Based on Shraga Elam's research

Ha'aretz Friday, April 28, 2000

Nazi collaborator, or hero?

Who was Jaac Van Harten? Was the affluent businessman from Savyon a hero who saved many Hungarian Jews from the Nazis - or a collaborator with the Nazis who invented a heroic biography for himself? Testimonies here made public for the first time show that Van Harten, a Dutch Jew, was under the protection of the SS officer Kurt Becher and played a key role in the Gestapo's vast operation to counterfeit British currency. No evidence has been found that he saved even one Jew. His family insists that he was a hero.

By Ronen Bergman*

From his arrival in Palestine in 1947 until his death in 1973, Jaac Van Harten was considered a respectable, well-to-do businessman who during the Second World War had heroically saved a large number of Jews from the Nazi war machine. In the rare interviews he gave, he said nothing that was liable to contradict that image, which was even reinforced after his death by the journalist Habib Kena'an on an Israel Radio program and in an article he published in Ha'aretz Magazine. Kena'an, who succeeded in interviewing Van Harten before he died, portrayed him - based on what he was told by Van Harten and by his children - as an untarnished hero.The few who knew the truth preferred to remain silent. "I read and heard how Van Harten and his children portray him as a righteous man," says Peretz Reves, who was the head of the Young Maccabi movement in Budapest and the liaison with the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee headed by Israel Kastner during the period of the Nazi occupation of Hungary. "It was all nonsense, but after he died I didn't want to spoil the good impression they had of their father."

Testimonies made public here for the first time show that Van Harten was in fact under the protection of the SS officer Kurt Becher in Budapest. Reves says that Van Harten effectively handled the financial affairs of Becher, who was chief of the economic department of the SS. Nevertheless, Van Harten's name was never mentioned in the two trials in which an in-depth inquiry was conducted into the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry: the 1955 trial in which Kastner sued Malchiel Grunwald, who accused him of collaboration with the Nazis (and which has ever since been known, erroneously, as the "Kastner trial"); and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

Gestapo officers, American intelligence agents, Jewish underground activists and emissaries of the pre-state Haganah force were all convinced that Van Harten collaborated with the Nazis. He was an important cog in a secret Nazi operation to distribute counterfeit British currency in order to undermine the British economy and, as an equally important by-product, to finance the procurement of goods to keep the German economy afloat. After the war, the Americans arrested Van Harten as a collaborator, but an unknown hand exerted pressure to effect his release and to silence the testimonies against him.

"I first met him in 1944," says Reves, who lives in Kibbutz Kfar Hamaccabi. The director of the Swedish Red Cross in Budapest, Nina Langtel, who with her husband saved tens of thousands of people and were later declared "Righteous Gentiles," told Reves she suspected Van Harten might be a collaborator with the Nazis and suggested that he look into the matter. Reves accordingly

called on Van Harten in his office. "It was a luxurious office on Budapest's main and most expensive street, Vacsi Utza. He told me that he was Jewish and offered his help. I took him on a tour of a children's home which housed 200 infants with their mothers. Van Harten in fact succeeded in organizing one delivery of supplies for the home. After that I was occasionally in contact with him."

In their next meeting, Reves continues, Van Harten asked him whether he wanted money. "In our situation, we did not refuse an offer like that. Van Harten gave me British money that was worth about $50,000 at that time and only asked that I sign a receipt together with two witnesses. 'The Jewish Agency will reimburse me after the war,' he said. We signed immediately - why not? In any event we measured our lives then in terms of days and sometimes hours. It was clear that sooner or later the Gestapo would arrest us."

By this time Eichmann and Becher were already operating in Budapest. Eichmann was in charge of organizing the deportation of the Jews for extermination and Becher, whose SS rank was equivalent to Eichmann's, was busy confiscating goods for the German war effort. This was the same Becher who afterward was able to avoid being tried at Nuremberg and whose reputation was restored in a de-Nazification process thanks to the famous testimony on his behalf given by Israel Kastner. That testimony was also a central factor in the comment by Judge Binyamin Halevy, in his decision regarding Kastner's libel suit, that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil."

Becher arrived in Hungary after serving on the Eastern Front in a unit that murdered 15,000 Jews within the space of three months. In January 1943, Becher received a letter from SS commander Heinrich Himmler lauding him for his "indefatigable efforts against the sub-humans." In Hungary, Becher quickly seized control of the giant Manfred Weisz concern, which was run by Jews and former Jews, using extortionist tactics based on the carrot-and-stick approach: He told the owners that if they transferred the concern to him, he would allow them to leave Reich-controlled territory; if not, they would be sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. As Himmler's personal emissary for the plunder of Hungary, Becher oversaw the transfer of industries, goods, raw materials and art works worth a total of 13 billion Swiss francs at the time.

Reves relates that Van Harten invited him and his wife to visit him at his villa. "It was a surrealistic scene," Reves recalls. "It was an incredible place, the walls were covered with pictures that were already then worth tens of millions in any currency. We sat there, in the middle of the war, four Jews, in a dazzling palace with servants dishing out excellent food. His wife kept boasting that she was a relative of the Schocken family. Van Harten said the Germans needed him because he arranged all kinds of deals for them. In time I discovered that he himself was handling Kurt Becher's financial affairs. I can't tell you how impossible that appeared to be. For us, Eichmann and Becher personified hell itself."The missing money Reves' remarks provide a clue to one of the mysteries left unresolved by the "Kastner trial." Much of the trial focused on the money that the Rescue Committee, headed by Kastner, transferred to Becher in order to ensure the departure for Switzerland of a train carrying 1,684 Hungarian Jews. Becher received money, diamonds and jewelry then worth about $2 million and claimed afterward that he returned the money in the final days of the war. The treasure was deposited with American intelligence. When the suitcases were eventually transferred to the Jewish Agency in Geneva, they were found to contain money and jewels worth only about $50,000, including counterfeit British currency. The fate of the rest of the money was not determined in the trial.

"When the Russians approached Budapest," Reves says, "Van Harten called me to him urgently at his villa. He asked me to help him load his car. It was the most luxurious car I had ever seen until then. I think it was a General Motors vehicle with all the latest features, including central locking and electric windows. I asked him why he was fleeing, as the liberation was at hand. He replied that Becher had just left and that he had to join him.

"As I was lugging one of his huge suitcases to the car, I accidentally dropped it and it broke open. A huge amount of British pound notes and jewels were scattered over the floor. Van Harten looked very embarrassed. He quickly collected everything and put it in the car."

That was the last time Reves saw Van Harten. Reves remained in Budapest after the war. "One day Gideon Raphael [later the director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry] and another activist of the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet [the organization set up by the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, to bring Jews there in defiance of the British authorities]. They wanted to know if I knew a certain Van Harten and if I had signed a receipt for a contribution he gave me. I told them it was all true. Raphael said I had made a mistake because the money consisted of bills counterfeited by the Germans. You see, Van Harten not only gave us fake money, he had the chutzpah to demand its reimbursement from the Jewish Agency. Raphael heard about the story by chance and started to investigate it."

Reves adds that Van Harten "lied" when he claimed to have rescued many Hungarian Jews as a representative of the Swedish Red Cross. "The Swedish Red Cross thought he was a collaborator with the Germans and kept away from him like fire."Operation Bernhard When the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry began, the operation to circulate the fake money was already in full swing. The notes were manufactured in Bloc 19 at the Sachsenhausen death camp by Jewish inmates who were master engravers by profession. In Operation Bernhard, as it was called, the focus was on counterfeiting British currency, but Russian rubles were also produced as well as Dutch birth certificates and, toward the end of the war, American dollars. According to a calculation made by Oskar Sakla, who was one of the prisoners involved in forging the money, he and his colleagues produced about 8.9 million notes worth around 134.6 million British pounds by the end of 1944. By comparison, in 1933 the British Empire had gold reserves worth 137 million pounds.

It is astonishing to discover how many testimonies exist about Van Harten's part in the Nazis' counterfeiting scheme. He held two secret meetings in the Engadin Valley near the Swiss resort town of St. Moritz. Traveling southeast (today via a tunnel), one crosses the Offen Pass to the town of Mustair on the border with Italy. It was from here that Van Harten dispatched his people, equipped with false English currency. Two hours away by car lies Merano, a quiet gem of a tourist town, in the heart of the Southern Tyrol region. Merano's inhabitants still prefer German over Italian. Most of the street signs are also in German. While I was in Merano, the veteran Hungarian-born Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon spoke at the town's library - in German, of course. As people who make their living from tourism, the residents of Merano are very polite and cordial - until they are asked about what went on in this region during the Second World War. With pronounced reluctance and embarrassment, they tell about a small town that became a center of operations for the SS and German intelligence, and which after the war became an important transit point for the escape of members of those units to friendlier countries, mainly in South America. "Odessa," the organization of SS veterans, centered much of its activity in Merano.

The townsfolk are especially loath to talk about the history of the Labers castle, one of the finest sites in the region, which is now the Schloss Labers hotel. It was from there that the SS ran Operation Bernhard, which was supervised by Himmler himself. The SS officer Friedrich Schwend sat in room number 3 on the top floor of the building, from where he organized the "sale" of the counterfeit money. His group was code-named "Wendig."

Recently discovered documents, here made public for the first time, reveal the large part played by Van Harten in the operation. The SS officer Wilhelm Hoettl was responsible for his organization's espionage network in the Balkans, Hungary and Italy, and he worked with Operation Bernhard almost from its start until it ended. In his memoirs, which were published in Austria in a limited edition for his confidants, Hoettl wrote: "It is interesting to note that these people, Schwend and his team, very often made use of Jews to circulate the counterfeit sterling notes, as they were certain that they [the Jews] would never be suspected of being German agents. The senior and most successful operative was a Dutch-German Jew named Van Harten."

A U.S. Army intelligence agent Vincent La Vista, who was sent on a mission to Italy in 1946, sent a "top secret" memo to his superiors in Washington on May 15, 1947, stating that Col. Friedrich Schwend was accountable directly to SS chief Himmler and his deputy Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He identified Van Harten as a top agent of the SS and as one of four Jews who were involved in the Wendig operation. Van Harten, the memo noted, was then living at 184 Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv, Palestine, and was demanding $5 million from the U.S. government to compensate for property that was impounded from him at Merano immediately after the war. The property in question was in fact loot of the SS group involved in the counterfeiting operation and it included a large amount of fake British notes. La Vista noted that Van Harten and other agents of the Wendig group had made use of false Red Cross papers to cover up their activity.Expulsion from Switzerland The Swiss police knew long before this about Van Harten's dubious connections. Shraga Eilam, an Israeli who lives in Switzerland where he works as a journalist and a historian, came across Van Harten's name when he was collecting material for his comprehensive study on "Hitler's Forgers." "The first time Van Harten was accused of being a German agent was in an anonymous letter that was sent in April 1940 to the Swiss authorities," Eilam says. "The letter stated that Van Harten, who was then in the Lausanne area, was a false name being used by a person who was in fact an agent of the Gestapo."

