Until 1944, despite severe anti-Semitic restrictions, Hungary had permitted its large Jewish population to live in a semblance of peace, It had even served as a refuge for several thousand Jews from Poland and Slovakia. But on March 19, 1944, fearing that Hungary would defect to the Allies and angry at its failure to deport the Jews into Nazi hands, Hitler sent occupying forces into that nation. The arch-organizer of deportation, Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Budapest soon afterward and, drawing· on extensive Hungarian collaboration, set his operation in motion. In mid-April, concentration of Jews into central locations began. On May 15, mass deportations to Auschwitz commenced. [1]
Eichmann had divided Hungary into six geographical zones. He planned to dispatch the Jews to Auschwitz, zone by zone, until the provincial areas were cleared. Then Budapest, the last zone, would be emptied of Jews, thus completing the "final solution" in that country. [2]
The concentration process was utterly inhumane and the suffering on the death trains worse yet. Jews were crowded, with little food or water, into ghettos, brickyards, and tobacco sheds, where they remained for two to four weeks. Conditions everywhere resembled those of the 15,000 Jews in a brickyard at Kosice. One of them smuggled out a letter:
I am afraid I cannot stand it for long, for we are suffering beyond description. We lie in the dust, have neither straw mattresses nor covers, and will freeze to death. The place is sealed, I do not see any way out.... We are so neglected, that we do not look human any more. There is no possibility for cleaning anything. We have not taken off our clothes since coming here. Best greetings to you all, pray for us that we shall die soon. [3]
If the writer of that letter did not perish in the brickyard, he encountered a hell even worse on the deportation train. A report smuggled to Switzerland by the Jewish underground revealed that in mid-May four trains began leaving Hungary daily for Auschwitz. Each carried about 3,000 Jews closely packed in sealed freight cars. During the two-to-three- day trip, the victims were pressed together, standing, without water or sanitary facilities. Hundreds died on the way. [4]
Convinced that accounts he was hearing were exaggerated, the first secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest looked for himself. In one brick factory, he found 10,000 Jews herded into an area so small they had to stand, pushed closely together, old and young alike, with no sanitary facilities. Many died standing up. He also witnessed Jews being loaded into boxcars, eighty to a car, and the doors being nailed shut. [5]
Fully detailed reports took a few weeks to get to the Allied world. But the basic information came out almost immediately. At the start of April, even before concentration began, Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva telegraphed Stephen Wise that he had reliable reports that the Germans planned to exterminate the Jews of Hungary. Registration of Jews and yellow-star identification were under way. After these typical preliminary steps, Riegner warned, concentration and deportation would surely follow. In late April, a United Press report from Zurich disclosed that 300,000 Jews had been concentrated in collection centers in Hungary. On May 10, a New York Times story from Istanbul, derived from neutral diplomatic sources in Budapest, revealed that the Hungarian government "is now preparing for the annihilation of Hungarian Jews." [6]
On May 18, only three days after the mass deportations began, the Times reported that the first transports of Jews had left the Carpathian provinces for "murder camps in Poland" At the same time, the War Refugee Board received essentially the same information via London from the Jewish Agency for Palestine. WRB inquiries to neutral governments with diplomatic missions in Hungary soon confirmed the news. Less than six weeks later, McClelland telegraphed the board that "at least 335,000 Jews already have been deported." He had "little doubt" that the destination was the extermination camp at Auschwitz. [7]
Because of the extreme difficulty of direct rescue from Hungary, surrounded as it was by Axis territory, the WRB had to rely heavily on psychological approaches. In April, when it first learned of the impending danger, the board sent stern warnings to Hungary through neutral channels. Directly after the deportations started, it urged the five neutrals, the Vatican, and the International Red Cross (IRC) to assign additional diplomatic personnel to Hungary. The presence of a larger number of foreign observers might act as a restraining influence. Sweden and the Vatican soon complied; the IRC did eventually. Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Turkey did not. The WRB also appealed to the neutrals to grant protective citizenship documents to Hungarian Jews who had family or business ties to their countries. Turkey did not participate, but the cooperation of the other four ultimately contributed to the safekeeping of thousands of Jews. [8]
From Washington, the WRB launched an intensive propaganda campaign to persuade the Hungarian government to stop the deportations. For many weeks, a barrage of threats and warnings buffeted the country. At the board's urging, several prominent Americans put the Hungarian people and their government on notice that sure retribution would follow if persecution of the Jews continued. Others aimed their words at the Hungarian conscience. [9]
President Roosevelt condemned the Nazi atrocities and promised that "none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished." Secretary of State Hull reemphasized Roosevelt's warning twice in a three-week period. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in highly unusual actions, directed strong statements at the Hungarians. So did Alfred E. Smith. His message was cosigned by seventy-one prominent Christians, including nearly a score of governors and four Nobel Prize winners. Hungarian-American leaders castigated the Budapest government for betraying "every Hungarian tradition" and urged their former countrymen to "redeem Hungary's honor" by helping the Jews. Archbishop Francis]. Spellman of New York recorded a message for broadcast to the heavily Catholic country. He emphasized that persecution of the Jews was "in direct contradiction" to Catholic doctrine. [10]
