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During World War II, the Nazis and their European cohorts killed over six million Jews. One tenth of these Holocaust victims were Hungarian Jews, resulting in a total of over 550,000 deaths.
Although the Jews in Hungary were emancipated in 1867, they nevertheless experienced segregation within the community of other Hungarian citizens. Between the years of 1938 to 1941, the Hungarian government put into effect three anti-Semitic laws, not unlike the Nuremberg laws in Germany. The first two laws restricted their economic prosperity and livelihood, while the third was a blatant racial law that stipulated "race-protective" orders.
Why the Hungarian Parliament agreed to pass these harshly undemocratic Jews laws is up for debate. Most historians agree that it was a gesture of "appeasement" to Hitler and his Reich. Germany stood as a neighbor to Hungary after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the German empire. Others speak of a "follower mentality" of the Hungarian government, that the Hungarian leaders blindly imitated the policies of their neighboring countries. Instances of this can be seen throughout most of Hungarian history during and after the war. For example, by the time the Nazis had taken over Germany, the Arrow Cross Party, too, had established itself and had garnered much public support. When Germany decided to mechanically exterminate the Jews, the Hungarians followed suit. However, when the Russians occupied Hungary after the war in 1945, an event that ceased the genocide of Jews, the Hungarian leaders decided that they were at core communists and subsequently formed a similar government to that of the Soviets. When Stalin died in 1953, Hungary again changed their program to parallel the Soviet’s transformation. One can speculate why the Hungarian leaders never really formed a unique government of their own, but the point here is not to emphasize why they did not create their own government, but, rather, to be cognizant of the fact that their political identity rested on others’. Tragically, Nazi Germany was one of the political systems that Hungary made the unfortunate mistake of emulating.
The massacre of Jews started shortly after the anti-Semitic laws went into effect. Over the course of two months, July and August of 1941, over 16,000 Jews deemed alien were deported to Galicia, a territory under German rule. There, the Germans slaughtered them; this was the first five-digit massacre, a "record achievement" for the Germans during the Holocaust. In January 1942, Hungarian gendarmeries murdered 3,500 people, eight hundred of whom were Jews, and in order to dispose of the corpses, the gendarmeries simply tossed them into the Danube. On top of the systematic extermination, the gendarmeries also held public hangings as a scare tactic for the civilians.
Despite the terror that had already begun, March 19, 1944 marked the beginning of the most horrific year in the eighteen centuries of Jewish history in Hungary, but that simple statement alone cannot adequately express the severity of the persecutions the Hungarian Jewry had to endure. Unlike in the past, they had never been singled out for extermination by a country of which they were legal citizens.
The catalyst of the Hungarian Holocaust came from an "invitation" addressed to Regent Miklós Horthy from Hitler, commanding him to come to the Schloss Klessheim. Here, the Germans convinced Horthy to keep the Hungarians fighting in the war. Horthy had arrived the 18th of March, and by that afternoon, Germany had already started "Operation Margarete", the military occupation of Hungary. One speculates that Horthy succumbed to the German demands because he was at an older age of seventy-six, and did not have a strong enough will to defend himself against Hitler. Horthy ended up agreeing to all of the Führer’s demands. By the time governor Horthy returned to his country, the Germans had already successfully occupied Hungary without any opposition from the Hungarian troops.
The two men responsible for the Hungarian occupation, Dieter Wisliceny and A. Krumey, first met with the leaders of the Israelite Congregation of Pest to discuss how the Germans were going to deal with the Jewry. They assured the Congregation leaders that no harm or deportation would occur if the Jews obediently followed their orders. Obviously, this was only a ploy used to disguise their true intentions. Unfortunately, the Jewish leaders bought into the deception; they felt optimistically that they had reached some sort of understanding with the Germans.
