As we know today, the safety of these three hundred thousand Jews newly acquired by Hungary was due to the Germans' reluctance to start a separate action for a limited number, rather than to the Hungarians' eagerness to offer asylum. In 1942, under pressure from the German Foreign Office (which never failed to make it clear to Germany's allies that the touch-stone of their trustworthiness was their helpfulness not in winning the war but in “solving the Jewish question”), Hungary had offered to hand over all Jewish refugees. The Foreign Office had been willing to accept this as a step in the right direction, but Eichmann had objected: for technical reasons, he thought it “preferable to defer this action until Hungary is ready to include the Hungarian Jews”; it would be too costly “to set in motion the whole machinery of evacuation” for only one category, and hence “without making any progress in the solution of the Jewish problem in Hungary.” Now, in 1944, Hungary was “ready,” because on the nineteenth of March two divisions of the German Army had occupied the country. With them had arrived the new Reich Plenipotentiary, S.S. Standartenführer Dr. Edmund Veesenmayer, Himmler's agent in the Foreign Office, and S.S. Obergruppenfürer Otto Winkelmann, a member of the Higher S.S. and Police Leader Corps and therefore under the direct command of Himmler. The third S.S. official to arrive in the country was Eichmann, the expert on Jewish evacuation and deportation, who was under the command of Müller and Kaltenbrunner of the R.S.H.A. Hitler himself had left no doubt what the arrival of the three gentlemen meant; in a famous interview, prior to the occupation of the country, he had told Horthy that “Hungary had not yet introduced the steps necessary to settle the Jewish question,” and had charged him with “not having permitted the Jews to be massacred” (Hilberg).
Eichmann's assignment was clear. His whole office was moved to Budapest (in terms of his career, this was a “gliding down”), to enable him to see to it that all “necessary steps” were taken. He had no foreboding of what was to happen; his worst fear concerned possible resistance on the part of the Hungarians, which he would have been unable to cope with, because he lacked manpower and also lacked knowledge of local conditions. These fears proved quite unfounded. The Hungarian gendarmerie was more than eager to do all that was necessary, and the new State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, Lászlo Endre, was a man “well versed in the Jewish problem,” and became an intimate friend, with whom Eichmann could spend a good deal of his free time. Everything went “like a dream,” as he repeated whenever he recalled this episode; there were no difficulties whatsoever. Unless, of course, one calls difficulties a few minor differences between his orders and the wishes of his new friends; for instance, probably because of the approach of the Red Army from the East, his orders stipulated that the country was to be “combed from East to West,” which meant that Budapest Jews would not be evacuated during the first weeks or months—a matter for great grief among the Hungarians, who wanted their capital to take the lead in becoming judenrein. (Eichmann's “dream” was an incredible nightmare for the Jews: nowhere else were so many people deported and exterminated in such a brief span of time. In less than two months, 147 trains, carrying 434,351 people in sealed freight cars, a hundred persons to a car, left the country, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz were hardly able to cope with this multitude.)
The difficulties arose from another quarter. Not one man but three had orders specifying that they were to help in “the solution of the Jewish problem”; each of them belonged to a different outfit and stood in a different chain of command. Technically, Winkelmann was Eichmann's superior, but the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders were not under the command of the R.S.H.A., to which Eichmann belonged. And Veesenmayer, of the Foreign Office, was independent of both. At any rate, Eichmann refused to take orders from either of the others, and resented their presence. But the worst trouble came from a fourth man, whom Himmler had charged with a “special mission” in the only country in Europe that still harbored not only a sizable number of Jews but Jews who were still in an important economic position. (Of a total of a hundred and ten thousand commercial stores and industrial enterprises in Hungary, forty thousand were reported to be in Jewish hands.) This man was Obersturmbannführer, later Standartenführer, Kurt Becher.
Becher, an old enemy of Eichmann who is today a prosperous merchant in Bremen, was called, strangely enough, as a witness for the defense. He could not come to Jerusalem, for obvious reasons, and he was examined in his German home town. His testimony had to be dismissed, since he had been shown, well ahead of time, the questions he was later called on to answer under oath. It was a great pity that Eichmann and Becher could not have been confronted with each other, and this not merely for juridical reasons. Such a confrontation would have revealed another part of the “general picture,” which, even legally, was far from irrelevant. According to his own account, the reason Becher joined the S.S. was that “from 1932 to the present day he had been actively engaged in horseback riding.” Thirty years ago, this was a sport engaged in only by Europe's upper classes. In 1934, his instructor had persuaded him to enter the S.S. cavalry regiment, which at that moment was the very thing for a man to do if he wished to join the “movement” and at the same time maintain a proper regard for his social standing. (A possible reason Becher in his testimony stressed horseback riding was never mentioned: the Nuremberg Tribunal had excluded the Reiter-S.S. from its list of criminal organizations.) The war saw Becher on active duty at the front, as a member not of the Army but of the Armed S.S., in which he was a liaison officer with the Army commanders. He soon left the front to become the principal buyer of horses for the S.S. personnel department, a job that earned him nearly all the decorations that were then available.
Becher claimed that he had been sent to Hungary only in order to buy twenty thousand horses for the S.S.; this is unlikely, since immediately upon his arrival he began a series of very successful negotiations with the heads of big Jewish business concerns. His relations with Himmler were excellent, he could see him whenever he wished. His “special mission” was clear enough. He was to obtain control of major Jewish business concerns behind the backs of the Hungarian government, and, in return, to give the owners free passage out of the country, plus a sizable amount of money in foreign currency. His most important transaction was with the Manfred Weiss steel combine, a mammoth enterprise, with thirty thousand workers, which produced everything from airplanes, trucks, and bicycles to tinned goods, pins, and needles. The result was that forty-five members of the Weiss family emigrated to Portugal while Mr. Becher became head of their business. When Eichmann heard of this Schweinerei, he was outraged; the deal threatened to compromise his good relations with the Hungarians, who naturally expected to take possession of Jewish property confiscated on their own soil. He had some reason for his indignation, since these deals were contrary to the regular Nazi policy, which had been quite generous. For their help in solving the Jewish question in any country, the Germans had demanded no part of the Jews' property, only the costs of their deportation and extermination, and these costs had varied widely from country to country—the Slovaks had been supposed to pay between three hundred and five hundred Reichsmarks per Jew, the Croats only thirty, the French seven hundred, and the Belgians two hundred and fifty. (It seems that no one ever paid except the Croats.) In Hungary, at this late stage of the war, the Germans were demanding payment in goods—shipments of food to the Reich, in quantities determined by the amount of food the deported Jews would have consumed.