For weeks, the Office of War Information and the BBC broadcast these messages to Hungary and other parts of Europe. The OWI had them publicized throughout the neutral European press and radio. And Allied aircraft dropped them into Hungary in pamphlet form. [11]
In parallel with its propaganda drive, the WRB pressed the neutral nations, the International Red Cross, and the Vatican to urge the Hungarian government to stop the deportations. On June 25, Pope Pius XII telegraphed a personal appeal to the Hungarian head of state, Regent Miklos Horthy. Shortly afterward, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, also sent a personal plea to Horthy, asking him, "in the name of humanity," to save the remaining Jews. But the International Red Cross, fearful that it might antagonize Germany and find itself excluded from its important work for war prisoners, hesitated to intervene. [12]
Continued pressure from the board and discussions in late June between Red Cross leaders, the Czech minister to Switzerland, and spokesmen for the World Jewish Congress finally persuaded the IRC to act. The spur was a shocking, detailed report on Auschwitz that the WJC and the Czech minister had recently received. [13]
IRC president Max Huber dispatched a handwritten letter to Horthy that summarized the new revelations about Auschwitz and requested detailed information on what was happening to the deported Jews and where they were now. The IRC offered to send a mission to Hungary to be present at the deportations, help with food and medicine, and assist the deportees at their destination. [14]
Huber's message raised extremely sensitive issues in Hungary and kept the heat on the Horthy government. But by July 6, the day it was sent, the earlier pressures, along with Germany's declining military situation, had already induced Horthy to stand up to the Nazis at last and insist that the deportations halt. By then, the Hungarian provinces had been cleared. Almost 440,000 Jews were gone. But most of Budapest's 230,000 Jews were still in the capital. The appeals from the Pope and the king of Sweden, stimulated in part by the WRB, had been especially important in stopping the deportations. So had a very sharp warning that the WRB had dispatched through Swiss government channels on June 26. The board's other diplomatic efforts and its propaganda campaign had also played a significant part in the change of policy. [15]
But Horthy's control of the situation was shaky. The deportations might resume at any time. On July 18, however, hopes rose for the Jews in Budapest. In a startling reply to the International Red Cross, Horthy offered to permit emigration of all Jewish children under ten who possessed visas to other countries and all Jews of any age who had Palestine certificates. He also invited the Red Cross to provide relief to the Jews in Hungary. [16]
Horthy's overture put the pressure squarely on the United States and Britain. Within ten days, the WRB was prepared to assure that the United States would find havens for all Jews let out of Hungary. But because Horthy had directed his proposal to both the Western Allies, the board did not want to act alone. On July 29, it informed the British that it would wait until August 7 for them to join in accepting Horthy's offer. [17]
August 7 passed with no decision from London, but the board decided to wait a few more days. The British were searching for a way out of their dilemma. They were alarmed at the pressure that acceptance of Horthy's proposal would place on their Palestine policy, yet they were unwilling to bear the onus of rejecting the offer. As usual where Jews were concerned, the British leadership was far more impressed with "the practical difficulties of dealing with a large flow of refugees" than with the alternative-their annihilation in Nazi killing centers. [18]
One British solution, to hand the Horthy proposal over to the Inter. governmental Committee, offered the obvious advantage of indefinite delay. But the WRB rejected that. The British next proposed a joint statement in which they would pledge, "to the extent of their resources," to cooperate with the United States in caring for the Jews who got out of Hungary. The WRB saw this as hardly any commitment. It asked Morgenthau and Josiah DuBois, then in London on other business, to try to bring the British around. Morgenthau talked with Churchill and Eden. DuBois and John Winant, the American ambassador, held long discussions with members of the Foreign Office. These steps finally brought results. On August 17, thirty days after Horthy had made his overture, and almost three weeks after the WRB had begun to press the British, the two governments publicly issued a state ment accepting responsibility for finding havens for all the Jews allowed out of Hungary. [i] [19]
Fleetingly, it looked as though mass evacuation from Budapest might take place. The WRB, guaranteeing financial help and prompt removal of the refugees, urged the neutral states to open their borders. Switzer. land offered td take 13,000 Jews on a temporary basis. Sweden was ready to accept 10,000 children. The State Department agreed to issue 5,000 visas for children. Hirschmann and Steinhardt cleared the way for a large flow through the Balkans to Palestine by obtaining transit permission from the Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish governments. [21]
But no Jews ever left Hungary under the Horthy proposal. While the Americans and British had been negotiating, the Nazis had barred the doors. It soon became clear that the Germans, who controlled Hungary's borders, had determined to prevent Jewish emigration. [ii] [22]
Although it could not be implemented, the American-British guarantee to accept responsibility for relocating the Hungarian Jews constituted a major breakthrough in the Allied response to the Holocaust. But it came very, very late. The same assurances might have significantly altered the course of the Holocaust had they been made during 1942, or when Rumania offered to release 70,000 Jews in early 1943, or at the Bermuda Conference, or even in April 1944, when the danger signals arose in Hungary. But by August 1944 most possibilities for rescue by evacuation had passed.
As for the Horthy offer itself, quick Allied action might have caught the Nazis off balance and succeeded in bringing numbers of Jews out to safety. But no matter what the outcome might have been, the month's delay in responding remains unconscionable. The outside world had clear knowledge of the peril that hung over the remaining Hungarian Jews.
