The Hungarian death marches of November 1944 are usually treated separately from the camp evacuations of 1945, although they killed people in similar numbers and by similar methods. They were the work not of the SS but of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist movement that took power in October 1944 after Germany toppled the more cautious Horthy government.
The political background
Hungary had been a German ally throughout the war, but the regent Miklos Horthy had refused to deport Hungarian Jews to the death camps until German forces occupied Hungary in March 1944. Adolf Eichmann then ran the Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944, in which around 437,000 Jews from outside Budapest were sent to Auschwitz. The Budapest deportations were stopped in July 1944 by international pressure, including from the King of Sweden, the Pope and President Roosevelt.
In October 1944, Germany toppled Horthy and installed the Arrow Cross under Ferenc Szálasi. The new government immediately resumed the persecution of Hungarian Jews, particularly the still-large Jewish community of Budapest.
The marches
By November 1944 the railway system out of Hungary to the Auschwitz region had broken down under Soviet advance and Allied bombing. The Arrow Cross began marching Budapest Jews on foot toward the Austrian border, around 200 kilometres away, where they were to be handed over to German labour battalions for use building defensive fortifications.
The first column of around 25,000 left Budapest on 8 November 1944. The marchers were given almost no food. The weather was cold and rainy. The marches took eight to ten days. Anyone who fell behind, who tried to escape, or who could not keep pace was shot by Arrow Cross guards. Survivors recorded that the worst violence often came from teenage Arrow Cross militiamen.
Several thousand died on the route. Many more were shot on arrival when German officers refused to take prisoners they considered too weak to work. Estimates of the total killed in the Arrow Cross marches range from around 10,000 to 20,000.
The Danube shootings
The Arrow Cross also killed Jews in Budapest itself in the same period. Militias took Jewish people to the Danube embankment in groups, made them remove their shoes (so the shoes could be reused), tied them in groups of three, and shot the middle one so all three would fall into the river. The Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial in Budapest, sixty pairs of iron shoes set into the embankment beside the parliament building, marks these killings.
The Soviet army reached Budapest in January 1945. The Pest side of the city was liberated on 18 January, with the central ghetto and around 100,000 surviving Jews still inside. The Buda side held out until 13 February. The Arrow Cross regime ended with the German surrender of Budapest.
See also
- Arrow Cross, Hungary
- Hungary
- Miklós Horthy
- Adolf Eichmann
- The Hungarian Deportations 1944
- The Death Marches
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards