Hungary

Hungary is the case of the Holocaust’s last and fastest mass killing. Around 825,000 Jews lived in Hungary in 1939, including the Jewish populations of territories Hungary had recovered from Romania and Czechoslovakia in 1938 to 1940. Of those, around 565,000 were murdered, almost all in the eight weeks between mid-May and early July 1944, when the German occupiers and the Hungarian gendarmerie deported around 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The Hungarian deportations of 1944 were the fastest mass deportation of the entire Holocaust, organised by Adolf Eichmann and a small team of around 100 SS men, with the active cooperation of the Hungarian state.

The community before the war

Hungarian Jewry was the second largest in central Europe after Polish Jewry. The community was largely urban, with a quarter of all Hungarian Jews in Budapest. Hungarian Jews had been emancipated in 1867 and had taken full part in Hungarian public life since then. The community produced disproportionate numbers of Hungarian doctors, lawyers, journalists, business owners and academics. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, had been born in Budapest. The Hungarian Nobel laureates Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann (the mathematician), Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, George de Hevesy and others were all Budapest Jews of this generation. Most of them had emigrated by 1939; the rest of the community had not.

The Hungarian alliance with Germany

Hungary entered the war on the German side in 1941, partly to recover lost territory and partly because the regime under Admiral Miklos Horthy considered the Soviet Union the greater threat. Hungarian forces fought in the Soviet Union alongside the German army. Antisemitic legislation along Nuremberg lines was passed in 1938 and 1939, restricting Jews in the professions, in education, and in property ownership. Jewish men of military age were excluded from the regular Hungarian army and were instead drafted into labour battalions, which were attached to Hungarian units fighting in the east. Conditions in the labour battalions were murderous. Around 50,000 Hungarian Jewish men died in them, mostly in the winter of 1942 to 1943, of cold, exhaustion and casual violence by their guards.

The Hungarian Jewish community in Hungary proper was, however, not deported during this period. Horthy resisted German pressure for deportations on the grounds that Hungarian Jews were Hungarian citizens. The community survived in increasing fear, but largely intact, until the spring of 1944.

The German occupation, March 1944

Hitler had concluded by early 1944 that Hungary was wavering and might attempt to make a separate peace with the Allies. German forces occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. A new government under Dome Sztojay, more compliant with German demands, was installed. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a small Sondereinsatzkommando staff of around 100 men. He had eight weeks to organise the deportation of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz, and he intended to do it.

The eight weeks

The deportations began on 15 May 1944 and ran until 9 July 1944. In eight weeks, 147 trains carried around 437,000 Jews from the Hungarian provincial cities and towns to Auschwitz. The Hungarian gendarmerie, the Csendorseg, conducted the round-ups. Local Hungarian officials drew up the lists. The Hungarian railway operated the trains. The Germans supervised. The pace was around 12,000 to 14,000 deportees per day at peak. Auschwitz-Birkenau ran its gas chambers and crematoria continuously through this period. Around three quarters of each transport, mostly women, children and the elderly, were gassed on arrival. The remainder were selected for labour.

The deportations cleared the Hungarian provinces. By the first week of July 1944 the only major Jewish community remaining in the country was the Budapest community of around 200,000 people. The deportation of Budapest was scheduled for July.

The international protest

By July 1944 the world knew what was happening in Hungary, partly because of the Vrba-Wetzler report, the detailed account of Auschwitz produced by two escaped prisoners, which had reached the Allies in April. The international protest was unprecedented. The King of Sweden, the Pope, President Roosevelt, the International Red Cross, and others sent direct appeals to Horthy. Allied bombing raids on Budapest in early July were associated, in Hungarian eyes, with the Allied position on the deportations. Horthy, faced with this combination of pressure and the increasingly obvious approach of Soviet defeat, ordered the deportations halted on 7 July 1944.

The order saved the Budapest Jewish community from the immediate fate that had befallen the provinces. Around 437,000 Hungarian provincial Jews had already been murdered. The Budapest community, around 200,000 people, was now under restrictions but in place.

The Arrow Cross terror

In October 1944, Horthy attempted to take Hungary out of the war. The Germans intervened and replaced him with the Arrow Cross movement under Ferenc Szálasi. The Arrow Cross was the Hungarian fascist party, modelled on the German Nazi Party but with an even more brutal local character. From October 1944 to January 1945, the Arrow Cross carried out an extended pogrom against the Budapest Jewish community. Death marches of Budapest Jews to the Austrian border were organised: tens of thousands were marched on foot through autumn rain and winter snow, with thousands dying en route. Inside Budapest, Arrow Cross militias took Jews from their homes, marched them to the Danube embankment, made them remove their shoes, and shot them so the bodies fell into the river.

The Budapest community was saved, in significant numbers, by the international diplomatic operations of Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz, Giorgio Perlasca and Angel Sanz Briz, each of whom is covered on his own page. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews received protective papers from one or another of these diplomats and were sheltered in protected houses until Soviet forces took the city in February 1945.

The post-war record

Around 200,000 Hungarian Jews survived the war. The post-war Hungarian state, under communist rule, did not engage extensively with the specifics of the Hungarian role in the deportations until 1989. The post-communist Hungarian state has done so unevenly. The Hungarian government under Viktor Orban has, since 2010, taken a position that minimises Hungarian state responsibility for the wartime deportations and emphasises Hungarian victimhood under both German and Soviet occupations. The Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial, sixty pairs of iron shoes set into the embankment, marks the Arrow Cross killings of late 1944. The Hungarian Jewish community of around 100,000 today is the largest in central Europe outside the Russian Federation.

See also

Sources

  • Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, 1981
  • Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, Routledge, 2003
  • Christian Gerlach and Gotz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944-1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002
  • USHMM: Hungary