Even though the emigration proposal collapsed, Horthy had opened the possibility of survival for the more than 200,000 Jews in Budapest. The deportations had stopped. The Red Cross accepted the invitation to bring in relief supplies. And neutral diplomats and the papal nuncio devised ways to safeguard tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Hungarian fascists. Palestine visas offered some protection. Thousands of them came in through Catholic diplomatic couriers and the nunciature. Baptismal certificates were issued. The Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, and Portuguese legations provided thousands of protective documents and visas. (Zionist youth groups forged thousands of additional papers.) The neutral legations, the church, and the Red Cross also protected thousands of Jews by keeping them in buildings that they placed under their extraterritorial jurisdiction. [24]
The Swiss and especially the Swedish legations led in this unusual venture in mass preservation of Jewish lives. At the center of the effort was Raoul Wallenberg, one of the main heroes in the entire struggle to counter the Holocaust, The thirty-one-year-old architect and businessman, member of a leading Swedish diplomatic and banking family, met with the WRB's Iver Olsen' in Stockholm in June 1944, He offered to go to Hungary to do what he could for the Jews there, At Olsen's suggestion, the Swedish government appointed him an attach" to its Budapest legation, In practice, though, Wallenberg served as the WRB's representative in Hungary, Through Olsen and the Swedish Foreign Office, the board sent him suggestions for action and the funds for his mission. [25]
Working with a staff of over 300 people, largely volunteers, Wallenberg developed relief projects, but threw most of his efforts into plans to bring Jews under Swedish protection, Soon after arriving in Budapest, he rented a building, applied Swedish extraterritorial status to it, and used it as a safe haven for several hundred Jewish religious leaders, He also persuaded the Swedish government to allow the legation to issue special protective passports to Hungarian Jews, With time, he brought several additional buildings under Swedish extraterritoriality and expanded the passport scheme, By these means, Wallenberg ultimately saved at least 20,000 Jews. [26]
For three precarious months after Horthy terminated the deportations, conditions for the Budapest Jews, though bad, remained survivable, Then, in mid-October, with the Russians only one hundred miles east of the capital, Horthy moved for an armistice with the Allies, Reacting swiftly, the Nazis forced him to resign as head of state by threatening to kill his son, They then installed a puppet regime under Ferenc Szalasi and the fascist Arrow Cross party, Almost immediately, the fervidly anti-Semitic Arrow Cross loosed a reign of terror against the Budapest Jews, slaughtering thousands, Throughout that fall and winter, beating, plundering, and murdering continually broke out, During the final two months before the Red Army conquered the city, the Arrow Cross killed more than 10,000 Jews and left them in the streets or in the Danube's freezing waters. [27]
The most barbaric episode during the Szalasi regime took place in November, Deportations began again, but not to Auschwitz. (The rail systems had collapsed, and the Auschwitz killing operations were soon to be shut down,) The Nazis needed labor 120 miles to the west, across the Austrian border, So they drove approximately 40,000 Jews on foot, through bone-chilling rains, toward Austria, On the march, 15 to 20 percent either died or fell out from exhaustion and exposure and were shot, Those who reached Austria but were judged unfit for hard labor were pushed back across the border into Hungary and driven into the woods to die of starvation, exposure, and disease. The horrible consequences of the marches, especially the high death rate among the women, finally became too much even for Szalasi. On November 21, he stopped the deportations. [28]
The Szalasi period put Raoul Wallenberg to his severest tests. The day after the Arrow Cross came to power, his mostly Jewish relief staff completely disappeared. The next day, he located them, one by one, and moved them to safer locations. At about the same time, the Szalasi regime declared all the protective passports void. Wallenberg managed to get that ruling retracted. Once, an armed patrol entered an area of Swedish protected houses and began to seize Jews. Wallenberg appeared and shouted, "This is Swedish territory.... If you want to take them you will have to shoot me first." The Jews were released. Again, when he learned that eleven people with Swedish passports had been put on a train for Austria, Wallenberg pursued it by automobile, caught it at the last stop before the border, and took the eleven off. At the time of the ghastly marches to Austria, he carried food and other supplies to the victims. And he succeeded, by various pretexts, in removing hundreds of Jews from the columns and returning them to protected houses in Budapest. [29]
During the Szalasi government's four months of terror, tens of thousands of Budapest Jews perished. When the Russians finally captured the city, in mid-February 1945, about 120,000 Jews remained alive. The Budapest Jews had suffered disastrously at the hands of the Arrow Cross. Nevertheless, the survival of 120,000 was a significant accomplishment under the circumstances. All were on the brink of extermination in July, and throughout the fall and winter they were trapped by a murderous government. The forces from the outside world that had pressured Horthy in the spring and the later protective measures inside Budapest were crucial in saving those 120,000. The War Refugee Board had been a decisive factor in both efforts. [30]
