Kasztners Crime

Download or read book Kasztner's Crime written by Paul Bogdanor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-examines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezs Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a saviour. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost?After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided.Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people.

Download or read book Perfidy [Illustrated Edition] written by Ben Hecht and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the Kastner affair: a conspiracy, a violation of conscience, criminal betrayal. Picture those early days when the new nation of Israel was being formed in the region of Palestine European Jews had just endured history’s ultimate holocaust. Allied governments such as Great Britain had refused to take action to block the trains from carrying thousands of them to certain death. In those final days before the end of the war, the epicenter of the Nazi extermination effort was Hungary. Jews had fled there from Germany and Poland, but they could not outrun the shadow of death. That is the obvious truth, but was there more? Was there collaboration with the enemy that resulted in these murderous acts? Can you really trust governments and leaders to do what is right and best for those they represent? As Edmund Burke declared, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But what happens when those who are trusted as good join forces with evil? Underlying this story is a bizarre tapestry of deception at the highest levels of government with the lives of many innocents in the balance. The libel trial of Rudolf Kastner, a prominent journalist representing the new government and supported by its Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, establishes the outline of that hidden past, protected by the political interests of some of Israel’s early leaders. A true classic...History that reads like a mystery novel when villains parade themselves as heroes and the real heroes are targets of evil.-Print ed. Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust

Download or read book The Jewish Leaderships in Slovakia and Hungary During the Holocaust Era written by Ruth Landau and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the established narratives surrounding the Holocaust. The focus of this book is the comparative study of the history of two Jewish communities in Central Europe, Slovakia and Hungary, during the Holocaust. The study reveals that, although the Jews of Slovakia and Hungary expected to receive reliable information from their leaders regarding how to behave in view of the Nazis’ decrees, they were deported to the extermination camps without knowing where the journey would take them. In the spring of 1944, the Jewish leaders in both countries were fully informed about Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet, they kept silent in order not to “create panic,” and did not warn the Jewish people of the impending disaster. Estimates suggest that 83% of Slovakia’s Jews, and 65% of Hungary’s Jews perished in the Holocaust. Almost all the Jewish leaders in these two countries survived the Holocaust. The study further shows that, although one of the leaders, Dr. Rudolf Kasztner, saved 1,684 Jews on the ‘Kasztner Train’, not only did he not share the information in his possession regarding the final destination of the deportees to Auschwitz, but he also disseminated false information in Cluj, the town where he was born. His desire to help German Nazi war criminals, by giving them favorable character evidence at the Nuremberg trials, remains a mystery to this day.

Download or read book Deception written by Christopher Hale and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Download or read book The Collaborator written by Diane Armstrong and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling story of heroism, passion, and betrayal based on astonishing true events set in the darkest days of World War II in Budapest. For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Alice Network and My Name is Eva. Budapest, 1944: The Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences... Sydney, 2005: Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past and present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption. From USA Today bestselling author Diane Armstrong come a story of an act of heroism, the taint of collaboration, a doomed love affair, and an Australian woman who travels across the world to discover the truth...

Download or read book Claude Lanzmann’s 'Shoah' Outtakes written by Sue Vice and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we approach the end of the 'era of the witness', given the passing on of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Claude Lanzmann's archive of 220 hours of footage excluded from his ground-breaking documentary Shoah (1985) offers a remarkable opportunity to encounter previously unseen interviews with survivors and other witnesses, recorded in the late 1970s. Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah, this book focuses on the interviews from which no extracts appear in the finished film or in any subsequent release. The material analysed features interviews with such significant figures as the former partisan Abba Kovner, wartime activist Hansi Brand, Kovno Ghetto leader Leib Garfunkel, rescuer Tadeusz Pankiewicz and members of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, and focuses throughout on the efforts at rescue and resistance by those within and outside occupied Europe. Sue Vice contends that watching and analysing this wholly excluded footage gives us new insights into the making of Shoah through what was left out. Moreover, she reveals that the near-impossibility of rescue and often suicidal implications of resistance emerge through these excluded interviews as inextricable from the process of genocide. She concludes by arguing that the outtakes show the potential for new filmic forms envisaged on Lanzmann's part in order to represent the crucial topics of attempted Holocaust rescue and resistance.

Download or read book The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: Historiography, Archives Resources and Remembrance written by Adina Babeş – Fruchter and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many decades, the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe lacked the required introspection, research and study, and most importantly, access to archives and documentation. Only in recent years and with the significant help of an emerging generation of local scholars, the Holocaust from this region became the focus of many studies. In 2018, under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure umbrella, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a workshop dedicated to Holocaust research, education and remembrance in South-Eastern Europe. The present volume is a natural continuation of the above-mentioned workshop with the aim of introducing the current state of Holocaust research in the region to different categories of scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, to students and—why not—to the general public. Our scope, not an exhaustive one, is to present a historical contextualization using archival resources, to display the variety of recordings of discrimination, destruction and rescue efforts, and to introduce the remembrance initiatives and processes developed in the region in the aftermath of the Holocaust.