With the guard down, the Jews became easy victims for the Germans. The Germans moved quickly into Hungary and by the end of March, 1944, they had already detained 3,364 Jews from just the upper class alone , and a month later, the number escalated to over 8,000. On March 29, the Hungarian Council of Ministers also formed the three aforementioned anti-Semitic decrees that stripped the Jews of whatever they had left. The laws excluded from all basic necessities of living. They forbade them from the professions of law, the press, motion picture and theater. They could no longer ride in cars, taxies, trains, buses and ships; the only mode of transportation left to them was the streetcar. Eventually, even telephones and radios disappeared from Jewish households. However, the Jews no longer cared about simple pleasures such as listening to the radio; they were more concerned with staying alive from day to day. Because the government froze or restricted their bank accounts, the Jews could only have a nominal amount of money, which made even buying a meal nearly impossible.
But, in its efforts to keep down the Hungarian Jewry, the quality of Hungarian intellectual life and culture inevitably declined. Hungary banned books from Jewish authors, such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Marcel Proust, Theodor Herzl, Lajos Hatvany, Georg Lukács, and Zoltán Zelk. The press became nothing more than another vehicle for the Nazis to disseminate their ideology; the Hungarian fascists even came up with an equivalent of the German der Stürmer, a publication called Harc, meaning Battle. They had also set up an institution dealing with the "Jewish Question", an establishment that systematically studied and influenced the Hunagarian public opinion on Jews, much like the German one.
In the early summer of 1944, Adolf Eichmann, head of a section in the German Reich Head Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), and his 200-men Sonderkommando deported the provincial Jews (about 437,000 people; half of the Jewish population in Hungary at the time) with the support and help of other Hungarians—clerks, soldiers, and policemen. Eichmann found even more support in a pro-German Hungarian movement headed by Döme Sztójay whom Horthy appointed prime minister under the Germans’ demands. Also at German insistence, Horthy appointed two anti-Semitic state secretaries, László Endre and László Baky. The three of them helped Eichmann realize the "final solution" in Hungary.
Eichmann wanted to exterminate all Jews in Hungary in as little time as possible. He ordered that all the prefects, mayors, gendarmerie commanders, and other officials to round up all Jews, regardless of sex or age, and execute them. Because the German occupations forces in Hungary were few, the Hungarian local police and gendarmerie handled most of the executions under the supervision of Eichmann. The willingness of the Hungarians to participate in these genocide projects depended heavily on the propaganda that the Germans fed to them. They were often reminded that it was their patriotic duty to keep Hungary Judenrein (Jew-clean). Since the Hungarians did nothing to prevent the genocide, other forces had to intervene. President F. D. Roosevelt in June of 1944 ordered the cessation of deportation, and the day before that, the pope sent a personal plea to Horthy. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden threatened action against the Hungarians if the brutality continued. These personal pleas and warnings combined with the military successes of the Allies eventually forced Horthy to cease the deportations and dismissal of Endre and Baky. The Germans had already planned a deportation of Budapest Jews starting in July, but these efforts and events prevented this. If the deportation had occurred, thousands of families would have perished. The deportations officially ended on July 6, 1944. Possibly, the landing of Allied forces on the shores of Normandy prompted this decision, or Horthyt may have reacted form a fear of the Red Army who were quickly advancing into Hungary. Without the cooperation of Horthy and other Hungarians, Eichmann’s plans could not continue. However, shortly after Horthy announced the cease-fire, Ferenc Szálasi and the Arrow Cross Party members came to power with the help of the Germans. The Arrow Cross Party was responsible for the massacre and torture of hundreds of Jews daily. By the time the Red Army overtook Hungary and put an end to the Arrow Cross killings, Budapest had been completely razed. Due to the Holocaust and emigration after the war, only 70,000 Jews remain in Budapest, a city in which over 825,000 Jews inhabited at one time.
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Bibliography
2. Patai, Raphael. The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology. Wayne State University Press, Detroit: 1996.
3. Braham, Randolph L.
Hungarian-Jewish Studies. The City College of the City University
of New York, New York:
1966.