How much of this was Raoul Wallenberg's work? He was directly responsible for rescuing the 20,000 Jews housed in Swedish buildings and protected by Swedish papers. Similar measures by the Swiss, Spanish, and Portuguese legations, the nuncio, and the Red Cross helped save numbers estimated at from 11,000 to 30,000. Wallenberg was indirectly responsible for much of that achievement, for his example had influenced the others to expand their operations. Another 70,000 Jews who survived were huddled in the Budapest ghetto. For them, too, Wallenberg's actions were critical. Besides providing what food he could, he forestalled several Arrow Cross attacks on the ghetto. Finally, as the city was about to fall, plans were under way for the last-minute destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants. Wallenberg's threat of sure postwar punishment in a confrontation with the SS commander of Budapest may have been the decisive factor in stopping that scheme. [31]
In the end, Wallenberg fared worse than the miserable Jews he saw through the devastation. He incurred the wrath of Eichmann as well as the Arrow Cross, and in the final weeks the Germans and the Hungarian fascists tried to hunt him down. The young Swede evaded them by hiding in different houses from night to night. But what the Nazis dared not or could not do, the Soviets did. [32]
On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg left the city for Russian occupation headquarters at Debrecen, apparently to request emergency relief assistance for the Budapest Jews. He was never heard from again. In June, responding to a Swedish government inquiry, Moscow advised that its last information, dated January 18, reported Wallenberg under the protection of Soviet troops. Continued inquiries finally, in 1957, elicited an official Soviet statement that he had died of a heart attack in a Russian prison in 1947. But in the years since, reports have persistently surfaced indicating that he has been seen alive, in the Soviet prison system. [iii] [33]
Why the Russians seized Wallenberg is a mystery. It may be that his American connection aroused Soviet suspicion that he had been planted in Budapest as a spy. Perhaps the Russians were also aware that the WRB representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, who was in regular contact with Wallenberg, was an OSS operative, and from this they inferred a Wallenberg tie to the OSS. [35]
Another sequence of events that arose out of the Hungarian Jewish tragedy also left an enigmatic trail. On May 19, 1944, four days after the mass deportations to Auschwitz started, a small German aircraft touched down at Istanbul and discharged two Hungarian Jews. One, Joel Brand, was a leader of the Relief and Rescue Committee, a Hungarian Zionist organization involved in refugee aid and small-scale escape projects. The other, Andor ("Bandi") Grosz, a convert to Christianity, made his living as a small-time secret agent. [36]
Grosz's orders, which emanated from the SS, were to arrange for a meeting between high Nazi officials and upper-level American and British officers to discuss a separate peace between Germany and the Western Allies. The real objective of Brand's mission is still unclear. But recent scholarship indicates rhat it, too, was an attempt by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler to bypass Hitler and, using the Zionist leadership as a channel, to contact the Western Allies concerning the possibility of a separate peace. [37]
The proposal that Brand carried to the Zionists of the outside world was given to him in Budapest by Adolf Eichmann. On its face, it was fantastic. Eichmann offered to release one million Jews in return for 10,000 trucks (to be used, he stated, only on the eastern front) and sizable amounts of coffee, tea, cocoa, and soap. He also mentioned the possibility of an indefinite amount of foreign currency. Eichmann told Brand that he would let an initial group of several thousand Jews leave Hungary as soon as the Allies agreed to send the trucks. [38]
None of Eichmann's requirements were hard-and-fast, however. This convinced Brand that further negotiations could -- and must -- be pursued. In his view, the only way to stop the death trains was for him to return to Budapest within a very few weeks with some indication that the Allies did not reject the scheme. He believed that trucks were not essential, that the deportations might be halted if Britain and America expressed an interest in further negotiations. [39]
Brand left Turkey for Syria, where he was to meet Mushe Shertok, political secretary of the Jewish Agency. He reached Aleppo on June 7, only to be arrested by British authorities. After allowing him to confer with Shertok, the British took Brand to Cairo and held him there for more than three months. They also picked up Grosz. They kept him in detention in Cairo, too, and his mission ended at that point. But Brand's ordeal was far from over. Convinced that his lengthening absence from Budapest was angering the Gestapo, he became increasingly distraught about the fate of his family and the continuing deportation of Hungarian Jewry. [40]
Jewish leaders in Palestine recognized that Eichmann's conditions could not be met, but hoped that something useful might come out of the Nazi overture. During June and July, they pressed the British to keep the negotiations going and to send Brand back to Budapest so the Nazis would not conclude that the proposal had been rejected. Hirschmann, who interviewed Brand in Cairo on orders from the War Refugee Board, took the same position-as did Steinhardt. In Washington, Morgenthau and Pehle, with the express concurrence of President Roosevelt, strongly supported continuing negotiations in the hope that Eichmann's offer might be the forerunner of other proposals. [41]
In Britain, however, the proposition drew implacable opposition. Within the Cabinet Committee on Refugees, fear surfaced that negotiations might "lead to an offer to unload an even greater number of Jews on to our hands." The Foreign Office took the position that the scheme was either blackmail or an attempt to disrupt the war effort by sending out a flood of refugees. Accordingly, it should not be pursued any further. [42]
