Deception E-Book

Christopher Hale

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 852

Beschreibung

'I suppose you know who I am? I was in charge of the actions in Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia. I am prepared to sell you one million Jews: Goods for blood … Blood for goods.' These were the chilling words uttered by one of the most notorious Nazi bureaucrats, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, to a young Jewish businessman called Joel Brand in the spring of 1944. Brand embarked on a desperate mission to persuade the Allies to barter with Eichmann – and failed. At the same time, the SS deported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau packed in cattle trains. The majority were gassed, then incinerated. For decades after 1945, many blamed the Allies for callously abandoning a million Hungarian Jews to their fate. In Deception, Christopher Hale presents a new account of the 'Brand Mission' based on evidence in the national archives of Germany, Hungary, Britain and the United States. Hale reveals that Eichmann's offer formed one part of a monstrous deception designed to outwit the leaders of the last surviving Jewish community in Europe. The deception was more complex and – from the German point of view – more successful than any operation mounted by the secret services of the Allied governments.

Leseprobe

For Alice, Felix and Jacob

First published 2019

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Christopher Hale, 2019

The right of Christopher Hale to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9289 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

‘Over the years I learned which hooks to use to catch which fish.’

‘Hungary really offered the Jews to us like sour beer, and Hungary was the only country where we could not work fast enough.’

‘If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would have been satisfied and would say, good, we annihilated an enemy. … I wasn’t only issued orders, in this case I’d have been a moron, but I rather anticipated, I was an idealist.’

Adolf Eichmann, Sassen interviews, 1957

Kasztner: I’ve wondered many times whether, instead of the negotiations, it wouldn’t have been better to call on the Zionist youth and rally the people to active resistance to entering the brickyards and the wagons.

SS officer Kurt Becher: You wouldn’t have achieved anything this way.

Kasztner: Maybe, but at least we would have kept our honour. Our people went into the wagons like cattle because we trusted in the success of the negotiations and failed to tell them the terrible fate awaiting them.

Kasztner–Becher minutes, 15 July 1944

CONTENTS

A Note on the ‘Auschwitz’ Concentration Camp

Prelude: Cairo, June 1944

1     ‘Blut Gegen Waren’: A Puzzle Wrapped in an Enigma

2     Geneva, April 1945

3     Despair Deferred

4     The Twisted Road to Genocide

5     The Worlds of Hungarian Jewry

6     The Politics of Envy

7     Ransom and the Slovak Trick

8     The Trap

9     Who was Adolf Eichmann?

10   Managing the Whirlwind

11   The Dogwood Connection

12   Occupation and Deception

13   Deceiving the Rescuers

14   Agents of Deceit

15   Eichmann’s Gambit

16   Emissary of the Deceived

17   The Ramp

18   The Fallacy of Ransom

19   Plunderers

20   Quandary

21   Horthy Hesitates

22   Aftermaths

Epilogue: Endgame in Israel

A Note on Numbers

Important Organisations and Terms

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

A NOTE ON THE ‘AUSCHWITZ’ CONCENTRATION CAMP

‘Auschwitz’ is today the most notorious site in the memorial topography of the German genocide. The Second World War is now viewed through the lens of the Holocaust – and the memorialisation of this genocide is seen through the lens of Auschwitz. Historians now recognise that the murderous German onslaught on European Jewry was not initiated inside the KL (concentration camp) system. A huge proportion of the more than 5.5 million Jews murdered under the Nazi regime were killed in ditches, forests, fields and burial pits across Eastern Europe and only later in the specialised death camps such as Treblinka, Sobibór, Chełmno and Bełżec. In the aftermath of the Wannsee Conference convened in February 1942, Himmler issued an order: ‘Jews into the KL.’ From mid 1942 until the end of the war, the majority of Jews were deported to specialised camps to be worked to death if they were deemed ‘fit’, or murdered. A second important point is that ‘Auschwitz’ (the German word for the Polish town of Oświęcim) was an archipelago of camps that had many different functions in the KL system administered by the SS. The SS managers ordered the construction of facilities to carry out mass killings at Auschwitz II, which was originally built in 1941 on the cleared site of a village called Birkenau (Březinka).

Birkenau was not built to exterminate Jews but to incarcerate Soviet prisoners of war; however, in March 1942 the SS began to deport European Jews there and constructed gas chambers and crematoria to incinerate corpses. Inside the Auschwitz camp archipelago, Birkenau was transformed as a specialised extermination facility and entered its most lethal phase in the spring and summer of 1944. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 1.3 million people were transported to the Auschwitz complex: 1.1 million perished. Nine-tenths of those killed ended up there because of their Jewish origin, and every third victim was a Hungarian citizen. The largest group of victims were Hungarian citizens. I have used ‘Auschwitz’ to refer to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

PRELUDE: CAIRO, JUNE 1944

On 14 June 1944, in the early hours of the morning, the twice-weekly train from Haifa in the British-mandated territory of Palestine pulled into the main station at Bab el Hadid, the Iron Gate, in Cairo. As the big, sand-dusted locomotive exhaled a gasping wheeze of steam, a British military police officer emerged from the carriage behind the engine. He was quickly followed by a stocky, middle-aged man who sweated profusely in a crumpled brown suit that had seen better days. He was a Hungarian Jew called Joel Brand and he was to all intents and purposes a prisoner of the British. For a few moments, Brand hesitated, blinking in the harsh light that pierced the station roof and blinded by a torrent of perspiration, before he descended unsteadily to the platform.

Brand’s journey to Cairo had begun six weeks earlier and more than 3,000 miles away in Budapest, and he had already endured many tribulations. Months earlier in March, Adolf Hitler had ordered German troops to occupy Hungary. His loyal henchman, Heinrich Himmler, the Chief of the SS, had despatched a ‘Special Commando’ led by SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann to liquidate the last intact Jewish community in Europe numbering some 800,000 souls. Brand had taken to referring to himself as the ‘emissary of the doomed’ and many who encountered him feared for his state of mind. His fragility is not difficult to understand for he had an astonishing tale to tell. He had been entrusted, he claimed, with a mission to barter the lives of a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 military trucks. This perplexing yet tantalising ransom offer had been put to Brand by Eichmann with the approval, Brand alleged, of Himmler himself.

