The Kastner Report

Affidavit of Dr. Rudolf Kastner, former President of the

Hungarian Zionist Organization, 9/13/1945

 

 

 

Rudolf Kastner

Dr. Reszco (Rudolf) Kastner, being duly sworn deposes and says:

I was born in 1906 at Kolozsvar (now Cluj, Romania), solicitor and journalist, residing at Chemin Krieg, 16, Pension Sergey, Geneva, now temporarily at 109, Clarence Gate Gardens, London.

I was in Budapest until November 28, 1944; as one of the leaders of the Hungarians Zionist organization. I not only witnessed closely the Jewish persecution, dealt with officials of the Hungarian puppet government and the Gestapo but also gained insight into the operations of the Gestapo, their organization and witnessed the various phases of Jewish persecution.

The following biographical data of mine might be of interest:

Between 1929-1931 – Political editor of “Uj Lelet? Jewish daily newspaper published in Koliszvar; Secretary-General of the Parliamentarty Group of the Jewish party in Romania.

Between 1929-1931 -Worked in Bucharest; member of the Executive of the Palestine Office of the Jewish Agency.

In Dec. 1940 -Being a Jew I was excluded from the Chamber of Lawyers. “Uj Kelet” the daily, was closed down by the Hungarian authorities: I moved to Budapest.

Between 1943-1945 -Associate President of the Hungarian Zionist Organization.

July 1942 -I have been called up for Labor Service: together with 440 other Jewish Intellectuals and citizens we worked in South-Eastern Transylvania on fortifications along the Hungarian-Rumanian border.

 

In Dec. 1942 -I was demobilized, and later returned to Budapest. Some time before being drafted I have begun to organize relief work for refugee Slovakian Jews. After my demobilization I succeeded in establishing – through diplomatic couriers – contact with the Relief Committee of the Jewish Agency, working in Istanbul. On their instructions I have taken over the leadership of the Relief Committee in Budapest.

 

Our task was:

1. To help smuggle Jews from Slovakia and Poland into Hungary to save them from the threat of the gas-chamber.

2. To feed and clothe them and to assist in their emigration to Palestine.

3. To forward the minutes based on the declaration of the refugees on the question of deportation and annihilation of Jews to Istanbul, later to Switzerland, to the hands of the representatives of the Jewish Agency and the Joint distribution committee.

4. To co-operate with the Relief Committee of Bratislava in matters concerning saving, hiding, of refugee Jews and exchange of information. After German occupation of Hungary, on the 19th March 1944, the Relief Committee concentrated its efforts on the saving of Hungarian Jewry.

5. The Relief Committee of the Jewish agency which I was a president was engaged in helping Allied prisoners-of-war. More-ever we sent confidential reports to the Allies thru Istanbul and Switzerland about our connections with officials of the German government. We helped to hide and supported leaders of the Hungarian underground and gave a wealth of information to those Hungarian authorities which were working against the Germans. During the siege of Budapest, when I was already out of the country, other members of the Relief Committee participated in street fighting against the Germans.

On 15 May 1944 One of my collaborators, Eugen Brand was sent by the Germans to Istanbul to pass on certain business proposals in connection with the saving of Hungarian Jews.

On 21 August 1944 I travelled from Budapest under German escort to the Swiss frontier and acted as intermediary for the first conversation between Kurt Becher and Saly Mayer, Swiss representative of the Joint D.C to discuss the price of abandoning the gassing.

 

The conversation took place between St. Margaraten and Hochst on the bridge. From there I returned to Budapest.

On 14 October 1944 I travelled for the second time to St Margathen.

On 30 October 1944 I travelled to St. Gallen, accompanied by Kurt Becher and Dr. Wilhem Billitz, director of the Manfred Weiss Works. On this occasion an interview took place between Becher and McClelland, Swiss representative of the War Refugee Board in the Savoy Hotel, at Zurich. I returned to Budapest.
 

The house in Budapest where the meeting with Becher and Saly Mayer first took place

On 28 November 1944 I left on German instructions to the Swiss Border.

On 20 December 1944 I entered Switzerland.

On 27 December 1944 I started out to travel back to Budapest but could only get to Vienna. The Red Army had encircled Budapest.

On 29 Dec. 44 thru 28 March 1945 I remained in Vienna. Afterwards toured Bratislava-Spitz an der Donau – Berlin – Bergen Belsen – Hamburg – Berlin – Theresienstadt.

On 19 April 1945 I crossed the Swiss border.

The Germans entered into discussion with leaders of the Jewish community for reasons of administrative efficiency. We conducted the discussion in the hope that we might be able to save some human lives. By holding the axe over our heads they made them responsible for financial contributions and other extractions imposed on the Jewish community.