The Swiss police located the Van Hartens in the city of Montreux, on Lake Geneva, and summoned them for questioning. The first interrogation took place on July 11, 1940, at 9:30 A.M. in the police station at Lausanne; the second, on the day following. The testimonies of the Van Hartens are filed in the Swiss National Archives in a thick folder that bears their name. They admitted to carrying false papers. In a search of their home, the police confiscated various tools used for counterfeiting.

Van Harten told the Swiss police that he was a Jew named Jakob Levy. He said he was born in Silesia in 1901 and had grown up in Breslau (today Wroclaw). His father, a jeweler, had taught him the trade. His wife presented herself as Elfrieda-Viola Boehm, a member of the Schocken family on her mother's side. Van Harten was her second husband and she had a son, Micha-Anthony, from her first marriage.

Van Harten further told his interrogators that in 1937 he moved to Berlin, where he set up a business in diamonds, jewelry and art objects. In September 1938, he said, the Gestapo ordered him out of Berlin because he was a Jew. At the same time, he also admitted that the Gestapo had

issued him a false Dutch passport in the name of Van Harten. He declared that he owned property worth about 30,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland (about $500,000 at today's value).

The Swiss deported him as a Nazi agent. He moved to Hungary, at that time an ostensibly neutral state but in fact an ally and satellite of Germany. Van Harten had more than one version of the circumstances by which he arrived in Hungary and about what he did there. In 1974, his stepson Micha said the only reason his father ended up in Hungary was because the train he was on happened to stop in Budapest. Now, though, it emerges that the Haganah Archives contain another version, offered by Van Harten himself in testimony he gave in the 1960s.

Van Harten agreed at that time to speak to Nana Nusinov, then an M.A. student and now Prof. Nana Sagi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was researching the post-war operation to get Jews from Italy to Palestine and had heard about Van Harten's financial help to the Bricha (Escape) movement. Van Harten's fascinating tale was not, finally, included in Nusinov's paper because it was of only marginal interest to her research subject. "From September 1940, I was there [in Hungary] at the order of Haim Posner from the Jewish Agency," Van Harten told her. "He assigned me a specific mission: to make contact with the Jewish Agency's man in Budapest, whose name was Krauss, and to find out how much money Hungarian Jewry could transfer for the aid of the Jews in Poland." Posner's personal archive, which is housed in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, makes no mention of this.

Van Harten took up residence in a large villa in Budapest and started doing business. He set up an import-export firm called Intercontinental. He told Nana Sagi that he established the company in order to assist the Jews: "We wrote fine letters and I received excellent recommendations from the Interior Ministry. I received all the seals I needed, and we got these people, many people, out of the camps."

Asked what happened to those Jews, Van Harten replied: "They were released from the camps. They went into the underground in Budapest. They had our official papers, which enabled them to work, and no one asked them how they were released." Van Harten told Sagi that "at least several hundred" Jews were released in this manner. "It was very simple," he said. "No one supervised it."

Shraga Eilam says: "Van Harten's account is totally unsupported - not in survivors' testimonies, not in memoirs of members of the underground and not in any other documentation about the events in Budapest during the war."Van Harten's version Van Harten told Sagi about his meeting with the SS officer Kurt Becher: "In May 1944, when we were in the Ritz Hotel in Budapest, an armored truck arrived carrying 60 armed soldiers. They took me to a very beautiful villa, where I was introduced to a man, a very handsome man, who told me: 'I have heard about you, Mr. Van Harten. Can you tell me, if I show you this photograph, can you tell me whether this a painting by Franz Hals?'

"I am an expert on such things," Van Harten boasted to Sagi. "He showed me a photograph and I told him it was not by Franz Hals. It was a Dutch painting, I knew that, but not by Hals. Then he said, 'I have a big problem.' I asked him what he meant exactly, and so forth, and he replied: 'I paid two million Marks for this picture. I bought it at Himmler's order. And Himmler sent a special train to Budapest to take the picture to Berlin, escorted by 200 soldiers.'"

Becher told Van Harten he had promised to send him the picture for his birthday and now he had a serious dilemma. What should he do? Van Harten suggested that he inform the SS commander

that the painting needed some restoration work and in the meantime he could send another picture. What Van Harten did not tell Nana Sagi is that Becher obtained the picture from a wealthy Jew named Max Knap. In the wake of Van Harten's pronouncement that the picture was a fake, Becher had Knap thrown into prison in solitary confinement.

According to Van Harten, Becher was extremely grateful for being spared Himmler's wrath and asked, "What can I do for you?" To which Van Harten says he replied, "Listen, I am working for the Swedish Red Cross. You can be of great help to me, and I will help you. I have a few ideas on how you can help me."

Van Harten told Nana Sagi that he had proposed that Becher save Jews. "There were many shoemakers, tailors and other professionals who worked for the army. I suggested to Becher that he have these people brought to safe houses that were under German protection. I told Becher that there were many Jews here. They can help you and you need a lot of tailors and so on for the army. These people can do that when they are together in these houses, but they have to have your protection."

