellectual snob, Brand was a drinker, a gambler, and a “playboy” who spent most of his time in cafés and nightclubs. This dissolute life had allowed him to develop an extensive network of double agents and Nazi intelligence officials who would prove useful in the days ahead.
Although the Jewish establishment disdained the Zionists and their methods, the two groups would soon come to need each other.
~~~
On March 19, 1944, German troops marched into Budapest and imposed a new puppet government. In the Nazi vanguard was Adolf Eichmann, who that day celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday. An SS colonel, Eichmann was under secret orders to implement Hitler's “Final Solution” in Hungary as quickly as possible—that is, to round up seven hundred thousand Jews and transport them to death camps or forced labor camps.
Why did the Nazis invade their own ally? For two reasons: they feared that Hungary was about to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, and they believed that Hungary was being too lenient toward its own Jews.
By this time, Germany's war efforts were faltering. The Soviets had repelled the Nazi invasion and were advancing on the eastern front. The Allies had invaded Italy. The realization that a German defeat was a real possibility, and almost within sight, created complicated crosscurrents that were difficult to read accurately at the time.
Within a day of the invasion, Nazi officials demanded a meeting with the leaders of Budapest's Jewish establishment. At the meeting, the Nazis addressed the Jewish leaders with respect and promised that as long as the Jews followed orders and didn't panic, no Jew would be harmed. These assurances fell on receptive ears. Rumors about the fate of Polish Jews had circulated widely among Hungarian Jews, but many could not believe that this could happen in a “civilised country like Hungary.”16 So when the Nazis ordered that Jewish Councils be set up throughout Hungary, ostensibly to promote a measure of Jewish self-government, the Jewish leaders complied.
Soon, however, the intended role of the Jewish Councils became clear: they were to be instruments for carrying out the Nazis' orders. Through a combination of threats and false promises, the Jewish leaders were co-opted into “contribut[ing] to the smooth running of the Holocaust.” Among other things, the Jewish Councils “published the newsletters announcing Eichmann's orders, … delivered Jewish money and valuables to the Germans” and “compiled the lists of Jews” that would later be used for roundups and deportations. When Jewish leaders protested, Eichmann assured them that these orders were simply wartime necessities and that cooperative Jews would not be in danger. The Nazis were, of course, lying.
According to German records, within four months of the invasion, some 437,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces were shipped to Auschwitz.
By the end of the German occupation, more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed.
Much of Kasztner's work, and the critical events of this story, happened during this very short period.
~~~
From the beginning of the invasion, Kasztner believed the Jewish Councils were pursuing the wrong strategy. His knowledge of Nazi procedures elsewhere—the creation of Jewish Councils, which then were enlisted in the creation of ghettos that were a prelude to mass deportations—persuaded him that Hungarian Jews were in serious danger. Moreover, he knew that some Nazi officials could be bribed. In 1942, a Jewish group in Bratislava,
Slovakia, had paid the Nazis some twenty thousand dollars to stop deporting Slovakian Jews. Because the deportations had halted around the same time, the Bratislava group was firmly convinced that their bribe had been the cause of the reprieve. That inspired them to concoct a much bigger plan, offering the Nazis $2 million (which they didn't have) to stop deporting Jews from other occupied countries. This scheme sputtered for lack of funds,23 but the Relief and Rescue Committee group was well aware of it.
Kasztner thought the best approach was to contact the Nazis directly and try to negotiate protection for the Jews. But he had a problem: Whom did he represent? For whom could he speak? His first challenge was to negotiate with the Budapest Jewish establishment for permission to speak on behalf of Hungary's Jews.
Three days after the invasion, he met in an elegant café with Samuel Stern, the patrician president of the Jewish Community and the head of the Budapest Jewish Council. Kasztner laid out his case: that Hungarian Jews were in danger; that Nazis were bribable, and that Zionists—not the Jewish Council—should handle this effort because they were experienced hands at this game. Stern was not persuaded. Confident of his contacts with the Hungarian government, the Jewish Community leader refused to believe that his constituents could possibly meet the same fate as Polish Jews.
Consequently, he expressed disinterest in receiving any assistance from the Zionists.
Kasztner and his cohorts were on their own.
Through Brand's Nazi contacts, however, a meeting was soon arranged with two SS officers, both members of Eichmann's “Sonderkommando”
(Special Action Commando). One of these men, Captain Dieter Wisliceny, was the same Nazi who had negotiated with the Bra-tislava group. Kasztner and Brand thought this was a good sign.
In preparing for the meeting, Kasztner and Brand focused on two goals.
One was to establish the Relief and Rescue Committee as a credible negotiating partner. They couldn't claim to speak for the Jews of Hungary, so they came up with an even grander idea: they would claim to represent all of “World Jewry.” They knew that many Nazis genuinely believed in a vast international conspiracy of Jews who were immensely rich and controlled the Allies and the Soviets. Kasztner and Brand decided to take full advantage of that myth—and for good measure, to claim linkage to the Bratislava group.
Their second goal was equally ambitious: to reach a deal that would protect all the Jews in Hungary. They decided to offer the Nazis $2 million —which, like the Bratislava group, they did not have—in exchange for a series of conditions.
~~~
Before we get to the substance of this meeting, let's step back and analyze Kasztner's decision in favor of negotiation.
How did he analyze the benefits and risks? We can assume that, like Sharansky, he had a strong interest in physical survival. The best way to save his own skin would be to avoid the Nazis entirely and go into hiding or flee. But Kasztner seems to have ignored that interest. The only goal he seems to have recognized was to save as many Jewish lives as possible. No doubt because of his experience as a “fixer,” he thought he could achieve that through negotiation.
He had no moral qualms about negotiating with devils. He was far too cynical for that. In fact, I think he believed that negotiating with the Nazis was justified on both pragmatic and moral grounds, because lives might be saved.
Did he experience any conflict between pragmatism and principle? Only to the extent that the personally safe choice—to head for the hills—would have meant not engaging in this negotiation. But there is no evidence he even considered that option. In fact, there is no evidence that he really did a cost-benefit analysis at all, at least one that Spock would recognize.
Kasztner was a fixer, not a hider. He had been negotiating with devils all his life. That was his public identity. All his skills called for negotiation, and so did his temperament. His decision to negotiate may well have been based largely on such intuitive judgments.