What would soon become infamous as the ‘Blood for Trucks’ offer was already being dissected, pondered, disputed and quarrelled about in the corridors of power in Washington, London and Moscow. It would seem that the unprecedented offer to ransom lives was a tiresome inconvenience for the Allied warlords. At every waking moment in his long journey, the weight of these million lives, among them his wife and sons, weighed heavily on Joel Brand’s soul. They haunted his nightmares. That day in Cairo, he was not aware that Eichmann and his Hungarian collaborators were herding tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews into cattle cars every day – and despatching them to the Auschwitz camp in occupied Poland. There, in the words of Paul Celan, the sky became their grave.

In Egypt, the summer heat was brutal even at this early hour. The British police officer firmly placed a hand on his prisoner’s shoulder and guided him towards the swarming and cacophonous station entrance, lit by low beams of sunlight cutting through swirling clouds of dust stirred up by the great army of hawkers lured to the great station. A British army staff car stood parked, its engine muttering fitfully, in front of the main entrance. The policeman, who had accompanied Brand from Haifa, opened the back door with a tight smile. The elderly Egyptian driver waited impassively, then without so much as a glance behind, steered the car into the churning flow of heavily laden donkeys, camels, carts, trams and motor vehicles that eddied perpetually around the Iron Gate.

In the summer of 1944, Cairo, like Budapest, was an occupied city. Egypt was independent only in a nominal sense. For the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the war with the Axis powers was as much about sustaining the tottering British Empire as defending the British Isles. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth …’ he insisted. Britain still ruled the oceans of the world and the Empire still covered two-fifths of the globe. In Churchill’s mind, British national identity was rooted in the multitude of colonies, protectorates and dominions that were either ruled or controlled from the Colonial Office in London and together made up the most far-reaching empire in world history. This was not just an emotional attachment. Britain depended on the peoples and raw materials sucked out of her imperial possessions to sustain a globalised war.

The Second World War was a battle for supremacy between rival empire builders and Nazi Germany’s imperial ambitions, inspired by Churchill’s cherished Indian Raj, posed a mortal threat to British strategic interests. The Middle East was the strategic hub of the Empire and the Suez Canal the gateway to India. This meant that GHQ Cairo was the epicentre of Britain’s imperial struggle. To protect its Egyptian base, the British had for more than half a century ridden roughshod over the nationalist aspirations of countless Egyptians. A British army had seized the canal at the end of the nineteenth century and in 1922, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was offered a severely restricted kind of independence. As they did in other regions of the Middle East, the British wielded power through a ruling dynasty, often corrupt, which in Egypt was descended from Mohammed Ali who had, at the turn of the nineteenth century, ousted the Turkish Mamluks and made himself master of the Nile Valley. A British consul had boasted that, ‘We do not govern Egypt, we only govern the governors of Egypt.’ Now King Fuad I, installed and cossetted in the sprawling Qubba Palace, repaid British investment in his despotic rule as the King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, Kordofan and Darfur by holding down, for now, simmering discontent and nationalist revolt. Dissent could not be permitted in such a vital imperial hub. The British insisted on what were called ‘Reserved Points’, which meant that they retained control of the Sudan and, most importantly, the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal, the gateway to India.

When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936, Fuad was forced to seek closer British protection. But, in the aftermath of decades of tension and instability, the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty, signed that year, gave Egypt a status that bore a resemblance to sovereignty. The British High Commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, was demoted to ambassador and Egypt joined the League of Nations. But in return, the British forced the Egyptian government to accept the stationing of 10,000 British troops to defend the Suez Canal. The treaty wrought other, unintended changes that would have far-reaching consequences. The Royal Military Academy, which had been dominated by Egypt’s pampered young elites, threw open its doors to a broader section of this riven society. Among the new intake were Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat – bright, ambitious young men from poor families who would never have enjoyed such opportunities before 1936. That same year, as Nasser and Sadat took their first tentative steps out of poverty towards the road to power, King Fuad died and was succeeded by his corpulent playboy son Farouk, who secretly reached out to Hitler through Egypt’s pro-Nazi consul in Istanbul and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had fled the Middle East to find refuge in Berlin.1

As Joel Brand was driven through the grand boulevards that led to the magnificent medieval citadel, the symbol of British power in Egypt, he was startled by subtle echoes of Budapest, the city he had left behind and to which he would never return, and which centuries before had been conquered by an Ottoman army. To be sure, the streets were crammed with a multitude of turbans and tarbushes that bobbed vigorously behind creaking carts and wheezing trucks loaded high with vegetables and raw hunks of fly-crusted meat. Through the half-open window, he was taken aback by Cairo’s unique and inescapable odour that churned together acrid spices with exhaust fumes, manure, perfume and the sweat of starved and beaten cab horses and their whip-happy masters. Imperious Europeans in gleaming motor cars waged war with sputtering motorbikes, camels and mangy dogs. Buses and trams, overflowing with their human freight, rattled past festooned with blue beads to ward off the evil eye. Although the armies of the Axis powers had at last been driven out of North Africa, the British could not be avoided. Men and women in sweat-soaked uniforms rushed from office to café or bar, conveyed in a honking armada of petulantly driven British staff cars and military trucks. They turned their eyes from the multitudes of the sick, the misshapen and the poor who occupied their own pavement empires. A young sapper wrote in his diary: ‘Beggars, in filthy robes, accosted all and sundry, wailing eternally for “Baksheesh, effendi” – for the love of Allah!’ The British novelist Lawrence Durrell was a British military attaché in wartime Cairo: he came to hate the city. Durrell complained about the miasma of dirt, dust and flies, and the unavoidable sight of grinding poverty. Through his eyes, Egypt was a place of ‘cripples, deformities, ophthalmia, goitre, amputations, lice, fleas … horses cut in half by careless drivers … obscene dead black men …’

This was the underworld of callous British imperialism that so deeply offended the American businessman Wendell C. Wilkie when he arrived in Cairo as President Franklin Roosevelt’s emissary. Wilkie soon realised that Lampson, the loud, 6ft 5in British Ambassador, ‘for all practical purposes’ ruled Egypt. In the sanctimonious way of American critics of empire, Wilkie was disgusted by the British elites who ‘exhibited Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes. [sic] Those, executing policies made in London, had no idea that the world was changing …’2 Just as Stain craved possession of Eastern Europe freed from Nazi rule, Roosevelt was intent on calling time on the British Empire.

