The Arrow Cross (Nyilaskeresztes Párt, the Hungarist Party) was the Hungarian fascist movement led by Ferenc Szálasi. It came to power in a German-backed coup against Regent Horthy on 15 to 16 October 1944, three months after Horthy had halted the deportations of Hungarian provincial Jews to Auschwitz. The Arrow Cross had a four-month period in power, from October 1944 to the Soviet capture of Budapest in February 1945. In those four months it conducted the most intense urban phase of street-level Jewish killing in the entire Holocaust. The Danube shootings of December 1944 to January 1945, the death marches to the Austrian border, and the destruction of much of the Budapest ghetto in the final weeks took the lives of around 80,000 Hungarian Jews. The killers were not Germans. They were teenage Arrow Cross militants, in many cases boys of fourteen and fifteen, in their distinctive green shirts.
The 15 October 1944 coup
On 15 October 1944 Horthy announced over the radio that Hungary was seeking an armistice with the Soviet Union. The Germans had been preparing for the announcement. Otto Skorzeny’s commando unit kidnapped Horthy’s son the same morning. Horthy was forced to abdicate that evening. Szálasi was installed as Nemzetvezető, leader of the nation, the next day. The new Arrow Cross government was nominally Hungarian but operated under German occupation control with extensive German participation, principally Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando which had remained in Budapest and now resumed work.
The death marches
From late October 1944 the Germans demanded large numbers of Hungarian Jewish forced labourers for the construction of the Südostwall fortification line on the Austrian-Hungarian border. The trains were not running. The Arrow Cross authorities organised the labourers as foot marches. From 8 November 1944 columns of Jewish men, women and the elderly were marched from Budapest westwards toward the Austrian border, around 220 kilometres. The marches took about a week. Marchers who fell behind were shot on the side of the road by Arrow Cross escorts. Around 50,000 to 76,000 Jews were marched out. Around 10,000 to 20,000 are estimated to have died on the route or in the makeshift labour camps at the border. Survivors were transferred to Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and other camps.
The Budapest ghetto
On 29 November 1944 the Arrow Cross government decreed the establishment of a closed ghetto in central Pest, around the Dohány Street synagogue. Around 70,000 Budapest Jews were forced into the ghetto in early December 1944. The ghetto was sealed on 10 December 1944. Conditions were lethal: around 800 deaths per week from starvation, exposure and disease through January 1945. The ghetto was liberated by the Red Army on 18 January 1945. Around 12,000 of those who had been forced into it had died.
A separate international ghetto
in Pest contained Jews holding protective papers issued by the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese and Vatican legations. Around 25,000 to 35,000 Jews lived under those protections in around two dozen apartment buildings on the Pest side of the Danube. Most of them survived. The protective system, organised in significant part by Raoul Wallenberg of the Swedish legation and Carl Lutz of the Swiss, is one of the largest single rescue operations of the Holocaust.
The Danube shootings
From early December 1944 Arrow Cross militants began conducting nightly killings of Jews on the embankments of the Danube in central Budapest. The pattern was consistent. Groups of Jews, sometimes from the international protected houses, would be marched from their accommodation to the river bank. They were ordered to remove their shoes (the shoes had value, the bodies did not) and tied together in groups of three. The middle person was shot. The weight of the dead body pulled the other two into the river, where they drowned. The killings continued nightly through December 1944 and January 1945 and reached a peak in early January as Soviet forces closed on the city.
Around 10,000 to 15,000 Jews were killed in the Danube shootings over six weeks. The shoes left at the embankments are commemorated today in Gyula Pauer’s memorial Shoes on the Danube Bank, sixty pairs of cast-iron 1944-style shoes set into the stone embankment between the Hungarian Parliament and the Chain Bridge. The killers were almost entirely Hungarian, almost entirely Arrow Cross.
The young perpetrators
The Arrow Cross militants who carried out the Danube shootings were in many cases in their teens and early twenties. The Arrow Cross movement had a youth section, the Levente, which provided much of the operational manpower. Survivor accounts and post-war testimony describe the killers as boys, sometimes drunk, often in groups, conducting the killings as a form of cruel public spectacle. The pattern is unusual within the Holocaust, in which most of the killing was conducted by older men in formal SS or police units. The Hungarian Danube shootings were a younger and more anarchic operation.
The Wallenberg case
Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat assigned to the Budapest legation in summer 1944 specifically to organise rescue of Hungarian Jews, issued thousands of Swedish protective passports during the Arrow Cross period and personally intervened to remove Jews from death-march columns. He was last seen alive on 17 January 1945, going into Soviet custody as the Red Army entered Budapest. He never came out. The Soviet government acknowledged in 1957 that he had died in Soviet custody, claiming heart failure on 17 July 1947 at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. The actual circumstances of his death have never been clarified. The probable cause of his arrest was a Soviet suspicion that he was a Western intelligence asset. He had saved at least 10,000 Hungarian Jews. He was 32 when he disappeared.
The trial of Szálasi
Ferenc Szálasi was captured by US forces in May 1945, returned to Hungary, tried by the Hungarian People’s Court in February 1946, and hanged at the Markó Street prison in Budapest on 12 March 1946. Several other Arrow Cross leaders were tried and executed alongside him. The lower-level perpetrators of the Danube shootings, the death-march escorts, and the ghetto guards were prosecuted in smaller numbers; many escaped to the West.
What it was
The Arrow Cross is the case of the local fascist movement that had its operational moment in the last weeks of the war and used it to kill its country’s remaining Jews with a ferocity that exceeded what the Germans had been doing in the same city six months earlier. The killings on the Danube embankment, in the heart of one of Europe’s great capital cities, in front of a partly watching civilian population, are the case study in what local fascist movements could do when given a free hand in the closing weeks of the war. The shoes are still on the embankment.
See also
Sources
- Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, two volumes, 1981
- László Karsai, Szálasi Ferenc, Balassi, 2016
- Ingrid Carlberg, Raoul Wallenberg, MacLehose, 2015
- Yad Vashem: Hungary
- USHMM: Hungary, 1944-1945