Is it possible that Van Harten was a kind of Jewish Oskar Schindler who used his connections to save hundreds of Jews? "I never heard of any Jews that he saved in Budapest," Peretz Reves asserts.Twilight period Contrary to what he told Peretz Reves, Van Harten did not in fact follow Becher, but he did spend the last months of the war in the company of Nazis. After fleeing Budapest, he went to Merano and joined his colleagues from Operation Wendig. In February 1945, the commander of the SS in Italy, Gen. Karl Wolff, launched secret negotiations for the surrender of his forces, getting in touch with the representative of the American secret service in Berne, Allen Dulles. During the talks, Wolff tried to use the 150 Jewish prisoners in the Belzano concentration camp as bargaining chips. Two Jews, Van Harten and an Italian, Valerio Benuzzi, were used as middlemen between Wolff and Dulles. At Wolff's behest, Van Harten supervised the release of the prisoners from Belzano and even arranged housing for them at Merano.

Van Harten told Sagi that he had also initiated a far larger deal: The Americans would undertake not to bomb Merano and the German soldiers there would be withdrawn, leaving only prisoners and the wounded, and in return the Nazis would stop the transports from the Belsen camp to Auschwitz. Allen Dulles, with whom Van Harten claimed to have held this negotiation, made no mention of it in the book he published after the war.Contributions in forged notes Years later Van Harten would claim that he had conducted his mediation activities as an official representative of the Red Cross. But in the organization's archive in Geneva his name appears in the file labeled "Impostors." A Swiss doctor who accompanied a Red Cross convoy of trucks to Merano immediately after the war describes in his memoirs that he and his colleagues encountered inexplicable suspicion and hostility from Allied soldiers. However, they soon grasped the reason: American intelligence had marked Van Harten as the source of the Red Cross certificates which many Nazis had used to save their lives. Schwend, for example, carried such a certificate, which had been issued to him on April 28, 1945, ten days before the end of the war, bearing Van Harten's signature. The senior Red Cross representative in the region, Kurt Tschudi, who investigated the episode of the impostors, examined Van Harten's papers and found he had no official authorization to represent the organization.

Following the German surrender, Van Harten was left with large amounts of counterfeit money, which he used to try to buy the good will of the emissaries of the Zionist movement in Europe.

But something in him made them suspicious. One of them, Eliahu Cohen (afterward Maj. Gen. Eliahu Ben Hur), who at the time was a member of the British Army's Jewish Brigade and active in the Bricha movement, wrote to his wife in May 1945: "Try to find out and let me know quickly [whether] anyone knows Van Harten ... He is connected with our people in Switzerland. It is important to know about his reliability, honesty, etc., because he has possibilities. There is something strange about his behavior, so the clarification is important and it is also urgent. He is either very good or very dangerous."

In one case, which is described in Prof. Yehuda Bauer's book on the organized escape of the Jewish survivors of Eastern Europe, "Flight and Rescue: Brichah" (Random House, 1970), Van Harten almost succeeded in entangling two emissaries of the Hashomer Hatza'ir movement in the counterfeiting episode. The two, Levi Argov (Kopelevitch) and Moshe Ben David, who were sent to Europe from the Yishuv, happened to meet Van Harten in northern Italy. "Van Harten led them into a cellar where a number of boxes were stored and from one of them he took thick wads of notes and stuffed 10,000 British pound notes into the rucksacks of the speechless youngsters," Bauer writes, adding that "they do not seem to have doubted the genuineness of the bank notes, which obviously had been taken from the Germans - and that was enough."

The two went on to Budapest, where they "paid a debt which Van Harten had asked them to settle for him." Afterward, "a Czech Zionist unsuspectingly took some of the Van Harten money for a visit to England as a member of an official Czech delegation. Soon he found himself the subject of an unpleasant investigation. The money, it seemed, was counterfeit. When he heard this news, Argov quickly got rid of the money."

Nana Sagi, who knew about this incident, asked Van Harten about it. He replied that the money he gave the two emissaries was not counterfeit.

On May 17, 1945, Van Harten was arrested by an American intelligence unit. A search of his residence turned up a huge stock of black-market goods and tens of thousands of counterfeit British notes. He was incarcerated in a detention camp for Nazis and collaborators at Terni, Italy. When asked by Nana Sagi why he had been arrested, Van Harten replied, "For nothing. They never told me why they arrested me. I bothered them. They came to my house and took a lot of things. They also took pictures and said they were stolen. I told them they were my personal pictures, but they took them."Hush money to the Mossad Official representatives of the Zionist movement came to Van Harten's aid, though not necessarily because they had any sympathy for him. Officers of the Jewish Brigade recounted the story of his arrest to Yehuda Arazi, the commander of the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet in Italy, and he went to meet with Van Harten's wife. She gave Arazi a sum of money in Swiss francs (genuine) and British pounds (counterfeit). The British money was sent to Austria where a Jewish Brigade soldier sold it on the black market in return for gold that was smuggled to Switzerland, where it was sold at a large profit, enabling some of the escape movement's operations to be financed.

The historian Bracha Eshel, today a researcher at the Rabin Center, was in the 1960s friendly with Shalheveth Freier, who had been active in the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet (and afterward was a key figure in the development of Israel's nuclear program). He told her about Van Harten. "Freier and his friends were looking for wealthy Jews who could donate money to their activity," Eshel relates. "Shalheveth learned about Van Harten's dirty past and understood that he could extract a lot from him as hush money. Freier told me that Van Harten was not interested, to put it mildly, in having what was known about him made public. Maybe what [Freier] did wasn't very nice but he was very committed to the rescue goal, and from that point of view his ideology was that the

end justifies the means."