Like Budapest, Cairo was a cosmopolitan city, a human patchwork of Copts, Muslims and Jews, who all had deep roots in the city’s ancient fabric, as well as French, Italian and Greek expatriates. In every nook and cranny, the British bristled in their stiff uniforms or tumbled loud and red-faced out of backstreet bars, but in the city’s tearooms and cafés, French was still the medium of gossip. French fashion and furniture were ubiquitous in the city’s most affluent homes. While the Germans had swept through Jewish communities in a bloody swathe across Europe, in Cairo, the grand Jewish families – the ‘Haute Juiverie’ like the Rolos, the Hararis and the Menasces – still proudly played their parts as the financiers of Egypt, rubbing shoulders with Copt and Greek grandees at the Gezira Sporting Club. In the wealthy heart of Cairo, imposing buildings in Viennese, Italian, art nouveau and neo-Arab styles proclaimed the paradoxical pride of a city as pluralistic as Budapest that, in 1944, remained firmly under the British thumb. It had been a close-run affair.

The loss of Tobruk to the German Panzerarmee Afrika in June 1942 had been a stunning blow. The German and Italian forces under Field Marshall Erwin Rommel had pushed deep into Egypt, scattering the British 8th Army in a confused rout. In the wake of the Panzerarmee came a ‘Special Unit’ or Einsatzgruppe tasked to destroy the ancient Jewish communities of North Africa. At least 23,000 British soldiers deserted and hid out in the Delta; in Britain, national morale plummeted. At the end of this catastrophic month, Rommel’s exhausted troops dug in close to El Alamein in the Qattara Depression, a mere 60 miles from Alexandria. The Empire itself was in peril. But it was in the bleak terrain of the Western Desert that the tide of war turned, at last, against the Axis. In October 1942, by means of a ruse masterminded by camouflage expert Jasper Maskelyne, the 8th Army massed its tanks and artillery, and on the evening of 23 October 1,000 British guns opened fire, smashing the German lines. Rommel was forced to fall back and on 12 November Tobruk was retaken. Church bells rang out all over Britain.

So it was that Joel Brand was brought to a city that clung to the swagger of imperial confidence. GHQ Cairo coordinated supplies and operations across the region. Hidden away inside the Rustum Buildings, a humdrum block of flats known to taxi drivers as ‘The Secret Building’, was the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which deployed a smokescreen of names such as MOI (SP), Force 133 or just ‘The Firm’ to conceal its identity. It was from inside the Rustum Buildings that SOE operatives Basil Davidson and Captain William Deakin launched missions to back Colonel Draža Mihailović’s Cetnik resistance forces fighting the Germans in the Balkans. Mihailović was a devout royalist who spent as much time fighting a rival partisan army led by a Communist called Josip Broz, known as Tito, as the Germans. From another office, intelligence officer James Klugmann covertly channelled funds away from the quarrelsome Cetnik forces to Tito’s partisans. Klugmann had won a Double First in Modern Languages at Cambridge and was an intimate friend of the yet to be exposed ‘Cambridge Spies’ Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Klugman made no secret of his beliefs and had met Mao Zedong in China. Despite his open commitment to the Communist cause, he was trusted by his SOE commanders and proved himself in all matters to do with the Balkans. Just months before Brand’s arrival as a prisoner in Cairo, the SOE had despatched the ‘Jewish Parachutists’, including the Hungarian Zionist Hannah Szenes, who had been trained in mandate Palestine, to Yugoslavia. Brand knew little about the mission of the ‘Parachutists’ to occupied Hungary. But his friend and colleague, Rudolf Kasztner, who had remained in Budapest, would have a fateful encounter with these doomed young men and women.

The SOE was not the only intelligence organisation in Cairo. Brand was the prisoner of SIME, Security Intelligence in the Middle East. According to intelligence expert Roger Arditti, SIME was established in 1939 as a coordinating body, an inter-service organism, as he calls it, that would counter Axis penetration of the Middle East.3 The role of SIME was to harmonise the work of MI5, responsible for security within the Empire, and MI6, which collected intelligence in foreign territories. At a meeting in Cairo in March 1942, Brigadier R.G. Maunsell and other SIME agents discussed how they could acquire and exploit decoded top secret communications sent by agents of German military intelligence, the Abwehr. As I will show, this goes a long way towards explaining why it was that SIME agents took charge of Brand, who had surprising connections with treacherous Abwehr agents in Budapest and Istanbul.

Brand was, it would seem, a rather privileged prisoner of the British intelligence service. In his bitter account of his mission he reveals that on arrival inside the sprawling British military base ‘a friendly corporal led me to my cell, which in fact was a large and well-furnished room. He left the door open, but always remained near at hand. If someone passed by, he would temporarily lock me in …’4 He was, he admits,

treated as a person of importance. The food was excellent, and an Arab waiter laid the table with great attention and asked me what wine I would care to drink. He served me the choicest of foods, and far more than I was able to eat … No one entered the room without first knocking on the door.

Soon after his arrival in Cairo, Brand discovered that a second Hungarian was locked up in a neighbouring cell. This was Samu Springmann, a Budapest jeweller who, like Brand, had been involved with raising funds to rescue Jews in Europe. Springmann had spent time in Istanbul developing connections with the little group of Zionists who represented the Jewish Agency in Turkey but had been expelled by the Turkish authorities. He had travelled to Aleppo hoping to enter Palestine, but he had been arrested by British agents and brought to Cairo six weeks before Brand.

