The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 were the fastest single Jewish deportation of the Holocaust. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, around 437,000 Hungarian Jews from the provinces outside Budapest were transported by rail to Auschwitz-Birkenau and almost all murdered on arrival. The operation was carried out in eight weeks. It was planned by Adolf Eichmann, organised by the Hungarian gendarmerie under László Endre and László Baky, and executed with the active cooperation of the Hungarian state across the territory of Hungary as it then existed. It was the largest single Holocaust deportation of any national community.
The German occupation of March 1944
Hungary had been allied with Germany since November 1940 but had refused, throughout the period from 1941 to 1944 when the rest of European Jewry was being murdered, to deport its Jews. The Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, had treated the protection of Hungarian Jews from German deportation as a matter of national sovereignty. The position was politically expensive but it had held.
The position broke in March 1944. Hitler, increasingly frustrated by Hungarian foot-dragging on multiple fronts, ordered the German occupation of Hungary. German troops crossed the border on 19 March 1944. Horthy, met by Hitler at Schloss Klessheim two days earlier and detained there, returned to find his country occupied. He retained the title of regent but the government of Hungary was now in the hands of a German-installed administration under Prime Minister Döme Sztójay.
Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest on 21 March 1944 with his special operations team, the Eichmann-Sondereinsatzkommando. Within days he was meeting with the new Hungarian Interior Ministry officials. The relevant Hungarian counterparts were Secretaries of State László Endre and László Baky, both committed antisemites of the Hungarian radical right, who had been waiting for years for the opportunity to organise the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The agreement between Eichmann and the Hungarians was reached within ten days of the occupation. The deportation operation was settled in early April 1944.
The ghettoisation, April and early May 1944
The Jewish population of Hungary as it existed in 1944, including the territories regained from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania during the war, was around 762,000 people. The plan was to deport the 437,000 Jews living outside Budapest first, in geographic zones moving from east to west, and to take Budapest’s around 250,000 Jews afterwards.
The provincial Jewish populations were ghettoised in April and early May 1944. The pattern was uniform across the country. Jews were given between a few hours and a few days to gather what they could carry and report to designated assembly points. They were held in ghettos established in Jewish neighbourhoods of provincial towns, in synagogues and Jewish community buildings, and in some cases in brick factories and other industrial sites. Conditions in the ghettos were deliberately severe. The ghettoisation was carried out by the Hungarian gendarmerie (csendőrség), a paramilitary police force of around 20,000 men under Endre and Baky’s control. German personnel were not required.
The deportation, 15 May to 9 July 1944
The first transport left the Kassa (Košice) station on 15 May 1944. Over the following eight weeks, 147 transports of forty to fifty cattle wagons each carried around 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria were operating at peak capacity throughout the period; a special railway spur into Birkenau itself, the Judenrampe extension, had been completed in early May 1944 specifically to handle the volume. The Sonderkommando revolt of October 1944 took place against the background of the Hungarian transports.
The selection process at the Birkenau ramp was the same one used throughout 1942 to 1944. Around 75 to 80 per cent of each transport was sent directly to the gas chambers. The remaining 20 to 25 per cent were registered into the camp for slave labour, with most dying within months. Of the 437,000 deported in the eight weeks, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 survived the selection; perhaps 30,000 of those survived the war.
The Horthy halt of 9 July 1944
The Budapest deportations had been scheduled to begin in early July 1944. They did not. International pressure on Horthy in late June and early July, including the publication of the Vrba-Wetzler report describing Auschwitz that had reached the Allies in June, the Allied bombing of Budapest on 2 July, and diplomatic interventions from King Gustav of Sweden, Pope Pius XII, the International Red Cross and President Roosevelt, had become intense. Horthy halted the deportations on 9 July 1944. The provincial deportations were already finished. The Budapest community remained, for the moment, in place.
The Budapest community would suffer a different fate after the Arrow Cross coup of 15 October 1944, with mass killings on the Danube embankment, forced marches west and confinement in the ghetto established around the Dohány Street Synagogue. But the bulk of Hungarian Jewish dead had already been killed by 9 July 1944 in the eight-week operation that had taken the provincial communities. The figure of 437,000 in eight weeks remains the highest deportation rate of any single Holocaust operation.
Sources
- Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, 1981, revised 1994
- Randolph L. Braham (ed), The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary, Northwestern University Press, 2013
- Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944-1945, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002
- László Karsai and Judit Molnár (eds), Documents on the Hungarian Holocaust, multiple volumes, various publishers
- Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933-1945, Yale University Press, 1994 (chapters on the Brand mission and the halt)
- Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, “The Auschwitz Protocols” of April 1944, Yad Vashem archive
- Holocaust Memorial Center Budapest, https://hdke.hu
- USHMM, “Deportation of Hungarian Jews”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org