Nana Sagi also spoke with Freier, in 1967. He told her that a variety of reports about Van Harten, contradictory in character, reached the Jewish institutions: "The only unifying element in the stories about Van Harten," Freier said, "was that his actions were all on a large scale. Either he was a total villain, or he was a great man. At some point, we learned that he was in a camp for German prisoners."

Asked whether Van Harten was accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Freier replied: "They thought, as I said, that that was part of the story. Afterward it turned out that he was extremely wealthy. I don't know whether we actually planned this, but we were short of money and we wanted to take his money. I think I was given the task of dealing with Van Harten in general, and in practice, with his release. I went to Merano and there I found his wife with her suitcases packed, and in her suitcases I found, in addition to money that was not counterfeit, packets of British five-pound notes; as we all discovered later, that money had been printed in Germany in order to undermine the British economy, and afterward they decided to use it to underwrite operations of German intelligence.

"A second thing I recall is packages of jewelry, each neatly packed, with a name. I think the story was that the jewels were given to them by Jews in Hungary on the assumption that they would be able to leave Hungary as they were foreign subjects. I also remember a bag containing wedding rings, apparently belonging to Jews in concentration camps.

"In any event, I went back and I must have filed a report. It was decided to bring Mrs. Van Harten to the Yishuv and take that property. I looked for Van Harten and found him in a POW camp. He had a very imposing presence. Not necessarily a positive one, but he was tall and had broad shoulders with a large head, very large, with cheeks like sacks, and I think very agile lips. In my imagination I always see him putting a precious stone in his mouth and taking it out again to feel its value. Certainly his attitude to jewelry was one of passion, not only of an expert. There was some sort of very powerful identification there."

Other people also tried to intervene on Van Harten's behalf, Freier told Saguy. "His wife is related to the Schocken family, and I think they approached one of the Schockens, Gershom Schocken [the editor of Ha'aretz from 1939-1990], anyhow one of the Schockens who was there and he wanted to intervene. As I recall, they were told to drop the matter, that if they did not want to entangle themselves, they should not touch the Van Harten case."

Van Harten and his wife told Nana Saguy that activists from the Yishuv had put pressure on the Americans, who eventually agreed to release him. He had been incarcerated for a year. Bracha Eshel: "After Freier located him in the camp and helped to get him released, Van Harten helped him and his colleagues. He went through a purification dynamic and was definitely interested in building himself a new biography focusing on assistance to Jews. Apparently he succeeded. The fact is that he told that cover story to the journalist Habib Kena'an, who published it."

Van Harten's daughter-in-law said this week that Freier was an intimate friend of her parents, I told Eshel. "What are you talking about?" she replied. "That's nonsense. It was the exact opposite. Freier was the first to suspect that Van Harten collaborated with the Nazis."

Last week, Aviva and Micha (Mike) Van Harten declined to comment on this. After being apprised of the contents of this article, Aviva stated: "That is all nonsense. He was a wonderful man, marvelous, extraordinary, who saved thousands of Jews in the war, a true righteous man.

What people say about him is lies that come from envy."Golda intervenes In 1947, Van Harten moved to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. He felt confident enough to demand compensation of $5 million from the Americans for "his property" which was confiscated at Merano. He also filed similar, albeit more modest, claims against the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish relief organization. In the two latter cases, he sought reimbursement for counterfeit money he had given to Jewish rescue activists during the war. At first the British Mandate authorities wanted to deport him, but were finally persuaded to desist. Aviva Van Harten says that Golda Meir, then the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, interceded on his behalf with the British to prevent the expulsion.

"The whole Van Harten phenomenon was somewhat strange," Shalheveth Freier told Nana Sagi. "I didn't want to get especially close to him. But because I was considered his rescuer, I recall that he wanted to adopt me, or to pay for my university studies. In any event, I know that I didn't visit them any more ... I would see him occasionally on Dizengoff Street, but I kept away from them. I was rather surprised that his name did not come up in either the Eichmann trial or the 'Kastner trial.' I don't know if an investigation was ever conducted against Van Harten."

That statement is mere pretense. Freier, who would become the chairman of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, knows very well that Van Harten was never investigated. In fact, according to one knowledgeable person, it was Freier himself who afterward made sure that there would be no inquiry in order to prevent the exposure of his extortion tactics in the case.The fragmented transcript One of the mysterious annexes to the Van Harten story has to do with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, whose diary, written in his Israeli prison cell, was finally made public this year. But it turns out that not only the diaries were kept secret. Avner Les from the Israel Police was in charge of Eichmann's interrogation. He recorded the entire interrogation process on 76 audio tapes, all of which were transcribed and translated into Hebrew. Regarding reel number 66, dated October 10, 1960, Les wrote in his diary: "In connection with specific questions about a particular affair relating to Hungarian Jewry, by order of the attorney general, no proofreading was done and the transcript was not given to the defendant for his examination and authorization."

What is on that "special reel," as it is called in the police records? There is no complete answer to that question. The State Archives contain only a fragmented transcript of that conversation, filled with deletions marked by an ellipsis. Attached to this section of the transcript is a note, typed in Hebrew and German, and signed by Les, stating: "I, Avner Les, a chief inspector of the Israel Police, hereby confirm that according to orders I received, I removed, for security reasons, the section that was recorded at this spot."

