Kasztner's Crime

ISBN-13: 9781412864435 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 336 str.

Paul Bogdanor

Opis

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 Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's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.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Underground
2 Negotiating with Nazis
3 Salvation or Extermination?
4 Two Days in May
5 Co-opting the Rescuers
6 The Brand Mission
7 The Kenyermez Deception
8 Sabotaging Rescue in the Ghettos
9 The Strasshof Deal
10 Deceiving the Outside World
11 The Strasshof Operation
12 Gestapo Informer
13 Sabotaging Rescue in Budapest
14 Pseudo-Rescuer
15 A Guest of the SS
16 Nuremberg
17 Kasztner in Court
18 The Verdicts
Conclusion
Source Abbreviations
Important Names
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

O autorze

Paul Bogdanor