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"This book reexamines one of the most intense controversies of the Holocaust: the role of Rezső Kasztner in facilitating the murder of most of Nazi-occupied Hungary's Jews in 1944. Because he was acting head of the Jewish rescue operation in Hungary, some have hailed him as a savior. Others have charged that he collaborated with the Nazis in the deportations to Auschwitz. What is indisputable is that Adolf Eichmann agreed to spare a special group of 1,684 Jews, who included some of Kasztner's relatives and friends, while nearly 500,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. Why were so many lives lost? After World War II, many Holocaust survivors condemned Kasztner for complicity in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. It was alleged that, as a condition of saving a small number of Jewish leaders and select others, he deceived ordinary Jews into boarding the trains to Auschwitz. The ultimate question is whether Kastztner was a Nazi collaborator, as branded by Ben Hecht in his 1961 book Perfidy, or a hero, as Anna Porter argued in her 2009 book Kasztner's Train. Opinion remains divided. Paul Bogdanor makes an original, compelling case that Kasztner helped the Nazis keep order in Hungary's ghettos before the Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and sent Nazi disinformation to his Jewish contacts in the free world. Drawing on unpublished documents, and making extensive use of the transcripts of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials in Israel, Kasztner's Crime is a chilling account of one man's descent into evil during the genocide of his own people"--

'FEDERALISM', CLAIMED THE SWISS PHILOSOPHER, DENIS DE Rougemont, 'rests upon thelove of complexity, by contrast with the brutal simplicity which characterises the totalitarian spirit'. It would be hard to deny that complexity is the most striking feature of federal government in Switzerland. To comprehend it fully, one would have to analyse the history, politics and atmosphere of each of the twenty-six cantons, for each is a political system in itself; and there is no such animal as a 'typical' canton. Political scientists have studied one or two cantons in some depth, and there are also impressionistic accounts of cantonal life, but there is no really satisfactory comparative analysis of the cantons as a whole. Further, many Swiss cantons are 'closed' societies, difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and not easily accessible to the academic inquirer. The political scientist needs to acquire the skills of the anthropologist in addition to those of the analyst of political institutions if he is to make headway. It is difficult, therefore, to give anything more than a very general impression of the principles lying behind federal government in Switzerland, an impression which is bound to be, to some degree at least, misleading. For of no country more than Switzerland is it more correct to say that the truth lies in the minute particulars and not in generalities.The complexity of Swiss federalism is a consequence of the fact that the Swiss have embraced more completely than any other democracy that essential principle, the leitmotiv, of federalism — the sharing of power. Switzerland is indeed an extreme example of federalism, just as it is an extreme example of the application of the principles of democracy and of neutrality in foreign affairs.