The Eden Memorandum on Migration to Palestine:

The National Archives in London has recently released a secret document from 8 August 1944, a Memorandum prepared for the War Cabinet by Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of an “offer” from Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, that, provided the United Kingdom and the United States governments could find sufficient accommodation, the Hungarian government would be prepared to allow all Jewish children under ten years of age, with visas for other countries, and all adults and children with Palestine immigration certificates, to leave Hungary. Horthy also announced that there would be no further transportations of Jews to Poland, i.e. to Auschwitz. This document, and the attached correspondence between Washington and Whitehall, is significant in that it clarifies the controversy about if, when and how Horthy acted to bring the deportations to an end, and to enable the remaining Jews (mainly trapped in Budapest, many of them refugees from other countries) to seek asylum elsewhere. The matter was discussed at the War Cabinet Committee on Refugees meeting on 4 June, although Eden himself was not present. The Government faced a dilemma, since refusing to accept this offer would result in a hostile public reaction both in the United States and Britain, but accepting it would be ‘risking civil war in Palestine owing to the inroad of Jews from Hungary into the Levant.’  Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the Cabinet reached a ‘no-decision’. The proposal of the International Red Cross for the almost immediate removal of 41,000 Jews from Hungary to Romania alarmed the meeting, which was generally against joining the US in accepting. The Secretary of State for the Colonies argued that the British Empire would be signing a blank cheque which we could not honour.

Although both Foreign Office and Home Office secretaries argued that the offer should be accepted in concert with the USA, they felt that in doing so the US Government must accept that the British authorities should not be forced to deliver the impossible in terms of accommodating the refugees, and it was eventually agreed to extend the transit camp originally established for Yugoslav refugees, especially to contain a potential sudden influx of immigrants to Palestine. There had even been suspicions expressed within the Cabinet that Hitler himself had inspired Horthy’s offer in order to create fundamental difficulties for the Allies in the Near East by allowing an exodus of Jews. Certainly, at this point, we know that the Regency in Budapest was incapable of acting independently from the occupying Nazi forces and Hitler’s all-powerful agent in the capital, Veesenmayer. It was not until the end of the month that the Romanians defected from the Axis camp and it became possible for a more independent Hungarian government to be formed again, so the Allies were rightly cautious about any overtures from Budapest at this stage.

Colonel Koszorús’ Unparalleled Action:

However, not to accept the offer would give the Nazis and the pro-Nazi Hungarian government a propaganda coup, and Eden agreed that the acceptance of the offer should be widely publicised and that the Dominion governments should be asked to help in receiving some of the refugees. He also suggested that it might be necessary to establish a transit camp in Syria in order to prevent the situation in Palestine from becoming ‘acute’. In a flurry of telegrams, the US Government agreed to wait before accepting the offer until after the full British War Cabinet on 8th, although before writing his Cabinet memorandum, Eden had already sent a third telegram to Washington signalling the British Government’s acceptance, subject to the detailed terms of transport and accommodation being agreed by the two governments. What effect this agreement had in Hungary we do not yet know, neither can we say that the deportations had been ended by this time, whatever the Regent’s intentions might have been. Horthy had originally ordered their suspension on 6 July, but a further 45,000 Jews from Transdanubia and the County of Pest had continued to be deported after that date. The most effective action to shield the Jews of Budapest had been taken on the initiative of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús in July, having important consequences for the survival of the Regency into the later summer and autumn:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself and a liberal Democrat who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, recognised Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg , who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszurús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

We know that the Sztójay Government had rescheduled the deportation of the Budapest Jews for 27 August, but the Romanians switched sides on 23rd, and it was Himmler who cancelled any further deportations on 27th.

Raids on the Roma & Horthy’s ‘Hiatus’:

Throughout August and September, the horrors of ‘all-out’ warfare had continued within Hungary and its occupied territories, with massacres by government troops and continued forced marches. These were also experienced increasingly by the Roma communities (pictured above). In August and September, the remaining Roma were subjected to raids on their villages, pressing the men into forced labour companies. The first massacre of gipsies took place on 5 October in Doboz, Békés County, where twenty Roma, including women and children, were killed by hand grenades and machine-guns of the Hungarian first armoured division’s military police, acting together with the local gendarmes. Later that month, the Roma were ordered not to leave their permanent residences. At the same time, there were some signs of hopes for peace that late summer. Regent Miklós Horthy could no longer stomach the activities of Eichmann’s SS, and this led to a ‘hiatus’ in the anti-Jewish campaign. On 29 August he sent word to Edmund Veesenmayer that he had decided there would be no more deportations, at least for the time being. With the transportation of Jews from the provinces completed, there were only the Jews in the capital left. Himmler approved the suspension of deportations and the continuation of negotiations through Kasztner and Brand. Himmler, like the Hungarian government itself, had been thinking of an acceptable way of bringing the war to an end. Once back in his office in Budapest, Kasztner was astonished to learn from Dieter Wisliceny that Eichmann and his unit had been ordered out of Hungary. You have won, the Nazi officer told him, the Sonderkommando is leaving. Eichmann, furious with Himmler’s vacillations, retired to sulk at his estate near Linz. The latter later compensated him with the order of an Iron Cross, ‘Second Class’.

In spite of the change to a more ‘neutral’ government under General Lakatos, Hungarian troops occupied parts of Southern Transylvania, Romania, and massacred hundreds of Jews, starting on 4 September. Soviet units then reached the borders established by Trianon later that month and then moved across these into Szeged, where Horthy had begun his journey to power twenty-five years earlier. His failure as an Axis ally was now complete as a gigantic tank battle took place around Debrecen in early October. By mid-October, the Soviet Red Army entered the outskirts of Pest and Horthy, finally, tried desperately to agree on an armistice. Throughout the short period of Géza Lakatos’ premiership, rumours had abounded in Budapest that Horthy was getting ready to exit the war and that all he needed was an honourable way out. He wanted to sue for peace, but not if that peace included Stalin. The British and the Americans were not interested and insisted that nothing less than unconditional surrender would do. Horthy’s insistence on hanging onto his German alliance, however reluctantly, did not help his country’s cause. In final desperation, Horthy sent Lieutenant General Gábor Faragho across the front lines to present Hungary’s case to the Russians. On 11 October, Faragho cabled a draft armistice agreement from Moscow requiring Hungary to give up, once again, its historic territories in Transylvania, everything he had fought for during his years as head of state. Horthy’s hesitation over this gave the Germans the time they needed to prepare a coup.

On Sunday morning, 15 October, there were rumours that the Regent’s son had been abducted, together with a general and two senior officers. It was a warm, sunny autumn morning. German planes had dropped leaflets over the city urging a rebellion against the government. Politicians had also been arrested. Hungarian Radio announced that the Regent would make a general proclamation at 1 p.m. In a soft and shaky voice, Horthy gave a long, detailed statement, in which he announced his decision to sign a separate peace treaty with the Allies, that Hungary had withdrawn from the war and had declared that it is returning to its neutral status. All laws relating to the repression of the Jewish population were revoked. The Reich had lost the war and had also broken its obligations to its Hungarian partner when it had occupied the country in March and arrested many Hungarian citizens. He blamed the Gestapo for dealing with the “Jewish problem” in an inhumane way and claimed that his nation had been forced to persecute the Jews.  The news spread like wildfire on what was a glorious autumn afternoon: Anna Porter has described the scenes…

…the sun was shining and the trees along the boulevards displayed their startling red, yellow and deep-purple colours as if the horrors of the past few weeks had not happened, as if the houses lining the avenues had not been turned into rubble. People came out of their cellars, put on their best clothes and walked, holding hands and greeting each other as in peacetime. Many Jews who had been in hiding paraded their newfound freedom; some tore the yellow stars off their breasts and ordered shots of pálinka in bars where they used to go, or dared to use a public telephone and take rides on streetcars where the tracks had not yet been bombed..

But the atmosphere of general euphoria did not last long. The Germans had listened into every conversation in Buda Castle and were not surprised by the attempt to break free. They were aware of the plan to bring two Hungarian regiments into the city and knew of the arming of the Jewish battalions. German troops and armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of Budapest and set up control points. A further announcement came over the waves: Horthy had been forced to abdicate, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross (Nazi) party has formed a government under its leader Ferenc Szálasi. Hungary was back in the war on the Axis side, and all anti-Jewish legislation was back in force. With the Arrow Cross in charge, the Jews realised that Eichmann would be back to complete their transportation and that random killings would be carried out by the Arrow Cross units themselves. Tom Leimdörfer recalls his family’s fears:

The lives of all of us were in immediate danger. What followed was six months of hell redeemed by some amazing bravery and kindness on the part of some who were willing to risk their lives for us.

Rudolph (Rézső) Kasztner, unlike the members of the Jewish Council, had no faith in Horthy’s protestations that he had been duped into allowing deportations in the first place and even less faith in Himmler’s change of heart. He pressed on with his negotiations for the lives of the remaining Jews of Budapest, Bratislava and Kolozsvár. In the late summer of 1944, a bloody insurrection erupted in Slovakia. A few parachutists from Britain and two Soviet airborne brigades also took part in the uprising, as did some Jewish partisans, including Rudolf Vrba, one of the authors of The Auschwitz Protocols. The uprising failed and led to further reprisals against Bratislava’s Jewish community. In Budapest itself, there was what Kasztner described as a brief lull in the terror in the early autumn. Nevertheless, there was a widespread belief that the Germans would pack up and go home. The cafés and restaurants were full, and no-one left even when the sirens sounded. By mid-October, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts were ready to execute Stalin’s order to take Budapest quickly. Arrow Cross newspapers accused the Jews of signalling bombers from rooftops, directing bombs to specific targets. Raoul Wallenberg had opened the door of the Swedish Embassy and directed his staff to hand out Swedish protection papers to all Jewish applicants. The certificates claimed that the holders were Swedish citizens awaiting exit visas. The number of Jews with official Swedish papers exceeded 4,500 by the end of October, and another three thousand fake Swedish certificates were handed out by the Rescue Committee and its Halutz workers. They all waited for permits to leave the country and be allowed into Palestine. The Swiss Red Cross had received over three million Swiss francs from the Jewish ‘Joint’ in the US to pay for food in the protected Star Houses bearing the Swedish colours and in the Columbus Street camp.

Victims, Survivors and Heroes:

Tom Leimdorfer, pictured here as a young child during the war, has narrated the effect of the events of 15 October on his family’s struggle to survive in Budapest, and especially in terms of their decision to go into hiding:

By now, my grandparents (Sári and Ármin) and my aunt Juci all lived in our flat. Juci’s husband Gyuri was in a labour camp. He had a dreadful accident there in March 1943 when he fell off a scaffolding. For some time, his life was in the balance, but he recovered albeit with a back injury which gave him much pain for the rest of his life. He was allowed home when he was in plaster recuperating, but was then back again in the forced labour camp outside Budapest. As the family wondered what to do on the evening of my eventful second birthday, Dr. Groh arrived. A kindly medical consultant, he was one of my grandfather’s customers who became a friend. He was a Roman Catholic who was appalled by the treatment of Jews and by the apparent acquiescence of his church. He said we were in danger and should leave our home immediately as Jews were being herded from ‘marked’ houses to designated ghettos. He insisted that we should all (15 of us!) go into hiding with his family even though that risked their lives.

Dr. Groh and his wife had six children. They made a room available for us and kept its shutters closed. For the next eight days we huddled together in that room, joining the family when there was nobody around who might report our presence. With Arrow Cross gangs and police raids everywhere, this was not a safe hiding place and the Groh family were at great risk. In spite of their protests, we crept back to our home one night to pick up some essentials and left for different destinations. Soon after we left, an Allied air raid hit the Groh’s house and tragically one of their daughters was killed. The room where we had been hiding was a pile of rubble.

My mother and I first headed across the Danube to the Pest side, to a house protected by the Swedish Embassy, where ‘Feri bácsi’ and ‘Manci néni’ (my grandparents younger siblings) were already staying. The Swiss and Swedish embassies as well as some churches had tried to set up ‘protected houses’ outside the overcrowded main Jewish ghettos. These were not always ‘safe’ as the Arrow Cross raids were unpredictable and (depending on the particular gang commander) would carry out atrocities without respect for any foreign diplomacy or even orders from their own Nazi puppet government, with its very thin veneer of legality. There were no more trains for Auschwitz, but there were the ‘death marches’ towards Austria organised by Eichmann as well as the random Arrow Cross raids. Diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg did all they could to thwart the murderous onslaught by distributing Swedish and Swiss passports and demanding safety for their ‘citizens’, by declaring houses as being under their protection and by threatening allied retribution after the war. With the Russian army advancing, this had some effect.

 

After the Arrow Cross coup d’état on 15 October, tens of thousands of Jews of Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches, and most of the remaining forced labourers under Hungarian Army command were deported to Bergen-Belsen. One of these forced labourers was the poet, Miklós Radnóti.