Then, in mid-June, the Soviet government, which had been informed of the Eichmann offer by the British and Americans, declared that it was absolutely impermissible "to carry on any conversations whatsoever with the German Government" on this question. The Russian reply, along with an order from Churchill on July 7 that there should be no negotiations at all with the Germans, ended any chance of an official American or British follow-up. In mid-July, that conclusion was reinforced when the British interrogation of Grosz in Cairo indicated that Himmler's real objective in the affair had been to extend feelers regarding a separate peace. The British saw it as a trap, an attempt to split the Western Allies from the highly suspicious Soviets. The Foreign Office, to scuttle the entire risky business, leaked the story to the press. [43]
The Brand affair produced two concrete results. Not long after Brand left Hungary, Dr. Rudolf Kasztner, leading Hungarian Zionist, informed Eichmann that a report from Turkey indicated Allied acceptance in principle of the German offer. Now, said Kasztner, the Nazis should provide evidence of their seriousness. At the end of June, after extracting a sizable ransom from the Hungarian Jews themselves, Eichmann permitted a special transport of almost 1,700 Jews to leave Hungary. Supposedly bound for Spain and freedom, the train instead delivered its passengers to Bergen-Belsen. The second ransom transaction to emerge from the Kasztner-Eichmann negotiations involved some 18,000 Hungarian Jews scheduled for deportation to Auschwitz. They were diverted to labor projects near Strasshof, Austria. About 75 percent of them survived the war. [44]
Unlike the British government, the War Refugee Board was unwilling to break entirely clear of the Eichmann-Brand overture. In August 1944, responding to a German initiative, the board decided to pursue the matter indirectly, through sixty-two-year-old Saly Mayer, the Joint Distribution Committee's representative in Switzerland. [45]
Communicating through McClelland, the WRB emphasized to Mayer that no ransom arrangements were permissible and he must act only as a Swiss Jewish leader -- not as a representative of any American organization (including the WRB and the JDC). Mayer thus operated from an extremely weak position; he had almost no authority and could not agree to provide the Germans with what he knew they would insist on. [46]
Mayer's tactic was to deceive the SS negotiators into believing they would eventually get, if not strategic goods, at least monetary gain. With this bait, he sought to persuade them to stop the slaughter of the Jews and specifically to halt further deportations from Hungary. The WRB objective was for Mayer "to draw out the negotiations and gain as much time as possible." Meanwhile, it was hoped, the remaining Jews would be permitted to live, and Allied military advances would put an end to the extermination process. [47]
Mayer's opening thrust brought quick results. Before be would negotiate at all, he insisted on delivery to Switzerland of an initial installment of 500 of the 1,700 Hungarian Jews who had been sent to Bergen-Belsen. The discussions commenced on August 21, at St. Margarethen, on the Swiss-Austrian border. That very day, 318 Jews arrived from Bergen-Belsen. [48]
At that first meeting, Kurt Becher, a high SS officer who represented Himmler, demanded 10,000 trucks in exchange for the million Jews supposedly still alive in Nazi Europe. Mayer replied that he saw no chance of providing trucks. He suggested instead that the Germans prepare a list of scarce, but nonmilitary, materials that the United States might allow to go to Germany from neutral countries. [49]
In a series of follow-up meetings extending- over six months, Mayer ingeniously stretched out the negotiations, while still keeping the Germans interested. After the first meeting, he asked the WRB through McClelland (with whom he was in constant touch) to provide him with a substantial sum to use in leading the Nazis on. The board agreed, but stipulated that none of the money could be promised to the Germans without approval from Washington. Well before any funds were actually transferred, Mayer convinced the Nazis that he controlled at least 5 million Swiss francs ($1.25 million). He also shifted the discussions away from trucks to an offer to open an account in Switzerland on which the Germans could draw to buy nonstrategic goods. More time elapsed while the Nazis visited Switzerland to find out what might be available. Aware that the WRB would not permit any actual financial transactions, Mayer and McClelland recognized by late November that the ransom ruse had been played for all it was worth. [50]
In a bold stroke that was helped by the worsening German military situation, Mayer managed to turn the talks in another direction. He offered, in exchange for an end to the exterminations, to send food-into German-held territory for the International Red Cross to distribute to the surviving Jews. The Nazi negotiators, who had been claiming that the Jews were a drain on German resources, were willing to discuss the plan. McClelland backed it and endorsed Mayer's plea to the WRB to send $5 million to strengthen his bargaining position. The money arrived three weeks later, in early January. But the project did not materialize. [51]
What did Saly Mayer achieve? In August 1944, he succeeded in bringing out 318 of the Hungarian Jews held in Bergen-Belsen. In early December, the other 1,368 people in the original transport from Hungary also reached Switzerland. Apparently, Mayer's repeated insistence that their continued internment was impeding the discussions finally persuaded !he Germans to let them go. Beyond that, the negotiations had little or no practical effect. But despite the limited results, Mayer's endeavors touched on the heroic. He had almost nothing to work with, he received little support from the WRB, yet he invested tremendous effort in an almost hopeless cause. It was a gamble that he believed had to be taken. [iv] [52]
While Mayer's negotiations were unfolding, another Swiss-based rescue attempt secretly involved Orthodox rabbis in the United States in activities that led straight to Himmler. This scheme grew out of the rescue work of Isaac Sternbuch, his wife, Recha, and other Orthodox Jews, whose committee, HIJEFS, was the Swiss affiliate of Vaad Hahatzala. Vaad Hahatzala was a New York-based rescue committee sponsored by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis.
