Rich Jews Could Buy Their Way Out

The claim is built on a few real cases of negotiated exits, dishonestly generalised. Some Jews did escape from occupied Europe through paid arrangements with the German authorities, particularly through the Hungarian rescue negotiations of 1944 (the Kasztner Train) and the Swiss-German negotiations of 1944 to 1945. The total number rescued in this way was approximately 2,700 in the Kasztner case and a few thousand more in other operations. Set against the approximately 5.7 million Jews who were killed, the rescued represent approximately 0.05 per cent of the total. The cases also raise difficult ethical questions for the Jewish negotiators involved (which the historical literature has treated extensively), but they do not modify the operational reality that the killing was an extermination programme that proceeded regardless of the wealth of its victims.

The Kasztner negotiations

The most famous of the negotiated exits was the Kasztner Train. Rezső Kasztner was a Hungarian Jewish lawyer and Zionist activist who, with his colleagues in the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee (Va’adat Ezrah ve-Hatzalah), opened negotiations with Eichmann and his deputy Kurt Becher in spring 1944 as the Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz began. The negotiations centred on Eichmann’s so-called “blood for goods” proposal: the Germans would release 1 million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other goods to be supplied by the Western Allies. The proposal was floated through the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and through Joel Brand, who travelled to Istanbul and was eventually intercepted by British intelligence. The Allies refused the deal as an obvious German attempt to obtain military supplies in exchange for victims they were going to release in any case.

Kasztner managed, against this background, to negotiate a separate small exit: a train of 1,684 Hungarian Jews, selected by Kasztner and his committee, was sent from Budapest in June 1944 to Bergen-Belsen and then in two stages onward to Switzerland (the first group of 318 in August 1944, the rest in December 1944). The selection of who would go on the train was made by Kasztner and his committee under conditions of unimaginable difficulty: with all of Hungarian Jewry being deported to Auschwitz on a daily schedule of approximately 12,000 per day, who would Kasztner save? He selected family members and political colleagues; he also selected representatives of every Hungarian Jewish community (“a Noah’s Ark of Hungarian Jewry”) and a substantial number of Orthodox Hasidic rabbis and their families. The selection has been the subject of intense ethical and legal controversy. Kasztner was sued in Israel in the 1950s by Malchiel Greenwald in a libel case that became the Kasztner Trial; the case was eventually decided in Kasztner’s favour by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1958 (Kasztner had been assassinated in 1957 before the appeal was decided).

The Swiss-German negotiations

Beyond Kasztner, the Swiss-German negotiations of 1944 to 1945, conducted by Roswell McClelland of the US War Refugee Board with Saly Mayer of the Swiss Jewish committee on the Jewish side, and by Becher and (briefly) Himmler on the German side, produced additional small exits. Approximately 1,200 Jews were transferred from Theresienstadt to Switzerland in February 1945. Approximately 7,000 Hungarian Jews held at Bergen-Belsen were transferred in similar arrangements. The total of negotiated exits across the entire war probably did not exceed 15,000 to 20,000 individuals, almost all from Hungary, Slovakia and the late-stage Theresienstadt population. The figure is small in absolute terms and microscopic as a proportion of the killing operation.

What the negotiations actually meant

The negotiations were not “buying out” individual Jews in any sense the deniers’ framing suggests. They were political negotiations between the SS at the highest level and the Western Allies through Jewish intermediaries, conducted as the war was ending and as some senior SS officers (Himmler, Becher) sought to position themselves for post-war negotiations with the Western powers. The SS was prepared to release small numbers of Jews in exchange for political consideration; the SS continued to kill the vast majority of Jews under its control regardless of the negotiations. The Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz of approximately 437,000 Jews in summer 1944 proceeded at full intensity throughout the period of the Kasztner negotiations; the small Kasztner exits were a side-channel that did not affect the main operation in any significant way.

The deniers’ framing also implies that wealthy Jews preferentially escaped while poor Jews died. The actual record does not support this. The Kasztner Train, the largest single exit, was selected by Kasztner himself on criteria of his own choice (family, political affiliation, communal representation, religious leadership), not on financial criteria. Wealth was not the determinant; political and personal connection to Kasztner was. The smaller Swiss-German negotiations were similarly arranged on political and diplomatic criteria. The image of wealthy Jews systematically buying their way out is not supported by the case record.

The vast majority who could not

The vast majority of Jews under German control had no negotiation option of any kind. The Polish Jewish population of approximately 3 million in 1939, the Soviet Jewish population of approximately 2.5 million in the territories that fell under German occupation in 1941, the Dutch, Belgian, French, Greek, Yugoslav and other Western and Southern European Jewish populations were processed through the killing operation regardless of any wealth they might have had. The German confiscation of Jewish property was systematic and total: the Reich Finance Ministry collected the assets, the Reich Bank handled the proceeds, the Auschwitz “Kanada” warehouses sorted the personal effects of those who had reached Auschwitz, and the eventual disposal was made through organised auctions across Germany. The Jews killed in the gas chambers had no resources by the time they reached the chambers; the SS had taken everything in advance.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it converts a small number of negotiated exits, conducted under impossible ethical conditions in the war’s final stages, into evidence that the killing operation was an extortion racket rather than an extermination programme. The negotiated exits affected a tiny fraction of the total population; the rest of the operation proceeded regardless. The framing also embeds an antisemitic stereotype of wealthy Jews as having access to private deals while their poorer co-religionists died, a stereotype that has no basis in the actual case record. The Kasztner case in particular has been weaponised by deniers in ways that distort what actually happened to a man working under impossible pressure to save anyone he could. The historical and ethical complexity of the negotiations is genuine; the use to which deniers put it is not.

How many Jews were rescued through negotiated exits? Out of how many killed? Where can the Kasztner Trial transcripts be read?

See also

• Hungary
• Switzerland
• The Hungarian Deportations 1944
• Adolf Eichmann
• Heinrich Himmler

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Sources

• Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933 to 1945, Yale University Press, 1994, the standard treatment
• Anna Porter, Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, Walker Books, 2007
• Ladislaus Löb, Dealing with Satan: Rezső Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission, Jonathan Cape, 2008
• Israeli Supreme Court, judgment in Greenwald v. Attorney-General (the Kasztner appeal), 17 January 1958, Israel Law Reports
• Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt, 1993, with the post-war Israeli reception of the Kasztner case
• Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, condensed edition, Wayne State University Press, 2000
• Joel Brand and Alex Weissberg, Desperate Mission: Joel Brand’s Story, Criterion, 1958
• Saly Mayer correspondence with Roswell McClelland, US War Refugee Board records, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
• David Kranzler, The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador, and Switzerland’s Finest Hour, Syracuse University Press, 2000
• Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Metropolitan Books, 2007, on the German confiscation of Jewish property
• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945: The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Rescue” and “Rezső Kasztner”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org