History, Law, Narrative: The “Kastner Affair” – Fifty Years Later

Abstract

The Kastner affair was one of the most notorious court cases of Israel’s early decades. It centered on a charge of libel against a pamphleteer, Malchiel Grunwald, who accused Israel Kastner and others of collaborating with Nazi officials in Budapest during the weeks in which the great majority of Hungary’s Jews were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

In the years since the court case, historians have collected documents and testimonies relating to the progress of the Final Solution in Hungary. As a result, we now have a wealth of information that was unavailable to the judges in the case—the district court judge who, in his ruling, vilified Kastner as an abettor of the Nazis, and the Supreme Court judges who, on appeal, rejected the first court’s analysis of the critical events. Yet, despite having only partial evidence available to them, both courts made unequivocal rulings. In doing so, the judges, whose task was to determine the legal responsibility of the accused, wrote history.