Correcting a Minor Historical Inaccuracy

Incidentally to a story on one of the current Satmar Rebbes 9there are two, brothers), Arutz 7 has written that Rudolf Kastner, who arranged for a rescue train out of Hungary upon which the previous Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, escaped, was assassinated by "someone who had lost his family".

Not true.

Kastner was shot by two former GSI (Shabak) agents, Dan Shemer, the trigger man, and Ze'ev Eckstein, the driver. They claimed a former Lechi operative, Yosef Menkes (who I met many years ago in the 1970s), initiated the act and provided the weapon.

Sources:

here; here;
here on B-G's fix on clemency.

^

Kastner

Recently, Rudolf Kastner's papers were handed over to Yad Vashem and a big hullaballoo was made that these would basically exonerate him.

I have a friend who was a Betari since the 1930s, Stephen Esrati, with whom I correspond via the American Betar history discussion list, and here's something he just published there (with slight editing):-

Ben Hecht was too easy on Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian "Zionist" leader who sold his soul to Adolf Eichmann. You have to read Dr. Rudolf Vrba's book - "I Escaped From Auschwitz" (2003, Barricade Books, Fort Lee, N.J. [and now there's a new paperback edition at Robson Books])to learn just how culpable Kastner was in the extermination of the first 400,000 Jews of Budapest.

Until I read Vrba, I thought Kastner's greatest crime was that he saved himself and his friends and family from the Nazis, that he testified at Nuremberg on behalf of SS Col Kurt (Gold Teeth) Becher, and that he lied about it all.

Now I know that Kastner got the warning for which Vrba worked so hard in plenty of time not only to warn the Jews of Hungary of what was in store for them (certainly, not "resettlement") but also to lay the groundwork for resistance. It turns out that
Eichmann had only 140 Germans in Budapest to help him deport one million people. And they all got on the cattle cars willingly, sheep led to the slaughter.

Here's Elliot Jager's recent op-ed.