Pictured: The Zionist in question.
The agreements between the Zionist movement and [the Third Reich] were a well‐kept secret for many years. But once the scandal known as the Kastner case broke in 1953, the details began to come to light gradually.
The first secret agreement to be fully revealed was the one reached between Dr. Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest and Colonel Adolf Eichmann (who had signed the 1938 emigration agreement with Moshe Bar‐Gilad), the official responsible for settling the “Jewish question” in Hungary, in 1944. The Kastner–Eichmann agreement concerned the fate of some 800,000 Jews in Hungary.
“The great bulk of Hungary’s Jews were without organisation. They belonged neither to Zionism nor the Jewish Agency. They belonged only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafés. Who could speak for these assimilated Jews, these Jews without chairmen? […] The organised Jews took over the entire rescue work for the whole 800,000 doomed.”^75^
The organised Jews were the Zionists, who set up the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee. Kastner and the other officials of this Committee, like Ginsberg and Bar‐Gilad, were officially recognised by the [Third Reich] as negotiators and representatives of the Zionist movement.
The truth about the activities of this so‐called “Rescue Committee” did not begin to come out until [a Jewish] writer named Malchiel Greenwald publicly denounced Kastner as a collaborator with [Fascism], maintaining that “Kastner’s deeds in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.”^76^ Greenwald was sued for libel not by Kastner but by [Zionism’s] Government, whose leaders had been Kastner’s superiors and had drawn up the policy he had implemented.
The trial did not go well for the [neocolonial] Government. Greenwald was cleared of the charge of libel, indicating that there was a firm basis for his accusation that Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the [Fascists] and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine.
According to the Judge in the Kastner case, Benjamin Halevi: “The Jews of the ghettoes would not have trusted the [Axis] rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish [but Zionist] 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 [Zionist] leaders… 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 ghettoes… The [Fascists’] patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save 600 prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews… The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism…
“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 [Axis]. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment or prominents, whom the [Axis] promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the [Axis] designated for death, on the other hand. An imperative condition for the rescue of the first camp by the [Axis] was that Kastner will not interfere in the action of the [Axis] against the other camp and will not hamper them in its extermination. Kastner fulfilled that condition… 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 SS. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the […] SS opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.”^77^
Greenwald’s lawyer Shmuel Tamir (who as a member of the Herut party was hoping to topple the government of the Mapai party to which Kastner belonged) next sought to bring Kastner to trial for collaboration with [Fascism]. For this, Tamir collected “a suitcase full of new evidence against Dr. Kastner, and God knew whom else.”
Before this second trial could be held, however, Kastner was assassinated by Zeev Eckstein, formerly “a paid undercover agent of the [neocolonial] government’s Intelligence Service”, thereby putting an end to the danger that his appearance in court might reveal more embarrassing details.^78^
At the same time that Kastner was carrying through his deal with the [Axis], Rabbi Weissmandel wrote to the Zionist movement: “We send you this special message to inform you that yesterday the [Axis] began the deportation of Jews from Hungary… The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas… This is the schedule of Auschwitz. from yesterday to the end: 12,000 Jews—men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones — are to be suffocated daily…
“And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you, ministers of all the Kingdom, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands on thousands, reaching now to 6 million Jews, were murdered. And silent now while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal you are and murderers too you are, because of the cold‐bloodedness of the silent in which you watch. Because you sit with folded arms and you do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour… You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money ? Murderers. Madmen. Who is it that gives charity? You who toss a few pennies from your safe homes ? Or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?”^79^