 

On the same day the War Cabinet met in London, 8 August to discuss the proposed evacuation of Jewish children from Budapest, Miklós Radnóti wrote the following from his work camp in the mountains above Zagubica in Yugoslavia:

ROOT 

Root, now, gushes with its power, 

rain to drink and earth to grow,

and its dream is white as snow.

Earthed, it heaves above the earthly,

crafty in its clamberings,

arm clamped like a cable’s strings.

On its wrists pale worms are sleeping,

and its ankles worms caress;

world is but  wormeatenness.

Root, though, for the world cares nothing,

thrives and labours there below,

labours for the leafthick bough;

marvels at the bough it nurses,

liquors succulent and sweet,

feeds celestially sweet.

Root is what I am, rootpoet,

here at home among the worms,

finding here the poem’s terms.

I the root was once the flower,

under these dim tons my bower,

comes the shearing of the thread,

deathsaw wailing overhead.

Radnóti’s words continued to be prophetic. The death saw continued to ‘wail overhead’ for many caught up in the Hungarian holocaust. Miklós Radnóti himself was one of these, and one of Hungary’s greatest poets of the twentieth century. Born in Budapest in 1909, from its very beginning, Radnóti’s life was overshadowed by tragedy. At his birth, both his mother and twin brother died. The ‘Numerus Clausus Act’ of September 1920, the first anti-Semitic law in Europe, required that the number of Jews in Hungarian universities be reduced to six per cent. Barred from the University of Budapest, Radnóti enrolled at Szeged University, where he read French and Hungarian literature and was awarded a PhD in 1934. In response to the country’s shift to the right, there were a number of groups arising on the centre-left, liberal, populist and social democratic. Continuing in the liberal tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungarian poets, Radnóti was among the young people in favour of social change. He joined the Art Forum of Szeged Youth, a populist movement addressing the plight of Hungarian peasants, supporting agrarian reform. Drawing on Hungarian folklore, they identified with the national poet Sándor Petőfi and musicians like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.  Inspired by the left-wing idealism common among writers and artists of the time, both inside Hungary and from outside, Radnóti cherished the values he developed in this group for the rest of his life. He also insisted on his identity as a Catholic and a Hungarian poet for the rest of his life, though his country branded him as a Jew. Once identified as such, regardless of his own detentions, he was effectively sentenced to death.

Despite his darkest premonitions, Radnóti’s work also continued to flourish, especially after his marriage to his high school sweetheart, Fanni Gyarmati, who had been the central focus of his love poems since the late twenties. By the late thirties, he was widely recognised in literary circles. However, within three years, from 1938-41, three sequences of anti-Jewish laws were introduced. The first two defined who was Jewish and regulated the percentage of Jewish participation in various economic activities. The third created a forced labour system that became responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including that of Radnóti himself. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg on Poland, he anticipated the full-scale destruction of Hungary, and became sick in the stomach, ridden by insomnia and near to collapse. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to produce work of great innovation in the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. In 1938 he published a collection of poems, Steep Road, and in 1940, three more collections, including a volume of prose writing, a selection of translations and his own Selected Poetry. Two more volumes followed in his lifetime.

He was caught up in the whirlwind of the Hungarian Holocaust which followed the Nazi takeover of the country in March 1944. He suffered unspeakable deprivation and died a horrifying, anonymous death. Taken by a freight train from Hungary to Yugoslavia in May 1944, he was shot and buried in a mass grave with twenty-one other forced labourers, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November. He left behind poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate Hungarian culture. Many of them convey moods and perceptions untainted by the horrors, while others offer first-hand accounts of the wholesale murder. Taken as a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti’s imagination and the obligation he felt to give testimony to an existence engulfed by catastrophe. As well as being masterworks in the annals of the poetry of the last century, they are also documents of destruction. Through them, Radnóti subverted the horror of the Holocaust, in helping us to understand it.

Much of what he started, however, he was unable to finish, as from 1940 he was called up three times into slave labour units. He was worked to exhaustion in coalfields, sugar plants and ammunition factories during his first two call-ups and in his last, he was taken to the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia. However, under pressure from Soviet and Partisan forces, the German Army was forced to evacuate the Balkans. Radnóti’s squad was force-marched back to Hungary, to be transferred from there to slave-labour camps in Germany. Cold weather, exhaustion, hunger, savage beatings and killings meant that of marching column which contained 3,600 men on leaving Bor, only eight hundred crossed the Hungarian border. Marching on through Western Hungary in November, Radnóti began to lose his strength. His feet were covered with open blisters, such that he could no longer walk. It was probably on 8 November that the squad reached a brickyard in a town near Győr, where they spent the night. Next day three NCOs of the Hungarian Armed Forces separated Radnóti and twenty-one others from the column. Crowding them onto two borrowed carts, they took them first to a hospital, then to a school housing refugees. Neither had room for them, so the soldiers took them to the dam near Abda, where they were ordered to dig a ditch. The guards then shot them one by one into the ditch.

When his body was exhumed a year and a half later, his last poems, stained by dirt and blood, were found in the pocket of his raincoat. Within a few years of the end of the war, his poems, including these resurrected ones, became well-known to Hungarians, exalting and moving millions of them in the continuing gloom which followed. Radnóti’s place among the Hungarian masters was confirmed. Until now, they have not been so well-known outside Hungary, but Ozsváth and Turner’s recent volume seeks to call the attention of the English-speaking world to them, giving them the means to resound… and communicate the vital, immediate sense which characterizes the original. Radnóti’s last volume of poetry, Foamy Sky, was published posthumously in 1946, a volume which did not then contain the last five poems. Only after his body was exhumed were these five poems found, inscribed in the small camp notebook (pages of which are shown below) he had obtained in Bor. Two years later, the entire and complete volume was re-published. Since then it has been re-published many times in Hungary, but never in English, until now. Ozsváth concludes:

…the unforgettable formal music of his poems not only preserves his most personal perceptions but also echoes the lives and culture of all those who were murdered in the Holocaust.  And while they give account of the darkest hours of history, they also demonstrate the tremendous power of the human spirit to triumph over death.

The Swiss & Swedish Missions:

Meanwhile, the remaining Jewish population of Budapest were living at the same subsistence level as the general population, despite the claims of the political far right that they were having a cushy time. As a result of the persistent removals of rights, men away on compulsory forced labour, and the deaths of many in the process, mass impoverishment and demoralisation were more and more in evidence. Applications to officialdom from widows who had lost husbands went unanswered. The Jews’ yellow ration cards bought less food of inferior quality in the shops.

The Swedish and Swiss embassies and their diplomats Wallenberg, Anger and Lutz did all they could to ameliorate these conditions and to protect the Jews against recurrent threats of deportation, providing safe houses, exemptions from wearing yellow stars and from forced labour in the army. Wallenberg was appaled at the helplessness of the Jews crammed into the starred houses. Those in need were quickly given financial assistance. A wide range of Jews doing forced labour, who were reduced to rags, were helped and enabled to obtain shoes and clothing. A separate purchasing section of the Swedish Embassy was set up for this purpose.

Wallenberg had arrived in Budapest on 9 July with a brief as embassy secretary of assessing and reporting on conditions in Hungary with a view to the organisation of further ‘humanitarian’ action. The director of the American War Refugee Bureau (WRB) and of OSS, Iver C Olsen, had chosen him for the mission in Hungary. He also had the backing of the US ambassador in Stockholm and the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He was charged with a number of tasks: in addition to reporting on the situation in the country, he was to build up and run a Swedish relief organisation, and to support persecuted Jews and registered persons in Budapest with a view to their rescue. He was to collaborate closely with the International Red Cross, thereby to organise escape routes in various directions. In this matter, from mid-July, he called on the services of Carl Lutz at the Swiss Consulate, from whom he learnt of the talks between the officials of the ‘Reich’ and the Hungarian authorities, and of the purpose and text of the Swiss protective documents.

Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s Vice-Consul, worked from the US Legation, declaring seventy-two buildings in Budapest as annexes of the Swiss Legation, thereby saving over sixty thousand Jews. On 24 July, Lutz moved the Emigration Section to a building in the old business quarter of Pest. It was granted extra-territorial status, and the series of numbered emigration documents prepared in its offices was called a ‘collective passport’. This originally contained the names of 7,800 ’emigrating’ Hungarian Jews. From October, Swiss protective letters (Schutzbrief) in Hungarian and German were also issued. With the assistance of Zionist members of the opposition, these were steadily circulated to the nominated Jewish families, who also received certificates like the one pictured below which they could display on doors and in windows to declare their protection by the Swiss Consulate. When Szálasi came to power, these were mostly of symbolic value. Lutz’s wife, Gertrud Frankhauser was also devoted to this humanitarian work, and both of them were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem later in their lives.

Above: Daisy Lászlo, as named on her letter of protection

(to be continued)

The Introduction of ‘The Final Solution’ to Hungary:

By 1944 it was clear that the Hungarians had backed the wrong side in the war, despite the extension of the country’s territories that its support for the Axis Powers had enabled since 1938. After their forces had been crushed on the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans, Regent Horthy had tried to manoeuvre a way out of the war. In March, however, when Hitler had learnt of Horthy’s plans, he forced the Regent to accept an occupation of the country and the application of the ‘Final Solution’ to Hungary’s territories through the deportation of the entire Jewish population, as enumerated in 1941, to Auschwitz.

 

Four gas chambers were fully operation by 1943 and were working at full stretch by the time 437,000 Hungarians were brought there from early May and killed, within a matter of eight weeks, by early July. At the camp, between four and eight hundred people could be packed into huts that had originally been designed for forty-two horses, in which lice and flees were endemic.

SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Adolf Eichmann led the special force that deported the Jews from Hungary.

He later boasted to one of his cronies that he would ‘jump laughing into his grave’ for his part in the deaths of four million Jews. In a 1961 diary entry after his conviction in Israel for genocide, Eichmann wrote, chillingly:

I saw the eeriness of the death machinery, wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they re-wound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time; this I saw.

Ghettoisation, Deportation & Collaboration:

Above: The Dohány Street Synagogue, at the centre of the Jewish ghetto in 1944-45.

On the morning of 3 April, British and American aircraft bombed Budapest for the first time since the beginning of the war. In response, the Hungarian security police demanded that the Jewish Council provide five hundred apartments for Christians who had been affected by the raid. Those Jews moving out of their homes were to be concentrated in apartment buildings in an area between the National Theatre and the Dohány Street Synagogue (above). The following day, 4 April, Sztójay’s minister László Baky and Lieutenant-Colonel László Ferenczy of the gendarmerie met to firm up plans for the ghettoisation and deportation of the Jews of Hungary. All Jews, irrespective of age, sex or illness, were to be concentrated into ghettos and schedules were to be would be set for their deportation to Poland. The few people who were still employed in armaments production or in the mines were temporarily spared, but only until suitable replacements could be found for them. Each regional office would be responsible for its own actions. The “rounding up” of the Jews was to be carried out by the local police and the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie units. If necessary, the police would assist the gendarmerie in urban districts by providing armed help.  It took until 16 April for the full directive and extensive explanations to be typed in multiple copies and sent to local authorities, but the ghettoisation had already begun on 7 April. The orders were marked “secret” and bore the signature of László Baky. He declared:

The Royal Hungarian government will cleanse the country of Jews within a short time. I hereby order the cleansing to be conducted district by district. Jews are to be taken to designated collection camps regardless of gender and age.

This was the basis on which the Hungarian government agreed that the Gestapo could organise the removal of the roughly 450,000 Jews from the provinces, but not the 200,000 from Budapest. It was Adolf Eichmann’s task to organise the liquidation of Hungarian Jews. Between 7 April 1944 and 8 July 1944, we know (from the meticulous records kept by Eichmann’s SS) that 437,402 men, women and children of all ages were forced to leave their homes, first herded in to ‘collection camps’ or ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz. They were to be transported in 148 long trains of cattle wagons. At the end of April,the Jewish leaders of Hungary, together with the Hungarian leaders of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran Churches, in addition to the Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, received a detailed report about the deportation to Auschwitz, but kept their silence, thus keeping the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and their Christian neighbours in ignorance, and enabling the success of Eichmann’s timetable. The reality that no one in the villages knew anything about the plan in advance of it being carried out is borne out by the testimony of the Apostag villagers detailed below. Few survived, and of those who did, even fewer returned to their former homes. Once gathered in the collection camps, they were effectively doomed to annihilation, even before they boarded the trains.

