The Problem with Ken Livingstone: Facts v Tropes

 

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone was interviewed on Sky TV on the day of the local council election results in England, despite having been suspended for his inflammatory remarks, made in a radio interview last week, that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’. In his Sky TV interview, he reiterated that his original statement was ‘historical fact’ and that all we need to do is consult the internet. I have done so, and I have also consulted reference books and textbooks used by teachers of this period in Germany’s history and can find no reference to Hitler or the NSDAP supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in the two 1932 elections to the Reichstag, or the Presidential election. Neither of these elections brought them to power, we need to remember. That only began to happen in January 1933 when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, but even then the German government was a coalition, and it was not until the summer of 1933 that the Nazis gained full control over the German state. What Livingstone is trying to do is to conflate Hitler’s coming to power with the NSDAP ‘policy’ in 1932, which was by no means clear on its ‘solution’ to ‘the Jewish Question’, and the later actions of the SS up to 1941. He is trying to suggest that Zionism and Nazism were, and are, common ideological bed-fellows. In doing so, he conveniently ignores the broader context of the development of both Zionism and anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the Middle East, both before and after the Nazis came to power. He is applying a politically motivated ‘trope’ to a complex set of historical events.

Doing Business with the Nazis? The Ha’avara Agreement

Part of Ken Livingstone’s argument no doubt relates to The Ha’avara Agreement, which allowed some German Jews fleeing to Palestine to recover some of their property by buying German goods for export to Israel, was made with the German government in March 1933, before the Nazis had full control over German society. These were Jews who had already emigrated or were in the process of doing so. It was not part of a government deportation scheme, though it was thought among some Nazi circles to be a possible way to rid the country of its supposed ‘Jewish problem’.  The head of the Middle Eastern division of the foreign ministry, the anti-Nazi Werner Otto von Hentig, supported the policy of concentrating Jews in Palestine. Hentig believed that if the Jewish population was concentrated in a single foreign entity, then foreign diplomatic policy and containment of the Jews would become easier. Hitler’s own support of the Havard Agreement was unclear and varied throughout the 1930s. Initially, Hitler criticized the agreement, but reversed his opinion and supported it in the period 1937-1939, as a legal means of ethnic cleansing before going to war. However, the programme was ended after the German invasion of Poland. It’s also worth noting that the agreement was heavily criticised by leading Zionists at the time, including Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist leader.

Most historians are very clear that, whilst a tiny minority of the Revisionists may have had some sympathy with Nazi ideology, especially its anti-Marxist elements, the vast majority of both the Revisionists and the German Zionist movement as a whole was totally opposed to it in all its elements. Only anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists believe otherwise because they want people to believe that the movement for the creation of the state of Israel collaborated with the Nazis to set up the conditions for the massacre of those Jews choosing to remain in Europe. The further implication, of course, is that Zionists, having aided and abetted the Nazis in the genocide against their own people, would have no compunction in conducting ethnic cleansing against Palestine’s post-war Arab population.

Reading Forward: The origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Anyone looking for documentary evidence on this period should consult Walter Lacqueur’s superb compendium, ‘The Arab-Israeli Reader’, first published in 1969, which I used as a reference book when teaching ‘The Arab-Israeli Conflict’ in schools in England in the 1980s.

Of course, the Labour Party has had a long history, and not always a proud one, in its dealings with Palestine. Following the Arab riots of 1929, the Labour government published a new statement of policy, the Passfield White Paper,  which urged the restriction of immigration and land sales to Jews. It was bitterly denounced by Zionist leaders as a violation of the letter and spirit of the mandate over Palestine given to Britain by the League of Nations in 1920. PM Ramsay MacDonald sent a letter in February 1931, which became known to the Arabs as the “Black Letter” in which he gave assurances to Dr Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist movement, that the terms of the Mandate would be fulfilled. In it, he quoted from his speech in the House of Commons:

Under the terms of the mandate his Majesty’s government are responsible for promoting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

A double undertaking is involved, to the Jewish people on the one hand and to the non-Jewish population of Palestine on the other; and it is the firm resolve of his Majesty’s Government to give effect, in equal measure, to both parts of the declaration and to do equal justice to all sections of the population of Palestine…

