The Hungarian Jewish forced labour service was a wartime institution that killed somewhere between 25,000 and 45,000 Hungarian Jewish men of military age between 1939 and 1944. The men were conscripted not into the regular Hungarian army but into separate labour battalions called the munkaszolgálat, attached to the army but denied the status, weapons, uniforms or protections of soldiers. They were sent in large numbers to the Eastern Front, where they performed mine-clearing, road construction and trench-digging under conditions designed to be lethal. The labour service is the documented story of how Hungary, several years before the deportations of 1944, had already begun to kill its Jewish men.
The institution
The Hungarian labour service had been established under the Defence Act of 1939 as a non-combat formation for those deemed unsuitable for regular military duty. The original concept was a general labour service for men exempted from arms-bearing for a variety of reasons: physical, religious, political. From 1940 onwards, under the influence of the increasingly radical Hungarian antisemitic legislation, Jewish men were systematically channelled into the labour service rather than the regular army. By 1941 the service was, in practical terms, a Jewish-only formation. By 1942 it was operating under explicitly racial regulations: Jewish labour servicemen were forbidden uniforms, forbidden military insignia, and required to wear yellow armbands (white for converted Jews and Christian-born men of partial Jewish ancestry).
The men were placed under Hungarian army command but at a status well below that of the regular soldiers. Discipline was at the discretion of the commanding officer. Beating, withholding food, exposure punishments, summary execution and mass execution were all documented practices in particular units. The variation across units was substantial: some company commanders ran their formations within the formal regulations and saw moderate casualty rates; others ran their units as instruments of murder. The most-cited example of the latter is the company commanded by Lieutenant Sándor Vörös at Doroshich (Dorošići in Ukraine) in April 1943, where around 800 Jewish labour servicemen were burned alive in a typhus barracks set on fire by guards on the order of the unit’s officers.
The Eastern Front, 1942 to 1943
From the spring of 1942 the labour battalions were deployed in large numbers on the Eastern Front in support of the Hungarian Second Army’s operations on the Don river. By the summer of 1942 around 50,000 Hungarian Jewish labour servicemen were in the field. They cleared minefields without protective equipment, built roads under enemy fire, dug trenches in winter without adequate clothing, and operated under chronic food shortages. Death rates from cold, disease, exhaustion and execution rose through the autumn of 1942 and accelerated catastrophically during the Soviet winter offensive of January 1943.
The Soviet breakthrough at Voronezh on 12 January 1943 destroyed the Hungarian Second Army. The retreat that followed was a death march for the labour servicemen attached to the army. Hungarian regular soldiers were transported back; the labour servicemen were left to walk. Those who fell were shot or left to freeze. The roughly 30,000 to 40,000 deaths among Hungarian Jewish labour servicemen during this period were never recorded by the Hungarian state with the precision that would allow a final figure. The estimate of total Hungarian Jewish labour service deaths between 1939 and the end of 1943 ranges, in the principal academic studies, from 25,000 to 45,000.
The labour service after 1944
The German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 brought a new phase. The labour servicemen still in Hungary were not deported to Auschwitz with the rest of Hungarian Jewry; the Hungarian army wanted to retain them as a labour force and Eichmann’s deportation team reluctantly conceded the point. Many were sent west, towards the Austrian border, in the Hungarian death marches of November and December 1944, after the Arrow Cross took power. Others were used by the Germans on the Vienna defence-line construction (Südostwall) in the closing weeks of the war; thousands died in the construction work and on the marches between work sites.
The total number of Hungarian Jewish labour servicemen who survived to liberation is uncertain. The post-war Hungarian state did not investigate the labour service deaths in the way it investigated, eventually, the 1944 deportations. The closest figure available is that of the around 100,000 Hungarian Jewish men who passed through the labour service during its existence, perhaps 35,000 to 40,000 returned. The remainder were either killed in the service or, if the surviving labour servicemen of 1944 are counted, deported and murdered in the closing months of the war.
What it shows
The Hungarian Jewish labour service is documented in the historiography in part because it complicates the picture of Hungarian Jewish wartime experience. The standard narrative is that Hungarian Jewry was largely safe until the German occupation of March 1944, after which the deportations of May to July 1944 destroyed most of the community. That narrative is true for women, children and the elderly. It is not true for men of military age. By March 1944 the Hungarian Jewish male population had already been heavily depleted by the labour service. The men who returned to find their families being deported in May 1944 had themselves spent two or three years in conditions designed to kill them.
Sources
- Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System 1939-1945, East European Quarterly / Columbia University Press, 1977
- Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, revised edition 1994 (chapters on the labour service)
- László Karsai, A magyarországi munkaszolgálat, multiple essays in Századok and other journals
- Tamás Stark, Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War 1939-1949: A Statistical Review, East European Monographs, 2000
- Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, Yad Vashem, 2013
- Holocaust Memorial Center Budapest, https://hdke.hu
- USHMM, “Hungarian Labor Service System”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org