So let's look more closely at his decision to negotiate with the Nazis as an occupying power. Did it make any sense? What would Spock say? We must take care to base the analysis on what was known at the time and not on how things turned out.
~~~
The sweeping deal Kasztner and Brand envisioned, if implemented, would clearly serve the interests of the entire Jewish community in Hungary. So if Spock were to advise the Relief and Rescue Committee negotiators, he would focus on implementation. He would remind Kasztner and Brand of the risks of bluffing. They had no money. They were not authorized to speak for a single Hungarian Jew, much less the Jewish Agency in Palestine or the representatives of the American Jewish community in Switzerland. “What makes you think you can pull this off?”
Spock would ask. “How confident are you of raising the money? What might be the consequences if you can't deliver?”
Kasztner would probably respond that the chances were reasonably good that money could be raised; Stern would likely help raise funds within Hungary and the balance might be secured from Jewish sources abroad— and paid over time. Playing for time was valuable. In the meantime,
Germany might lose the war.
Spock would then turn to the Nazi side of the bargain. Why should the Nazis agree to such a deal? Why would it be in their interests? Even if they did make a deal, there was a significant risk they wouldn't honor it. Spock would also want to know whether Wisliceny had authority to make promises on behalf of the Nazis, especially about deportation. Wisliceny might simply be taking the money for himself.
Kasztner would probably respond that, in his experience, not all Nazis were committed to exterminating Jews. Some cared little for Nazi ideology and were willing to bend the rules in exchange for cash. The Bratislava episode appeared to be a prime example of this—and was presumably approved at high levels. The Nazi war machine needed money, and the Reich was under increasing international pressure to stop killing Jews. It wasn't entirely out of the question that the Reich would trade Jews for cash.
Kasztner would surely admit, however, that the whole plan was tenuous; the Relief and Rescue Committee held a very weak hand. It had no way of enforcing a deal with the Nazis, so there was substantial risk of paying a bribe and getting nothing in return.
But—and this was the key question—what were the alternatives? To Kasztner, who understood the Nazis' intentions, there were only three real alternatives to negotiation:32 fight, flee, or hide. None was feasible on an organized, massive scale. Armed resistance was hopeless: Hungarian Jews had hardly any weapons, most of the young men had already been sent to work camps, and the Jewish leadership opposed open resistance as too risky. Flight en masse was impossible. Much of nearby Yugoslavia was occupied by the Nazis and the border was heavily patrolled. Individuals might be able to escape to nearby Romania, but it was hard to imagine spiriting Jews en masse across that border. The final possibility was to go into hiding. But outside of Budapest, there was nowhere to hide large numbers of Jews. Certainly not in open fields, or small towns where everyone knew each other.
So what would Spock say? Having weighed all of these factors, I believe he would conclude that it was reasonable for the Relief and Rescue Committee to see whether it could negotiate a deal with the Nazis. The prospects of success weren't great, and Nazi promises were hardly worth banking on, but it was a desperate situation. Why not try? I suspect, however, that Spock would have urged Kasztner to have a backup plan, a “Plan B.” The alternatives to negotiation were terrible, but the best of the lot would involve spreading the alarm and warning Jews to avoid the ghettos and Nazi transports at all costs; better to go underground or flee.
The Relief and Rescue Committee's first meeting with the Nazis took place on April 5, 1944. Two Nazis were present: Captain Dieter Wis-liceny and another SS officer. Brand and Kasztner, introducing themselves as agents of World Jewry, immediately put an offer on the table by referring to the negotiations in Bratislava. They offered $2 mil-lion, with an immediate down payment of $200,000, subject to “four stipulations”: (1) no ghettos or concentration camps in Hungary; (2) no mass executions or pogroms; (3) no deportations from Hungary; and (4) permission for all Jews who held valid entry certificates to emigrate to Palestine.
Wisliceny's response was a masterful blend of promises and quasi- promises. He appeared to accept at least one of the conditions, explicitly stating, “We can guarantee that there will be no deportations out of Hungary.” His response to the other terms was ambiguous. For $2 million, he said, it might be possible to prevent ghettoization and to allow some Jews to emigrate. But over time, $2 million would not be enough. There would have to be more payments later. Furthermore, to demonstrate goodwill, the Relief and Rescue Committee would have to deliver the $200,000 down payment within a week. “Your people will not be harmed,” he promised, “so long as our negotiations are going on.”35
Brand and Kasztner agreed to raise the money but added another condition: in order to coordinate the fund-raising effort, they and their colleagues would need to move freely around the city. The SS officers agreed and gave the Relief and Rescue Committee officers special “immunity passes” that exempted them from the restrictions that applied to other Jews. (Thus, for the rest of the war, Kasztner would not be required to wear a yellow star. He would also be allowed to use cars and phones and to largely ignore curfews and travel restrictions.) Kasztner also demanded a good-faith gesture from the Nazis. “World Jewry,” he explained, would want proof that its money was actually helping Jews; it would “want to see results.”37 To this end, Kasztner proposed that one hundred Jews be allowed to leave Hungary for Romania, where the Jewish Agency had chartered a ship that would take them to Turkey and then to Palestine. Such a gesture from the Nazis, Kasztner asserted confidently, “would mean that we could ask for much more money from our people in Constantinople and Jerusalem.”38
Wisliceny made no promises but agreed to consider the matter.
“Meanwhile,” he suggested, “you can prepare a list of the people you want to send.” Thus, almost as an afterthought, a seed was planted that would later blossom into what became known as the “Kasztner Train.”
~~~
As Kasztner had hoped, Samuel Stern, the leader of the Budapest Jewish establishment, made a complete about-face and agreed to raise the down payment. By now, alarmed by the Nazis' anti-Jewish measures, Stern also authorized Kasztner to negotiate with the SS on behalf of all Hungarian Jews.
But over the next few weeks, even as the Relief and Rescue Committee was delivering the down payment in installments, Kasztner began receiving terrible news. Through sources in German counterintelligence he learned that, despite all public claims to the contrary, the Nazis planned to ghettoize all Jews in Hungary and then deport them.Kasztner immediately looked for Wisliceny, who was nowhere to be found. The other SS officials were no help. Kasztner accused them of reneging on Wisliceny's promise, but they just shrugged and feigned ignorance. However, they still wanted to negotiate. For the down payment already delivered, they said, perhaps a small number of Jews could be allowed to leave Hungary. A scant day later, the same officials announced to Kasztner that “as a gesture of good will,” their supe-riors had given permission to allow six hundred Jewish families to emigrate—half from the provinces and half from Budapest. Once again, they suggested that the Relief and Rescue Committee draw up a list.