The list of questions Les prepared for that session was located last week in Les's private archive by Shraga Eilam. During the interrogation he made a check mark next to the questions Eichmann answered fully and those for which he claimed not to know the answer. Les inserted a check mark next to the question about whether Eichmann had a Jewish collaborator named Jaac. Eichmann's reply does not appear in the transcript.

Ha'aretz Friday, May 19, 2000

The Van Harten affair: New evidenceFollowing the disclosure of the Van Harten affair in Ha'aretz Magazine, family members consented to be interviewed. According to their account, Dutch Jew Jaac Van Harten did not collaborate with the Nazis but was a hero who saved thousands of Jewish lives. At the same time, however, additional evidence has been uncovered which indicates that Van Harten did collaborate with the SS.

By Ronen Bergman

"Let's call the man Van Harrah [excrement]. That was not his name, but Van Harrah is quite similar to the man's Dutch name." With these words, Pardes Hannah resident Yitzhak Tamari opened the chapter titled "The Word of a Gentleman" in his memoirs, which he published in a few dozen copies for members of his family. During the Second World War, Tamari was a driver and a translator for the British army. Following the disclosure of evidence of the late Savyon businessman Jaac Van Harten's wartime links with the Nazis (Ha'aretz Magazine, April 28), Tamari wrote the newspaper:

"Van Harten's story is much more ominous than the article depicts. Since I am close to 80, I fear that when I'm gone, the truth about Van Harten will disappear as well."

It has become clear from Tamari's testimony, along with a great deal of additional material that has reached the newspaper in the last two or three weeks, that the affluent Van Harten's ties with the Nazis in general and the SS in particular were known to many people who kept the secret for decades.

Activists of the Mossad l'Aliya Bet (the group set up by the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, to bring Jews here in defiance of British authorities) promised Harten their silence in exchange for funds he "contributed" to their covert activities. Moreover, academics who were privy to the details now maintain they simply did not find the time to write about the affair.

"On the first of May, 1945, I arrived with the cease-fire commission at the German supreme headquarters for the Italian front in Bolzano, a city in the Italian Tyrol," Tamari wrote. "They put us up in the best-protected building in Bolzano - the Gestapo headquarters. Immediately after our arrival in the city, a luxury Mercedes automobile suddenly entered the building's courtyard at high speed, carrying two men and a woman. ['They made us feel as though they were the lords of the manor,' he now relates.] By chance, we... were in the courtyard.

"The car stopped beside us, and one of the men asked us, in Hebrew, if we were Hebrew-speakers. The three people in the car identified themselves as Jews. You couldn't have called the meeting emotional. We already knew of the Holocaust, and three Jews in a luxury car aroused our suspicions. The driver, Van Harrah, was a man in his prime, well dressed, and I remember the woman as beautiful, stylishly dressed.

"It was particularly the woman who prompted our discomfort and suspicion. A Jewish woman, in May 1945, in festive attire, in an open Mercedes, in Bolzano, with the local branch of the Nazi party still operating, and within the city two armed divisions of the Ukrainian SS and an armed

German SS division. That was not all that aroused our suspicions. It was also her self-confidence, her lack of fear. After all, we had already met Jews who had succeeded in eluding the Germans. They were frightened, insecure, nervous, they distrusted others and even themselves."

Jaac Van Harten, Tamari said, introduced himself to the soldiers from Palestine as a Red Cross official and consul of Switzerland for the southern Tyrol. He told them that a Hungarian lived in the villa in Bolzano, a former minister in the fascist government who was involved in sending Jews to Auschwitz. "He urged us to go out that very night and kill the Hungarian, adding with a wink that he had lots of money and jewelry in the house, so that we could also profit from the hit. We were very keen to wipe out Nazis at that time, and two of us went out to kill the Hungarian."

When they got there they discovered that someone had preceded them. The house was surrounded by soldiers of the American military secret service, who had arrested the Hungarian. "Later it became clear to us, from Jewish officers in the secret service, that the Hungarian had in fact been a business partner of Van Harten, and claimed that Van Harten had cheated him. You see, Van Harten sent us to kill a man who was an impediment to his business deals."

The Americans, Tamari said, were not interested in the question of who had cheated whom. "They arrested Van Harten in the light of serious suspicions that he had collaborated with the Nazis. Many SS men who were captured trying to cross the border to Switzerland were found with forged Swiss travel papers or forged Red Cross documents which Van Harten had given them."

Activists working for Jewish immigration to Palestine mobilized to help the arrested Van Harten, their goal being to extort funds from him in return for their aid and silence. One of those who pressured Van Harten in order to milk more and more money from him was the Mossad l'Aliya Bet's Shalheveth Freier (later a key figure in the development of Israel's nuclear program).

Although the Van Harten family describes Freier as an intimate friend of Jaac's, Freier testified damningly against him. Not only did he link Van Harten to the distribution of counterfeit British money (produced by the SS in an attempt to undermine the British economy), but he also raised suspicions that Van Harten was in possession of the property of exterminated Jews.

Freier was a member of a secret organization of Jewish soldiers in the British army who called themselves the havurah (the gang) or TTG, short for Tilhas Tizi Gesheften (the Lick my Ass Businesses). One of the havurah's men was Shmuel Osia. "We lacked money to finance rescue activities and purchase arms for the Yishuv," Osia says.