Ultimately the leaders of the “Jewish Council” and other intermediaries were also scheduled for extermination. The SS and the Gestapo were particularly bent on liquidating those who had direct knowledge of their operations.

I escaped the fate of other Jewish leaders because the complete liquidation of the Hungarian Jews was a failure and also because SS Standartenfuhrer Becher took me under his wings in order to establish an eventual alibi for himself.

 

He was anxious to demonstrate after the fall of 1944 that he disapproved the deportations and exterminations and endeavored consistently to furnish me with evidence that he tried to save the Jews.

SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Wiscliczeny repeatedly assured me that according to him German cannot win the war. He believed that by keeping me alive and making some concessions in the campaigns against the Jews he have a defense witness when he and his organization will have to account for their atrocities.

 

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/kastner.html

 

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T  2009

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Images of Nazi Euthanasia Facilities & T-4 Staff

 

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2009

Oscar Strawczynski

Ten Months in Treblinka

[photos added to enhance the text]

 

Biographical Notes  

Oscar (left) and brother Zygmunt

Oscar Strawczynski was born in Lodz, Poland in 1906. He was the oldest son in a large family of seven children. Three sisters and three other brothers reached maturity and most of them already had families by the time war broke out.

 

Strawczynski received his primary education in Lodz. He attended a Polish public school as well as a Yiddish cheder. He completed his formal education at about fourteen years of age when he started to work in his father’s tinsmith shop.

 

However, he was an avid and enthusiastic reader and maintained a special love of Yiddish literature throughout his life.

 

Strawczynski learned his trade from his father. He became a skilled and accomplished artisan who took great pride in his work and whose services were greatly sought after. His abilities as a tinsmith eventually saved his life in Treblinka and also made it possible for him to save the life of his brother Zygmunt.

 

Strawczynski served in the Polish Army for two years, 1927 -29. He married shortly afterwards and had two children. He was a very devoted family man who had a great love and loyalty for his wife and children, as well as for the other members of his immediate family. His bond with Zygmunt, the brother closest to him in age, was particularly strong.

 

The memoirs are written in a spare, bitter and ironic style which it is difficult to do justice in translation. The translation is literal, no effort has been made to edit the work. His account of life in Treblinka is direct and matter of fact – no attempt is made to embellish the events or his own participation in them.

 

His account of the uprising is characterised by the same sparseness and an unwillingness to glorify what occurred. Oskar Strawczynski and his brother Zygmunt were two of a tiny handful of Treblinka survivors.

 

After the revolt, Oscar hid in the surrounding forest area where he made contact with the partisan movement. The memoirs were written while he was in the forest, at the request of one of the partisan leaders.

 

Shortly after the war it was suggested that the memoirs be published. However, the Jewish Community Organisation in Lodz, Poland, was opposed to publishing the work in its entirety because of the frankness with which the Jewish collaboration was depicted. Strawczynski refused to change or edit his manuscript.

 

Oscar Strawczynski testified against the Nazis at the trial in Dusseldorf in 1964 -65.  Strawczynski entire immediate family perished during the War – in Treblinka and in Auschwitz – with the exception of his brother Zygmunt and his younger sister.

 

After the war, Oscar remarried and the surviving family emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal. In Canada he made no attempt to publish his memoirs. He died in Montreal in 1966 leaving a wife and three children                

 

- Nadia Strawczynski Rotter 

Foreward 

The late Oscar Strawczynski wrote these memoirs of Treblinka after he escaped from the camp and sought refuge in the forest. After some time, he was able to join a group of partisans from the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (the organisation of Jewish fighters). His comrades in this group encouraged him to put his recollections down on paper. They secured writing materials for this purpose from a nearby village in April 1944.

 

Mrs Hannah Fryshdorf , who was with the group made two copies of the manuscript. In fact Strawczynski began making the first copy but after a few pages Mrs Fryshdorf continued. In July 1944, she had occasion to go to Warsaw and brought one of the copies to Yankel Tzelemensky. This copy survived and was returned to Mrs Fryshdorf in Lodz when hostilities ended. The original and other copy were lost in the forest.  Mrs Fryshdorf’s copy is in the possession of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York.

 

The document is unusual in several respects. Memoirs were written immediately following the revolt in Treblinka while memories were fresh and vivid. The account was written in isolation in the forest, free of pressure and outside influences, and while survival itself was still uncertain.

 

Translated from the Yiddish  by Nadia Strawczynski Rotter. with the assistance of her daughter, Frederika. Nadia Strawczynski Rotter is the sister of the late Oscar Strawczynski

 

            

        

 

 

Guta & Abus Strawczynski

Mr Strawczynski began these memoirs with the following words to his wife who had perished in Treblinka:

 

My dearest Chanele, More than eighteen months have passed since we were most brutally parted. During all that time under the harshest conditions, I never abandoned the thought of perpetuating your memory, my dearest, and the memory of our two small angels, Guta and Abus, as well as that of my beloved parents –Yoseph and Malke.