Kasztner was alarmed. What had happened to the original deal? One moment they had been talking about saving the entire Jewish community; now they were down to only six hundred families. Kasztner was determined to find Wisliceny and confront him. But before he could do so, he was distracted by another stunning development.
On April 25, Eichmann summoned Brand to his office and made a proposal. (Kasztner was annoyed at having been passed over. Why Brand?) Brand later described the meeting as surreal: Eichmann chain-smoked, paced around the room, and bragged about having rounded up all the Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Finally getting to the point,
Eichmann said that the Reich needed trucks for its war effort and was willing to trade one million Jews for ten thousand winterized trucks. (This proposal would come to be known as blut gegen waren—“blood for goods.”) Eichmann instructed Brand to go to Istanbul, in neutral Turkey, to present this offer to “World Jewry.”
“I want you to go abroad and get in direct touch with your people and with representatives of the Allied powers. Then come back to me with a concrete proposal.”47
Brand left the meeting in shock. He thought the deal was preposterous.
How could “World Jewry” produce ten thousand trucks? It would require the full cooperation of the Western Allies, who would never allow the Nazis to receive war materiel in the middle of a war. What was Eichmann up to? In his postwar report of these events, Kasztner recalled asking himself: “What was behind these suddenly generous offers on one side, and the absurd demands on the other side? Were they lunatics or clumsy plotters, who would make such proposals?”48 Ultimately, however, it was decided to play along and attempt to meet Eichmann's terms.
~~~
In early May, Kasztner finally got permission to travel to Cluj, where Wisliceny had been reassigned. He soon discovered what Wisliceny was doing there. Local police had just begun rounding up Jews and moving them into a brickyard—a makeshift ghetto. Wisliceny himself was supervising the effort. When Kasztner confronted him about his earlier promise, Wisliceny admitted that he really had no authority to prevent deportations. “[Eichmann] gave me the dirtiest job, and I am now the one who has to transfer the Jews into Ghettos. … I wear a uniform, I must follow orders.”50
“At least tell me the truth,” Kasztner insisted. Was it true, as he had heard, that the Nazis planned to deport all the Jews in Hungary? Wis-liceny waffled but promised to find out. In the meantime, he said, Kasztner could prepare the list of six hundred families who would emigrate in exchange for the ransom already paid.
Let's step back again and ask: What was going on? Was it time to reassess? There is no evidence that Kasztner asked himself this question, but Spock would have strongly recommended it. The original decision to negotiate with the Nazis had been made in March. It was now May and Kasztner had new information. The Nazis had lied to his face about the deportations. His original, glorious deal was dead. He had paid a substantial bribe and so far had nothing to show for it. Eichmann was pushing a bizarre proposal that would probably go nowhere (although it might allow the Jews to buy valuable time). Wisliceny and his cohorts were dangling a carrot— the prospect of emigration for a small group—but they weren't trustworthy.
Spock would say: Slow down. Think. What should be your strategy? And what should you tell your family and the Jewish leaders in Cluj? Kasztner would probably respond that he was thinking, but that he couldn't exactly slow down. As he would write later, events were happening so fast that “even thoughts were too slow.”53 In that respect he was right: the ghettoization process in Cluj went so quickly that it was completed in a week.What did Kasztner do while he was in Cluj? He met with local Jewish leaders, including his father-in-law, but it is not clear what he told them.
Years later, the exact content of these discussions would be-come highly controversial. How much did Kasztner know about the Nazis' plans for Hungary, and how clearly did he warn his fellow Jews about the disaster that was coming? Although many Hungarian Jews had heard reports about Nazi atrocities elsewhere, and therefore had reason to understand that they, too, were in danger, others didn't know—or refused to believe—just how bad things were. Kasztner was much better informed than most. He knew from reliable sources that the Nazis planned to deport all Hungarian Jews.
He also knew that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not simply a forced labor camp as the Nazis claimed, and that deportation to Auschwitz was a probable prelude to extermination.
Kasztner later claimed that he had warned the Jewish leadership of Cluj, and his family and friends, of precisely this danger. Others said he had not. What is undisputed is that no dire warning ever reached the rest of the community and that no Jews were advised, by Kasztner or the Cluj leadership, to flee Hungary or go into hiding.
Kasztner did, however, tell the Jewish leaders about his negotiations with the Nazis. He said he was working on a deal that might allow some Jews, including a number from Cluj, to emigrate. One can easily imagine Kasztner, the fixer, wanting to hold out hope to those closest to him. One can also imagine his tendency to believe that if anyone could pull off a miracle, he could.
Kasztner decided not to abandon the negotiation track, despite Wisliceny's broken promise. Indeed, I think he was burning to go up the chain of command. To hell with Wisliceny … How could he get to Eichmann?
~~~
With the Nazis' help, Brand left for Istanbul on May 17 to carry Eichmann's proposal to a representative of the Jewish Agency. On Eichmann's orders, Brand was forced to leave his wife, Hansi, behind as a hostage. No member of the Relief and Rescue Committee had much confidence that the deal would succeed, but they hoped that by keeping the prospect of negotiations alive, they could stall for time and perhaps stop the deportations.
That hope would prove to be misplaced. Nothing ever came of the Brand mission, and Brand himself was never able to return to Hungary. In the meantime, mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz began on May 15 and continued at horrifying speed. But for about a month, the Jewish Agency pretended to take the “Jews for trucks” deal seriously, and these sham negotiations gave Kasztner the opportunity he needed to take Brand's place in Budapest. First he began an affair with Brand's wife, Hansi. It was Hansi who served as the bridge to Eichmann. Through her own contacts, she set up Kasztner's first meeting with Eichmann and attended it with him.
Thus Kasztner was finally able to establish himself with Eichmann as the chief agent of World Jewry in Hungary. The relationship between the two men would last for the remainder of the war and test all of Kasztner's skills.
