ABSTRACT
During the Holocaust in Hungary, the acting head of the country's Jewish rescue operation betrayed his duty to rescue the victims and placed himself at the service of the murderers. When the Nazis occupied Hungary, Rezso Kasztner and Joel Brand quickly began negotiations and learned that any deal with the Nazis would take the form of "emigration disguised as deportation"—meaning that the Jewish rescue committee would have to assist the Nazis by encouraging the Jews to board the deportation trains. The Nazis took advantage of the initial period of negotiations to isolate the Jews from Hungarian society and to drive them into ghettos as a prelude to the deportation to Auschwitz. In parallel with the bogus mass rescue negotiations, the Nazis offered an equally bogus scheme to permit the emigration of several hundred Jews, also in the guise of a Nazi deportation.