It is desirable to make clear that the landless Arabs,… were such Arabs as can be shown to have been displaced from the lands which they occupied in consequence of the land passing into Jewish hands, and who have not obtained other holdings on which they can establish themselves, or other equally satisfactory occupation. It is to landless Arabs within this category that his Majesty’s Government feels itself under an obligation to facilitate their settlement upon the land. The recognition of this obligation in no way detracts from the larger purposes of development… of furthering the establishment of a national home for the Jews…

MacDonald went on tho state in his letter that there would be a need for co-operation, confidence, readiness on all sides to appreciate the difficulties and complexities of the problem, and, above all, that there must be a full and unqualified recognition that no resolution can be satisfactory or permanent which is not based upon justice, both to the Jewish people and to the non-Jewish communities of Palestine.  It seems from this document that, from (at least) its second time in government, the Labour Party has favoured what has now become known as a two-state solution. 

A Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel was established in 1936, following the fresh outbreak of rioting by Arabs earlier that year. It found that Arab and Jewish differences could not now be reconciled under the Mandate and therefore suggested the partition of Palestine. The Arab leadership rejected the plan, but the Zionist Congress accepted it with qualifications, though with a substantial minority voting against. The British government eventually rejected the plan itself in November 1938. Jabotinsky’s evidence submitted to the Royal Commission is revealing in its definition of the evolution of Zionism by this stage:                                                                                   

The conception of Zionism which I have the honour to represent here is based on what I should call the humanitarian aspect. By that, I do not mean to say that we do not respect the other, the purely spiritual aspects of Jewish nationalism, such as the desire for self-expression, the rebuilding of a Hebrew culture, or creating some “model community of which the Jewish people could be proud.” All that, of course, is most important; but as compared with our actual needs and our real position in the world today, all that has rather the character of luxury. The Commission has already heard a description of the situation of World Jewry especially in Eastern Europe, … you will allow me to quote from a recent reference in ‘The New York Times’ describing the position… as “a disaster of historic magnitude.” … Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists among whom there were many great minds… have come to the conclusion that the cause of our suffering is the very fact of the “Diaspora,” the bedrock fact that we are everywhere a minority. It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer. Of course, there are ups and downs; but there are moments, there are whole periods in history when this “xenophobia of Life itself” takes dimensions which no people can stand, and that is what we are facing now…

… the phenomenon called Zionism may include all kinds of dreams – a “model community”, Hebrew culture, perhaps even a second edition of the Bible – but all this longing for wonderful toys of velvet and silver is nothing in comparison with that tangible momentum of irresistible distress and need by which we are propelled and borne. We are not free agents. We cannot “concede” anything. Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own Party, accused of asking for too much – Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes, we do want a State; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and humblest who do not claim any merit, any role in humanity’s development, they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same condition as the Albanians enjoy… then it is called too much.

We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of re-housing one-third… half… or a quarter of the Jewish race… Certainly the way out is to evacuate those portions of the Diaspora which have become no good, which hold no promise of any possibility of livelihood, and to concentrate all those refugees in some place which should not be Diaspora, not a repetition of the position where the Jews are an unabsorbed minority within a foreign social, or economic, or political organism.

I have the profoundest feeling for the Arab case… I could hardly mention one of the big nations, having their States, mighty and powerful, who had not one branch living in someone else’s State… but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation…

After the failure of the partition scheme and a subsequent attempt to work out an agreed solution at the London Conference (Feb-March, 1939), the British government announced its new policy in a White Paper published in May 1939. Arab demands were largely met: Jewish immigration to Palestine was to continue at a maximum rate of 15,000 for another five years. After that, it was to cease altogether unless the Arabs would accept it. Jewish purchase of land was also to be restricted in some areas and stopped altogether in others. Jewish reaction was bitterly hostile, but the Arab leaders also rejected the White Paper: according to their demands, Palestine was to become an Arab state immediately, no more Jewish immigrants were to enter the country, and the status of every Jew who had entered the country was to be reviewed. The Jewish Agency for Palestine, which had been coordinating the migration, led the Zionist reaction to the British government’s new policy:

1.  The new policy for Palestine laid down by the Mandatory in the White Paper now issued denies to the Jewish people the right to rebuild their national home in their ancestral country. It transfers the authority over Palestine to the present Arab majority and puts the Jewish population at the mercy of that majority. It decrees the stoppage of Jewish immigration as soon as the Jews form a third of the total population. It puts up a territorial ghetto for Jews in their own homeland.