At their first meeting, Eichmann—who Kasztner knew “ruled over life and death”57—greeted Kasztner and Hansi with characteristic bullying, boasting that he had served as commissar of Jewish affairs in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Abruptly, however, Eichmann grew amiable and spoke of his support of Zionism, including the Jews' right to have their own state.
Eventually, they got down to business.
Kasztner tried to persuade Eichmann to stop the deportations while Brand carried on the negotiations in Istanbul. He was unsuccessful.
Kasztner then reminded Eichmann of the promises his subordinates had made: that six hundred Jewish families would be allowed to leave Hungary.
Kasztner cannily linked this prior agreement with the Brand mission, and this connection, at least, he succeeded in making stick. World Jewry needed a showing of good faith, Kasztner argued. If Eichmann couldn't follow through on a simple promise to release six hundred families, there would be no hope of progress on the “Jews for trucks” deal.
Eichmann agreed to nothing at that first meeting, but he asked Kasztner to prepare a list of six hundred Jewish families who might be sent by train out of Hungary. On May 22, Eichmann explicitly agreed that six hundred families might be spared.
In the following weeks, Kasztner and Eichmann played a game of “double-bluff,”60 both sides playing for time, each aware that the other was unlikely to meet his commitments. Kasztner falsely claimed that Brand was making progress with the Allies in Istanbul and argued that if the deportations continued, Eichmann would have no Jews left to trade.
Eichmann pretended to negotiate the “blood for goods” deal while herding ten to fifteen thousand Jews a day into boxcars for transport to Poland.
Eichmann proved to be a thoroughly unreliable negotiating partner, constantly making promises and breaking them. In Hansi Brand's words,
“What we had established on one day … the next day was found to be nothing at all.”61
A showdown came in early June when Eichmann reneged on yet another promise—to bring several hundred provincial Jews to Budapest for inclusion on the emigration train. Kasztner decided to push back.
Instead of confronting Eichmann directly, Kasztner taunted him by making provocative statements to two of his officers. To one, Kasztner complained that Eichmann had broken his word and that Kasztner was going to inform Istanbul that all further discussions should be ended. To another, he declared that Eichmann's behavior was unworthy of an SS officer.
As expected, these comments got back to Eichmann, who summoned Kasztner to his office and threw a “fit of rage.” Kasztner reports that he simply didn't respond. Eventually Eichmann calmed down and asked Kasztner, “What do you really want?”
“I must insist on our agreements being kept. Will you bring the people suggested by us from the provinces to Budapest?”
Eichmann retorted, “Once I have said no, it's no!”
“Then there's no point in continuing to negotiate,” Kasztner said. He stood up and started to leave the room.
Eichmann responded with a threat: “You are a bundle of nerves,
Kasztner. I will send you to Theresienstadt to recover. Or do you prefer Auschwitz?”
Kasztner shot back: “It would be pointless. Nobody else would take my place.”
Hours of haggling followed, during which a significant shift occurred.
Eichmann stopped talking about Jews from the “provinces” generally, and started talking about Jews from Cluj, Kasztner's hometown. Was this a new aspect of the devil's bargain? The record is not clear on whether Eichmann or Kasztner initiated this change in emphasis, but eventually Eichmann relented and said: “All right. The [Cluj] people are coming to Budapest.”
By the end of the meeting, Kasztner had negotiated the number of Cluj Jews up to about 200, but eventually the number rose to 388. (Later, Jews from other provinces would be added.)
In retrospect, commentators say that Kasztner was uniquely suited to the task of dealing with Eichmann. Although Kasztner often felt nothing but despair, his smooth façade never cracked in Eichmann's presence. He got invaluable help from Hansi. Early on, Kasztner had told Hansi that he was terrified of Eichmann, who chain-smoked in Kasztner's presence and never offered Kasztner a cigarette. Hansi suggested that Kasztner bring his own cigarettes, and advised him to chain-smoke as well. Kasztner took her advice and his bravado won Eichmann's grudging admiration and respect.
As Eichmann recalled in his memoir: This Dr. Kasztner was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. … Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kasztner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strongman. We negotiated entirely as equals. … When he was with me, Kasztner smoked cigarets, as though he were in a coffeehouse.
While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigaret after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.
~~~
For Kasztner, dealing with Eichmann's tirades and treachery was easy compared to the task of drawing up “the list.” Here was another aspect of the devil's bargain, which Kasztner may not have anticipated. Which Jews should be chosen for emigration, and how should they be selected? It was an agonizing and chaotic process. Kasztner later called it a “merciless chore.”68 Not wanting to take on the burden alone, he asked a small group of members from the Relief and Rescue Committee to direct the effort, with input from other Jewish leaders. In an effort to be fair, the committee established categories for selection, such as “deserving figures in Jewish public life” and “widows and orphans of slave labourers.”69 Not surprisingly, this process sparked intense conflict; committee members were barraged with desperate appeals and charges of favoritism. Meanwhile,
Kasztner successfully haggled with Eichmann to expand the list to 1,300 people in exchange for a ransom of a thousand dollars per head. To raise the money, the committee created a new category: Jews who could pay far more than their pro rata share. In this way, 150 wealthy Jews bought their way onto the list and subsidized the others, who had no money.
The list was in constant flux, and the Relief and Rescue Committee did not have full control over it. Some people declined a spot on the train, fearing that the deal was a Nazi trap. Others on the list were deported before they could take advantage of the opportunity. Still other names were added by Nazi officials in exchange for individual bribes.
And then there was SS colonel Kurt Becher, an opportunist who was soon to play a crucial role in Kasztner's life. Becher's rank was equal to Eichmann's—both reported to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and had similar clout. But they had opposite temperaments. Whereas Eichmann was an ideologue who wanted to deport every last Jew, Becher was a pragmatist who cared only about his own career, self-enrichment, and survival after the war. Recognizing the train as a gold mine for himself, Becher maneuvered his way into the negotiation and reserved fifty places on the train, which he sold separately to Jews who bribed him directly. There is no evidence that Kasztner objected to this development. To the contrary, Kasztner recognized in Becher someone he could do business with. In the coming months, Kasztner would find Becher a more cooperative partner than Eichmann and would work increasingly closely with him.
On June 30, some 1,684 Jews finally left Budapest on the “Kasztner Train.” But the passengers' ordeal continued for months more. Again Eichmann broke his word. The train's destination was not Spain or Switzerland, as promised, but a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen,
Germany, where the émigrés were held hostage as “privileged” inmates.