In the spring and summer of 1944, well before the Mayer negotiations began, Sternbuch and his associates were drawn into a plan to buy Jews out of Hungary by supplying Swiss-built tractors to the Nazis. This scheme originated with an Orthodox group in Hungary that had agreed with the Germans to exchange one hundred tractors for 1,200 rabbis and other leading Orthodox Jews. [v] But the Hungarians could not raise enough money for the deal and turned to Sternbuch for help. [54]
McClelland found out about the plan and opposed it, on the grounds that it would aid the German war effort. Bur Sternbuch went ahead anyway, and in July he secretly bought the first ten tractors, paying 170,000 Swiss francs. [vi] In September, he obtained 260,000 francs from Saly Mayer (from his JDC funds), which also went for tractors. Over the next few months, Mayer passed about 310,000 additional francs to Sternbuch for the same purpose. At least twelve and possibly as many as forty-three tractors were shipped into Axis territory without McClelland's knowledge. [56]
While the tractor project was still under way, Sternbuch's group opened up a connection with Himmler that had the potential for a major breakthrough. The key figure in this episode was sixty-eight-year-old Jean-Marie Musy, formerly president of Switzerland and member of the Swiss Federal Council. In fall 1944, Sternbuch asked Musy, who had turned strongly pro-Nazi in the 1930s, to intercede with Himmler for release of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Musy agreed, perhaps in hopes of rehabilitating his political reputation in Switzerland. Or perhaps he thought this step might open the way for a Nazi accommodation with the West, which he saw as the only chance to avoid a Russian takeover of Germany. [58]
For Sternbuch's committee, the advantages in working through Musy -- and they were of utmost importance -- were his past acquaintance with Himmler, his ability to gain direct access to him, and his status as a pro-Nazi neutral. Only Musy or someone like him could have confronted Himmler face-to-face on the Jewish issue and steered him toward release of the Jews. But there was an important disadvantage in proceeding through Musy. Sternbuch anticipated that McClelland would not be cooperative and might even oppose rescue efforts that included Musy, whom he distrusted, especially if they appeared to involve ransom. [59]
Sternbuch kept the plan secret from McClelland as long as possible. Communications about it between Sternbuch and Vaad Hahatzala were transmitted through Polish diplomatic cable facilities, thus circumventing the censors, the State Department, the WRB, and McClelland. (In New York, Vaad Hahatzala kept the secret correspondence in special files marked "Incoming -- Illegal -- Sternbuch" and "Outgoing -- Illegal Cables.") [60]
In early November, through the intervention of Walter Schellenberg, a high SS official, Musy talked at length with Himmler. From Sternbuch, he brought an offer of one million Swiss francs "and perhaps more" in return for the release of the remaining Jews, whose number Himmler estimated at 600,000. Himmler said that he could free the Jews but that he needed goods, particularly trucks, rather than money. The meeting ended without a decision. [61]
During November, further negotiations led to an agreement to release the Jews in exchange for several million Swiss francs. Without revealing details of the plan, Sternbuch asked McClelland to request ten to twenty million francs from the WRB to get the Jews out. Instead, McClelland advised the board not to back the scheme, because it was vague and unreliable and because the disreputable Musy was mixed up in it. [62]
In the meantime, Sternbuch had spelled out the new plan in a secret message to Vaad Hahatzala. It called for the release of 300,000 Jews in exchange for $5 million (20 million Swiss francs), or approximately $17 per person. The Jews would come out at the rate of 15,000 per month in return for monthly installments of $250,000. Aware that the proposition involved outright ransom, the people at Vaad Hahatzala nevertheless agreed to it and immediately launched a fund-raising campaign. Two weeks later, on December 5, they dispatched their first receipts, $107,000, to Sternbuch. By mid-January, they had sent nearly $150,000 more. [vii] [63]
The WRB did not learn of the scheme to ransom 300,000 Jews until January 24, when George Warren, the State Department's liaison with the board, reported that a representative of the Vaad had told him about the plan. The board promptly instructed McClelland to look into it. [65]
Meanwhile, in mid-January, Musy met with Himmler again. On February 1, back in Switzerland, he told Sternbuch what had been accomplished, again with Schellenberg's help. Himmler had lowered his requirements drastically. He would release virtually all the Jews, in weekly trainloads of about 1,200, if a token payment of 5 million Swiss francs ($1.25 million) were placed in a Swiss bank in Musy's name. Musy said the funds would not go to Germany-they would most likely be transferred, later on, to the International Red Cross. As proof of Himmler's seriousness, Musy reported, the first train would soon leave for Switzerland. [66]
Sternbuch told McClelland about the new development on February 6. McClelland thought the board would approve the deal, provided the money went into a double account that Musy could not touch without American approval. The next day, a train arrived at the Swiss border carrying 1,210 Jews from Theresienstadt. McClelland reported the apparent breakthrough to the WRB. Both he and Sternbuch suspected that Himmler's motive. was to find a way to extend peace overtures to the United States. [67]
The next move was up to the WRB. But Vaad Hahatzala did not leave it at that. Sternbuch had warned the Vaad that additional trains would not come out unless he received $937,000, the amount needed to fill out the $1.25 million that Himmler had specified. Unremitting pressure by Vaad leaders won WRB approval to transmit the money, on condition that it could not under any circumstances be used for ransom and that it be placed in an account jointly controlled by Sternbuch, McClelland, and the WRB. On March 1, a license was issued. The Vaad then obtained $937,000 from the JDC and dispatched it to Switzerland. [68]
Although it agreed to the transfer of funds, the WRB was very uneasy about this plan. Morgenthau, especially, feared that word of the Orthodox rabbis' covert activities might teach the press, along with the impression that the American government was paying ransom to the, Nazis to free Jews. There was also some concern about Vaad Hahatzala's illegal use of Polish communication lines, a practice that was now fully clear to the Treasury Department. Pehle and others had known about it for some time but had not blocked it. Pehle explained to Morgenthau:
We have never wanted to stop it, because they get results. Is it risky? Sure it is risky; this whole thing is risky; it is fraught with difficulty.... It is easy to stop, but it is a serious responsibility.