2. The Jewish people regard this policy as a breach of faith and a surrender to Arab terrorism. It delivers Britain’s friends into the hands of those who are biting her and must lead to a complete breach between Jews and Arabs which will banish every prospect of peace in Palestine. It is a policy in which the Jewish people will not acquiesce…

3. The Royal Commission… indicated the perils of such a policy, saying it was convinced that an Arab Government would mean the frustration of all their (Jews’) efforts and ideals and would convert the national home into one more cramped and dangerous ghetto. It seems only too probable that the Jews would fight rather than submit to Arab rule…

4. The Jewish people have no quarrel with the Arab people. Jewish work in Palestine has not had an adverse effect upon the life and progress of the Arab people. The Arabs are not landless or homeless as are the Jews. They are not in need of emigration… The Jewish people has shown its will to peace even during the years of disturbances. It has not given way to temptation and has not retaliated to Arab violence. But neither have Jews submitted to terror nor will they submit to it even after the Mandatory has decided to reward the terrorists by surrendering the Jewish National Home.

5. It is in the darkest hour of Jewish history that the British have decided to deprive the Jews of their last hope and to close the road back to their Homeland. It is a cruel blow… This blow will not subdue the Jewish people. The historic bond between the people and land of Israel cannot be broken. The Jews will never accept the closing to them of the gates of Palestine nor let their national home be converted into a ghetto…

This document shows quite clearly that Jewish immigration to Palestine, which had been underway for at least a decade and a half before Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, was neither the product of a defeatist collaboration with them nor of some form of perverted ideological motivation.

Nazism & the Arab Cause: Hitler & the Grand Mufti

Further evidence as to the ideological distance between Nazism and Zionism, were it needed, is revealed by Hitler’s recorded statements made in the presence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in November 1941. In the previous year, following the German destruction of Poland and occupation of western Europe, Jewish emigration to Palestine from the Reich had all but halted, falling to 1,100 from a high of 9,800 in 1934, following the Ha’avarah Agreement, and from 9,200 between the Anschluss (reunification with Austria and the onset of war). Hitler’s true intentions, were they ever to be doubted, as to the means of achieving ethnic cleansing, are as clear in these statements as they are from the mass murders of Polish Jews that had already taken place and were common knowledge in those countries, like Hungary, which received large numbers of refugees who could no longer so easily gain passage to Palestine. Anna Porter’s book, Kasztner’s Train, contains details of this which I have summarised elsewhere on this site.

Haj Amin al Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the most influential leader of the Palestinian Arabs both before and during the Second World War when he lived in Germany. He met Hitler, Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders on various occasions and attempted to coordinate Nazi and Arab policies in the Middle East (Lacqueur). The Record of Conversation between him and the Führer in Berlin begins with his statement on foreign policies of what he termed The Arab Legion, including the Arab countries of North Africa which he said were ready to rise up, together with the Palestinians, against the ‘enemies’ they shared with Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists. He mentioned a letter he had received from the German government which stated that

Germany was holding no Arab territories and understood and recognised the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs, just as she supported the elimination of the Jewish national home.

Hitler himself then stated that Germany’s fundamental attitude was as stated in this letter:

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included opposition to the national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a centre, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the function of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work done there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.

Germany was at the present time engaged in a life or death struggle with the two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Theoretically there was a difference between England’s capitalism and Soviet Russia’s communism; actually, however, the Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal. This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself as in the main as a conflict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. It went without saying that Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle, because platonic promises were useless in a war for survival or destruction in which the Jews were able to mobilize all of England’s power for their ends.

Hitler went on to refer to Iraq, where Germany had been prevented from the rendering of effective practical aid so that the country was overcome by the power of Britain, that is, the guardian of the Jews. Germany was involved in severe battles to force open the gateway to the northern Caucasus region. Therefore, he argued, he could not make any declaration of intent about Syria, because this would be united by de Gaulle’s followers as an attempt to break up France’s colonial empire and lead to a strengthening of their common cause with the English. He then made the following statements to the Mufti:    

1. He would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.

2. At some moment… which… was not too distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.

3. As soon as this happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.

This would, he concluded, bring about the end of the British world empire and French influence in the Middle East. Significantly, however, he refused to make the kind of declaration the Mufti had asked of him at that time, which would provoke an immediate revolt against the British and the Jews in Palestine. Referring to the Anschluss with Austria, he remarked that,…

… he (the Führer) would beg the Mufti to consider that he himself was the Chief of State for five long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of liberation.                   