"We gave Van Harten a choice: If he wants to atone for his sins and have us keep quiet about his past, he should be so kind as to give us what he has. Shalheveth was the man who was in contact with him. They spoke for days and nights. I clearly remember one scene, in Milan, when I entered the room in which they were sitting. I saw Shalheveth talking and Van Harten quaking in fear."

There is evidence that at least some of the money Van Harten gave them was counterfeit.

"We weren't that interested whether the money that Van Harten gave us was counterfeit or not. We used it to purchase equipment and supplies for Holocaust survivors, weapons for the Haganah, and engines for tanks that we put together on the decks of the immigration ships that left for Israel."

The family's version Following the article's publication in Ha'aretz, the family hired Etti Eshed, former spokeswoman for the Justice Ministry, to conduct the media battle.

The family also offered its version of Van Harten's wartime deeds, after having flatly refused to do so prior to the publication of the first article.

The sequence of events, according to the Van Harten family, can be summarized as follows: Jaac Van Harten, his wife and son, were deported from Switzerland and "got stuck," by chance, in Budapest, en route to Palestine. They had a good life in Budapest under the cover of being non-Jews, though not the life of luxury described by eyewitnesses in the article last month. The son, Mike, attended a military boarding school in the city, and the father dealt with rescuing Jews. The mechanism for saving Jews was actually a barter operation: Jaac Van Harten used his expertise as an art collector and dealer in appraising stolen paintings for Kurt Becher of the economic department of the SS. In exchange, Becher stopped some of the shipments of Jews to Auschwitz, and as a result the lives of thousands of Jews were saved. In addition, Van Harten set up safe houses for children and extended much aid to Jewish refugees.

The Van Hartens deny that Jaac was Becher's assistant and that he rushed to leave Budapest before its liberation by the Russians, in order to join Becher. "You don't understand who the Russians are," Mike Van Harten explains. "Father was scared that his fate would be the same as Raoul Wallenberg's [the Swedish diplomat in wartime Budapest who issued papers that protected tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, was arrested by Russian troops, and was never seen again]. He [Van Harten] knew the Russians killed everyone, their own allies, too, and the Jews as well."

The Van Harten family's account raises a number of questions, aside from the fact that Van Harten chose to flee with his family into an area held by the Nazis, who, as is well known, also killed Jews. Parts of it contradict, or constitute a new version of, the account that Jaac Van Harten himself provided. Either way, the accounts are unsupported by any of the archives or the many research studies written on wartime Budapest.

The only direct evidence the family has of these "thousands of Jews" is a letter by Yosef Steiglitz, about whom the family knows nothing more. When American intelligence arrested Van Harten on suspicion of being an SS agent, his wife appealed to several of his acquaintances, asking them to write something on his behalf. Steiglitz, an art and antiques dealer in Budapest, wrote: "When the Germans captured Hungary in 1944, the possibility of my living as a Pole, and, even more so, as a Jew, grew harder and harder. I decided to leave Hungary illegally with my family, my sister, my brother-in-law, and their two children. I was destitute at the time, and in my distress I turned to Mr. Van Harten, who helped me greatly. He put himself entirely at my disposal and gave me everything I asked toward my goal, and I was [after all] just some stranger to him. From that time on, I spent much time with Mr. Van Harten and observed his activities. In the hardest of times he was always ready to help people in distress. He helped hundreds of people with money and advice, and by hosting, in his home, people facing mortal danger. He looked after thousands of Jewish children, and saved thousands of them. The Van Hartens fought for the Jewish children, to save them from deportation, at the risk of their own lives."

From Budapest, Mike Van Harten maintains the family escaped to Merano in the southern Tyrol (he was 16 at the time). The city was still in Nazi hands, because it was full of wounded, so the Allies refrained from bombing it (Jaac Van Harten claimed while he was still alive that the

bombings were prevented thanks to his initiative of concentrating all the prisoners there soon after he arrived in the city).

The family adds that, in Merano, Van Harten was acting as a representative of the International Red Cross in Italy, offering as evidence reports written by Van Harten himself on what appears to be official stationery of the organization. This contradicts documents found in the Red Cross archive in Geneva, which refer to Van Harten as an impostor who had supplied many Nazis with forged Red Cross documents that secured their paths to freedom.

The Van Harten family also offers a number of written declarations of Jews and non-Jews who were freed from the concentration camp in Bolzano, thanking Van Harten for his help in their release. For example, former prisoner Erich Wektor relates that Van Harten conducted a heated argument with the camp's SS commander, demanding the immediate release of all the Jews:

"I certify that our rescue stemmed solely from Mr. Van Harten's aggressive and firm stance. Had Mr. Van Harten not freed us at that moment, none of us would have remained alive."

Wektor adds an interesting comment. He tells of how a few days after his release he was invited to the office of his rescuer: "At that moment Mr. Van Harten said to me, 'From now on, you all will have no more worries.'" Van Harten opened a crate and showed Wektor "pounds sterling and other kinds of currency which were unfamiliar to me. 'I have collected all of this for you, and beside this I have more gold, jewelry, and precious stones for loyal hands, and they will be assessed by a committee. All these valuable articles belong to the Jews that survive, because the source of these things is Jewish wealth.'"

Bargaining chips In his study entitled "Hitler's Forgers," Shraga Eilam, an Israeli journalist and historian who lives in Switzerland, exposed Van Harten's ties with the Nazis, uncovering a great deal of material on him in various archives. Eilam studied the documents given Ha'aretz by the Van Harten family. The content of the documents did not convince him.