 

No tombstone can I erect for you. Your sacred bodies were burned in the ovens of Treblinka, along with thousands upon thousands of other Jewish victims. The remembrance of what I saw and lived through during the ten months in Treblinka – this shall be your memorial, even though I know and already feel with the first words, how the wounds, which will never heal, are torn open again and bleed as in the first days.

 

Let this be the last bloody page of Jewish History.

 

-Oscar    

 

Chapter 1

 

 

It was the day after Succoth, October 5 1942. The morning was bright and sunny. Although utterly exhausted after twenty-four hours in the tightly packed cattle cars, we shivered with terror when the train stopped and we heard frightful shouts: “Out, Out.”

 

Whips fly over our heads. In the eyes of my wife I recognise that finally even she has begun to believe the horrible rumours about the gas factory beyond Malkinia. I can see that now she regrets not having agreed to my plan to hide with the children in our neighbour’s hideout.

 

She could not bring herself to believe all the malicious talk. She had wanted to believe that as long as we were together, no evil could reach her or our dear children. We run out as fast as we can to avoid the whips lashing overhead and find ourselves on a long narrow platform, crowded to capacity.  All familiar faces – neighbours and acquaintances.

 

Read the full Oscar Strawsczynski story here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/strawczynski%20.html

 

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2009

Richard Glazar

Treblinka Recalled

Richard Glazar

We travelled for two days. On the morning of the second day we saw that we had left Czechoslovakia and were heading East. It wasn’t the SS guarding us, but Schutzpolizei, the police in green uniforms. We were in ordinary passenger cars, all the seats were filled. You couldn’t choose – they were all numbered and assigned.

 

In my compartment there was an elderly couple. I still remember the good man was always hungry and his wife scolded him, saying they’d have no food left for the future. Then on the second day I saw a sign for Malkinia, we went on a little farther.

 

Then very slowly, the train turned off the main track and rolled at walking pace through a wood.

 While we looked out – we’d been able to open a window – the old man in our compartment saw a boy…. cows were grazing and he asked the boy in signs, “Where are we?” And this kid made a funny gesture – draws a finger across his throat.

 A Pole?

 A Pole. It was where the train had stopped. On one side was the wood, and the other were fields. We saw cows watched over by a young man, a farmhand.

 

 And one of you questioned him?

 Not in words, but in signs, we asked, “What’s going on here?” And he made that gesture. Like this. We didn’t really pay much attention to him. We couldn’t figure out what he meant. And suddenly it started: the yelling and the screaming, “All out! -everybody out!” All those shouts, the uproar, the tumult! “Out! Get out! Leave the baggage!”

 We got out stepping on each other. We saw men wearing blue armbands. Some carried whips. We saw some SS men – Green uniforms, black uniforms. We were a mass, and the mass swept us along. It was irresistible. It had to move to another place. I saw the others undressing. And I heard: “Get undressed – you’re to be disinfected.”

 As I waited already naked, I noticed the SS men separating out some people. These were told to get dressed. A passing SS man suddenly stopped in front of me, looked me over, and said, “Yes, you too, quick, join the others, get dressed. You’re going to work here, and if you’re good, you can be a Kapo – a squad leader.” We were taken to a barracks. The whole place stank.

 

 Piled about five feet high in a jumbled mess, were all the things people could conceivably have brought clothes, suitcases, everything stacked in a solid mass. On top of it, jumping around like demons, people were making bundles and carrying them outside. It was turned over to one of these men. His armband said “Squad Leader.” 

The Treblinka Station

He shouted and I understood that I was also to pick up clothing, bundle it and take it somewhere. As I worked I asked him, “What’s going on? Where are the ones who stripped?” And he replied, “Dead all dead!”

 

 But it still hadn’t sunk in, I didn’t believe it. He’d used the Yiddish word. It was the first time I’d heard Yiddish spoken. He didn’t say it very loud, and I saw he had tears in his eyes. Suddenly he started shouting, and raised his whip. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an SS man coming. And I understood that I was to ask no more questions, but to rush outside with the package.

 

 All I could think of then was my friend Carel Unger. He’d been at the rear of the train, in a section that had been uncoupled and left outside. I needed someone – near me – with me. Then I saw him. He was in the second group, he’d been spared too. On the way, somehow, he had learned, he already knew. He looked at me. All he said was, “Richard, my father, mother, brother. “He had learned on the way there.”

 

 Your meeting with Carel – how long after your arrival did it happen? 

 

It was around twenty minutes after we reached Treblinka. Then I left the barracks and had my first look at the vast space that I soon learned was called “the sorting place.” It was buried under mountains of objects of all kinds. Mountains of shoes, of clothes, thirty feet high. 