Kasztner was in despair. He had intended the train to be the first step in a much larger rescue. But while he had been matching wits with the wily Eichmann, the latter had succeeded in shipping off to Ausch-witz nearly all of the Jews outside of Budapest. Only about 250,000 Jews remained in Hungary, nearly all in Budapest. And now Kasztner's train was trapped in Bergen-Belsen.
But Kasztner did not give up. Eventually, by December 1944, nearly everyone on the train made it to safety in Switzerland. Shortly thereafter,
Kasztner joined his wife, Elizabeth, in Switzerland. But their reunion was temporary.
Rather than remain in safety, Kasztner returned to Nazi-occupied Europe to try to save more Jews, a mission he pursued until the war's last days. In April 1945, as the Nazis were in their final retreat, Kasztner conducted a final rescue effort with Becher. Himmler had offered to make Becher responsible for final oversight of various concentration camps. And here Kasztner made what would later prove to be another devil's bargain. He persuaded Becher to accept this duty so that together they could save Jewish lives before the now-inevitable German defeat. In exchange,
Kasztner promised to help save Becher's skin by telling the Allies about his good deeds. Becher agreed. So the SS officer Becher and the Jew Kasztner (traveling with German papers) went from camp to camp, trying to prevent further wholesale deaths of inmates by asking that the camps be handed peacefully over to the Allies.
In the end, what did Kasztner achieve? This question has never been definitively answered. Certainly, his negotiation efforts were indispensable in saving the nearly seventeen hundred Jews who reached Switzerland via the Kasztner train. But Kasztner also had some luck. The release of the Jews from Bergen-Belsen was very much tied to Himmler's desire, at the end of the war, to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies.
Kasztner also claimed credit for saving tens of thousands more Jews, but these claims are harder to assess. He was very proud of a deal he negotiated with Eichmann in which, for a money bribe, Eichmann agreed to send some seventeen thousand Jews to a work camp instead of to Auschwitz. But as it turned out, Eichmann was independently under orders to send Jewish laborers to that work camp, so some commentators believe that Eichmann outsmarted Kasztner by making him pay for something that would have happened anyway. As to Kasztner's negotiations with the Nazis on behalf of other Jews—including those in Budapest74 and concentration camps—it is hard to determine with any precision what difference his intervention made. Historians differ in how much credit they give Kasztner for saving these additional lives, but most acknowledge that Kasztner played a role, and possibly a significant one.
Three Tribunals Judge Kasztner
When the war ended, Kasztner had no doubts about his own conduct. In his own mind, he was a hero. He continued to work for the Jewish cause, remaining in Europe for more than two years, participating in the Nuremberg trials of German war criminals, working to recover Jewish property stolen by the Germans, and trying to track down Eichmann so he could be brought to justice. Kasztner also made good on his promise to SS officer Becher, who was arrested by the Allies shortly after the war's end.
Kasztner submitted an affidavit that credited Becher with saving many Jews, and as a result Becher was soon released.
Kasztner also sought broader recognition for his accomplishments in negotiating with the Nazis. But instead, he found himself the object of ugly innuendos and even open attacks. Critics accused him of collaborating with the Nazis and enriching himself in the process. His accusers were a “mixed bunch … personal or ideological enemies, survivors who had lost relatives or had themselves suffered in the camps, and even some members of [the Kasztner train].”75
These attacks would last his entire life, and questions about his actions would prove so persistent that even today there is no consensus. During his lifetime, three different tribunals would consider charges against him and each would come to a different conclusion.
The first inquiry arose soon after the war at Kasztner's insistence.
Furious about the nasty rumors swirling around him,76 he demanded in 1946 that the World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, conduct hearings in a “court of honour.” A fact-finding committee was appointed and Kasztner prepared a 200-page report of his wartime activities. But after two meetings, the committee was unable to reach a decision. It was hardly an exoneration.
In 1947, just before Israel attained statehood, Kasztner moved to Israel with his wife and infant daughter, where the second inquiry was destined to occur. At first, things went reasonably well for him in the new state.
Although anonymous rumors about his past Nazi “collaboration” continued occasionally to haunt him, he successfully established a new public life. He was welcomed by the governing Mapai (later Labor) Party and appointed to a succession of government posts. But Israeli politics were deeply affected by the Holocaust and Kasztner was an open target. Within a few years he became the center of a sensational trial.
It started with Mikhail Grunwald, a bitter, right-wing crank who wrote an obscure mimeographed newsletter. In 1952, Grunwald published a tirade about Kasztner: Dr. Rudolph Kasztner must be liquidated! For three years I have been waiting for the moment to unmask this careerist who grew fat on Hitler's lootings and murders. Because of his criminal machinations and collaborations with the Nazis I consider him implicated in the murder of our beloved brothers.
The whole thing would probably have blown over if the Mapai party had not been feeling vulnerable. Grunwald's salvo was partly an attack on the governing party, and the attorney general decided to file charges of criminal libel against Grunwald. That meant he needed Kasztner as the government's star witness. He gave Kasztner a choice: either act to clear his name or resign his government post.
Kasztner was ambivalent about the prospect of a trial in which he would be the central focus. He saw the wisdom of ignoring Grunwald's insults, but he didn't want to resign his position and he wanted to fight back.
Moreover, Kasztner, who always loved the limelight, assumed that the trial would “shine a light on his actions” and win him the recognition he felt he deserved. So finally he agreed to fight Grunwald, and the government filed criminal libel charges against Grunwald.
The trial proved to be an unmitigated disaster for Kasztner.
Grunwald's newsletter rant had been a confused jumble of charges, but the trial judge organized them into four potential instances of libel: that Kasztner had (1) collaborated with the Nazis; (2) worked to save his own relatives and a few elite Jews while leaving the masses to die; (3) stolen money intended for rescue operations; and (4) helped Becher evade justice after the war.
The trial lasted for months and there were scores of witnesses. A good deal of the testimony focused on May 3, 1944—the day Kasztner had spent talking with the Jewish leadership in his hometown of Cluj. At issue was what Kasztner had said in those discussions. Did he simply tell the Jews about the train, or did he also warn them of the danger of deportation? Although Grunwald was technically the defendant in the case, he had a brilliant right-wing lawyer who successfully turned the trial into an indictment of Kasztner—and by extension, of the entire Israeli political establishment for its failure to do more during World War II to save European Jewry.