"It is important to remember that senior SS men, including Himmler, tried to use Jews as bargaining chips to win political concessions from the Allies, and ransom money from Jews," Eilam explains. "Toward the end of the war, many Nazis resorted to 'saving' Jews in order create a humane image for themselves in the last moments before the defeat. This fact makes it difficult at times to distinguish between true acts of rescue and false ones."

Eilam says of the rescue of Steiglitz: "The release of one individual from Budapest is inconclusive, since even staunch Nazis made sure to 'save' Jews that they knew. In all of the archives, there is no support for the version Van Harten gave, and for the family's account, that he supposedly saved thousands or hundreds or even dozens of Jews in Hungary. Van Harten claims that he was the man behind the creation of 'safe houses' for Jews in Budapest. Studies of that period demonstrate that these safe houses were in fact another of Kurt Becher's mechanisms to extort money from Jews; and the testimony of Peretz Reves, a member of the Jewish underground, shows that Van Harten was Becher's financial director, which places him on the wrong side of the barricade."

Regarding Van Harten's actions at war's end in northern Italy, Eilam says: "There is no doubt that Van Harten was involved in the release of Jews, but it is unclear if his efforts merit the exalted title of 'rescue.' In the release of the prisoners from the concentration camp at Bolzano,

the SS first tried to exact a financial and political price, as is shown in Joint Distribution Committee documents. After this attempt failed, International Red Cross documents indicate that an agreement to free the prisoners was reached at the highest levels, between Himmler's deputy, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the head of the Red Cross, Hans Bechmann.

"Van Harten was the man appointed to carry out the release in situ. It is clear, therefore, why he was seen by prisoners as the great liberator. Many documents - among them those showing his close ties to the Nazis and the forged patronage of the Red Cross that he granted SS men who dealt with the distribution of counterfeit money - raise suspicions that his supervision of the release of camp inmates was in fact at the behest of the Nazis. It should be recalled that Van Harten took part, on behalf of the Nazis, in some of the contacts with the Americans on the terms of the cease-fire and the surrender."

The Van Harten family presents a letter of recommendation by Golda Meir, then head of the Jewish Agency's political department, written after the British wanted to revoke his permit to immigrate to Palestine on suspicion that he had been a Nazi agent. Meir writes very warmly of Van Harten:

"The 'facts' in this letter are in absolute contradiction to the testimony of witnesses who were involved in the operations of the Jewish underground. This letter, rather than demonstrating the innocence of Van Harten, points to the protection that he received after the war from the highest political levels of the Yishuv."

Counterfeit currency Last month's article in Ha'aretz described how Van Harten nearly embroiled soldiers of the Jewish Brigade in an SS-directed effort to pass counterfeit British pounds. Many witness accounts point to Van Harten as having acted as a central distributor in the scheme.

The Van Harten family vehemently denies that he was at all involved in the operation, and claims that in the midst of the war, two emissaries arrived in Italy from Palestine - Levi Argov (Kopelevitch) and Moshe Ben David. In northern Italy they met Van Harten. He gave them 52,000 British pounds. Some time later, British authorities arrested a different Zionist activist who had received some of the money. The charge was possession of counterfeit bills. Van Harten, of course, had not bothered to inform the two emissaries that he had equipped them with counterfeit money.

Moshe Ben David's widow, Anna, told Ha'aretz in the last few days that she was very moved to discover that at long last Van Harten's story is coming to light. She passed along portions of testimony given by her late husband on the matter, in which he said of the meeting with Van Harten:

"We went in to him. Was this a Jew? A Jew of Dutch origin, a handsome character, tall and imposing. It was our impression that he was a personage. He inspected the satchels and said: 'Bring bigger packs.' So we brought bigger packs. He took us into a sort of cellar full of large wooden crates stamped 'Bank of England,' and took each pack and began to stuff in as much as possible. We took some 52,000 pounds sterling. The matter was a bit suspicious to us. How was it that the Bank of England had opened a branch and was handing out so much money with such generosity? However, we reconciled ourselves to the matter."

At another point in his testimony Ben David described an astounding coincidence: On his journey he met a Jew, a survivor of the Sachsenhausen death camp and a master engraver whom

the SS had put to work there producing counterfeit bills. "I asked him: Can you distinguish between real and counterfeit? He said: 'Yes, it's possible to tell. If you'd give me one pound I would tell you.' I gave him bills of 10 and 20 pounds, he looked and I saw him turning pale and nearly fainting, saying: 'This is our money. This is counterfeit money.'"

It has also become clear that after the war, Van Harten tried to sue the Jewish Agency to return the money he gave the two emissaries, and asked the two to testify for him. They agreed, but told him that they would state in court that the money was counterfeit. Van Harten decided to forgo their testimony.

Van Harten did the two emissaries one actual favor. He gave them a forged Red Cross document that helped them cross roadblocks and borders. He supplied exactly the same documents to Nazis, among them Fritz Schwend, an SS officer and the commander of the operation to distribute counterfeit money. Schwend used a document like that to flee the Allied forces who were searching for him. He reached Peru, joining Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie ("the Butcher of Lyon") there. About a week ago, Shraga Eilam discovered documentation in Schwend's personal archive in Switzerland showing that even in 1953-54 Van Harten had financial connections with Schwend, and asked him to help him recover 300,000 francs he had deposited in a bank in Geneva during the war.

*These articlesare based mainly on historical research of Shraga Elam