There was a third Hungarian incarcerated by British intelligence in Cairo and in much less salubrious conditions. His name was György or Andor (‘Bandi’) Grosz. Brand described him as a ‘boastful, scheming fellow’: ‘ein Grosser Bluffer’. When Brand was taken to meet Grosz in his cell, he recalled ‘he looked ill and weak, and I saw at once that he had been treated very differently from me … He was kept in an ordinary cell, poorly furnished and without a chair. He lay on a wooden pallet. I was almost ashamed …’ Both men were interrogated separately by Lieutenant W.B. Savigny – a secret service officer who would later write German textbooks for secondary schools. Brand’s mission had already provoked a flurry of memoranda between London and Washington, fretting about how to deal with the German ransom offer. Savigny did not inform Brand that days before his arrival in Cairo, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden had insisted to his American counterparts in Washington that he could not permit negotiations of any kind with the Germans. What becomes evident in the lengthy interrogation files and reports in the UK National Archives is that SIME now saw both Brand and his Hungarian companions not as ‘emissaries’ but sources of intelligence about the baffling interactions between rival Nazi organisations and the confusing circus of personalities involved.

In Cairo, Brand was not too proud to spurn the lavish hospitality offered by his British hosts. At a cocktail party in the garden of an institution Brand calls the British–Egyptian Club, by which he almost certainly means the Gezira Club, he claimed that he was introduced to Lord Moyne, Walter Guinness, the British Minister of State in Cairo and a close friend of the British Prime Minister. According to Brand, Lord Moyne enquired: ‘Did you take this offer of Eichmann’s really seriously?’

‘Absolutely seriously,’ replied Brand. ‘I am completely convinced the mass murders will be stopped if Eichmann’s offer is accepted.’

Brand’s account continues:

Moyne: How many people will be in the advance party?

Brand: I’ve already told you, a hundred thousand people.

Moyne: And how many people will there be altogether?

Brand: Eichmann spoke of a million.

Moyne: What on earth are you thinking of Mr Brand? What do I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?

Brand’s story of his encounter with Moyne at the Gezira Club is not corroborated in any other source, but such derogatory remarks may have had fatal consequences. For radical Zionists, Lord Moyne became the embodiment of callous British officialdom that refused to allow Jews to take refuge in Palestine and he paid with his life. On 6 November 1944, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, members of the Jewish terrorist group Lehi, known as the ‘Stern Gang’, ambushed Moyne and his driver Lance Corporal Arthur Fuller, and shot both men. Fuller bled out instantly; Moyne was rushed to hospital but died of massive injuries that evening. The decision to assassinate Moyne had been taken by Lehi leaders Israel Eldad and the future Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. In an interview, decades later with the Times of Israel in 2012, Shamir was unrepentant:

Certainly, we had known about his hostile attitude towards Zionism, towards the idea of ingathering of the Jewish people here. He was against any Jewish Aliyah, any Jewish immigration. He didn’t believe that there exists such a thing like a Jewish nation, or a Jewish people … and therefore, we decided to make this operation.5

For decades after Brand’s flight from Budapest and incarceration in a British military prison, the story of Blood for Trucks and the stories told by this embittered ‘emissary of the doomed’ gathered ever deeper layers of myth. This encrustation has made it almost impossible to see through the dense patina shrouding the records of the perplexing encounters that took place between Hungarian Zionists, German SS officers, British colonial mandarins and a supporting cast of secret agents and mendacious double dealers in 1944. It is the ambition of this book to expose the remarkable historical narrative that lies beneath the murky waters of myth.

1

‘BLUT GEGEN WAREN’: A PUZZLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA

It is one of the most notorious events of the Second World War – and yet one of the most mysterious. Seventy-five years ago, on 19 May 1944, an SS officer called Hermann Krumey drove two Hungarians from Budapest to an airport close to Vienna. Two months earlier, Hitler had ordered troops to occupy Hungary, which had been Nazi Germany’s military ally since the invasion of the Soviet Union, to forestall any attempt by its government to abandon the Axis alliance. In the wake of the army divisions came a Sonderkommando led by SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann. His task was to liquidate the last surviving Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe. At the airport, the two men boarded a German aircraft and were flown to Istanbul in neutral Turkey. The names of the two men were Joel Brand and Andor ‘Bandi’ Grosz. The leaders of the Allied governments in London, Washington and Moscow soon discovered that Brand had been sent with an extraordinary mission. In a series of meetings with Eichmann and other SS officers, he had been offered the chance to barter Jewish lives for military trucks and other supplies.

Not long after they were flown out of Hungary to Istanbul, Brand and Grosz were arrested by British police in Aleppo and brought to Cairo for lengthy interrogations. At the highest levels of government in Washington and London, the offer to barter hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives provoked incredulity, confusion and dismay. On the eve of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe, the release of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees was unthinkable. How could they be cared for? It was assumed that many tens of thousands of Jews would try to reach the British mandate of Palestine. For the British such an influx was anathema. The mandate was already a tinderbox. In short, it was rapidly concluded that there could be no negotiations. When the story of the ransom offer was leaked, British and American newspapers denounced a German trick. Brand and his mysterious companion stayed under lock and key in Cairo. For the rest of his life, Brand blamed the British for abandoning the Jews of Hungary to a terrible fate.

There was very good reason to doubt the good faith of the ransom offer. Throughout the summer of 1944, between mid May and early July, Eichmann and his Hungarian collaborators deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. Three-quarters of the deported Jews perished in a paroxysm of slaughter.

As this tragedy unfolded, another remarkable story was unfolding in Budapest. Brand was a member of a Zionist Rescue Committee known as the ‘Va’adat ha-Ezra ve-ha-Hatzala e-Budapest’ or simply – the Va’ada. The most prominent member of the committee was a former journalist called Rezső, or Rudolf Kasztner. When Brand had been chosen to travel to Istanbul with the SS ransom offer, Kasztner had remained in Budapest and continued negotiating with Eichmann and another SS officer, Kurt Becher. Through Kasztner’s efforts, the Germans permitted, in exchange for substantial payments, some 1,700 Hungarian Jews, most of them from Kasztner’s home town of Kolozsvár, now the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca, to leave Hungary on a special train. After a terrifying journey, the Germans held the Hungarians hostage for some months in a special compound known as the ‘Ungarnlager’ (Hungarian camp) at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Between 18 August and December 1944, the majority of the passengers on the train arrived in the Swiss village of Caux. And yet the story of ‘Kasztner’s Train’ remains mired in toxic argument to this day. A recent book is called Kasztner’s Crime. Was the Jew who negotiated with Eichmann a criminal?