In 1955, Judge Benjamin Halevi delivered a 240-page judgment that has been called “one of the most heartless in the history of Israel, perhaps the most heartless ever.”84 The judge not only cleared Grunwald of all but one of the libel charges,85 but he took the opportunity to condemn Kasztner for having actively colluded in the Holocaust. In the judge's view, Kasztner had known full well about the Nazis' extermination plans but had deliberately withheld this knowledge from the Jewish masses. Indeed, the judge found that Kasztner had made a deal with the Nazis, a quid pro quo: in order to save a small number of privileged Jews—the Kasztner train—
Kasztner had agreed not to warn the larger Jewish community of the true danger they were in. The judge framed this deal as a contract in which Kasztner and the Nazis had exchanged promises,87 with Kasztner agreeing not to warn “so that the deportations could proceed without encountering panic or resistance.” In essence, the judge held Kasztner responsible for the fact that some half million Hungarian Jews had gone passively to their deaths, never knowing they were bound for Auschwitz. The judge ended by drawing on two literary metaphors—he compared the Nazis' release of Kasztner's train to the idea of Greeks bearing gifts (the Trojan Horse) and Kasztner's deal with Eichmann to the legend of Faust, stating that Kasztner had “sold his soul to Satan.”88
As I see it, the judge's opinion was not only heartless, but gratuitous. The judge could have spared Grunwald from a criminal conviction, on the grounds that the essential facts could not be established “beyond areasonable doubt.” He did not have to cruelly demonize Kasztner. Much of the judge's opinion is overblown, rhetorical nonsense. The Nazis, not Kasztner, were responsible for rounding up and slaughtering Hungary's Jews. Nothing Kasztner could have done would have saved most of those who perished. Moreover, I find it stunning that the judge blamed Kasztner alone and said nothing to condemn the behavior of the leaders of the Jewish council (“Judenrat”) in Cluj. There was a great deal of testimony at the trial suggesting that these leaders urged people to cooperate with the SS and to board the Nazi trains. They were not encouraging people to flee. Moreover, some of these leaders, including Kasztner's father-in-law, probably suspected that these trains might be headed for an extermination camp.
So what explains the vicious nature of this opinion? In part, the opinion reflects the broader attitudes in Israel in the 1950s.
The Holocaust had traumatized the Jewish world. The slaughter of six million Jews raised profoundly troubling questions. How did the Holocaust happen? Why had so little been done to prevent it? Why had so many Jews died without putting up a fight? Israel, a fledgling state surrounded by hostile Arab armies, was creating a new identity as a nation of warriors who would fight for their survival. Kasztner, by contrast, could be portrayed as the old-style Jew of Europe, who would haggle and make concessions rather than take a stand. As one scholar writes: [T]he Jews who had settled in Palestine before the war and watched the Holocaust from a safe distance felt impatient with the Jews of Europe who had allowed the Nazis to drive them “like lambs to the slaughter” while the survivors from Europe, in their turn, struggled to get over the loss of their loved ones and their own sufferings. In addition, there was guilt—on one side from failing to give help when it was needed, on the other side for surviving when so many died.
Regrettably, Kasztner also played a role in his own destruction. Early in the trial, he was his usual self-confident self, swaggering and strutting, enjoying being the center of attention. But under cross-examination he was asked whether he had testified in Becher's favor after the war. He denied it. When his affidavit on Becher's behalf was introduced into evidence, he was caught in the trap. That lie, and a few others, destroyed Kasztner's credibility in the judge's eyes on issues far more central to the case. As a result, many historians believe, the judge lost all sympathy for Kasztner's predicament.
The impact of the ruling on Kasztner and his family was devastating.
“Their block of flats was daubed with graffiti saying 'Kasztner is a murderer' and worse.”94 There were death threats. There was also political fallout. The Mapai party was tarnished, its coalition government lost its majority, and new elections were called. Kasztner was advised to leave the country until things calmed down, but he issued a defiant statement: “History and all those who know what really happened during those woeful times will bear witness for me. … I will do everything in my power to clear my name and regain my honour.”95
The third tribunal to judge him was the Israeli Supreme Court, which reviewed the case on appeal. In 1958, the Supreme Court reversed—with a four-to-one majority—the trial court's judgment and resoundingly cleared Kasztner of collaboration with the Nazis and complicity in mass murder.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Shimon Agranat, criticized the trial judge for evaluating Kasztner's actions with the benefit of hindsight. The court held that Kasztner: (1) did not know for certain what the fate of the Jews not selected for the rescue train would be; and (2) had reason to hope that many more might be saved through negotiations.
Agranat's opinion was also rich with commentary. He affirmed that Kasztner's sole intention had been to save the Jews of Hungary. Although the train was only meant for a small group, this “was just part of his goal and never became for him an exclusive objective.” (The judge noted in passing that Kasztner also provided money and resources to help others not on the train escape Hungary.) Moreover, the judge wrote, Kasztner did not negotiate with Eichmann as an equal. To the contrary, Eichmann held life- and-death power over Kasztner, who behaved reasonably as a Jewish leader under the circumstances. Agranat described Kasztner as a leader with no real power who was forced to make on-the-spot decisions under conditions of extreme pressure and great uncertainty. Against such odds, Agranat wrote, “God forbid us to regard Kasztner as guilty.”This ruling should have been a vindication for Kasztner, and in some ways it was. But he did not live long enough to know that his honor had been restored. While the appeal was pending, on the evening of March 3,
1957, a member of a radical Jewish underground movement approached him outside his home and shot him at close range. Although he survived for eight days, he died in the hospital.
Eichmann was tried, convicted, and hanged in Israel in 1962.
Becher was never convicted of any war crimes. He prospered in postwar Bremen, Germany, and died a rich old man in 1995—nearly forty years after Kasztner's assassination.
Assessment
What are my own thoughts about this case? Was Kasztner wise to negotiate with the Nazis? I approach this task with reticence. Attempting to assess decisions made in such dark times is treacherous. Primo Levi, himself a Holocaust survivor and a renowned Italian author, eloquently warned that those who haven't lived in such times have difficulty grasping what life was like in what he called this “Grey Zone.”97
I am not critical of Kasztner's initial decision to negotiate with the Nazis.