In the end, the board kept its hands off the Polish communication arrangement. [69]
In the meantime, in mid-February, Musy received word from Himmler's headquarters that the project would be halted unless articles appeared in the Swiss and American press giving credit to the Germans for releasing the Jews who had come out of Theresienstadt. Such reports were published. But if Himmler's purpose was to cultivate American opinion in preparation for a peace approach, his tactic backfired. The press reports came to Hitler's attention, and he snuffed out the project, ordering that not one more Jew was to leave German territory. More Jews did get out, but the Sternbuch-Musy-Himmler agreement was dead despite several weeks of determined effort by Musy to revive it. [70]
The Brand, Mayer, and Sternbuch-Musy episodes all raised the troubling problem of ransom. The WRB adamantly opposed paying the Nazis to let Jews out. The primary reason, of course, was that the compensation could aid the Axis war effort. The board was also concerned about public reaction in the United States if news spread that materials or money were going to the enemy to ransom Jews. WRB policy allowed bribery of lower officials and border guards on the grounds that saving lives outweighed any tiny advantage the Nazis might gain from those transactions. But that was quite different from payments of millions of dollars or strategically important goods. [71]
Three Jewish rescue organizations differed, in varying degrees, with the WRB's policy against ransom. In the midst of the Joel Brand affair, the Jewish Agency informed the British Foreign Office that, if it finally came to a question of money, "we believe that the ransom should be paid." It conveyed essentially the same view to the State Department. The World Jewish Congress did not press the issue, but it opposed the WRB's ban on ransom. A month before the deportations began in Hungary, the WIC foresaw the catastrophe and called on the board "to resort even to such extraordinary methods" as large-scale ransom. Later, it sharply criticized the WRB's strict policy against ransom in the Saly Mayer negotiations. [72]
Vaad Hahatzala and the Sternbuch group not only disagreed with the WRB but pursued ransom arrangements in defiance of board policy. Sternbuch did not shy at deception or illegality. "Some activities. necessary in our operations are punishable," he explained, but the "sacred cause"-saving Jews-required that they be carried on. Vaad Hahatzala responded to the Holocaust on the basis of its leaders' understanding of the requirements of Jewish law for the preservation of human life. A 1944 report by another agency correctly observed that Vaad Hahatzala was ('prepared to disregard any consideration other than the rescue of the maximum possible number of Jews." The Vaad itself referred to its position as a "Stop-at-Nothing" policy. This approach created some uneasiness. For instance, the head of the Joint Distribution Committee once stated, referring to transmission of rescue funds into Nazi Europe, "As regards the methods used by the Vaad Haha tzala, the less said the better." Again, the Vaad's tactics in the Musy- Himmler affair had alarmed Morgenthau and some others. But as Pehle testified, experience showed that "they get results." [73]
***
The Hungarian Jewish disaster had little impact on the American nation. War news, especially the. Normandy invasion and the rapid drive across France, dominated the public's attention. New York and Wash, ington newspapers reported on the Hungarian Jews, but on inner pages. In other cities, the information reached the newsrooms, but editors printed little of it. In July, a New Republic editorial under the bitter heading "Getting Used to Massacres" registered the widespread apathy: "Such news is received nowadays with a shrug of the shoulders." [74]
American Zionist leaders were far from apathetic about the slaughter in Hungary. But they had committed their resources to the Palestine commonwealth resolution introduced in' Congress in January 1944. Wise, Silver, and other top Zionists, seizing the opportunities offered by the national elections, worked through the summer and fall to secure Democratic and Republican support for the Palestine resolution. Responsibility for pressing the rescue issue fell to a second level of leaders in the World Jewish Congress and in the faltering American Jewish Conference. They consulted frequently with the WRB and submitted rescue plans to the Washington missions of the Vatican, the International Red Cross, and various foreign powers. Otherwise, except for one midsummer project, they took little action. [75]
To generate pressure for measures to save the Hungarian Jews, the American Jewish conference held a mass demonstration in New York City on July 31. More than 40,000 people packed Madison Square Park and adjoining streets for two hours in oppressive late-afternoon heat. Stephen Wise, other prominent Jews, and a few non-Jews spoke for swift action to save the remnant of European Jewry. The crowd endorsed a call for immediate implementation of Horthy's offer to release the Hungarian Jews. But no one in the seats of power listened, except the War Refugee Board, which was already doing what it could. [76]
Despite a distinct decline in activity during 1944, the Bergsonite Emergency Committee continued as the leading force in building pressures for rescue. When the Hungarian crisis broke, the committee formed alliances with Christian Hungarian-American societies and clergymen. One result was that leading Christian Americans of Hungarian descent telegraphed the Pope and President Roosevelt urging action to save the Jews in Hungary. They also dispatched messages to prominent Hungarians calling for an end to mistreatment of the Jews. Their statements were beamed into Hungary by OWI radio, as were excerpts from special services in support of the Jews that were held in Hungarian· American churches. [77]
Throughout the first half of 1944, the Emergency Committee had campaigned in full-page newspaper advertisements and at public meetings for opening Palestine to Jewish refugees. With the announcement of the Horthy offer, which appeared to release all Jews who had Palestine certificates, the Bergsonites accelerated their drive. They also turned once more to Hearst, who again provided substantial editorial support. And they went to Congress with resolutions calling on the President to urge Britain to open emergency camps in Palestine, where tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews could be sheltered in safety until the war ended. They could then; if necessary, be returned to Hungary or sent elsewhere. [78]
