Discovering a relative was involved in mass murdering Jews

STEVEN KRAWITZ

By the end of 1944, 600 Hungarian Jews were reassigned from deportation to the death camps, to strengthen the defences around the town of Rechnitz, in the face of the advancing Russian army. They were housed in appalling conditions in the cellar of Rechnitz Castle.

On the night of March 24, 1945, with the Russian army just 15 km away, a party was held in Rechnitz Castle. Forty people, including leading Nazi Party, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth members, attended; the party started at 21:00 and lasted until dawn.

At midnight, 200 Jews – who were deemed unfit for further work on the local fortifications – were taken to a barn within walking distance of the party. Sixteen party guests were ushered into a storeroom at the castle, given weapons and invited to “kill some Jews”.

A massacre of 180 of the Jewish labourers followed. A number of them were spared to bury the murdered Jews. They were in turn killed the next night.

A number of factors make this massacre stand out, even though it occurred during the Holocaust. Firstly, it was carried out by individuals, not the Nazi state and its apparatus.

Secondly, it happened so close to the end of the war that it seems beyond belief that a group of Nazis would carry out such an atrocity with Russian forces so close by. Also, these Jews had endured such suffering, surely they could have been allowed to live to be liberated from the Nazi hell of wartime Europe?

Thirdly, the hostess of the party was Margit Thyssen-Bornemisza, a member of one of Europe’s wealthiest families and heiress to a family fortune.

Margit’s German father, Heinrich, himself heir to the Thyssen industrial fortune, had profited from the First World War, but lacked the necessary social position to be taken seriously within European society.

In the inter-war years, he acquired Hungarian nationality and the dubious title of baron. He completed his reinvention as a European aristocrat by buying a castle at Rechnitz, on the Austro-Hungarian border, 150 km south of Vienna.

In 1938 with the inevitable prospect of another war, Heinrich transferred ownership of the castle to his daughter Margit and moved to the safety of neighbouring Switzerland.

From his Villa Favoritaon at Lake Lugano, Heinrich controlled his mining and industrial holdings in Germany and supplied the Third Reich with coal, steel and U-boats. He also provided his friend, Herman Goering and the Nazi intelligence service, with access to international banking.

Margit had married a Hungarian count, Ivan Batthyany, whose family had originally owned the area around Rechnitz and a sizable portion of Hungary. The Batthyanys were one of the great Hungarian aristocratic families, but had fallen on hard times and reduced circumstances.

The marriage was a sham from the start, but it allowed Margit to enhance her social prestige by joining her wealth and arriviste title to the ancient Batthyany name.

Margit’s brother “Heini”, inherited the family businesses and built one of the great private art collections of the 20^th century. This collection was given to Spain when the Spanish government offered to house it in a palace across from the Prado Museum. It is the famous Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.

During the war, Margit remained at her castle even after it was requisitioned by the SS in the early years of the war.

She took a number of Nazi lovers as she had a voracious sexual appetite. A Thyssengas employer and Nazi, Joachim Oldenberg, managed the estate and shared her bed, as did Franz Podezin, leader of the Rechnitz Nazi Party, who was part of the Gestapo.

It was Podezin who handed out the guns and ammunition to Margit’s guests on that fateful night. Oldenberg and Podezin killed the Jewish prisoners who had been spared to bury the victims of the previous night’s massacre.   

Margit, Oldenberg and Podezin fled Rechnitz and the Russian army and escaped to Switzerland. Margit assisted Oldenberg to return to Germany and housed Podezin in a flat in Lugano in Switzerland where she continued her affair with him.

When the possibility of criminal proceedings against Podezin became a reality, he extorted funds and assistance from Margit and Oldenberg and escaped to South Africa. He was last seen in Pretoria. Oldenberg eventually followed the Nazi ratlines to Argentina.

Attempts at post-war efforts to investigate the Rechnitz massacres ended when the two main witnesses were killed and one of their houses was burnt down, destroying all incriminating evidence.

The locals also contributed to the obstruction of justice by maintaining a silence on the massacres. The Thyssen family has never acknowledged their wartime activities.

The Rechnitz massacre is one of a number of events that Sacha Battyhany, a great-nephew of Margit, deals with in his book, A Crime in the Family, published in German.

Having grown up in Switzerland, Sacha, a journalist, is surprised to hear for the first time as an adult, about his aunt’s wartime atrocities, when she is called “The Hostess from Hell” in newspapers across Europe.

The publication of The Thyssen Art Macabre by David Litchfield in 2006, provoked widespread interest in Margit, who died in 1989 and sent Sacha on his own personal investigations into his family’s history.

Not only does he travel to Rechnitz, he also gains possession of his grandmother’s diaries and discovers another family secret which sends him off to Argentina in search of a Holocaust survivor.

His grandfather Feri Battyhany’s post-war experiences as a Hungarian prisoner of war in the Soviet Union for 10 years, results in Sacha and his father retracing Feri’s steps through Siberia.

Sacha maintains that Margit was not present at the Rechnitz massacre and that she was guilty merely through association. This is hotly contested by David Litchfield who places Margit and her husband Ivan, at the scene of this heinous crime.

Is A Crime in The Family an honest account of a family’s war crimes, or a whitewashing of the family’s guilt, without assuming any responsibility for the crimes of the fathers? Is Sacha truly a victim of third generation guilt, or is his book, trading on the Batthyany name, an opportunistic grab for publicity?