Wisliceny's first response to the Relief and Rescue Committee proposal was promising. But it was hardly reliable. Like Spock, I believe it would have been wiser for Kasztner and his colleagues to begin to develop a Plan B as well—to make every effort to warn the Jews in the provinces to go into hiding or flee. Such a mixed strategy would have been optimal.
What of Kasztner's decisions in Cluj on May 3, when he obtained new information? He learned that Wisliceny's earlier promises were worthless and that Eichmann was in charge. He also learned that the Nazis were beginning to round up provincial Jews and that in all probability this was a prelude to mass deportations to Auschwitz.
This information demanded two decisions.
One was whether to continue negotiating with the Nazis, despite their lies. Kasztner decided to continue, and I don't quarrel with that. I agree that the negotiation track was still worth pursuing. The second decision was whether to spread the alarm among the Jews of Cluj. We will never know for certain what Kasztner said or did. At the trial he testified that he issued a warning. If he was telling the truth, I have no real complaint, since he would have done what wisdom required. But his testimony was contradicted by several Cluj witnesses at the trial who testified that they were unaware of the dangers of ghettoization and deportation. The trial court found these witnesses more credible than Kasztner, and the Israeli Supreme Court did not reverse the trial court's findings on this factual point. On balance, I am skeptical about Kasztner's testimony that he issued warnings during his visit to Cluj. My best guess is that he and his colleagues didn't pursue a mixed strategy, either on May 3 or in the weeks that followed.
But even if he had warned, would it have made any difference? Would it have saved more lives? Some commentators suggest the answer is no: that what Kasztner knew about the danger facing Hungary's Jews, nearly everybody knew.
Additional warnings would have made no difference in people's behavior.
I don't buy the first part of this argument. Kasztner knew more—much more—about the danger than most Jews in Hungary. He knew with certainty that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not simply a labor camp, and that there was a substantial possibility that many Hungarian Jews would be deported there—to be murdered, not to work. Other Hungarian Jews, especially in the provinces, did not know these things with certainty.
They may have heard that many Polish Jews had been killed by the Nazis, but they knew far less than Kasztner about Nazi procedures with regard to trains and deportation.
Would strong warnings have saved additional lives? I believe that if Kasztner and his colleagues had acted early enough—in May 1944, just as the ghettoization process was beginning in the provinces—Plan B might have saved additional lives. How many? We will never know, and certainly Kasztner could not have known at the time. And that is my point.
When one is negotiating under conditions of such terrible uncertainty, it is wiser to bet on two horses, if possible, than one.
Why didn't they pursue a mixed strategy? I am sure many factors were at work. As Kasztner wrote later, events happened too fast. There wasn't an efficient mechanism to “spread the alarm” in any systematic way through the provinces. He was probably being carefully watched by the Nazis.
Anything he said, especially in Cluj, to disrupt the deportation could be reported back to Nazi headquarters in Budapest.
As I see it, on May 3 Kasztner was in a very complicated and somewhat compromised position. On the one hand, he wanted to encourage some number of people from Cluj to accept the invitation to be on his rescue train. To do so, he had every incentive to make sure they understood the danger of not joining his train. On the other hand, he obviously realized that only a small number could be accommodated, at least on this initial train.
He may have (wrongly, in my view) emphasized his hope that there would be many more trains and that maybe the “big deal” would be accomplished.
I suspect there was another factor: Kasztner's love of danger and intrigue and being at the center of the action. He was like a riverboat gambler who was willing to take chances, and who probably thought of himself as rationally calculating the opportunities and risks of various “bets.” Indeed, he often described his activities in terms of gambling—roulette, poker, etc.
In assessing the costs and benefits of alternative strategies, how realistic was Kasztner? Kasztner didn't fall into any of the negative traps I discussed in chapter 3. He was always prepared to negotiate with the Nazis, and he had no illusions about the regime being evil. And he was far too cynical to fall into the “positive” traps that push people into negotiating when they shouldn't.
But in analyzing the costs and benefits of his alternatives, his apparent failure to pursue a mixed strategy may have been the result of three other common cognitive errors that psychologists suggest can distort decision- making.
1. Kasztner's primary focus was on the train and on the lives that would be lost if the train project didn't work. Because of the phenomenon known as “loss aversion,” Kasztner may have given less weight in his decision-making to the number of lives that might have been saved had there been a mixed strategy that encouraged flight, hiding, etc.. The people listed for Kasztner's train were individual human beings who could be identified. Those who might have been saved with a better warning could not be identified in advance but were instead nameless “statistical lives.” In decision-making, saving a few identified people counts for much more than saving more statistical lives. There is research suggesting that more money will be spent more readily to save an identified worker trapped in a mine than a similar amount on mine safety measures that might save many more (unidentified) miners in the future.
3. Kasztner may have also fallen into the trap of overconfidence—he may have exaggerated the chances of his own success in pulling off the “blood for goods” negotiation.
How did Kasztner himself evaluate the prospects that he and Brand could pull off Eichmann's proposal of exchanging trucks and war materiel for hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives? Certainly, he should have recognized all along that the deal was nearly inconceivable. It would require the full cooperation of the Western Allies. Spock would have ridiculed the notion that somehow World Jewry might persuade the Western Allies—in the middle of a war in which Roosevelt and Churchill had called for “unconditional” German surrender—to allow the Nazis to receive war materiel. It seems highly unlikely that Hitler had any intention of allowing a large number of Jews to escape.
A better rationale for Kasztner's negotiation was that it might buy time and slow down the deportations. Abstractly, this is plausible. Why not try? Moreover, I applaud him for shrewdly linking the “small plan” (the train) to the “big plan” (blood for goods), and for his skill in persuading Eichmann to expand the number of Jews allowed on the train.
But as time went on, this second rationale became less and less persuasive. Eichmann flatly refused to stop or slow down the deportations.
Boxcars were leaving the provinces daily. In other words, Kasztner's plan wasn't working. Yet he refused to give up: he continued to go to Eichmann's office, smoke cigarettes, tell lies about Brand's “progress” in Istanbul, and argue that Eichmann should stop the deportations. He never lost his focus or shifted his attention to another strategy. In a sense, his persistence washeroic. In another sense, it was perhaps willful blindness. Did he start to believe his own arguments that World Jewry could pull off the deal?107 Did he fool himself into thinking that if he just talked long enough, he could persuade Eichmann to stop the deportations? I suspect that he got so caught up in the intensity of the negotiation that he exaggerated its potential, even to himself. He was negotiating with Adolf Eichmann, after all. The scope of the deal was huge. Foreign governments were involved.