The Bergsonites saw the shelters plan as a way to open Palestine for the immediate emergency without getting the matter entangled in the politically difficult issues of the White Paper and Jewish statehood. Those questions, they concluded, could wait until after the war. This position paralleled that of the WRB. It had earlier decided to stay away from the controversy over the Zionists' Palestine resolution, but wanted pressure put on Britain to open Palestine at least as a temporary haven. [79]
The Palestine-shelters resolution quickly picked up important bipartisan backing in Congress. The Emergency Committee generated a flow of letters to Washington and claimed 500,000 signatures on petitions of support, which were presented to Congress by a small delegation of Orthodox rabbis and an archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church. But the proposal soon collapsed, largely because of opposition from the State Department and Zionist organizations. [80]
The State Department asserted that passage of the legislation would anger the Arabs and set off unrest in the Middle East. The Zionists persuaded key members of Congress, including Tom Connally and Sol Bloom (chairmen of the relevant Senate and House committees), not to act on it. They told the legislators that the plan was unnecessary because the few Jews who might get to Palestine from Hungary could enter under the remaining White Paper quota. Moreover, the Zionists strenuously opposed any plan to send Jews to Palestine with the understand ing that they might have to leave after the war. Such a concession, legitimized by the approval of Congress, might establish a precedent that could impair the Jewish claim to Palestine. [81]
Zionist opposition to the Palestine-shelters resolution was only one point of conflict with the Bergsonites that year. Acrimony reached the fever point in mid-May 1944 when the Bergson group purchased the former Iranian embassy building in Washington and declared it the headquarters of the newly formed Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. The Hebrew Committee, made up of the small Bergsonite core group of Palestinian Jews and patterned on the French Committee of National Liberation, set itself up as the government-in-exile for the Jewish (or Hebrew) state (yet to be established) in Palestine. At the same time, the Bergsonites launched a partner organization, the American League for a Free Palestine, a mass-membership body for Americans, Jews and non-Jews, who wished to support the goals of the Hebrew Committee. [82]
The regular Zionist organizations attacked this Bergsonite venture with a vengeance. They saw it as an attempt to wrest the leadership of the world Zionist movement from the long-established Zionist bodies -- and wreck them in the process. The Jewish press and non-Zionist Jewish groups were also outraged at the effrontery and flamboyance of the young "adventurers" from Palestine. The Bergsonites, to their own dismay, had incurred the full wrath of American Jewry. [83]
Frustrated by what they considered the ineffectiveness of the regular Zionist movement, the Bergson group had sought to form a new spearhead for Jewish nationalism. They had also hoped that the Hebrew Committee, like the French Committee, might open contacts at the world diplomatic level (foreign governments, International Red Cross, Vatican, UNRRA) -- contacts that could help the rescue cause. They did create a small, rival Zionist movement that remained active until the emergence of the state of Israel. And they achieved some minor gains in. the rescue area. But the main outcome was to crystallize a solid front of angry opposition all across the American Jewish community. [84]
The rush of animosity took a heavy toll on Bergsonite rescue activities. Inevitably, the barrage of attacks on the Hebrew Committee and the American League for a Free Palestine injured the older organization, the Emergency Committee. Zionist publicity, along with systematic Zionist pressure on prominent Americans to dissociate them selves from all Bergsonite enterprises, cost the Emergency Committee important support. Furthermore, the Emergency Committee, along with the two new committees, spent considerable time and energy countering the widespread and continuing assaults. The Emergency Committee did not go under. But never again was it as effective as it had been before. [85]
_______________
Notes:
[i] To obtain British approval, Winant had to endorse a secret subsidiary statement that protected Britain's Palestine position in case large numbers of Jews should actually get out of Hungary. In it, the United States agreed "not to face the British Government with a practical impossibility" in regard to taking in refugees. In short, the United States accepted most of the responsibility for finding places of refuge. [20]
[ii] A few thousand Jews did escape to Rumania, and a few hundred others to Yugoslavia. A small Jewish underground operation kept an outlet to Rumania open until mid-September. By then, though, the Russians had advanced the battle zone into eastern Hungary, and access to Rumania had been cut off. [23]
[iii] The most convincing of these accounts appeared in 1979. It pointed to the possibility that Wallenberg was alive and in reasonably good condition as late as 1975. [34]
[iv] Mayer and others have since credited the negotiations with several achievements. The talks possibly played some small part in Himmler's decision in the fall of 1944 to bring the extermination program to a halt. But solid evidence is lacking. The discussions did not put any brake on deportations. Although it is true that Eichmann never got the trains moving from Hungary again after Horthy stopped them in July, there is no proof that the Mayer negotiations influenced that situation. Nor did they impede the deportations to Auschwitz from many parts of Europe that went right on through the summer and into the fall of 1944. [53]
[v] The available documentation does not make clear whether this was an independent project or whether it represented part of the payment (or a confirmation payment) for the deal that sent the 1,700 Jews to Bergen-Belsen and eventually to Switzerland. [55]
[vi] Sternbuch explained to Vaad Hahatzala headquarters, "We need part of the money for bribes to save people. But we cannot tell about it McClelland." (i.e., we cannot tell McClelland about it.) The message bypassed American censorship through the cooperation of Polish diplomats in Bern and New York.
Historians have credited Saly Mayer with bringing the 318 Hungarian Jews out of Bergen-Belsen in August 1944. But Sternbuch persistently claimed that the tractor deal he completed in July was at least partly responsible for freeing that group. [57]
[vii] On December 6, Sternbuch informed the Vaad that as a result of these negotiations a train with 1,400 Jews from Bergen-Belsen would soon reach Switzerland. The transport, carrying 1,368 Hungarian Jews, arrived that night. Historians have generally agreed with Saly Mayer's assertion that his negotiations brought this convoy out. But Sternbuch's work, possibly the tractor deliveries, might have been a factor. [64]