When Kasztner settled in Tel Aviv after the war, many Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust who had come to live in the new state were dismayed by his assiduously cultivated reputation as a rescuer of Jews and his increasingly cosy relations with Mapai, the ruling political party led by David Ben-Gurion. Many survivors alleged that Kasztner had failed to warn Hungarian Jews of what he knew about German plans for mass murder. For the leaders of Mapai, it was imperative to protect Kasztner’s reputation and in 1953 the Attorney General sued one of his accusers for libel. The ‘Kasztner Trial’ had calamitous consequences. For many Israelis, he was no longer a rescuer of Jews but a despised collaborator. At the conclusion of the trial, the judge made biting use of a phrase from the Roman poet Virgil:

timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts). By accepting this present [the rescue train] Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil … The success of the rescue agreement depended until the last minute on the Nazi goodwill, and the last minute didn’t arrive until long after the end of the extermination of the Jews in the provincial towns.

Just after midnight on 4 March 1957, a squad of right-wing Zionists waited for Kasztner to return to his apartment in Tel Aviv. He would not live to see his German tormentor Adolf Eichmann kidnapped by Mossad agents and brought to stand trial in Jerusalem. Even today, the embers of Kasztner’s trial still smoulder.

These are the bare bones of the narrative this book will unfold. Telling it again requires some justification. The Blood for Trucks deal has been recounted, often at length, in most accounts of the Holocaust. This obsessive retelling was started by Brand himself, who published books about his story and confronted the shabby and diminished Eichmann across the Jerusalem courtroom. Brand was a man consumed by bitterness who believed until the end of his life that his mission had been coldheartedly betrayed by both the British and the wartime Zionist establishment. He could never forgive. After Brand’s early death in 1964, many historians have reiterated and amplified Brand’s recriminations. Just as the Allies refused to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, it is argued that they rebuffed the offer to ransom the lives of a million Hungarian Jews.

I first heard about the story from an old university friend who had fled Britain to become an American citizen and had cultivated some contempt for the land of his birth. Some years ago, he wrote to me about Joel Brand and the dastardly way his mission had been sabotaged. He quoted the notorious and perhaps apocryphal words of Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), the British Minister of State in the Middle East: ‘What can I do with a million Jews?’

It was a troubling story. Had the Allies betrayed the Jews of Hungary? Might the chronicle of the Holocaust have turned out differently if British and American officials acted with greater moral resolve? As I sifted through the many retellings of Brand’s mission and its aftermaths, I became ever more puzzled. To begin with, Eichmann was insistent that the ‘ten thousand trucks’ would be deployed only on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Army. This was surely an outlandish condition. In the spring of 1944, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill feared putting at risk their bond with Joseph Stalin, and indeed competed obsequiously for the Russian dictator’s favours. Blood for Trucks seemed to be more provocation than deal. I was surprised to discover that Eichmann had repeatedly insisted to Brand and the Rescue Committee that he could not permit any Jews to travel to Palestine. He explained that Hitler did not wish to offend Arab opinion. This implied that if the ransom offer was serious and the German conditions were met, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would need to be sent towards the West. Since an Allied invasion of Europe was expected at any moment, this was simply not a convincing proposal. The most chilling realisation was that at the very moment Brand set off for Istanbul, Eichmann and his Hungarian allies had already begun to deport Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz at a rate of up to 12,000 people a day. For weeks, Eichmann had been working closely with his friend, the camp commandant Rudolf Höß, to prepare for the arrival of daily transports from Hungary and the liquidation of anyone not deemed fit to work. Camp guards alluded to enjoying ‘Hungarian salami’ when the transports arrived. It would seem that Eichmann acted in the very worst of bad faith. What then was the purpose of his offer to trade lives?

I began to suspect that the story of Blood for Trucks, which has so often been told as a callous refusal to barter and save lives, concealed a very different narrative. But what was it? I was reminded of the legal axiom: cui bono? Who gains? I discovered that the SS officers who came to Budapest in the spring of 1944 had a very great deal to gain from playing a cynical and deadly game of deception and bluff. The German onslaught on European Jews was motivated not only by racial fanaticism but by a lust for profit. During the war, the SS had grown into a bloated and avaricious business empire. As he preached a message of German decency and probity, Himmler hatched a campaign of plunder that was itself founded on the mythologies that fuelled the mass killings of European Jews under German rule. In Nazi ideology, Jews were either murderous Bolsheviks or mercantile robber barons. It was the moral duty of the Nazi state to reclaim the vast and uncounted riches of the global Jewish clans. It is a newsroom cliché to urge reporters to ‘follow the money’ but mercenary plunder on a vast scale was integral to the Nazi Final Solution. Herding Jews into ghettoes and then deporting the majority to camps for labour or death was inextricably bound up with a systematic pilfering of assets. Inside the German camps, a finely tuned and ruthless apparatus of avaricious pillage harvested every remaining possession of the dead from the clothes on their backs to the gold in their speechless mouths. Mass murder took place hand-in-hand with the most ruthless profiteering. I began to suspect that it was these mercenary plans and desires that drove the deceitful actions of the SS men who enticed Brand and Kasztner with offers of rescue and salvation.

In the chapters that follow, I will try to follow the money to reveal the true story of the Blood for Trucks ransom offer. But, invariably, human action has many and contradictory motivations. Over time, these intents shift and alter in a kind of fractal psychic topology. When Eichmann was dispatched to Hungary in March 1945, he and his superiors were preoccupied by two strategic setbacks that had taken place the year before. On 19 April 1943, the eve of the Jewish Passover, German forces began the final liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. They were taken by surprise when a Jewish resistance group known as ZOB (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa) fought back – with a fierce and passionate resolve. It took heavily armed SS forces, led by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, close to a month to crush the Jewish uprising. Even as Stroop set charges to destroy the Great Synagogue and rejoiced in the destruction of the ghetto, other Germans voiced disquiet. The liquidation had proved ‘very difficult’ reported one official: ‘One noticed that armed Jewish women fought to the last …’ Then in September, Hitler insisted that the semi-autonomous government of Denmark, occupied in 1940, ‘solve its Jewish problem’ and begin deporting Danish Jews. As I will explain in detail in a later chapter, the German plans were unexpectedly thwarted. Some 7,000 Jews were ferried to safety in neutral Sweden by Danish rescuers. The majority of Danish Jews survived the war. For the German master planners of the Final Solution, the Jewish ghetto revolt followed by the spectacular rescue of Danish Jews were troubling setbacks. Despatched to Budapest in the spring of 1944, Eichmann understood that his reputation as the master planner of deportation could not survive any more mishaps.