When the dream ended, Kasztner was devastated. Porter writes: “When it seemed clear in Budapest that Joel [Brand's] mission had been a failure, only Hansi managed to remain calm. Rezso wept like a child. She cradled his head in her arms and kept repeating that they could not give up.”108
Kasztner wrote a revealing, nearly contemporaneous letter to a friend on July 12, 1944. He acknowledged that “the dream of a big plan is finished, the hundreds of thousands went to Auschwitz in such a way that they were not conscious until the last moment what it was all about and what was happening. We who did know tried to act against it … without our being able to do anything of importance to prevent it.” He added that “we did not forget the flight to Romania, to Slovakia and attempts at hiding people.”
But “the speed of the collapse was so wild that help and actions of succor and rescue could not keep up with it; even thoughts were too slow.”109
This last phrase is especially poignant, for it suggests that in retrospect Kasztner may have felt that he had not thought things through carefully enough—that his “thoughts were too slow.” And whose “dream of a big plan” could he have been referring to, if not his own? Did Kasztner sell his soul to the Devil? Absolutely not. But he may have been outsmarted. One scholar argues that Eichmann pursued a brilliant strategy that distracted and beguiled not only the Jewish Councils, but Kasztner and the Relief and Rescue Committee as well. By dangling bait such as the rescue train, the Nazis raised false hopes and kept the Jewish leaders in a constant state of turmoil. Once there was a train, there was a “list” that had to be drawn up—which created bitter conflicts that consumed and divided the Jewish community. Perhaps Kasztner, too, was drawn in.
He thought he was Eichmann's equal, and this may have blinded him to the fact that he was being toyed with and bought off for a modest price. I am not persuaded that the Nazis were quite as diabolically clever as all that, but I find the argument intriguing.
In sum, from a cost-benefit standpoint, I think Kasztner's decision to bargain with Eichmann was wise but his apparent failure to pursue a mixed strategy was not.
What about the charges that Kasztner's actions were immoral? The trial judge accused Kasztner of making a devil's bargain—that in exchange for the Nazis' sparing the lives of those on the train, Kasztner had promised not to urge resistance or flight. It's entirely plausible that Kasztner would make such a promise to Eichmann. My view is, so what if he did? Kasztner would promise Eichmann anything if he thought it would help save Jews. The critical question isn't whether he made such a promise, but whether he honored it.
As noted, the historical record is far from clear. But let's assume the worst. Suppose Kasztner made a vow of silence and kept it—that is, he chose not to warn in order to maximize the chance that the train would succeed. Would that be immoral? In my view, no. Such a choice would be morally culpable only if Kasztner knew or should have known that he would save more lives by making the opposite choice. At the time, there was no way for Kasztner to know which strategy would save more lives: negotiating with Eichmann or urging escape. It is simply preposterous to claim that Kasztner was morally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths because, in hindsight, he may have failed to make the very best decision under conditions of such extreme uncertainty.
The second moral issue also relates to the train: Was the selection process fair? Whatever its flaws, these cannot be laid at Kasztner's door.
Many people played a role in the process, and a reasonably diverse group of Jews ended up being chosen. The selection process wasn't perfect—it wasn't a lottery—but under the circumstances, it could not have been perfect. Certain groups were overrepresented, mainly wealthy Jews, prominent Jewish leaders, and Jews from Cluj, including members of Kasztner's family. But was it so terrible for Kasztner's relatives to be included? Perhaps a saint would refuse to do so, but if I had been inKasztner's place I would have made sure my family members were on the train. What could be more human than favoring your own family?113
This dilemma is similar to “Sophie's choice” in the William Styron novel of that name. In the novel, a Nazi tells Sophie that he will permit her to save only one of her two children—she has to choose which child or the Nazi will kill both children and Sophie as well. Eichmann and the Nazis, not Kasztner, deserve moral condemnation for forcing such a choice on Kasztner and his colleagues. Kasztner and his colleagues deserve sympathy.
A third moral issue relates to lying, and I find it the easiest. Having decided to negotiate with a devil, is it morally permissible to lie in order to save lives? One of Kasztner's strengths was his ability to lie, bluff, evade, and mislead. In less extreme contexts, one might persuasively argue that it is wrong to lie, even if the lie has beneficial results, be-cause if everybody lies the social fabric falls apart; people stop relying on each other to keep promises. But what moral or social fabric existed in the Nazi regime? None.
Even those philosophers with a very strict view, who broadly condemn all sorts of lies, acknowledge certain exceptions to interactions between oppressor and oppressed, especially if necessary to save lives.
Several lessons can be drawn from this inquiry.
If you bargain with the Devil, develop alternatives. You will need them if the deal doesn't work out.
If you bargain with the Devil, you'd better win big. Otherwise you may be harshly judged by history—and by your own people. You may even be demonized.
If you lie to the Devil, don't get seduced by your own lies.
I am pleased that more sympathetic accounts of Kasztner's rescue efforts are now emerging, after years in which he was vilified and then largely forgotten. I admire his courage. But I must confess to some ambivalence about his style of negotiation.
I don't fault Kasztner for lying to Eichmann. But I find troubling that at his trial he lied under oath about helping Becher. I wonder whether Kasztner was someone who lied, apparently without moral qualms, whenever he thought it was expedient.
Kasztner's style of negotiation is definitely not the approach that I teach and practice. My hunch is that Kasztner would claim that lying in negotiation—like bluffing in poker—is an appropriate part of the game.
You must simply be clever enough not to get caught. I disagree. I can typically achieve good results—as good as someone like Kasztner—without lying. Getting caught can ruin your reputation and have long-term consequences that outweigh any benefits. Besides, it's wrong. This is what I teach my students.
But this case strains the limits of any notion of principled nego-tiation.
If you were dealing with a devil like Eichmann, who would you want to negotiate on your behalf—a negotiator like me who hates to lie, or someone like Kasztner, who lies persuasively because he's had lots of practice?118
The answer is pretty obvious and it troubles me.
Tags: Book Summary,Negotiation,