His point was clearly that, before ‘force of arms’ had been successful in extending the Reich’s territorial control to the south of the Caucasus, the Judeo-British link could not be broken. Nevertheless, he assured the Grand Mufti that his statements could be regarded as a confidential declaration or secret agreement between the two of them. Hitler’s reference back to his first five years after becoming Chancellor of Germany is an interesting one in the context of recent claims that he was not always determined to exterminate the Jews but also supported Zionist emigration as a means to the ethnic cleansing of Europe set out in his early writings. If he went along with the dealings of some of his leading SS men, Eichmann included, it was only until such time as the military conquest of the European conquest was all but complete, and perhaps as a temporary means of earning money from exports. As he told the Mufti, he had to speak coolly and deliberately, as a rational man and primarily as a soldier, as the leader of the German and allied armies. In addition, we cannot escape the fact that his clearly stated aim in this German State document was the destruction of the Jews, not just in Europe, but also in Palestine and the Middle East, even if he expected this latter genocide to be carried out mainly by the Arabs. Given the extent of his military ambitions in 1941, it is difficult to imagine that he ever seriously contemplated, let alone supported, the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine which, as he himself acknowledged, would become a thorn in his side before very long.

Creation and attempted strangulation of Israel

By the time an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee was appointed in November 1945 to examine the state of the Jews in the former Axis-occupied countries and to find out how many had been impelled by conditions to migrate, Britain, weakened by war, found itself under growing pressure from both Jews and Arabs alike. The Labour Government of Clement Attlee, therefore, decided to invite the United States to participate in finding a solution. President Truman welcomed the recommendation of the Committee to rescind the immigration and land laws of the 1939 White Paper, although Attlee declared that the report would need to be “considered as a whole on its implications.” Arab League reaction was hostile and threatening, refusing to consider a bi-national, federal solution. Those Arabs who would consider it were assassinated by supporters of the Mufti, leading others to drop out of talks. The Ihud Zionists put forward this solution, but they too found few supporters among the Jewish Community in general. Eventually, the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced in February 1947 that HM’s Government had decided to refer the Palestine problem to the United Nations. The tension inside Palestine had risen, illegal Jewish immigration continued, and there was growing restiveness in the Arab countries. Palestine, Bevin said, could not be so divided as to create two viable states, since the Arabs would never agree to it. This was how, under a Labour Government, the British Mandate was terminated, and the state of Israel was declared in May 1948 and was immediately and illegally occupied by the armies of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab states. They tried, and failed, to block the implementation of the UN Resolution establishing what they called “a Zionist State” by “Jewish usurpers”.

Our ‘Dr Livingstone’ would do well to remember these facts as well. His latest statement, made on an Arabic language TV station, is that “the creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong”, a statement made with all the presumptive self-assurance of someone with a PhD in the history of Zionism and the establishment of Israel. Three greater Labour giants from the period itself, Ramsay MacDonald, Clem Attlee and Ernie Bevin clearly did not see what they were engaged in as wrong, but so would the United Nations, yesterday and today. Of course, Dr Livingstone is again looking through the wrong end of his explorer’s telescope. Palestine before the Second World War was never recognised as an ‘Arab state’ (even in prospect) and many Jews had settled there long before the Second World War. In fact, for reasons already mentioned, the majority of those settling in Palestine had already done so before the War. It was the failed attempt by the neighbouring Arab states to “strangle Israel at birth” which led to it seizing, for its own protection, more land areas beyond those defined by the UN. Once again, Mr Livingstone is scapegoating the Jews for the Arab-Israeli Conflict of the last seventy years, in addition to making them, as victims of the persecutions of the previous seventy years, responsible for their own Shoah, or suffering.

Sources:

Walter Lacqueur (1969), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict. New York: Bantam Books.