Allied Inaction:

Although it was logistically possible for the Allies to have bombed Auschwitz by air from Foggia in Northern Italy from early 1944, the decision was taken not to bomb a camp that the Allies had known since 1942 was being used for the systematic extermination of Polish Jews. While it was evident that the unmarked underground gas chambers and crematoria might well have escaped, it is argued that it might have been possible to bomb the railway lines running to and from the camp, and would anyway have been worth the attempt. French railway lines, stations, depots, sidings and marshalling yards were principal targets during the pre-D-Day bombing operations, after all. The possibility of killing large numbers of inmates was a major consideration, of course, but a much more regularly used argument was that the best way to help the Jews was to defeat the Germans as quickly as possible, for which the RAF and USAAF needed to bomb military and industrial targets instead. On 26 June 1944, the US War Department replied to a request from American Jewish organisations for the bombing of the Kosice (Kassa) – Preskov railway line between Hungary and Auschwitz by saying that it considered the most effective relief to the victims … is the early defeat of the Axis. By then, the opportunity to save the remainder of the Hungarian Jews from outside Budapest had telescoped to little more than a fortnight, since the last deportations were on 9 July and photo-reconnaissance, weather analysis and operational planning would together have taken longer than fifteen days. One historian has concluded that … Even if it had been successfully bombed, Jews would simply have been transported over a different route.

In any case, with the Allied Chiefs still concentrating on the battle for Normandy (Caen only finally fell on 9 July), the bombing of Auschwitz and/ or Kosice was not likely to get much high-level consideration. Nonetheless, the camp inmates desperately wanted the camps to be bombed, even if many of them would have been killed in the process. When the nearby IG Farben factory was attacked, killing forty Jews and fifteen SS, the inmates quietly celebrated.

The first transports from Hungary to Auschwitz began in early May 1944 and continued even as Soviet troops approached. The Hungarian government was solely in charge of the Jews’ transportation up to the northern border. The Hungarian commander of the Kassa railroad station meticulously recorded the trains heading to Auschwitz with their place of departure and the number of people inside them. The first train went through Kassa on May 14th. On a typical day, there were three or four trains, with ten to fourteen thousand people on each. There were 109 trains during these 33 days through to 16 June, as many as six trains each day. Between June 25th and 29th, there were a further ten trains, then an additional eighteen trains between 5-9th July. By then, nearly 440,000 victims had been deported from the Hungarian towns and countryside, according to the official German reports. Another ten trains were sent to Auschwitz via other routes from Budapest, while seven trains containing over twenty thousand people went to Strasshof at the end of June, including two from Baja, on the lower Danube.

The Deportation of Rural Jewish Communities:

The village of Apostag is in the County of Bács-Kiskun, occupying an area of thirty-two square kilometres, and with a population of just over 2,100. It is located close to the eastern bank of the River Danube, to the south of Budapest. It is both a village and a municipality. There has been a Synagogue in Apostag since 1768, by which time the Jewish population had developed into a sizeable, settled community, worthy of its own place of worship.  The Jews had first settled in this part of Hungary at the beginning of the Turkish occupation, following the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

By the end of the Great War and the beginning of the living memory of those giving oral evidence, there were some 2,300 inhabitants of the village and 104 Jewish families. Some of them owned land and some rented it, so not all the Jewish families were rich, and some remained quite poor. There were between one and three children in the families (smaller than the average ‘Magyar’ family). Twenty-four councillors were elected for the Village Council, one for each group of ten families. These representatives needed to be fairly wealthy landowners to qualify for election and the fact that twelve of these councillors were Jewish also shows how integral a part of the leadership of the village they had become.

One of these councillors, János, had joined the army in 1940 and was a soldier until 1948. He was only given leave once during this time, and this, crucially and perhaps poignantly, happened to be in May 1944. While he was at home, the Jewish families were taken away from the village. There is no evidence that anyone in the village, including ‘regular’ soldiers like János, had any prior knowledge of the Nazi deportation plan. Even if they had heard something, there were only two cars in the village in 1944, so there was no real possibility of escaping abroad in the days and nights before it was so rapidly and ruthlessly enacted. As it happened, János was surprised by the speed with which the Hungarian Gendarmerie and ‘Military Police’ came in and took the Jewish people to Kalocsa. No one knew where they were being taken, or how long they would stay there, or what would happen to them. They were told to gather what they needed and they had to leave this village. Two little girls, aged 9 and 11, were somehow left behind, and they were able to stay on for a while, but one day the soldiers came and took them to Kalocsa as well. He was able to talk with the Hungarian soldiers who said that they weren’t very happy to take the girls away, but they had to do this. In 1991, the surviving villagers recalled:

When the Jews had to leave this village, Anna saw a little girl in someone’s lap, crying, ‘don’t let me go away, I want to stay here’, but she had to go as well. Everybody had to leave this village. When the Jews had to leave the village, they didn’t want to leave their houses and were wailing at the walls. They were kissing the walls with their lips and caressing them with their hands. The children were crying. It was really terrible. Some of the Christian families who lived close to the Jews went to the Jewish houses to say goodbye, and it was a very sad event, such a sad thing that they cannot forget it.

The Library in the Village House (former synagogue), Apostag, 1991.

All the witnesses agreed in their evidence that the village people who weren’t Jewish couldn’t do anything to save their Jewish neighbours. The villagers also told us how they had watched from the nearby woods, in secret disbelief, as the soldiers took the Jews away in May 1944. They went on carts from the village to Kalocsa, which although further south of Budapest along the Danube, was apparently used as an assembly point for the Hungarian Jews being sent to the concentration camps. The villagers all stated that they did not know this at the time. So, when the Jewish people were taken away from the village, nobody knew anything about where they would go. They went by horse and cart to Kalocsa, some with their non-Jewish servants driving, so unaware were they of the ghastly reality which awaited them. All anyone knew was that they would stay for a while in Kalocsa, but nothing else. Of the roughly six hundred Jews deported from the village, only six ever returned after the war, before emigrating.

In total, 147 trains were sent to Auschwitz, where 90% of the people were exterminated on arrival. Because the crematoria couldn’t cope with the number of corpses, special pits were dug near them, where bodies were simply burned. It has been estimated that one-third of the murdered victims at Auschwitz were Hungarian. For most of this time period, 12,000 Jews were delivered to Auschwitz in a typical day. Photographs taken at Auschwitz were found after the war showing the arrival of Jews from Hungary at the camp (see above and below).

The devotion to the cause of the ‘final solution’ of the Hungarian Gendarmerie surprised even Eichmann himself, who supervised the operation with only twenty officers and a staff of only a hundred, including drivers, cooks, etc.

Very few members of the Catholic or Protestant clergy raised their voices against sending the Jews to their death. A notable exception was Bishop Áron Márton, in his sermon in Kolozsvár (now Cluj Napoca in Romania) on 18 May. But the Catholic Primate of Hungary, Serédi, decided not to issue a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of the Jews. By contrast, later that summer, when the fate of the Hungarian Jews became known in the West, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in a letter to his Foreign Secretary dated 11 July 1944, wrote:

There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world….

Churchill in France in 1944

Above: Hungarian Jews from the Carpathian Basin continue to arrive at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

Even so, in the summer of 1944, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry continued to defend its actions on The Jewish Question against the mounting international outcry against the genocide, led by the United States. According to the Hungarian government, the Hungarian nation was defending its own against the…

… greatest danger… a much greater danger than that presented to the white population of the USA by the negroes or the Japanese. As the Soviet army approached the frontiers of Hungary the defeatist propaganda and disruptive activity of the Jews had had to be stopped. They had therefore been segregated and set to useful work in Hungary and elsewhere. A large number of Jews had been transferred to Germany as a workforce, as had for years also been the case with Christian Hungarians.

The Rounding-up of the Roma:

Above: Rounding up the Roma & a labour detail in 1944

The ‘Christian’ Hungarians referred to may well have been members of the Roma communities. Alongside the anti-Jewish actions, the Roma were also herded into labour camps in several counties, including Szolnok and Bács-Kiskun, which were established on some of the larger farms. In June, those Roma designated as unreliable were moved to special concentration camps within Hungary. These were established near the bigger provincial towns, and the settled Roma communities in Szolnok, Csongrád, Bács-Kiskun, Pest, Heves and Nógrád counties were moved to camps in Szekszárd, Veménd, Pécsvárad, Baja and Nagykáta. A sizeable number of Roma and Sinti ‘gipsies’, in the tens of thousands, were also sent to their deaths in Auschwitz and other camps.

The Role of the Regency & the Reserve Corps in ‘saving’ the Jews of Budapest:

The idea that any member of the Hungarian government, including the Regent (pictured left), was unaware of the scale and nature of the deportations is fanciful, to say the least, as is the idea that Horthy was responsible for stopping the deportations from the countryside and/ or the capital. It is true that Horthy ordered the suspension of all deportations on July 6, but by then the Regent was virtually powerless. This is demonstrated by the fact that another 45,000 Jews were deported from the Trans-Danubian region and the outskirts of Budapest to Auschwitz after this day. Domokos Szent-Iványi (below right), an officer in the Regency and a leading member of the Hungarian Independence Movement, wrote of Horthy’s motivation:

The Regent’s idea was not to abdicate since that would end in the destruction of the lives of many thousands of people, first of all, Hungarian Jews. His old thesis was that he was still captain of the ship of State and that his duty was to remain on the bridge until the ship was saved or went down, of course with him, the Commander of the ship…

Macartney, a fellow British diplomat, recorded in his memoirs that:

Even the Jews have reason to be thankful that he decided as he did. He did not save the Jews outside Budapest (and it may well be that a more subtle politician or one less easily influenced, could have done more than Horthy did in this direction). But he saved the Jews of Budapest, and no other man could have done it…

Above: The Royal Palace on Castle Hill in Buda, which housed the Regency offices, facing the Parliament House and Government offices across the Danube in Pest; taken from Gellért Hill.

The Jews of Budapest itself, numbering about 230,000, had not yet been touched except that they had been required to move into Jewish Houses, but neither had they yet been saved. The negotiations between the Jewish leaders and the Germans were still going on. Although at one time Eichmann offered to suspend the deportations, or at least the gassings, pending the conclusion of a bargain, his price was far higher than anything which the Hungarian Jews could pay. Most of the negotiations concerned relatively small numbers – in the first place, only 750 emigrants for Palestine. Later, larger numbers were mentioned, partly in connection with a remarkable offer made by the Germans to trade the Jews for war material. The Allies rejected this, and in the end, the Kasztner-Brand negotiations brought the release of only a few thousand Jews. A few Jews bought their way out privately, and these included one group whose fate involved issues of nation-wide importance. These were the inter-linked families of the Weiss, the Kornfelds, the Chorins and the Mauthners, who between them owned not only the Weiss Manfred Works on Csepel, by far the biggest heavy industrial plant in Hungary, which alone employed over forty thousand workers, but also a very large number of other assets.

Above: Map (with Hungarian legend) showing the extent of the ‘Holocaust of European Jewry’, 1933-45, with deaths shown as a percentage of the total Jewish population, the main centres of the Jewish population in 1933 (red spots and squares) and the main concentration/ extermination camps (black spots).

In the spring and early summer of 1944, those who were interested in what was happening to Jews throughout Eastern Europe had relatively broad access to accurate information, whether from Hungarian soldiers returning from the front, or from refugees escaping from Galicia into Hungary. However, the plain fact is that these pieces of information did not interest a significant part, perhaps the majority, of both the non-Jewish and Jewish population of Budapest. Hungarian Jews looked down on other eastern European Jews and were unconcerned as to their fate. In any case, open resistance on the scale seen in Warsaw seemed futile and their faith in Hungarian society was not completely dead. Samuel Stern, the leader of the Jewish Council in Budapest, had no illusions about Eichmann’s aims, as he later stated:

I knew about what they were doing in all the occupied countries of Central Europe and I knew that their operation was a long series of murders and robberies… I knew their habits, actions, and their terrible fame.

János Horváth (born 1921, in Cece, Hungary), was an economist, becoming an MP 1945-7, who then emigrated to the US where he became founder-President of the Kossúth Foundation in New York. He returned to Hungary in 1997 and became an MP again after 1998 when he recalled how the Budapest Zionists had…

… got hold of the Auschwitz testimonies written by two Slovakian Jews, who had been able to escape from the death camp in early 1944. (They) had it translated and sent to diplomats and Jewish leaders abroad and in Hungary, as well as to Regent Horthy’s daughter-in-law, Ilona. This was the first time… as late as spring 1944, when political leaders in Europe and America read authentic personal testimony about systematic Nazi extermination going on in Auschwitz.

The saving of most of the Budapest Jews was made possible by Horthy’s reserve corps, the élite armoured battalion of Esztergom marching on Budapest on 5 July under the command of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús, dispersing and disarming pro-Nazi ‘gendarmerie’ units. This was a direct result of Horthy’s stunned reading of the testimonies…

Five years ago, on the seventieth anniversary of the German occupation of Hungary, Frank Koszorús, Jr,  the Colonel’s son and a lawyer in Washington DC, founder of the Hungarian American Coalition and President of the American Hungarian Federation of Wahington DC, wrote a clear statement of the established ‘facts’ of the Holocaust in Hungary; in the March 2014 edition of The Hungarian Review, he recorded the following view of these associations on the events of 1944:

The American Hungarian Federation, representing a cross-section of the Hungarian American community, strongly supports historical accuracy, completeness and integrity… Considering the extent of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, great care should be taken to avoid actions that serve no purpose other than to open old wounds and needlessly exacerbate controversies. Care should also be taken to objectively discuss all aspects of a period and not abuse history for political purposes.

Considering these general principles, the Federation believes:

First, that any attempt to whitewash the catastrophe of 19 March 1944 – when Hitler occupied Hungary – and the ensuing deportation and murder of 550,000 Hungarian Jews or the involvement of Hungarian authorities cannot be tolerated.

… the Federation further believes that rescue efforts by non-Jewish Hungarians who stood up against evil, such as Col. Ferenc Koszorús who intervened with his loyal troops to prevent the deportation of the Jews of Budapest in July 1944, must not be omitted, denied, forgotten or minimised. Such rescue efforts must also be acknowledged, taught and remembered for the sake of historical accuracy and to serve as examples for this and future generations of how one should behave in the face of barbarism that characterised the Nazis and their collaborators…

Map showing the ghettos, main concentration zones and deportation routes in Hungary.

The figure for the total death toll in the Holocaust quoted above takes account of the estimate that about half of the Jews of Budapest eventually became the victims of the ‘Arrow Cross’ Terror of the winter of 1944-45. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, publicly acknowledged the role of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg, who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszorús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

Above: Himmler and his journal.

In reality, the Sztójay government continued to ignore the Regent and rescheduled the date of deportation of the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz to August 27th. What prevented the resumption was that the Romanians switched sides on 23 August 1944, causing huge problems for the German military, and it was on Heinrich Himmler’s orders that the cancellation of further deportations from Hungary was enacted on 25 August. Horthy finally dismissed Prime Minister Sztójay and his government on 29 August. By that time, the deportations from the Hungarian and sub-Carpathian villages had been completed, however.

The Jewish Council, Samuel Stern & Kasztner’s Train:

In 2012, Zsolt Zágoni edited and published a notebook written in 1944 by Rózsi Stern, a Jewish woman who escaped from Budapest. Written in Hungarian, it was translated into English by Gábor Bánfalvi, and edited by Carolyn Bánfalvi. The notebook is of primary historical significance because it summarises, in forty-four pages of handwriting (published in facsimile), the events beginning from the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 until the author’s arrival at Bergen-Belsen. It describes the general scene in Hungary, the looting of her family home, and the deportation of the Jews from Budapest. Rózsi Stern was the daughter of Samuel Stern. In March 1944, he was the leader of the group which was obliged to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann, the SS man in charge of the final solution in Hungary, about the fate of the Jewish community. Given the controversy surrounding these events, and Stern’s life, it could be seen as a controversial document. However, as Zágoni himself points out in his ‘Foreword’,

… the importance of the notebook is that an everyday person – realizing the extraordinariness of the events – decides to tell her story, her fate, and the dramatic days of her family’s life and the black weeks and months of in Hungary … while she tries to understand the incomprehensible.

Rózsi’s account goes on to describe what happened to close relatives and neighbours in Budapest, as well as to the Jews in the countryside and provincial towns, where the Jews were first of all forced into ghettos and then deported or sent to forced labour camps as part of the army. Ghettos were then made in Budapest as well, and designated buildings were marked with a yellow star hanging on the front gate. In the best cases, friends and relatives were able to move in together, five or six of people to one room. Rózsi’s family had to move because their house was designated as a yellow star building, and they occupied his apartment on the first floor, though all the other Jewish people staying there were soon moved on to another apartment house. Together with their father, there were nine of them living in the apartment by June 1944. Her husband, Gyuri, decided they should leave for Palestine, but her seventy-year-old father could not be persuaded to leave his responsibilities, and Rózsi could not imagine parting with him and her mother’s grave. She would also have to leave her husband’s family, including her eighty-year-old mother-in-law. In the end, she decided to leave with her husband and daughter, accepting the place reserved for her on Kasztner’s Train. They were supposed to spend eight to ten days in a German camp outside Vienna and then travel through Germany and Spain to reach Palestine. The question was whether the Germans would keep their word and allow them to reach the Spanish border. The deportees on the Kasztner train numbered 1,684. Rózsa and Gyuri, her husband, were among the ‘privileged ones’ as she described them, those who ‘had a little hope to survive’:

One day my father told us that if we wanted to leave Budapest, there would be one more chance to make ‘aliyah’ to Palestine with the Zionists. This was the particular group I already mentioned. Gyuri, without any hesitation, decided to take the trip, even though this was also very dangerous. He couldn’t take all the stress and humiliation any more, or that so many of our good acquaintances had been taken into custody at Pestvidéki… We received news every hour: in Újpest and Kispest they are already deporting people, and on July 5th it will already be Budapest’s turn… In spite of the immunity that we were entitled through my father – and the protection of the German soldier who was ordered to live with us by the Gestapo (he was protecting us from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie) – Gyuri decided that we should take this opportunity and leave. 

Above: Samu Stern’s memoir written in 1945, before he died on 9 June 1946, with his photo on the cover.

Despite this decision, they were still hesitating on the eve of their departure, 29 June, when ‘Mr K.’, Resző Kasztner, who started this aliyah, came to see them and brought news that forced them to make a final decision. He also tried to persuade ‘Samu’ Stern to leave, because, he said, “if there are no mice, there is no need for a cat either.” He reassured them that he had a firm promise that they would reach their destination and that the best proof of this was that he and his whole family would be going with this ‘aliyah’. Unlike his family, Samu Stern decided to stay in Budapest, and somehow survived the terror of the Arrow Cross rule of the winter of 1944-45. However, when the Soviet troops arrived, he was accused of collaboration. The police started an investigation against him, but he died in 1946 before his case could go to court. His activity in 1944, manoeuvring between cooperation and collaboration, is still controversial, as is that of Kasztner and Brand, but it is not the topic under discussion here. However, when considering the question of his anti-Zionism in relation to the potential for Jewish resistance, we need also to notice the total indifference of the Hungarian authorities in Budapest towards the fate of the Jewish population.

On 30 June, her father, accompanied by the German soldier who had been billeted with them, took them by taxi to the camp with their luggage. After two hours trying to ensure their safety, he left them at the internment camp, the synagogue on Aréna Street, which was already crowded with people, mostly those saved from the brick factories in the countryside. Finally, after an anxious day standing in the pouring rain, they boarded carriages ready to depart:

After a two-hour carriage ride, we arrived at the Rákosrendező train station – on the outskirts of Budapest – totally soaking wet. It was starting to get dark by the time we occupied the wagon that was assigned to us.The suitcases were piled up against one of the walls of the wagon, and the backpacks were hanging on nails all around. In the meantime, people from other camps arrived, so by the time everyone got on there were seventy-two of us in our wagon… The wagon was only supposed to hold six horses or forty people…

We were sitting on our blankets, as tightly packed as we could be. There were twenty-six… children in our wagon, including sixteen orphans with one guardian lady… It was a miserable scene, especially seeing so many mentally worn-down people. Some people tried to stretch out, which was almost impossible, and others tried to make room for their legs while they were sitting.  Little children were crying from fear and because of the unusual environment; the bigger ones were fatigued, sleeping and leaning on one another. The adults, worn out from the stress they had gone through, were arguing or weeping in silence.

Everybody was wondering how long we would be able to take this. And we took it, and even worse… The wagon had no toilet, of course, so our human needs could only be taken care of when the train stopped for awhile and we got permission to get off, which was not too easy either as the wagon was very high, so women and children could only get off and on with help and that could take some time… People jumped off the train like animals and shamelessly took care of their needs… because there wasn’t enough time to get farther away…

On Saturday July 1st at 10 a.m., we departed (from Ferencváros Station). We all rushed to the wagon’s only small window to wave a last goodbye to Budapest and everything and everyone that meant our life until now. Tears silently dripped down our faces and our hearts were broken from the pain. Maybe this was the last time we would ever see the Danube, the bridges, and the whole beautiful city where we were born and raised. The youth began to sing the “we’re going to find a new homeland” Hebrew song. Perhaps they will find it, but the older ones cannot be replanted.

The train moved at a quick pace to the border at Mosonmagyaróvár, arriving there at 6 p.m. During the night a baby girl was born, with the help of the doctors in the carriage. They stayed there for four days, built latrines, washed fully and washed their clothes, and bought provisions from local villagers. Their German guards protected them from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie. On 6 July the train was directed to Komárom and rumours spread that they were being taken to Auschwitz. However, they arrived at the station in the Vienna suburbs in the evening of 7 July and were then moved on to Linz by the next morning, having been told that the camps around Vienna were full. Here they were disembarked and disinfected, fearing that they were to be gassed. When they departed, having been thoroughly humiliated and terrorised by the guards, they had little idea where they were going or how many more nights they would spend on the wagon:

The train sped towards Hannover. We stopped one or two times because there were airstrikes., but this didn’t even affect us anymore. We had submitted to our fate and were totally indifferent.

We arrived on the 9th, a Sunday morning, at an improvised forest station near Hannover. It was a huge prison camp. We washed ourselves in big troughs and after an hour’s break, we sped further towards our destination, Bergen-Belsen.

A whole bunch of German soldiers were waiting for the train, holding enormous bloodhounds on leashes… They yelled their orders harshly. They counted us by putting us in lines of five. This took about an hour and a half in the strong afternoon sun, and we almost collapsed from fatigue. After this, we walked nine kilometres. Sick and old people and our luggage were carried on trucks… We reached an immense camp. There were prisoners here of all types and nationalities: Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Jewish. Each barrack block was separated with wire fencing. We got block 11. When we arrived, everyone was registered, and then they assigned our accommodation. Men and women were separated… 

About 160 of us were placed in one barrack, as an average. It was a dark wooden building with one small window (without lighting in the evening) and three-level wooden bunk beds above each other. Lydia and I got bottom beds so I wouldn’t have to climb ladders. Between the beds there was just enough room to turn around. It was very sad to move in here, but we were so tired that we were happy to have the possibility to finally stretch out. However, this only happened much later. Once everybody had a bed, we received an order to line up… Lining up took place in the yard, with people grouped by barracks. The first lineup took two hours in the pouring rain, with us wearing thin summer clothes without hats…

The first dinner was next. They brought soup in pots. We stood in a line individually with the mess tins we were given. Unfortunately, no matter how hungry we were, we couldn’t swallow this slop. In the backpack we still had a little bit of food left from home, but we really had to be careful with that because our prospects were not very encouraging… we had to lie down wet, without blankets. It was a divine miracle that we didn’t catch pneumonia…

It is hard to imagine sleeping in these physical and mental conditions. Sometimes a child would start crying, suppressed sobbing and deep sighs, for the old life and loved ones we left behind. You could hear other people snoring, and the different emotional and physical manifestations of 160 people. There was not a single minute of silence. Crowds of bedbugs and fleas rushed to welcome us. However, towards the morning, sleep still overcame me because I was greatly exhausted.

That is where the notebook ends. On 1 August 1944, Lídia (pictured above) sent a postcard, which still exists, from Bergen-Belsen to her fiancée,  in a labour camp in Northern Transylvania. It told him that she and her parents were ‘doing well’ and had ‘the best prospects’ of continuing on their journey. Apparently, a ‘Collective Pass’ allowing group border crossing, stamped by the Swiss Embassy in Budapest and signed by its Consul, Carl Lutz, was what eventually secured their onward journey and border crossing. After their round-about route to Bergen-Belsen and their horrific sojourn at the death camp, the refugees were then taken in two groups to Switzerland. One of these groups, comprising 318, including Rózsa Stern and her husband and relatives, arrived in Switzerland relatively quickly, while the other could only pass the German-Swiss border in December 1944. About a dozen people died on the way. Rózsi Stern (Bamberger) died in 1953, the year after her husband György.

Rezső Kasztner’s personal courage cannot be doubted since he returned from Switzerland to Nazi Germany to rescue more people before he himself emigrated to Palestine, where he was assassinated by Zionist extremists in 1957.

(to be continued…)

From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944

In 2012, Zsolt Zágoni edited and published a notebook written in 1944 by Rózsi Stern, a Jewish woman who escaped from Budapest. Written in Hungarian, it was translated into English by Gábor Bánfalvi, and edited by Carolyn Bánfalvi. The notebook is of primary historical significance because it summarises, in forty-four pages of handwriting (published in facsimile), the events beginning from the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 until the author’s arrival at Bergen-Belsen. It describes the general scene in Hungary, the looting of her family home, and the deportation of the Jews from Budapest.

