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 Hungary during the Holocaust -The Kastner train 

             The 1955 Kasztner libel case: the verdict of Judge Benjamin Halevi.
The state of Israel claimed that Malkiel Grünwald's allegations against Kasztner were a lie. When Grünwald published these accusations, the Israeli Government did rather more than demand that his views should not be broadcast. Because a prominent Zionist official (Dr. Kastner was a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry) was involved, the Attorney General of the State of Israel prosecuted Grünwald for criminal libel. Let the verdict of Judge Benjamin Halevi (who later became one of the panel of three judges that tried Eichmann) in Israel's District Court of Jerusalem speak for itself.
The Attorney General v. Malkiel Grünwald
This material should be studied carefully. The masses of Jews from Hungary's ghettos obediently boarded the deportation trains without knowing their fate. They were full of confidence in the false information that they were being transferred to Kenyermeze. The Nazis could not have misled the masses of Jews so conclusively had they not spread their false information through Jewish channels. 
The Jews of the ghettos would not have trusted the Nazi or Hungarian rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish leaders. Eichmann and others used this known fact as part of their calculated plan to mislead the Jews. They were able to deport the Jews to their extermination by the help of Jewish leaders. The false information was spread by the Jewish leaders. The local leaders of the Jews of Kluj and Nodvarod knew that other leaders were spreading such false information and did not protest. Those of the Jews who tried to warn their friends of the truth were persecuted by the Jewish leaders in charge of the local 'rescue work'. The trust of the Jews in the misleading information and their lack of knowledge that their wives, children and themselves were about to be deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz led the victims to remain quiescent in their ghettos. It seduced them into not resisting or hampering the deportation orders. Dozens of thousands of Jews were guarded in their ghettos by a few dozen police. Yet even vigorous young Jews made no attempt to overpower these few guards and escape to nearby Rumania. No resistance activities to the deportations were organized in these ghettos. And the Jewish leaders did everything in their power to soothe the Jews in the ghettos and to prevent such resistance activities. The same Jews who spread in Kluj and Nodvarod the false rumor of Kenyermeze, or confirmed it, the same public leaders who did not warn their own people against the misleading statements, the same Jewish leaders who did not organize any resistance or any sabotage of deportations . . . these same leaders did not join the people of their community in their ride to Auschwitz, but were all included in the Rescue train. The Nazi organizers of extermination and the perpetrators of extermination permitted Rudolf Kastner and the members of the Jewish Council in Budapest to save themselves, their relatives, and friends. The Nazis did this as a means of making the local Jewish leaders, whom they favoured, dependent on the Nazi regime, dependent on its good will during the time of its fatal deportation schedule. In short, the Nazis succeeded in bringing the Jewish leaders into collaboration with the Nazis at the time of the catastrophe.

The Nazi chiefs knew that the Zionists were a most vital element in Jewry and the most trusted by the Jews. The Nazis drew a lesson from the Warsaw ghetto and other belligerent ghettos. They learned that Jews were able to sell their lives very expensively if honorably guided. Eichmann did not want a second Warsaw. For this reason, the Nazis exerted themselves to mislead and bribe the Jewish leaders. The personality of Rudolph Kastner made him a convenient catspaw for Eichmann and his clique, to draw into collaboration and make their task easier.

The question here is not, as stated by the Attorney General in his summation, whether members of the Jewish Rescue Committee were or were not capable of fulfilling their duty without the patronage of the S.S. chiefs. It is obvious that without such S.S. Nazi patronage the Jewish Rescue Committee could not have existed, and could have acted only as an underground. The question is, as put by the lawyer for the defense, why were the Nazis interested in the existence of the Rescue Committee? Why did the S.S. chiefs make every effort to encourage the existence of the Jewish Rescue Committee? Did the exterminators turn into rescuers?

The same question rises concerning the rescue of prominent Jews by these German killers of Jews. Was the rescue of such Jews a part of the extermination plan of the killers ? The support given by the extermination leaders to Kastner's Rescue Committee proves that indeed there