Institute for Historical Review

The Myth of the Six Million

8. The Weissberg Tale

An example of one of the Jewish Communist deportees from the Soviet Union who managed to escape German confinement throughout the war was Alexander WeissbergCybulski, Hexensabbat (Frankfurt a.M., 1951; Am. ed., The Accused, N.Y., 1951). He was born in Cracow and retained Austrian citizenship after 1938. He was a prominent scientific engineer in the second Soviet Five Year Plan until his arrest during the 1937 purge. Albert Einstein vainly interceded with Stalin on his behalf in 1938. Weissberg has written the most informative book to date on the gigantic Soviet purges. After he was deported by the Russians at the end of 1939, Weissberg went quietly to Cracow where he remained until he was forced to flee from Russian occupation forces in that city at the end of the war. Weissberg had expected the Germans to send him at once to a concentration camp, and he had made an eloquent appeal to the Soviet authorities to permit him to depart directly to Sweden from the USSR. His appeal was rejected.

Weissberg later produced a particularly amazing book, Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Köln, 1956; Am. ed., Desperate Mission, N.Y., 1958). There had been international interest in the Joel Brand story ever since the London Times carried the news on July 20, 1934, that Brand had come from Budapest to Istanbul with an offer from the Gestapo to permit the emigration of one million Jews from Central Europe in the midst of the war. The Gestapo, admitted that this huge emigration would greatly inconvenience the German war effort because of the demand on transport facilities involved, but they were willing to undertake the plan in exchange for ten thousand trucks to, be used exclusively on the eastern front. It goes without saying that the acceptance of the, plan would have produced a major breach between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Nevertheless, one of the Budapest Jewish leaders, Joel Brand, was in favor of acceptance. This prompted the British to conclude that Brand was a dangerous Nazi agent. He was whisked off to Cairo and forthwith imprisoned.

One of the, contentions of Weissberg's book is that the German Nazis were always pursuing a zig-zag policy throughout the war between the emigration of the Jews from Europe and their physical extermination. Weissberg confessed at the start a complete, lack of documentary sources to prove that Hitler ever intended the physical destruction of all Jews as such, but he nevertheless uncritically accepted the widely-propagated myth of the liquidation of six million Jews. He also denied Horthy of, Hungary the role of protector of the, Jews, and he claimed that Hungary had been under a "terroristic anti-Jewish regime" ever since 1919 (Ibid., p. 9).

The Nazi personalities receiving chief emphasis in the book are Dieter Wisliceny, the, Gestapo chief in Slovakia, and Adolf Eichmann, after 1934 the chief SS official expert on the Jewish question in Europe, Wisliceny, after 1945, made a vain effort to save his own life by supporting the efforts of the prosecution at Nuremberg. Eichmann was far from being as important in the Nazi hierarchy as his position might suggest. For instance, throughout his whole career Eichmann never once had a personal interview with Hitler.

The main thesis of the Weissberg book is that Hungarian Jews took the initiative in making deals with the Germans, that many of their deals were successful, and that, by implication, it would have been possible to negotiate with the Germans for the evacuation of the entire European Jewish population during World War II, thus showing that the Hitler regime still favored emigration as the real solution of the Jewish question. One unfortunate consequence of the book was to point the finger of suspicion at Rudolph Kastner, the chief leader of the Hungarian Jews. Weissberg sometimes made him appear to be almost pro-Hitler. Kastner was subsequently murdered in Israel by a young Jewish terrorist in the midst of the frantic furor accompanying the 1955 Israeli national elections. Excerpts from Weissberg's findings had appeared in Israeli periodicals early in 1955.

The turbulent Hungarian situation in 1944-1945, when the valiant Magyar nation was going down to final defeat before Communism, produced many bizarre situations, but none is more striking than that of Raoul Wallenberg. This Swedish Jew, who had no, special diplomatic status, was permitted by Swedish Foreign Minister Guenther to operate from the Swedish legation in Budapest in a gigantic business venture of selling Swedish passports. It was later alleged without any foundation that Wallenberg was murdered by the "fascist" followers of Hungarian Premier Ferenc Szalassi. Wallenberg as a result was virtually canonized for ten years as a selfless hero who had given his life to protect Hungarian Jews from the German Gestapo and their Hungarian cohorts. In reality, Wallenberg had made a fortune selling passports to these same "fascists", and for this reason he had been arrested and deported by the Soviet occupation authorities. The Swedish Government was fully informed of this by Alexandra Kollontay in Stockholm, but the truth did not reach the public until publication of the article by the Jewish writer, Rudolph Philipp, in the January 14, 1955, copy of the sensational Swedish newspaper, VI.