Also, Rózsi Stern was the daughter of Samu Stern, one of the elected leaders of the Hungarian Jewish Council in Budapest during the latter stages of the war under German occupation. In March 1944 he was the leader of the group which was obliged to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann, the SS man in charge of the final solution in Hungary, about the fate of the Jewish community. Given the controversy surrounding these events, and Stern’s life, it could be seen as a controversial document. However, as Zágoni himself points out in his ‘Forword’,

… the importance of the notebook is that an everyday person – realizing the extraordinariness of the events – decides to tell her story, her fate, and the dramatic days of her family’s life and the black weeks and months of in Hungary … while she tries to understand the incomprehensible.

I have decided to draw attention to it here, not just because of Holocaust Memorial Day, but because it deserves to gain a wider readership outside Hungary, where it is published. Hopefully, the extracts I have chosen will demonstrate something of its importance:

November 15 1944

Caille Inn, Geneva, Switzerland.

We, the Bamberger family and 318 other Jews, were granted a privileged fate by God’s will. After a terribly frightening, dangerous and adventurous five months, we can watch from Switzerland the collapse of the Germans and the Hitler regime at the end of the fifth year of the war. Although the lives of the three of us are safe now, we are dreadfully worried about my father, Irma (her sister), my husband’s entire family, and all of our relatives and friends at home. According to the radio, it is only a matter of days until Budapest will be taken by the Russians. But who knows what human evil can still do to the poor remaining Jews. We are totally cut off from them, but I still have firm faith in my good Lord that he will help our beloved ones along with the other long-suffering Jews. Therefore, I just keep praying to him and asking him to shelter and protect them from all harm, so soon we can meet again in happiness.

May it be like this! Amen.

March 19, 1944

The German Invasion of Budapest

On this Sunday, news that the Germans have occupied Budapest has spread like wildfire. People, especially Jews, are in unimaginable fear and shock. We have so far only heard from the radio and from stories of survivors about the brutalities of German terror and now we feel that the Jewish community in Hungary is facing the same fate. Unfortunately, our fears were justified. Already on the first day, some of the Jewish gentlemen holding the most prestigious positions were interned. They came twice to our house, and to the Community on Sip Street, looking for my father.

My father wanted to buy time, so our whole family spent the entire day and night with one of our doctor relatives. This is where we were notified that Krumey Obersturmbannfűhrer (lieutenant colonel) had ordered all the Community leaders – including priests, principals, and the president – to be present in the Sip Street office at 10 ‘o’ clock on Monday. We begged my father not to go, as we were afraid that he would be interned too. He said he would not hide and no matter what happens he would go to the indicated place. I cannot describe how nervous we were. Irma spent the whole morning walking up and down Sip Street, so at least she would see if my dad was being taken by the Germans. The Germans were negotiating with dad in a very polite way, and they assured him that nobody would get hurt and that they wanted to work with the Community.

They formed the Jewish Council with eight members, with my dad as the president. They were responsible for making sure that the regulations were carried out properly, and this was the prerequisite so that the Jewish community would be saved from the atrocities. Unfortunately, there was cruelty and lies behind the smooth manners. One of their first moves was to have all Jewish phones cut off, so that we couldn’t communicate with each other. Then radios had to be turned in. The Jewish Council had to make unimaginably great efforts to meet this incredible range of demands, which had to be taken care of within 24 hours. (We also had to turn in typewriters, paper goods, furniture, apartments, bicycles, gramophones with records, drinks, pictures, and much more). Whole warehouses and private properties had to be placed at their disposal within 24 hours. Jewish stores were closed and the goods were confiscated. The image of Budapest changed completely within the course of 48 hours. All business transactions were paralyzed and all you could see were worried, terrified people. Eskü Street 3 (dad’s house and also where Irma and her family live) turned int a scene reminiscent of the great migration. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances all turned to the president. What would happen now? What were we supposed to do? What fate is waiting for us? We always looked at my dad as a superior creature for his intelligence and kindness. Now I remember, with tears of emotion, how heroically he comforted and encouraged everybody and suppressed his anxiety and worries for his own children and grandchildren… even the Germans were impressed by his brave and calm behaviour…

…  People began to be collected from the streets. For example, if a married woman or a young girl went to the store or men left for work, you never knew if they would see their families again or would be captured on the street… At night men and women were taken from their homes… The yellow star had to be worn on your clothes or your coat on the left side above the heart, firmly sewn on. A lot of people were afraid to go out onto the street like this, branded, especially the Jews who… had denied a long time ago that they ever belonged to us. Amongst these – mainly the youth who didn’t know that they had Jewish backgrounds and now according to the German law they became Jewish again – many chose to commit suicide. 

Above: Lídia Bamberger

Rózsi’s account goes on to describe what happened to close relatives and neighbours in Budapest, as well as to the Jews in the countryside and provincial towns, where the Jews were first of all forced into ghettos and then deported or sent to forced labour camps as part of the army (I have written about these events elsewhere). Ghettos were then made in Budapest as well, and designated buildings were marked with a yellow star hanging on the front gate. In the best cases, friends and relatives were able to move in together, five or six of people to one room. Rózsi’s family had to move because their house was designated as a yellow star building, and they occupied his apartment on the first floor, though all the other Jewish people staying there were soon moved on to another apartment house. Together with their father, there were nine of them living in the apartment by June 1944. Her husband, Gyuri, decided they should leave for Palestine, but her seventy-year-old father could not be persuaded to leave his responsibilities, and Rózsi could not imagine parting with him and her mother’s grave. She would also have to leave her husband’s family, including her eighty-year-old mother-in-law. In the end, she decided to leave with her husband and daughter. They were supposed to spend eight to ten days in a German camp outside Vienna and then travel through Germany and Spain to reach Palestine. The question was whether the Germans would keep their word and allow them to reach the Spanish border.

Departure and Transportation:

On 30 June, her father, accompanied by the German soldier who had been billeted with them, took them by taxi to the camp with their luggage. After two hours trying to ensure their safety, he left them at the internment camp, the synagogue on Aréna Street, which was already crowded with people, mostly those saved from the brick factories in the coutryside. Finally, after an anxious day standing in pouring rain, they boarded carriages ready to depart:

We sat lined around the sides, squeezed against each other, with our legs hanging down. Those who couldn’t fit like this were standing, leaning on each other, trying to balance… On both sides of the carriages there were German soldiers following the procession. All the way I was happy that my family didn’t see me in such miserable conditions. People on the street gathered in groups were wondering where all these yellow-starred Jews were being taken. Only on a few faces did I see compassion… After a two-hour carriage ride, we arrived at the Rákosrendező train station – on the outskirts of Budapest – totally soaking wet. It was starting to get dark by the time we occupied the wagon that was assigned to us.The suitcases were piled up against one of the walls of the wagon, and the backpacks were hanging on nails all around. In the meantime, people from other camps arrived, so by the time everyone got on there were seventy-two of us in our wagon… The wagon was only supposed to hold six horses or forty people…

We were sitting on our blankets, as tightly packed as we could be. There were twenty-six… children in our wagon, including sixteen orphans with one guardian lady… It was a miserable scene, especially seeing so many mentally worn-down people. Some people tried to stretch out, which was almost impossible, and others tried to make room for their legs while they were sitting.  Little children were crying from fear and because of the unusual environment; the bigger ones were fatigued, sleeping and leaning on one another. The adults, worn out from the stress they had gone through, were arguing or weeping in silence. Everybody was wondering how long we would be able to take this. And we took it, and even worse… The wagon had no toilet, of course, so our human needs could only be taken care of when the train stopped for awhile abnd we got permission to get off, which was not too easy either as the wagon was very high, so women and children could only get off and on with help and that could take some time… People jumped off the train like animals and shamelessly took care of their needs… because there wasn’t enough time to get farther away…

On Saturday July 1st at 10 a.m., we departed (from Ferencváros Station). We all rushed to the wagon’s only small window to wave a last goodbye to Budapest and everything and everyone that meant our life until now. Tears silently dripped down our faces and our hearts were broken from the pain. Maybe this was the last time we would ever see the Danube, the bridges, and the whole beautiful city where we were born and raised. The youth began to sing the “we’re going to find a new homeland” Hebrew song. Perhaps they will find it, but the older ones cannot be replanted.

The train moved at a quick pace to the border at Mosonmagyaróvár, arriving there at 6 p.m. During the night a baby girl was born, with the help of the doctors in the carriage. They stayed there for four days, built latrines, washed themselves fully as well as their clothes, and bought provisions from local villagers. Their German guards protected them from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie. On 6 July the train was directed to Komárom and rumours spread that they were being taken to Auschwitz. However, they arrived at the station in the Vienna suburbs in the evening of 7 July, and were then moved on to Linz by the next morning, having been told that the camps around Vienna were full. Here they were disembarked and disinfected, fearing that they were to be gassed. When they departed, having been thoroughly humiliated and terrorised by the guards, they had little idea where they were going or how many more nights they would spend on the wagon:

The train sped towards Hannover. We stopped one or two times because there were airstrikes., but this didn’t even affect us anymore. We had submitted to our fate and were totally indifferent.

We arrived on the 9th, a Sunday morning, at an improvised forest station near Hannover. It was a huge prison camp. We washed ourselves in big troughs and after an hour’s break, we sped further towards our destination, Bergen-Belsen.

Bergen-Belsen:

A whole bunch of German soldiers were waiting for the train, holding enormous bloodhounds on leashes… They yelled their orders harshly. They counted us by putting us in lines of five. This took about an hour and a half in the strong afternoon sun, and we almost collapsed from fatigue. After this, we walked nine kilometres. Sick and old people and our luggage were carried on trucks… We reached an immense camp. There were prisoners here of all types and nationalities: Russian, Polish, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Jewish. Each barrack block was separated with wire fencing. We got block 11. When we arrived, everyone was registered, and then they assigned our accommodation. Men and women were separated… Lydi and I got barrack F and Gyuri got a bed in barrack D. Our barracks were across from each other. The Tordas and a few other people were also assigned together with us.

About 160 of us were placed in one barrack, as an average. It was a dark wooden building with one small window (without lighting in the evening) and three-level wooden bunk beds above each other. Lydi and I got bottom beds so I wouldn’t have to climb ladders. Between the beds there was just enough room to turn around. It was very sad to move in here, but we were so tired that we were happy to have the possibility to finally stretch out. However, this only happened much later. Once everybody had a bed, we received an order to line up… Lining up took place in the yard, with people grouped by barracks. The first lineup took two hours in the pouring rain, with us wearing thin summer clothes without hats… The first dinner was next. They brought soup in pots. We stood in a line individually with the mess tins we were given. Unfortunately, no matter how hungry we were, we couldn’t swallow this slop. In the backpack we still had a little bit of food left from home, but we really had to be careful with that because our prospects were not very encouraging… we had to lie down wet, without blankets. It was a divine miracle that we didn’t catch pneumonia… It is hard to imagine sleeping in these physical and mental conditions. Sometimes a child would start crying, suppressed sobbing and deep sighs, for the old life and loved ones we left behind. You could hear other people snoring, and the different emotional and physical manifestations of 160 people. There was not a single minute of silence. Crowds of bedbugs and fleas rushed to welcome us. However, towards the morning, sleep still overcame me because I was greatly exhausted.

That is where the notebook ends. On 1 August, 1944, Lydia sent a postcard, which still exists, from Bergen-Belsen to her fiancée in the labour camp in Northern Transylvania. It told him that she and here parents were ‘doing well’ and had ‘the best prospects’ of continuing on their journey. Apparently, a ‘Collective Pass’ allowing group border crossing, stamped by the Swiss Embassy in Budapest and signed by its Consul, Carl Lutz, was what eventually secured their onward journey and border crossing. Rózsi’s father, Samu Stern, died on 9 June, 1946. There were many accusations made against him, and have been since, for the role he played. Krisztián Ungváry, in a historical tailpiece to the notebook, points out that the prominent members of the Jewish Community, like Stern (who had been one of its elected representatives before agreeing to become its president under Nazi rule), experienced within a few days of the occupation that their former social connections were worthless. Those who they could rely on before were either arrested or removed, and the Hungarian authority’s statements revolved around absolute obedience to German commands. Ungváry states clearly that

Eichmann and his colleagues systematically used the operation of the Jewish Council to calm the victims and make them carry out as many of the anti-Semitic measures as possible.  

I will be writing more about this, and the controversial rescue mission of Rudolf Kasztner in the near future. For now, it is enough to state that, contrary to popular mythology among many Hungarians, those who were at all interested in what was happening to the Jews in the March-October 1944 in Hungary had relatively broad access to information. Hungarian soldiers returning from the eastern front and refugees escaping from Galicia could provide accurate information about the details of the Nazi final solution. As the notebook extracts above show, Rozsi’s group certainly knew what Auschwitz meant at the beginning of July. The question remains as to why these pieces of information did not interest a significant part of both the Jewish and non-Jewish population. Stern himself had no illusions about Eichmann’s goal because he himself stated:

I knew about what they were doing in all the occupied countries of Central Europe and I knew that their operation was a long series of murders and robberies… I knew their habits, actions, and their terrible fame. 

Unlike his family, Samu Stern did not escape abroad where he would have been safe, and after the ‘Arrow Cross’ (Hungarian Fascist Party) gained power he managed to survive somehow in illegality until the Soviet troops arrived in the ghetto towards the end of January 1945. Thereafter, he was accused of collaboration, and even the police started a an investigation against him, but he was never sent to court. Before he died, he wrote a memoir, which was published in Hungarian in 2004.

Lídia Bamberger’s son, Péter Sas, gave his grandmother’s to the Zsolt Zágoni, in his apartment in Budapest. Zágoni read it all there and then, and realized that it had to be published. The notebook had been in the Sas family ever since it was was written, probably from notes Rózsi took on the deportation from Budapest to Bergen-Belsen. She probably wrote up her notes into prose in the blue-covered notebook in Geneva after their crossing from Germany (Belsen was not liberated by the British until April 1945). Besides the 15 November entry (above), the name of the hotel she was staying in, ‘Caille’ is printed on the back cover of the exercise book. Lídia married  Pál Sas in October 1945, after returning home with her mother to Budapest, though she remained ill for a long time, an illness which her mother nursed her through, saving her from becoming another victim of the Holocaust.

The Jewish Cemetery, Budapest

The original blue-covered notebook

 Source:

Zsolt Zágoni, ed. (2012), From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. Budapest (published by the editor).

Part One: Chronology And Narrative:

There has been a lot of historical, even hysterical (!) hype about the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, or The Great War as it was known until the 1940s. However, this has come mainly from Britain and western Europe, for although the war began with Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914, from a central European perspective there are far more significant anniversaries coming up this year.

One of them, in Hungary, is the German occupation of March 1944, which led not only to the Hungarian Holocaust but also to the loss of Hungarian independence for the next forty-five years as the country was consecutively occupied by first the Nazis and then the Soviets. Undoubtedly, the dismemberment of the country by the western European powers as a result of the 1914-18 War was a major contributing factor to Hungary’s plight and dilemma in the second world war, but there is also a great deal of debate over the relative responsibilities of Hungarian politicians and diplomats in the events of 1936-44.

The last edition of The Hungarian Review (November 2013) contained a series of important articles on this period and these issues, which I wish to summarise here, together with re-iterating some of my own recent research, in an attempt to shed light onto them, rather than the heat which has been generated in recent months over the attempts to rehabilitate and exonerate the Regent, Admiral Horthy, and others. In a recent edition of The Budapest Times, an eminent Hungarian historian made the erroneous claim that had Horthy resigned following the occupation of Hungary, the Jews of Budapest would not have survived the Holocaust.

James C Bennett and Michael J Lotus have argued that there was a strong liberal streak in pre-World War One Hungary, as the Dual Monarchy felt its way towards a less authoritarian solution to its complex multi-ethnic composition. Vienna, Budapest and Prague were important centres of art, music, theatre, science and technology during the Belle Époque. Many of the brilliant minds generated were forced into exile, enriching America. Had the 1914-18 War not intervened, Budapest might well have become the centre of atomic physics research, rather than Chicago. They point out that rather than following an ‘Atlantic’ model of development, ‘the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe must probe their own historical roots, to determine which “continuities” should be cultivated, and which need to be overcome.  A dense web of cooperative institutions along the Danube might grow up along the Danube, returning central Europe to its more natural community of the Dual Monarchy, but without the subordination of Slavic ethnic groups which led to its demise in 1918-20, confirmed by the Paris Peace Treaties. They envisage the reconstruction of a Central Europe that is ‘free and stable… orderly and prosperous, in accordance with its inherited culture.’

In the first part of her writing on the book of the Hungarian inter-war diplomat, Domokos Szent-Iványi, Nóra Szekér argues that modern European history has largely been written by the victors, to the exclusion of the ‘what ifs’ raised by, for example, Bennett and Lotus. The two world wars were won by the West, not by the central-Eastern powers, a view strengthened by its victory against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  So, if we seek to evaluate the period of Hungarian history in which Szent-Iványi was operating and writing about, we see it as part of the most tragic years experienced by Hungary even in the course of a thousand-year narrative which is a liturgy of tragedy. Burdened by these events, people tried to make a stand while at the same time adapting to historical necessities. Judging lives lived in these conditions, within ‘morally corrupt dictatorships’,  from the viewpoint of the victor is therefore misleading.

So, she asks, what can sympathetic foreign observers learn from these decades, the thirties and forties in Hungary?  To go beyond sympathy seems to be her answer since that perspective divides our vision between respect for sacrifice on the one hand and condemnation on the other. The lessons need to go deeper and to begin with the tragedies within the Soviet occupation which should lead western historians to question whether the victorious powers used the full potential of their victory. Szekér refers back almost a century to Oswald Spengler’s famous book, The Decline of the West, in which he criticised the European way of thinking about history. He argued that Eurocentric historical thinking saw Western Europe as the steady pole around which all Cultures, existing over the millennia, both far and near,  were made to revolve ‘in all modesty’. All global history is therefore made to revolve around the ideal measure of the West, and all events and stories are judged in ‘the real light’ of this axis. Even the history of western Europe itself is therefore obscured by its own distorted centrality.

The history of the era of the two world wars proves that East Central Europe’s history is organically connected to the history of the continent as a whole. The extent to which the Entente powers misunderstood the region is shown by the peace treaties meant to end the conflicts. Domokos Szent-Iványi was consciously trying to educate his western European and American readers, writing from the perspective of the social and political traditions of Hungary. He was born in Budapest in 1898, the fourth child of a Transylvanian gentry family which was able to live comfortably on the income from their estates. After studying economic and political geography and literature at the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna, he became a Hungarian diplomat in North America, studying international law as well as English language and literature there. When he became a legal clerk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1926 he already spoke seven languages. He saw clearly, at first hand, the increasingly definitive role of the United States as a great power. On his return to Hungary, István Bethlen, PM, wanted to make him his advisor, but Bethlen then resigned in 1931, and it wasn’t until 1935 that he was able to fulfil this role.

The continuing rancour felt by most Hungarians over the failure of the western powers to address the injustices of Trianon, combined with the Depression, led to the rise of a radical right-wing in Hungary, and in 1932, Regent Horthy named one of their leaders, General Gömbös, as PM, with the restrictions that he could not dissolve Parliament or enact anti-Semitic legislation. However, Gömbös took Hungary into an alliance with Italy and sought support from Germany. Gömbös died in 1936 and was replaced by Kálmán Darányi, an ultra-conservative. Despite the obvious gulf in their views, Darányi needed Szent-Iványi’s linguistic abilities and he therefore became his personal secretary. By then, he had already become part of Count Pál Teleki’s circle of young men whom the geographer felt capable of building a sovereign, modern post-Trianon Hungary, able to resist German influence in the region.

In the Spring of 1938, following the German annexation of Austria, Darányi legalised the right-wing, anti-Semitic, violent Arrow Cross, and introduced anti-Semitic legislation. The Darányi government in Hungary passed a series of anti-Jewish laws based on Germany’s Nürnberg Laws. The first, passed on May 29th, 1938, restricted the number of Jews in each commercial enterprise, in the press, among physicians, engineers and lawyers to twenty per cent.

It is worth remembering, though not in order to absolve Darányi or any of the other ministers who were responsible for these fateful decisions, that casual anti-Semitism was still widespread throughout Europe at this time, not just confined to those countries falling increasingly under the shadow of Nazism, like Hungary. Harold Nicolson had supported Balfour’s pro-Zionist Declaration as a young diplomat in 1917, and in April 1919 he found himself travelling to Budapest with General Smuts, the South African member of the British War Cabinet. At the end of March, a communist revolution had taken place in Hungary, led by Béla Kun. For the world’s leaders gathered in Paris, the spectre of Bolshevism was haunting their efforts to achieve lasting peace settlements. For them, it threatened widespread starvation, social chaos, economic ruin, anarchy and a violent, shocking end to their old order. In particular, there were real and justified fears that Germany would also go Bolshevist, one of Lloyd George’s main themes. In this atmosphere, Béla Kun’s strike for communism in one of the most populous and prestigious capitals of central Europe had alarmed the Supreme Council. When the train stopped in Vienna, Harold was sent to the Hungarian ‘headquarters’ to warn the Kun’s Bolshevik government of Smuts’ imminent arrival. He found the ’embassy’ crowded with ‘men, women and children scrambling for passports’. He observed that ‘nearly all are Jews, struggling to get to Buda Pesth and the hope of loot’. The commissar-in-charge, ‘a Chicago-educated Galician Jew’ was brought along to Budapest to translate since Kun spoke only Hungarian. Smuts, unwilling to show any sign of recognising the new regime, conducted negotiations from the wagon. ‘The Jew Bolshevik’, as Nicolson called him, was called for and Harold was sent to meet him. He saw him as ‘a little man of about thirty: puffy white face and loose wet lips: shaven head: impression of red hair: shifty suspicious eyes: he has the face of a sulky uncertain criminal.’ Nicolson viewed the Foreign Minister accompanying Béla Kun with equally hostile eyes: ‘a little oily Jew – fur-coat rather moth-eaten – stringy green tie – dirty collar’.

In the interval in negotiations, Nicolson decided to visit Budapest, a city he had last visited during his father’s diplomatic posting there before the War. ‘The whole place was wretched’ he wrote, ‘sad, unkempt.’ He took tea at the Hungaria, Budapest’s leading hotel. Although it had been ‘communised’, it flew ‘a huge Union Jack and Tricolour’, a gesture of goodwill. Red Guards with fixed bayonets patrolled the hall, but in the foyer what remained of Budapest society ‘huddled sadly together with anxious eyes and in complete, ghastly silence.’ Smuts concluded that ‘Béla Kun is just an incident not worth taking seriously.’  On 10th April, the day after Harold wrote this letter to Vita Sackville-West, a provisional government was set up in Budapest reflecting the old Hungarian cliques, consisting of Count Julius Károlyi, Count Stephen Bethlen, and Admiral Horthy de Nagybanya, Nicholas (‘Miklos’). Béla Kun fled the capital on 1 August in the face of invading Romanian armies. In  February 1920, after the Romanians retreated, Horthy was appointed Regent and head of state. Kun went into exile in the USSR where he became a victim of one of Stalin’s purges in 1936. By then, the spectre of this ‘incident’ had haunted Hungary’s inter-war policies, and the casual association between Bolshevism and the Jews of Hungary was aided by, ironically, their integration into Hungarian society as well as by the determination of the ruling, aristocratic élite not to let the Bolsheviks back. If Harold Nicolson, educated at Oxford, was capable of making such associations so casually in his letters home, how much more commonplace should we expect to find such associations to be made in communications between Hungarian members of this old order in Europe.

Nevertheless, the pro-German, pro-Nazi groups in Hungary were relatively weak until the autumn of 1938. The turning point seems to have arrived with the Bled-Kiel incident of August 1938. The Bled Agreement was signed on 29 August, under which the ‘Little Entente’ powers of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia agreed to recognise Hungary’s equal right to armament and guaranteed observation of the rights of Hungarian ethnic minorities in their own territories, while Hungary renounced the use of force to re-annexe territories ceded at Trianon. Simultaneously, on the invitation of Hitler, Regent Horthy visited him in Kiel. Hitler considered Hungary’s agreement with the Little Entente as a ‘stab in the back’ By then he was preparing to carve up Czechoslovakia, in which he counted on Hungary’s active participation, including military action. As part of this process, he hoped to bring about the collapse of the Little Entente, whereas Hungary seemed to be strengthening it. The Kiel negotiations collapsed with Horthy and the delegation returning home with German reproaches still ringing in their ears. Following the Munich Agreement later that year, Hungary urgently needed a  rapprochement with Hitler.

The most important of these groups, according to Domokos Szent-Iványi, was the General Staff of the Hungarian Honvédség (Army) which, especially during the tenure of the Chief of Staff Henrik Werth (October 1938-September 1941) became ‘a state within a state’. Of course, it was the Regent who was solely responsible for his appointment, before Darányi’s resignation as PM. Although loyal to Horthy as Head of State, he was clearly pro-German, partly as a result of his Swabian origins, which he shared with many Hungarians at this time. Indeed, despite the deportations which followed the War, Hungary still has significant bilingual Swabian minority populations. Werth was also clearly political, believing that the revision of the post-Trianon borders could only be achieved through co-operation with Germany, especially given Germany’s growing military strength. In one of his situation reports of 1939, Werth went so far as to say that Hungary “had to stick to Germany, durch Dick und Dünn…”  (under all circumstances) even in the inconceivable case of Germany losing the war.

Werth had been recommended for the post of Chief of Staff by General Lajos Keresztes-Fischer, who with his brother Ferenc was a great favourite of Horthy. That this appointment was a blunder of the first order on the part of the Regent was later proved by the activities of Wert and his inner circle of collaborators. Their activities helped lead Hungary into the Second World War and put her last manpower reserves at Hitler’s disposal in 1944 when its outcome was no longer in doubt. Werth had acquired his office through his own propaganda campaign against General Jenő Rátz who, according to Szent-Iványi and his numerous sources, was ‘an excellent and capable soldier and in addition, extremely popular within the Army’. Had he been left in post, he would never have allowed the Army to enter the war on the side of Germany. Werth and his clique formed the power behind the curtain that caused Hungary to do so, also contributing indirectly to Premier Teleki’s death. Even after Werth was removed from his post, his political and military views were maintained by a group of staff officers, including General Dezső László, who had been brought up on his principles.

An overlapping pro-German group consisted of Hungarians of German origin who viewed the successes of Germany under Hitler from 1933-40 as clear evidence that the Germans were indeed ‘the master race’. They played an increasingly important role in the Volksbund, the pro-German federation in Hungary, set up under the auspices of Berlin. Alongside the German-Hungarians were the anti-Bolsheviks, who, like many among the European political élite, regarded the threat from the East (and from within) as the greatest menace to Hungary’s independence and integrity. The dictatorship of Béla Kun was undertaken by men who embraced communism and its ideas, following the model of the Soviet Union. They were nearly all of Jewish descent, too. The anti-Soviets believed that, since little Hungary would be no match for the Soviet Union in the event of war, so unconditional co-operation with Germany was, at least, the lesser of two evils. In addition, there were a number of careerist politicians and diplomats who looked to further their own personal ambitions by supporting the German ’cause’.  Others took a more principled stance, blaming France and her satellite states (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania) for the dismemberment of Royal Hungary by the Trianon Treaty. England had supported France and so could not be relied upon, neither could Italy, which had played its own role in Hungary’s dismemberment after changing sides.  From each of these countries, they argued, the architects of the peace treaties were “free-masons of Jewish descent”, part of an international conspiracy against the Hungarians and the Germans, who therefore had a common cause. There were also anti-Semites who became pro-German because they saw the Jews as public enemy number one.

On Darányi’s resignation in November 1938, Teleki, then Minister of Culture, asked Szent-Iványi to produce a report on the likely position of North America in case of war.  Under the premiership of Béla Imrédy, from May 1938, Hungary acquired southern Slovakia in November 1938. The region had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary and the majority of the inhabitants were Hungarian.  Imrédy was essentially pro-western and did not want to jeopardise Hungary’s future by co-operating too closely with Germany. As a brilliant economist, he promoted the cause of the revisionist movement as an economic one. However, he was vulnerable to his political opponents, who claimed that they had discovered he had Jewish ancestry. In order to deflect attention from this accusation, Imrédy crossed over to the extreme right and became the main promoter of anti-Semitic legislation. Therefore, the main legacy of his premiership was the second anti-Jewish law (May 5th, 1939), which defined Jews as a racial group for the first time. It was not a definition based on religious observance and was a harbinger of the Holocaust. People with two or more Jewish-born grandparents were declared Jewish. Private companies were forbidden to employ more than 12% Jews. 250,000 Hungarian Jews lost their income. Most of them lost their right to vote as well.

Szent-Irányi’s eighty-page report, completed in February 1939, revealed his insight, vision and sophisticated knowledge of the subject. He predicted that war would break out within six months, that the USA would enter the conflict in 1942, and that Germany would be defeated. The only real victors, he suggested, would be the USA and the USSR, as Europe would be ruined and the British Empire would be ‘put on a leash’ by the Americans. On the eve of war, this was not only an astonishingly accurate analysis but also a daring political programme.  Early in 1939, Hungary had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, allying it with Germany, Italy and Japan.

Following the dissemination of his report, Szent-Iványi became a leading light and confidant in anti-Nazi circles. When Teleki became PM in February 1939, he hoped to create a Central European and Balkan bloc with the support of France, Great Britain and the United States. First, he hoped to regain the Carpatho-Ukraine region of eastern Czechoslovakia, known as Ruthenia. US Minister Montgomery reported that Regent Horthy had secretly told him that Hungary was pursuing only its own interests and that while he and the Hungarian people sided with Great Britain rather than Germany, “the democratic powers since the war had remained inattentive to the pleas of Hungary who had achieved something only with the aid of Germany and Italy.” Horthy hoped that Hungary could remain neutral, and later expressed his belief that Italy would come to Hungary’s aid if Germany attacked. Nonetheless, later that year, Hungary withdrew from the League of Nations.

In the elections of May 28th–29th, Nazi and Arrow Cross parties received one-quarter of the votes and 52 out of 262 seats. Their support was even larger, usually between a third and a half of the votes, where they were on the ballot at all, since they were not listed in large parts of the country.

In this atmosphere, Teleki had entrusted Domokos Szent-Iványi with a confidential project, working with an alternative secret cabinet on an anti-German foreign policy and intelligence-gathering centre, which would have been unrealistic if it had been pursued openly in the shadow of the Third Reich. He became head of this Information Department, the ‘Fourth Section of the Premier’s Office, ME-IV’, and a key figure in this anti-Nazi conspiracy. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Hungarian Government allowed a large number of Polish soldiers to enter the country through Ruthenia, many of whom were therefore enabled to join the Western forces. Nevertheless, Hungary’s official alliance with Germany and Italy helped it to further reverse the Treaty of Trianon, most notably through the Vienna Conference, at which the axis powers forced Romania to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary. Together with its gains from Czechoslovakia, these gains meant that Hungary almost doubled its territory.

Despite these successes in achieving revisions of the borders by ‘peaceful’ means, the pro-German lobby continued pushing for an ever-closer alliance with Germany. Szent-Iványi recalled a conversation he had in 1940 with Kálmán Breslmayer, son of the owner of one of Hungary’s famous banks. Breslmayer, of German stock and strong pro-German sentiments, was also a former swimming champion. Following the invasions of Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and France, Breslmayer delivered a forty-minute speech in which he declared that Germany had already conquered Europe: In a short time both Britain and the USSR would be forced to submit to Hitler. A great reshaping of the European map would follow with a new geopolitical “Order” so that Hungary would need to ally herself fully to Germany without reservation.

The census of January 31st, 1941 found that 6.2% of the population of 13,643,620, i.e. 846,000 people, were considered Jewish according to the racial laws of that time. In addition, in April 1941, Hungary annexed the regions of Yugoslavia it had occupied, adding over a million people to its population, including a further 15,000 Jews. This means that inside the May 1941 borders of Hungary, there were 861,000 people who were considered to be Jewish. From this number, 725,000, nearly 5% of the total population were Jewish by religion. The ‘Third Jewish Law’ (August 8th, 1941) prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. 

In April 1941, Hungary participated in Hitler’s attack on Yugoslavia, which further changed the international borders, despite earlier entering into a pact with the Yugoslavs, which Teleki had hoped would develop passive resistance to Nazi pressure. That same month, the British began to bomb Hungarian cities, and broke off diplomatic relations. When Hitler demanded that Nazi troops be allowed to pass through Hungary to Yugoslavia, Teleki committed suicide. His successor, László Bárdossy, believed that Germany would be a useful ally in regaining former Hungarian territory in Yugoslavia. Although ME-IV was dispersed by Bárdossy, Szent-Iványi carried on the work in its clandestine successor, the Hungarian Independence Movement, the MFM (Magyar Függetlenségi Mozgalom). Through this, he was able to play a key role in the anti-Nazi Resistance in Hungary, far beyond the constraints of a secret foreign policy cabinet.

The return of the Hungarian Army’s standards removed as war trophies in 1849 was a Soviet gesture aimed at keeping Hungary out of the second world war. On 23rd June, 1941, the day before the beginning of the German attack on the Soviet Union, Soviet Foreign Secretary Molotov told the Hungarian Ambassador in Moscow that the Soviet Union had no territorial demands on Hungary, and would support it over Transylvania. He simply requested that Hungary remained neutral. Instead, Hungary’s decision to side with Germany led to the severing of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Budapest.

On 27th June, just days after the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany, the Hungarian government declared war on the USSR and sent troops to fight on the Eastern Front, alongside the Germans and other Axis forces. Hungary’s entry into the war came about as an illegal act of the Prime Minister, Lászlo Bárdossy, who had not consulted Parliament. In fact, the Hungarian army had already been preparing for a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union for some days. A considerable part of the army was relying on horse-drawn equipment and was composed of ‘fast-moving detachments’ mounted on bicycles! Bárdossy claimed his decision was made in response to the bombing of Kassa which he also claimed was a Soviet provocation. However, the Soviet Union had no reason to provoke Hungary, and had been trying everything to keep Hungary out of the war, and rumours spread immediately that the bombs dropped on the Slovak towns acquired by Hungary were in fact dropped in a casual way by the Luftwaffe in order to give the Hungarian government the excuse it needed to declare war. To the present day, there is no authoritative data connected to this event, not even the obligatory log book. Despite the efforts of US diplomats, the British declared war on Hungary in late 1941. A full week after Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941, Hungary was forced by the other Axis powers to declare war on the US, which reluctantly reciprocated in June 1942.

The leading light of the Hungarian Independence Movement was Pál Teleki, the world-famous geographer and twice PM, the second time from 1939 to 1941. He was one of the most influential Hungarian politicians of the inter-war period. Although he originally agreed with the objective of restoring all the lands lost by the Trianon Treaty, in the 1930’s he argued for a partial readjustment of the borders, based on ethnic composition. In this, he followed the epithet of László Nemeth, an influential contemporary philosopher, that “Nation is not land, but a historical reality.” It was the anti-Habsburg tradition in the best Hungarian political minds which made them so sensitive to the new German threat of the thirties in the fever of Drang Nach Osten. Zoltán Szabo, the brilliant essayist who was exiled in London after 1948, pointed out that, in the thirties, there were only two paths which the nations of East Central Europe could follow. Either they could find guarantees of their independence against the Great Powers in each other, or they could seek patronage from those powers for their own individual independence.

However, a foreign policy that saw Hungary in the historic role of forging an alliance with the nations of the region against the ambitions of the  Great Powers faced difficult geopolitical realities. To begin with, the Trianon Treaty assigned a completely different role to Hungary. Despite this, Teleki, Bethlen and Bánffy were among many others who believed that Hungary did have a calling to integrate the diverse interests of the region. Their decisions indicated that, despite the harsh realities of geopolitics, they believed that the goals of independence and interdependence were achievable. The trade negotiations of István Bethlen with Czechoslovakia and Miklós Banffy’s many attempts to bring about a rapprochement with Romania demonstrated this belief. Bánffy even went as far as moving back to his own estate in Transylvania, symbolically taking Romanian citizenship from the king. They tried to separate territorial revision for Hungary from German policies and interests. They tried to build links with Italy, to ease relations within  French and English political circles, to build a horizontal axis with Poland and to establish friendly contacts with Yugoslavia. All these efforts were designed to avoid a one-sided German orientation.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Teleki’s policy continued to concentrate on preserving Hungarian sovereignty within the Axis alliance and avoiding confrontation with the western Allied powers, even to the extent of jeopardising future territorial revisions. Apart from his goal of Hungarian independence, he found the politics and ideology of the Third Reich unacceptable. German victory, he felt, would spell the end of the best moral and spiritual values in Europe. When he finally ran out of room for manoeuvre and realised that Hungary had become a subordinate state to Nazi imperial goals, he chose suicide rather than resignation, sending a clear message which was understood everywhere across Europe, about the grave results of appeasing Hitler. Szekér suggests, interestingly, that it was his Transylvanian wisdom, virtue and “genius” for genuine compromise, which eventually convinced him that neither he nor Hungary, could survive as a slave of Nazi policy and that the only way out was suicide.

This subtle Transylvanian policy was, and continues to be, much misunderstood from western perspectives. Szent-Iványi, concluding his book in 1977, with the benefit of considerable hindsight on these events, developed the foresight to suggest that European Union could only be brought about through the ‘spiritualisation’ of borders, allowing for free communication and cooperation across them. Even at the time, he was writing, this was regarded as a daydream rather than pragmatic, strategic thinking. However, both Teleki and his protogé deserve at least a minor stardom in the constellation of Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and other early architects of the European Union. Like Churchill, Teleki was not just interested in the history and geography of his own territories, but also drew much of his inspiration from the variety and complexity of the United States of America.