 

I thought about it and said to Carel – “it’s a hurricane, a raging sea. We’re shipwrecked. And we are still alive. We must do nothing… but watch for every new wave, float on it, get ready for the next wave, and ride the wave at all costs.  And nothing else.” Greenery – sand everywhere else.

 

At night we were put into a barracks. It just had a sand floor. Nothing else. Each of us simply dropped where he stood. Half asleep, I heard some men hang themselves. We didn’t react then. It was almost normal. Just as it was normal that for everyone behind the gate of Treblinka closed, there was death, had to be death, for no one was supposed to be left to bear witness. I already knew that, three hours after arriving at Treblinka.

 

 The infirmary was a narrow site, very close to the ramp, to which the aged were led. I had to do this too. This execution site wasn’t covered, just an open place with no roof, but screened by a fence so no one could see in. The way in was a narrow passage, very short, but somewhat similar to the funnel.  A short tiny labyrinth.

 In the middle of it was a pit, and to the left as one came in, there was a little booth with a kind of wooden plank in it, like a springboard. If people were too weak to stand on it, they’d have to sit on it, and then, as the saying went in Treblinka jargon, SS man Miete would “cure each one with a single pill”, a shot in the neck. In the peak periods that happened daily.

 

 Read more here:  http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/glazar.html

 

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Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto 2009  H.E.A.R.T

Klaus Barbie

The Butcher of Lyon 

Klaus Barbie age 16

Nikolaus Klaus Barbie was born on the 25 October 1913 in Bad Godesberg a small town next to the Rhine, south of Bonn Germany. His father also called Nikolaus who was an office worker then a primary school teacher at the Noder school, where the younger Barbie was also a pupil. 

Barbie’s father fought in the First World War where he was wounded at Verdun, hit by a bullet in his neck, he returned home a bitter dejected man. 

In 1923 Barbie was accepted into the Friedrich – Welhelm grammar school in Trier, he was joined by his family in Trier in 1925 when his father retired and he moved with his wife to where Barbie was studying. 

In 1933 Barbie’s father and younger brother died and a year later he passed his graduation exams but with no money to continue his studies he became attracted to Nazism, and he volunteered for a six month stint in a Nazi Party voluntary work camp in Schleswig- Holstein. 

On the 26 September 1935 Barbie joined the SS, membership number 272, 284 and eventually joined the SD (Sicherheitsdienst – Security Service) arm of the SS. 

Klaus Barbie as an SS officer

His first attachment was in Berlin, as an assistant in department IV –D of the SD main office and within weeks he was posted to police headquarters in the Alexanderplatz to start training as an investigator and interrogator, which he was to put into brutal effect during the Second World War.

After service in the Berlin vice squad he was transferred to Dusseldorf and in 1937 after joining the Nazi Party, and graduated from the SD school at Bernau and was sent to an exclusive leadership course in Berlin Charlottenburg. For three months from September 1938 he served with the 39^th Infantry Regiment before returning to Charlottenburg for his final training and exams. 

On 20 April 1940 he graduated and was promoted to SS –Untersturmfuhrer and five days later he married Regine Willms, a stocky twenty-three year old daughter of a postal worker from Osburg. Almost immediately after the wedding Barbie rejoined his SD detachment and was part of von Runstedt’s army invading the Low Countries and France.

Barbie was officially posted to Holland on the 29 May 1940, Barbie’s SD unit was under the direct command of Willy Lages, the SD commander in the Hague, and his unit was shortly afterwards transferred to the Zentralstelle in Amsterdam, the “Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration.” Barbie’s responsibilities included rounding up German émigrés, freemasons and Jews. 

On the 12 February 1941, the German authorities used the death of a Dutch Nazi, Hendrik Koot killed in a fight with Dutch dockworkers, as a pretext to seal off the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam.

Abraham Asscher & David Cohen on right

On 19 February 1941 an SD raid in Amsterdam entered a tavern called Koco, run by Jewish refugees from Germany, Cahn and Kohn. In the tavern, a protective device which Cahn had installed, an ammonia flash went off by accident, spaying the Germans with ammonia. 

The SD raid was commanded by Klaus Barbie and after some violence everyone inside was arrested and three days later, as a reprisal for his act of “resistance” , the SS raided the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, seized 425 Jews, most of them young men.  

They were assembled on the Jonas Daniel –Meyer –plein subjected them to beatings and abuse and then on 27 February 1941 deported 389 of them to Buchenwald concentration camp and after two months 361 of them were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and certain death.    

The arrests were followed by a general strike, Barbie was ordered to execute Cahn and his associates, who had been condemned to death. Barbie was put in charge of the execution squad. 

Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/barbie.html

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Copyright 2009 Carmelo Lisciotto  H.E.A.R.T