Richard Overy (1996), Historical Atlas of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

 

Four years ago, the 19th March was officially designated as Hungary’s day for remembering the victims of the German occupation of Hungary which began on that day in 1944, following an agreement between its then Regent, Admiral Horthy, and the ‘Führer’ of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, two days earlier. The first implication of the current Hungarian government’s decision to commemorate the Holocaust on a different day from the rest of the world (which does so on Holocaust Memorial Day in January) was that the whole Hungarian people were just as much victims of this ‘invasion’ and the atrocities which followed, as the Jews and Roma who were murdered under the authority of the Nazi régime, or who somehow survived them in the last year of the war. The second was that the ‘Hungarian Holocaust’, to give it the title widely used by historians, had little to do with the anti-Jewish motivations and actions of the Hungarian governments of 1944-5, and those which had led up to them in the previous six to eight years, and that those actions in which they participated, were only undertaken by them under the extreme duress applied by the SS. Statues have recently been erected in Budapest and elsewhere which seek to symbolise this lie. The fact that, this year, there have been no published statements by or on behalf of the current state ministers or President, only goes to confirm that they have no wish to court controversy by repeating the lie, though they continue to seek to rehabilitate proven active collaborators by initiating, sponsoring and supporting the erection of statues of these public officials who took part in the deportations and murders of more than six hundred thousand Hungarian citizens and refugees from other countries who sought asylum in Hungary from 1936 onwards.

 

I have, for my part, continued to educate myself about these sufferings by reading Anna Porter’s book on (probably) the most famous of these refugees, the Transylvanian Jewish journalist, Rezső Kasztner. If there were any doubt about the guilt of the Hungarian state in 1944, the quotation she makes at the end of her chapter on Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann should answer this unequivocally. Although it took nearly three weeks for the ‘orders’ to be transmitted from State Secretary László Baky to the local authorities, marked “secret”, they clearly bore his signature and declared:

The Royal Hungarian government will cleanse the country of Jews within a short time. I hereby order the cleansing to be conducted district by district. Jews are to be taken to designated collection camps regardless of gender and age. 

In making so clear an anti-Jewish statement, Baky was clearly not acting under orders he disagreed with. In her previous chapters, Porter points out that Baky had served in both the Hungarian military and gendarmerie, from which he had retired with the rank of major, in order to devote himself to politics. He had joined the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1938, then switched to the Hungarian National Socialist Party in which he had used the Party’s newspaper, Magyarság, for his tirades against the Jews. He had been an informant for the SS before Hungary’s entry into the war and, in 1940, had once more joined the Arrow Cross, under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, to whom he was reported to remark:

We are going to have some hangings, aren’t we, Ferenc? 

When Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest in late March 1944, he had been expecting some resistance to his plans for The Final Solution from the new Hungarian government and authorities. Instead he was offered immediate, enthusiastic assistance. A week after he arrived, he had asked for a meeting with Baky and the other newly-appointed state secretary, László Endre. It was held over bottles of wine and pretzels in the garden of the Majestic Hotel in the Swabian Hill District, where Eichmann had taken over a villa owned by a recently-interned Jewish businessman. Eichmann informed the two secretaries that he had orders directly from Himmler himself for the ghettoisation and deportation of all Hungarian Jews. They greeted this statement with wholehearted support, eager to begin the task of concentrating the Jews the very next day, starting with the hundred thousand plus refugees without Hungarian citizenship, most of whom had already been ’rounded up’. Eichmann himself had to restrain them on practical grounds, because he needed time to organise the transportation system which would be used to deport the Jews to Auschwitz. This could only handle twelve thousand Jews a day, he told them, and added that the gas chambers and crematoria in the camp could not handle the numbers they were proposing, either.

They therefore accepted Eichmann’s more gradual plan, offering that the Hungarian state would provide the gendarmerie and pay for the fees of the transports and guards to the border, just as the Slovak government had done. Eichmann agreed with them that Budapest’s large, wealthy Jewish community would be the last to be deported, but that they too would be gone by the end of June. Since most of the young Jewish men were already serving at the eastern front, in labour battalions, the state secretaries could assure Eichmann that there would be little resistance and, if any did materialise, it would be firmly dealt with by the gendarmes, who would be faced with unarmed older civilian men  and women with children. Eichmann asked that a member of the Hungarian government should submit to him a request for the evacuation in order to maintain the thin veneer of independence. Baky then left, elated, to meet with Lieutenant Colonel László Ferenczy of the gendarmerie, who would need to execute the order. Ferenczy claimed that the five thousand men under his command would only be too willing as well as able, to carry out the ghettoisation and deportation of the Jews. Many of them were of Swabian origin and viewed the Jews as enemy aliens. Many years later, Eichmann gave an interview to a Dutch journalist in Argentina in which he recalled his meeting with Baky and Endre.  He was reported as saying:

On that evening, the fate of Jews of Hungary was sealed.