There is another puzzle. Why was Brand accompanied by ‘Bandi’ Grosz? The decision to send a second emissary to Istanbul was made by Eichmann or someone else on the German side and Brand, it seems, was taken by surprise. He was bewildered by the presence of someone he knew well both as unscrupulous smuggler and a devious informant who played off German and Allied intelligence agencies. Like Brand, Grosz ended up in a British military prison in Cairo, where he soon confounded his interrogators. He insisted that he, not Joel Brand, had been entrusted with the ‘real mission’. The ransom plan, he claimed, was a smokescreen. According to Grosz, the SS Chief himself, Heinrich Himmler, had grasped that Germany could no longer win the war and was ‘putting out feelers’ to the British and Americans behind Hitler’s back. The strategic purpose of the Brand/Grosz mission was not to end the war but to rupture the western alliance with the Soviets. A number of historians continue to argue that this was indeed Himmler’s masterplan – and accept that ‘the architect of the Final Solution’ was willing as early as the summer of 1944 to spare hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives as a means to acquire military supplies and/or a strategic lever to split the Allies. For historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust this argument has very significant implications. Might the lethal momentum of the Final Solution have taken a different course in the final years of the war? How convincing, then, is the evidence?

In this book I hope to prove that the evidence for Himmler’s ransom masterplan is flimsy and circumstantial. It is, in my view, a chimera. To begin with, Himmler was intent on mass murder until the very end of the war and remained the stubbornly loyal perpetrator of Hitler’s racial obsessions ‘to the final hour’. Neither Himmler nor his henchmen would have made any serious decision to deviate from that course. That is one aspect of my case. Another is that much of the evidence cited to explain Himmler’s involvement in the Blood for Trucks mission is based on claims made by the enigmatic ‘Bandi’ Grosz when he was arrested by British intelligence agents. The records of these marathon interrogations can be found in the British National Archives – and close reading of these documents casts serious doubt on Grosz’s credibility and motivations. The records show that Grosz was deeply involved with a network of spies, informers and couriers known after the code name of its founder as Dogwood. ‘Dogwood’ was a Czech Jew called Alfred Schwarz who had lived for many years in Istanbul. All his agents were named after flowers. Grosz was ‘Trillium’.

During the Second World War, Turkey was a neutral power and the streets, cafés and hotel rooms of her second city resembled the cells in a noisy hive of conspiracies and secrets. Istanbul was a refuge for a number of shady Germans who occupied their time fantasising about plots to depose or assassinate the upstart corporal Adolf Hitler. The American OSS, the fledgling precursor to the CIA, eagerly forged links with ‘Dogwood’ and his agents such as ‘Trillium’, who boasted about running valuable ‘assets’ in Eastern European cities including Budapest. Schwarz also cultivated representatives of the Jewish Agency based in Istanbul, who used Dogwood to smuggle messages and money to Jewish rescuers inside German-occupied Europe. Until it was too late, the OSS and the Zionists stubbornly refused to take seriously a stream of evidence that the Dogwood network had been compromised of German and Hungarian intelligence agents. By the spring of 1944, Dogwood was a poisoned snare, the leakiest network in the history of wartime intelligence. The story of the ‘Brand Mission’ was closely woven together with the downfall of Dogwood.

The story of Blood for Trucks cast a long shadow across the tumultuous decades that followed the end of the war and the foundation of the state of Israel. Brand’s desperate journey was undertaken inside a hall of shattered mirrors that has hidden its secret purpose to this day. After the violent birth of the new state of Israel, Brand struggled to make a living in his new homeland. He was embittered and forgotten. Brand appeared, reluctantly, as witness for the defence at the trial that shamed his old friend Rudolf Kasztner and devoted his time to writing a memoir about his wartime mission to save the Jews of Hungary. Then, on 20 May 1960, a team of Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann as he returned to his shabby family home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was secretly flown, disguised in an air steward’s uniform, to Israel to stand trial. Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, signed a bill of indictment against Eichmann on fifteen counts, including crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. Now the arrogant SS man who had managed the destruction of so many lives stood before the world inside a bulletproof glass booth: an unkempt symbol, it was said, of the ‘banality of evil’. It was in that courtroom that Joel Brand confronted Eichmann once again.

Finally, a few comments on the form of this book.

It is conventional, even obligatory, to shape non-fiction with the story of a single character, or protagonist. It became clear that this approach was neither feasible nor appropriate. The truth about the rescue negotiations in Hungary in 1944, if it was possible to recover at all, could not be excavated from the experience of a single life. What follows is not ‘the story of Joel Brand’. There are few heroes in this tale. It was necessary to probe events from multiple points of view. We must enter and take account of a political landscape in which power was distributed with extreme inequality. In German-occupied Europe, the exercise of power by a tyrannical state committed to violence compromised every individual drawn into its corrosive web. The narrative of this book must, then, find its way through this tangled and continuously evolving terrain. This Nazi state extinguished the lives of millions and destroyed the moral footing of those men and women who carried out its bidding. Hitler’s malevolent exploitation of the loyalty of satraps like Himmler generated a treacherous landscape of competitive struggle. The violence of the state was mirrored by aggressive pursuit of power and favour among its elite. At the lower levels of the Nazi state, subalterns such as Eichmann and his SS colleagues engaged in a struggle for survival that stripped away the values they purported to defend. There is no single individual who, alone, illuminates such a world of power.

It became clear too that I could not hope to understand the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews by confining the narrative to a single year, or even the entire Second World War. The experience of Hungarian Jewry was forged by the experience of Jews as citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its traumatic dissolution at the end of the First World War. Before 1914, the Emperor’s Hungarian realms wove a network of alliances that connected, uneasily to be sure, Jews and Magyars. It was Jewish entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, writers and journalists and their gentile partners who powered the advent of a Hungarian modernity before the cataclysm of the Great War.