In this context, the translated excerpts from Domokos Szent-Ivanyi’s book dealing with the period 1936-41 make fascinating reading. He makes it clear that the decision to appoint Darányi as Gömbös’ successor was made by the Regent, who would not appoint the widely-preferred Tihámer Fabinyi, the Minister for Finance, because of his involvement in ‘Socialist-Communist’ activities in 1918-19. Horthy was reluctant to replace Gömbös, whose pro-Nazi policies had alarmed Bethlen and others, with anyone except an ultra-conservative establishment figure. Whilst this may have helped Hungary to develop a more rounded foreign policy, it was Darányi who introduced the anti-Jewish legislation which foreshadowed the Holocaust.

At the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, the illusion that the war on the eastern front would be of short duration, and that the troops would return victorious after a few weeks. However, in the spring of 1942, the Second Hungarian Army of 200,000 was dispatched to the front, of whom only 150,000 survived the Russian counter-offensive on the Don in January 1943. Many of those who fell were not carrying weapons, but were members of forced labour units, including many Jews, labouring under armed guards. These were really portable slaughter-houses because some commanders were more interesting in exterminating the conscripts rather than working them. However, a greater proportion of the Jewish males survived in these units than those later hauled off with their families to the death camps.

After the annihilation of the Second Hungarian Army, Hungary had a new Prime Minister, Miklós Kállay, who again tried to follow a dual course. While the Nazis called for an intensification of the war effort, the Hungarians tried to diminish it and to make overtures to the Allies. However, their cautious and secretive diplomacy was closely followed by the Germans, who did not permit the Hungarians to reach a separate deal. Kállay had no alternative but to continue the military co-operation with Germany, though he protected the Jews living in Hungary, including the refugees from the Third Reich. He also permitted anti-Nazi groups to re-emerge and operate more openly. Above all, he hoped to be able to surrender to Western troops, avoiding a Soviet invasion. The US sent the Hungarian-American Francis Deák to Lisbon with instructions to talk to the Hungarians with the objective of keeping Hungary out of Soviet control. On 1 October Roosevelt met the Habsburg Otto von Habsburg, who had remained as his guest in the US during the war and assured him that if Romania remained with the Axis and Hungary joined the Allies, the US would support a continued Hungarian occupation and retention of southern Transylvania. The Hungarian government was willing and sent a message to Lisbon to that effect. In January 1944, the Hungarian Government authorised the Archduke to act on its behalf. An American military mission was dropped into Western Hungary on 14 March, calling for Horthy’s surrender. Twenty thousand Allied troops were then set to parachute into the country and the Hungarian Army would then join the fight against the Germans. However, these moves became known to German intelligence, which had cracked the communications code.  By the time Horthy came to believe that his government could reach an agreement with the Soviets to end their involvement on the eastern front, it was again too late.

On March 18th, 1944, Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Austria, where he demanded greater collaboration from the Hungarian state in his ‘final solution’ of his Jewish problem. Horthy resisted, but while he was still at the conference, German tanks rolled into Budapest on 19th March. Italy managed to pull out of the war, but while Horthy was conferring at Hitler’s headquarters, a small German army had completed its occupation of Hungary by 22 March. By this time Horthy possessed neither moral nor physical strength to resist, and simply settled for keeping up appearances, with severely limited sovereignty. On March 23rd, 1944, the government of Döme Sztójay was installed. Among his other first moves, Sztójay legalized the overtly Fascist Arrow Cross Party, which quickly began organizing throughout the country. During the four-day interregnum following the German occupation, the Ministry of the Interior was put in the hands of right-wing politicians well-known for their hostility to Jews. On April 9th, Prime Minister Sztójay agreed to place at the disposal of the Reich 300,000 Jewish labourers. Five days later, on April 14th, Adolf Eichmann decided to deport all the Jews of Hungary. With a small SS staff, he immediately set to work, making use of the lists of members of the Jewish community drawn up under the anti-Jewish Laws to organise one of the swiftest and most efficient episodes of the Holocaust. With the ready assistance of Hungarian officials and the Gendarmerie 440,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz within a few weeks, 90% to their almost immediate deaths on arrival. On some days the gas chambers and crematoria processed more than a thousand people an hour. A Jew living in the Hungarian countryside in March 1944 had a chance of less than one in ten of surviving the following twelve months. In Budapest, a Jew’s chance of survival of the same twelve months was fifty/fifty.

SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, whose duties included supervising the extermination of Jews, set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel and proceeded rapidly in rounding up Jews from the Hungarian provinces outside Budapest and its suburbs. The Yellow Star and Ghettoization laws, and deportation were accomplished in less than 8 weeks with the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség). The plan was to use forty-five cattle cars per train, four trains a day, to deport 12,000 Jews to Auschwitz every day from the countryside, starting in mid-May; this was to be followed by the deportation of Jews of Budapest from about 15 July.  Jewish leaders in Budapest, together with Hungarian leaders of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran Churches, and a number of Horthy’s aides, all received copies of the detailed Vrba-Weztler report on the deportations to Auschwitz on or just after 28 April but kept their silence. By doing so, they chose to keep the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews and their Christian neighbours in ignorance, thereby enabling the success of Eichmann’s timetable. The reality that no one in the villages knew anything about the plan in advance of it being carried out is borne out by the testimony of villagers themselves, which I have collected in the case of Apostag (about 30 km south of Budapest on the Danube). The published testimonies of Hungarian survivors from around the world further confirms this.

The first transports to Auschwitz began in early May 1944 and continued even as Soviet troops approached. The Hungarian government was solely in charge of the Jews’ transportation up to the northern border. The Hungarian commander of the Kassa railroad station meticulously recorded the trains heading to Auschwitz with their place of departure and the number of people inside them. The first train went through Kassa on May 14th. On a typical day, there were three or four trains, with ten to fourteen thousand people on each. There were 109 trains during these 33 days through to June 16th, as many as six trains each day. Between June 25th and 29th, there were a further 10 trains, then an additional 18 trains between July 5th and 9th. By then, nearly 440,000 victims had been deported from the Hungarian towns and countryside, according to official German reports. Another 10 trains were sent to Auschwitz via other routes from Budapest, while seven trains containing over twenty thousand people went to Strasshof at the end of June, including two from Baja, which may well have picked up the Jews from Apostag at Kalocsa.

In total, one hundred and forty-seven trains were sent to Auschwitz, where 90% of the people were exterminated on arrival. Because the crematoria couldn’t cope with the number of corpses, special pits were dug near them, where bodies were simply burned. It has been estimated that one-third of the murdered victims at Auschwitz were Hungarian. For most of this time period, 12,000 Jews were delivered to Auschwitz in a typical day. Photographs taken at Auschwitz were found after the war showing the arrival of Jews from Hungary at the camp.

The devotion to the cause of the ‘final solution’ of the Hungarian Gendarmerie surprised even Eichmann himself, who supervised the operation with only twenty officers and staff of a hundred, including drivers, cooks, etc. Very few members of the Catholic or Protestant clergy raised their voices against sending the Jews to their death. A notable exception was Bishop Áron Márton, in his sermon in Kolozsvár on 18 May. But the Catholic Primate of Hungary, Serédi, decided not to issue a pastoral letter condemning the deportation of the Jews.

When news of the deportations reached British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he wrote in a letter to his Foreign Secretary dated July 11, 1944:

 “There is no doubt that this persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world….”

Therefore, the idea that any member of the Hungarian government, including the President, or Regent, was unaware of the scale and nature of the deportations is fanciful, to say the least, as is the idea that Horthy was responsible for stopping the deportations from the countryside and/ or the capital. It is true that Admiral Horthy ordered the suspension of all deportations on July 6, but by then the Regent was virtually powerless.  This is demonstrated by the fact that another 45,000 Jews were deported from the Trans-Danubian region and the outskirts of Budapest to Auschwitz after this day. The Sztójay government continued to ignore the Regent and rescheduled the date of deportation of the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz to August 27th. What prevented this was that the Romanians switched sides on 23 August 1944, causing huge problems for the German military, and it was on Himmler’s orders that the cancellation of further deportations from Hungary was enacted on 25 August.  With the German high command preoccupied elsewhere, Horthy regained sufficient authority to finally dismiss Prime Minister Sztójay on 29 August. By then the war aims of the Horthy régime, the restoration of Hungary to its pre-Trianon status, were in tatters. The First and Second Awards and the acquisitions by force of arms would mean nothing after the defeat which now seemed inevitable. The fate of Transylvania was still in the balance in the summer of 1944, with everything depending on who would liberate the contested territories from the Germans. When Royal Romania succeeded in pulling out, the Soviet and Romanian forces combined forces began a joint attack and the weakened Hungarian Army was unable to contain them.

However, in spite of the change of government, Hungarian troops occupied parts of Southern Transylvania, Romania, and massacred hundreds of Jews, starting on 4 September. Soviet units then reached the borders established by Trianon later that month and then moved across these into Szeged, where Horthy had begun his journey to power in 1919. His failure was now complete as a gigantic tank battle took place around Debrecen in early October. By mid-October,  the Soviet Red Army entered the outskirts of Pest as Horthy tried desperately to agree on an armistice, declaring it on the radio on 15th October. However, he had not prepared either the political or military ground for this and the pull-out collapsed within hours. The Regent was taken hostage by the SS in Budapest and was then forced by the Nazis to transfer power to Ferenc Szalási and the Arrow Cross. Horthy and his family were then interned in Germany. Although the Hungarian People’s tribunal later condemned several ministers and generals who carried out Horthy’s policies for war crimes, most captured by the Americans, Horthy himself avoided this fate. He was therefore never made to answer for his actions and sought asylum in Portugal, where he died in 1957.

After the Arrow Cross coup d’état on October 15th, tens of thousands of Jews of Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches, and most of the remaining forced labourers under Hungarian Army command were deported to Bergen-Belsen. Two ghettos were set up in Budapest. The big Budapest ghetto was set up and walled in the Erzsébetváros part of Budapest on 29 November.  Arrow Cross raids and mass executions occurred in both ghettos regularly. In addition, in the two months between November 1944 and February 1945, the Arrow Cross shot between ten and fifteen thousand Jews on the banks of the Danube. Soviet troops liberated the big Budapest ghetto on 18 January 1945. On the Buda side of the town, the encircled Arrow Cross continued their murders until the Soviets took Buda on 13 February.

The names of some foreign diplomats, perhaps most notably Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz, are regularly referred to among those ‘righteous among the nations’. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, was arrested by Soviet security agents in Budapest in January 1945 and disappeared. Although some questions remain regarding his disappearance and death, there is no doubt that his activities in Budapest were instrumental in preventing further deportations and deaths among the capital’s Jews. Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s Vice-Consul, worked from the US Legation, declaring seventy-two buildings in Budapest as annexes of the Swiss Legation, saving over sixty thousand Jews. In the countryside, the role of as has that of the Hungarian actress Vali Rácz has also been recognised. She hid many families in her home in the countryside after the initial deportations but was denounced to the invading Red Army for fraternising with German soldiers (in order to protect her ‘guests’) and almost shot as a collaborator. A Red Army Colonel intervened to stop this and she was exonerated.

There were also some members of the army and police who saved people (Pál Szalai, Károly Szabó, and other officers who took Jews out from camps with fake papers) as well as some local church institutions and personalities. Rudolph Kasztner also deserves special attention because of his enduring negotiations with Eichmann to prevent deportations to Auschwitz, succeeding only minimally, by sending Jews to still horrific labour battalions in Austria and ultimately saving 1,680 Jews in Kastner’s train.

An estimated 119,000 Jewish people were liberated in Budapest (25,000 in the small, ‘international’ ghetto, 69,000 in the big ghetto and 25,000 hiding with false papers) and 20,000 forced labourers in the countryside. Almost all of the surviving deportees returned between May and December 1945, at least to check out the fate of their families. Their number was 116,000.

It is estimated that from an original population of 861,000 people considered Jewish inside the borders of 1941–44,  only about 255,000 survived. This gives a 30% survival rate overall under Hungarian rule, but only because the projected deportations from Budapest did not take place. As has already been stated, the survival rates for Jews from the Hungarian countryside were far lower. This number was even worse in Slovakia. On the other hand, the Hungarian-speaking Jewish population fared much better in the Romanian-controlled Southern Transylvania, since Romania did not deport Jews to Auschwitz. According to another calculation, Hungary’s pre-war Jewish population was 800,000, of which only 180,000 survived

Sources:

Andrew J Chandler (2012), As the Land Remembers Them. Kecskemét: Unpublished

Nóra Szekér, Domokos Szent-Iványi and His Book, Part I, in Hungarian Review, Volume IV, No. 6. Budapest, November 2013

Domokos Szent-Iványi, The Hungarian Independence Movement, Excerpts, Descent into the Maelstrom, Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

James C Bennett & Michael J Lotus, America, England, Europe – Why do we differ? Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Marc J Susser (ed.) (2007), The United States & Hungary; Paths of Diplomacy, 1848-2006. Washington: US Department of State.

István Lázár, (1989), The History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity. Budapest: Corvina.

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