The country was divided into six ghettoisation and deportation zones, each of which would be handled separately and in strict order, in agreed turns, beginning with Carpathian Ruthenia and Transylvania. All communication between the zones would be cut off. On 22 March, Prime Minister Döme Stojay informed the government that Dr Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, had insisted that Jews throughout the country should wear a yellow star. Regent Horthy ‘washed his hands’ of responsibility for this, stating that, in future, such “requests” regarding the Jews should not be presented to him. He later told Samuel Stern, with whom he had regularly and recently played cards in the Buda castle, that his hands were tied in the matter, under threat of total exclusion from power. He had, he said, held out for as long as he could on “The Jewish Question”. The order went into effect on 5 April, with only Stern and his newly Nazi-appointed ‘Jewish Council’ exempted.

On 31 March Eichmann summoned the Jewish Council to his offices on Swabian Hill. Eichmann’s men had surrounded the buildings around the Majestic Hotel with three rings of barbed wire. Eichmann’s office was on the second floor, while Baky had installed himself in an office on the third so that he and his staff could plan mass murder without interruption from other pressing matters, such as the conduct of the war on the eastern front. Eichmann sat in the only chair in the meeting room and told the Council members that he was not in favour of executions, except of those Jews linked with resistance movements. His job was to raise the output of the war industries, he lied, and the Jews, except of course for the Council members, would have to work in them. He shouted at them:

I am a bloodhound! All opposition will be broken. If you think of joining the partisans, I will have you slaughtered. I know you Jews. I know all about you. I have been dealing with Jewish affairs since 1934. If you behave quietly and work, you’ll be able to keep your community and your institutions. But… where Jews opposed us, there were executions… I will make no distinction between religious Jews and converts. As far as I’m concerned, a Jew is a Jew, whatever he calls himself.

Later the same day, the Hungarian government issued several new decrees regarding the Jews: they were prohibited from employing non-Jews; they could no longer work as lawyers, journalists, or public servants, or in theatrical and film arts; they were not allowed to own or even drive motor vehicles, including motor-bikes. They were even banned from riding bicycles. They had to hand in their radios and telephones to the authorities in charge of Jewish affairs. Above all, they all had to wear the yellow star of David, marking them out clearly for purposes of differentiation.

On the morning of 3 April, British and American planes bombed Budapest for the first time. Whole buildings collapsed along the main routes into the city centre and in the Castle District. In response, the Hungarian security police demanded that the Jewish Council provide five hundred apartments for the displaced ‘Christians’. Peter Hain, the chief of Hungarian Intelligence, decided to relocate influential Jews near to industrial and military installations, believing that they would somehow be able to warn the British and Americans not to bomb these targets. The Jewish Council was expected to provide five hundred of these hostages. Samuel Stern gave Hain a list which contained only eight names, all of whom, including himself, were members of the Jewish Council. The Germans told Hain to drop this ‘crazy plan’, realizing that they still needed the Council’s cooperation.

On 4 April, László Baky met with Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenczy and members of the Sonderkommando and Weirmacht, to firm up the plans for the ghettoisation and deportation of all the Jews of Hungary. All Jews were, irrespective of age, sex, or illness, were to be concentrated in ghettos and schedules would be set for their deportation to Auschwitz. Only the few still employed in mines or factories were to be temporarily spared until they could be replaced. Each regional office was to be responsible for its own actions. The directive read:

The rounding up of the Jews is to be carried out by the local police or by the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie units… If necessary, the police will assist the gendarmerie in urban districts by providing armed help.

It took until 16 April for the full directive and extensive explanations to be typed in multiple copies and sent to the mayors and prefects in the provincial towns and villages, but the ghettoisation was already underway on 7 April. In under three weeks, the Hungarian holocaust had been set in motion, and its success, at least in the rural areas, depended almost exclusively on the enthusiastic collaboration of the Hungarian authorities. In that respect, it was unique among the deportations of The Final Solution.

Source:

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train. London: Constable & Robinson.