After 1918, the evisceration of Austro-Hungary by the Allied powers tore open festering wounds between the peoples of the defunct empire. The collapse of the German Empire infected the violent fantasies of Adolf Hitler and his followers with the same kind of poison. They believed that Imperial Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ on the threshold of victory by a conspiratorial cadre of disloyal Jewish profiteers and traitors. The Russian Revolution, they believed, had spawned a hostile new state that threatened the existential survival of the West. Other new nation states that sprang up in the aftermath of the Great War shared this detestation and terror of their Jewish minorities. Two decades later, the poison of ethnic hatred would infest the strategic bonds between Hitler’s Germany State and the leaders of Romania and Hungary. As the fugitive Eichmann boasted: ‘Hungary was the only country where we could not work fast enough.’

The Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin did not live to experience the horror of Germany’s war. But he foresaw what would take place:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward …

2

GENEVA, APRIL 1945

The war was over. Adolf Hitler was dead. A petty, vindictive and self-pitying wreck of a man, he had ended his life in a foul-smelling concrete bunker beneath the ruined city of Berlin. Many millions of soldiers and civilians had died in a titanic struggle that the German Führer avowed would be a ‘War of Annihilation’ fought to protect the German people from the menace of Bolshevism and its supposedly Jewish leaders. It was a promise that he and his fanatical apparatchiks had amply fulfilled. Among the dead were more than 5.5 million European Jews who had been torn from their homes and murdered in the killing fields and camps that formed an archipelago of mass murder across the war-ravaged regions of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Europe had been turned into a vast cemetery across which multitudes of desperate refugees stumbled towards uncertain destinations. Great cities as well as lives lay in ruins. In Hungary, Budapest was a smoking ruin of ash-blackened stone and brick that had been shattered by the monstrous struggle between the Soviet Army and the city’s German occupiers and Hungarian collaborators. In the ghettoes of Pest, Jews who had somehow survived the Russian bombardment and murderous gangs of Hungarian fascists known as the Arrow Cross, struggled to identify the nameless dead who were piled high in the streets, squares and even the synagogues of the city. The freezing waters of the Danube were freighted with corpses.

In pristine Geneva, Rudolf Kasztner had taken refuge in the modest ‘Sergei’ pension with his wife Elizabeth (Bodiya).1 According to his physician Max Weisberg, Kasztner was sick and severely depressed. He was, Weisberg diagnosed, a man who had been abruptly deprived of power. There were no more meetings with the powerful; no more blustering telephone calls to colleagues. Kasztner was fixated with bolstering his reputation as a heroic rescuer of Jews on the one hand and fending off slurs about his compromising familiarity with certain German SS officers on the other. In their cramped room in the pension, he quarrelled frequently with Elizabeth. In more ebullient moods, Kasztner boasted of his exploits. By then, close to 1,700 Hungarian Jews who had been allowed to purchase their passages out of Hungary on the ‘Kasztner Train’ had at last reached Switzerland. For these privileged survivors, Kasztner was without any doubt a hero: he had saved their lives. Their praise was not enough. When he heard praise for other Jews who had organised rescue efforts, Kasztner often flew into jealous rages. ‘The truth is that we organised that transport …’ he insisted again and again. He grumbled about being ‘dispossessed of his work and sacrifice’.

Kasztner’s insistence on tribute troubled even some of his most loyal friends. ‘I found his behaviour repulsive …’ recalled one. Cooped up in his room, Kasztner poured out a stream of letters and telegrams lauding his exploits and denouncing a whispering campaign that, in his mind, was poisoning his reputation. Already, just months after the end of the war, he knew that a bitter thread of acrimony and innuendo was being woven around a single word: negotiations. A schism was beginning to open between the posthumous reputations of the heroic Jews who had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 or fought with partisans and the compromised leaders of the Jewish Councils such as Chaim Rumkowski, who had, it was said, done the bidding of the Germans. Where did Kasztner fit? In the shattered Jewish world in 1945, opinion was divided. Moshe Schweiger, a respected member of a refugee support organisation, applauded Kasztner for extracting concessions from ‘Nazi beasts’ despite his own revulsion. The problem was that many others suspected that in Kasztner’s case, such negotiations had shaded into fraternisation. It was rumoured that Kasztner had become inappropriately close to an SS officer called Kurt Becher. It was even implied that Kasztner and Becher had jointly profited from the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. For reasons that even today remain hard to explain, Kasztner went out of his way to exculpate Becher. In words that would, years later, condemn him to death by an assassin’s bullets, Kasztner had boasted: ‘Three months ago, I was invited to testify at the Nuremberg Trials. I took the opportunity to speak with Kurt Becher … who served as a liaison officer between Himmler and me [sic] during the rescue operations, and has in the interim been released by the occupation authorities thanks to my personal intervention …’

The stomach-turning and delusional self-importance of Kasztner’s boast that he helped to secure the release of an SS officer who had dedicated his career to a criminal organisation strongly implies that he persistently failed to recognize the razor-thin gap between negotiation and collaboration. This moral failure would contaminate his moral reputation for the rest of his life. From his youth, Kasztner had been a passionate Zionist. The irony is that the fulfilment of his dream of a Jewish national home would deepen the shadows that attached to his name. Was he rescuer or villain?

In December 1946, the revered veteran of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, opened the first Zionist Congress after the war in Basel. He recalled the harrowing experience of standing before the assembly to ‘run one’s eye along row after row of delegates’ and discover that ‘Polish Jewry was missing; Central and South-eastern Jewry was missing; German Jewry was missing.’ For Kasztner, the Congress offered another platform to silence his critics. His obsessions focused on the former head of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe (or Miklós) Krausz. In May 1944, Kasztner had revealed to his colleagues on the Rescue Committee the terms of his agreement with the SS to purchase the release of more than 1,000 Jews. When Krausz heard about the ransom plan he warned that Kasztner had fallen for ‘empty talk’ by the Germans. The deal was something to ‘keep the Jews preoccupied’; Eichmann wanted to ‘get the Jewish leaders into their hands as hostages’. As we will discover, Krausz’s insight was remarkably prescient but Kasztner refused to listen to his warnings. He had too much invested in the negotiations. Krausz, for his part, was unforgiving of Kasztner’s disastrous naivety. After the war ended, he encouraged the Hungarian journalist Eugen Jenö to write a report about the destruction of the Hungarian Jews and the activities of Kasztner and the Rescue Committee. I discovered an English language version of the report, entitled The Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, in the State Library in Berlin. It is journalism informed by anger, not an academic history, but no less powerful for that. The English version includes grisly photographs showing the executions of Hungarian collaborators. Jenö did not pull any punches when he turned his attention to Kasztner and the Rescue Committee. The Black Book was published in Hungarian a few months before the Zionist Congress opened.2 As Krausz had intended, the revelations in the book were very damaging. Jenö characterised Kasztner as tyrannical, arrogant and jealous; he persistently ignored advice. In the margins of the Congress, Kasztner and Krausz waged a noisy war of words to assert their own version of events. Congress leaders were dismayed, fearing that such an ugly squabble would tarnish the Zionist cause. They promised to investigate the contested claims, but nothing was settled when delegates had to leave Bern to resume their interrupted lives. Kasztner returned to Geneva consumed by anger.

