In 1940 Eichman came up with the idea of sending Jews to Madagascar and an Jew in Palestine called Stern tried to negotiate with the Germans to have them sent to Palestine instead. The Germans didn't even entertain that idea and never even bothered replying to the request.
Never heard of the Kastner trial ?
[quote:1okylyrg]Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer, to allow almost 1,700 Hungarian Jews to leave for Switzerland — in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds — on what became known as the Kastner train.
Kastner moved to Israel after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.[2]
In 1953, he was accused in a little-read pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald, an amateur writer and stamp collector, of having been a Nazi collaborator, because of the nature and extent of his relationship with Eichmann, and with Kurt Becher, another SS officer. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner's behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted two years, and a ruling in 1955 that Kastner had indeed, in the words of the judge, "sold his soul to the devil."[3]
The judge ruled that, by saving the Jews on the Kastner train, while failing to warn others that the "resettlement" promised by the Nazis was in fact deportation to Auschwitz, Kastner had sacrificed the mass of Jewry for a chosen few. The Kastner train was simply a "gift" from the Nazis, the judge said, aimed at obtaining the cooperation of the privileged so as not to panic the masses.[4] Accepting that gift was "collaboration in the fullest sense of the word," he said.