Joel Brand, too, was tormented by rage and frustration. The British had released him in at the beginning of October – and he took the night train to Jerusalem. He vented his anger not only at the British but against the Zionist establishment in Jerusalem, the Yishuv.3 In Satan and the Soul, the book he wrote with his wife, Hansi, he raged against the duplicitous Zionist leaders who in his mind had betrayed his mission: ‘Immediately after my release, I went from one office to the next in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem, hoping to ascertain what was going on in Hungary … and if possible, return to Budapest … There was no one willing or able to help me. Everyone understood what I was saying, but probably found it difficult to understand what I was asking of them …’ He must have been aware that Ben-Gurion and the Zionists were preoccupied preparing for a new war – to oust the British and confront the Arabs. The Jewish community in Palestine was increasingly militarised. Cooperation with the British ended after the German defeat at El Alamein. The Arab nationalist movement was compromised by the Grand Mufti’s Nazi connections – and its tendency to factionalism. As Hitler’s war entered its protracted final act, the Zionists had their eyes on the future. They had little time for an angry Hungarian obsessed with saving a few lives. He recalled:

I was dealing with an impersonal organisation … All my efforts to return to Hungary, or at least to Europe, came to nothing, and all my activities at this time seemed to be regarded as those of an impractical visionary … The officials were tired of seeing me in their offices and regarded me as a monomaniac.4

In Palestine, Brand’s torment was sharpened by the uncertain fate of Hansi and his two sons, who remained trapped in Budapest. During the terrible winter of 1944–45, Jews were in desperate peril as Arrow Cross gangs ran amok in the Pest ghetto. It was almost impossible for Brand to find out what was happening and whether his family had survived. Nor was he aware that following his departure for Istanbul in May, Hansi had embarked on an affair with Kasztner, his friend and colleague. Isolated, embittered, far away and living from hand to mouth, Brand refused to give up: ‘Well-trained secretaries would tell me glibly that their bosses, whom I had asked to see, were out and no one knew exactly when they were due to return.’ He demanded to be recognised as an official representative of Hungarian Jewry. Lives, he insisted, could still be saved. No one, he recalled, wanted to listen; he was treated as a pariah. Soon, he recalled, he was being warned to stop ‘pestering people’: ‘Drop the matter, wipe everything from your mind otherwise you won’t even be able to get a job cleaning streets in Tel Aviv.’ In May 1945, with the war over, Brand set off on the long journey to Switzerland. He needed to talk to Kasztner – and hoped that Hansi and the boys would join him in Geneva.

It was an emotional encounter. At the Hauptbahnof, the two men embraced wordlessly. They strolled through the streets of the Old Town to the shores of the lake. From the Perle du Lac park, Kasztner pointed out the great pyramid of Mont Blanc. A sharp wind sent clouds scudding across the sky, their reflections skittering across the lake. The war had barely touched the brilliant surface of the Swiss city. A single bombing raid, made in error, had scandalised its citizens. Young men and women leapt into the freezing water from pontoons or discreetly embraced on the rocky shore. Prosperous citizens, whose lives had barely been touched by the war, promenaded along the Quai Wilson. The views and the spring weather did little to lift the spirits of the two exiled Hungarians, who sat together awkwardly in the little park. Brand recalled that his old friend could not disguise that he was in a depressed state of mind; his ‘inner light seemed to have gone out.’ He was ‘grey not only in his features but also in his thoughts’. It did not take long for tensions to develop and for the rows to begin.

Brand had discovered that Kasztner had disparaged his efforts in Istanbul and his arrest. He boasted that if he had been sent to Istanbul, the Blood for Trucks mission might have been successful. Such innuendos were cruel and galling, and reminded Brand that Kasztner had always been a difficult colleague. He had been arrogant, self-centred, deaf to contrary opinions. And then there was the fraught matter of what had happened between Kasztner and Hansi after Joel’s departure from Budapest. He had been informed by his niece that the pair were ‘very friendly’ and ‘always seen together’. Matters worsened when Hansi arrived in Geneva with their sons. The journey had been arduous. During their first night together, Joel and Hansi began rowing. Hansi remonstrated with Joel that he had made a terrible mistake in falling into the hands of the British and not returning to Budapest. He retorted, feebly, that in wartime, ‘many men are plucked from their families’ arms’. When Joel turned his ire on Kasztner, she vehemently defended her former lover: ‘If not for him we should all be among the dead.’ Hansi insisted that she wished to stay in Europe with her sons, but Joel insisted the family return with him to Palestine. He won the argument. As soon as he was back in Tel Aviv, Joel Brand joined ‘Lehi’, an extremist Zionist organisation known as the ‘Stern Gang’ after its founder Avraham Stern. He had lost patience with the Zionist establishment.

In December 1947, Kasztner, Elizabeth and their daughter Zsuzsi left Geneva and followed the Brands to Palestine. They arrived in the port of Haifa penniless, with few resources. Kasztner had exhausted his savings travelling back and forth to Nuremberg as a witness for the International Military Tribunal and shoring up his battered reputation. He was now in his forties, in a fragile state of mind and forced to begin his life all over again. He was forced to borrow money from a relative and the Kasztner family moved from one cramped and sordid apartment in Tel Aviv to another.