Trapped between the Black Eagle & the Red Star:

At the beginning of 1945, even with the Pest side of the capital under siege, Szalási’s idiotic Arrow-Cross terror turned its attention to those who were helping the Jews of Budapest to survive until the Red Army could complete the ‘liberation’ of the whole city. Yet, even as they did so, the Red Army was also unleashing its own form of ‘revenge’ and terror on Hungarian citizens on the eastern suburbs and peripheral villages. Though the siege had begun at the end of 1944, the German army was ordered to hold the city to defend the Vienna Basin and the only oil field still at its disposal, the one in Zala County. But the war in the country did not end even after the siege of the Hungarian capital and its capitulation. Meanwhile, efforts were being made to have regular Hungarian troops take part in the final crushing of the Nazi Third Reich. A group of soldiers who wound up as prisoners of the Soviet armies initiated the establishment of a Hungarian legion, but they were not allowed to implement their plan.

The Provisional Government formed in Debrecen recruited a new democratic Hungarian army recruited in the ‘liberated’ part of the country, but it did not become battle-ready in time. Only the military cooperation of a single spontaneously rallied outfit, the Buda Voluntary Regiment, could be observed in the battle for Budapest. When the German Army’s attempt to break through the Allied lines in the Ardennes failed by early January, the few still combat-worthy élite guards, with the Sixth SS Panzer Army, were hastily transferred to Transdanubia, where, deployed around Lake Balaton, they were able to hold on to the Zala oil fields.

Above: Soviet soldiers in battle in Budapest on 14 January 1945. This photograph was taken four days before the liberation of Pest was completed. The complete defeat of German forces in the capital, including the equal numbers of Hungarian soldiers still supporting them, took until 13 February.

New Year in Pest – A Frightful Fortnight:

On New Year’s Eve, units of the Red Army overran Hungarian army positions around Pest. House-to-house fighting extended into the working quarters of the city, and Soviet soldiers penetrated the culverts of the inner district.  Often the two sides were separated by only one street or house. Aircraft squadrons continued to drop bombs, and fighter planes strafed streets that were deemed to be in enemy hands, though sometimes they were shooting at their own men. In the city centre, as the siege progressed slowly in their direction, the co-workers of Raoul Wallenberg, the Langfelder-Simon family, which had been placed under Swedish protection, moved from Üllői út to Révai utca, near to the Opera House.

Almost eighty people had moved into the apartment building which was rented by the Swedish Embassy. In the afternoon of 1 January, Arrow-Cross armed men shot the lock off the outside door. They smashed the door to the cellar, where the Swedish Embassy employees were living. To the accompaniment of shouting, swearing and threats, they pillaged all the families’ money and food. Meanwhile, someone managed to inform Wallenberg by telephone, and he sent a detective to intervene, thus avoiding more serious harassment or massacre on the spot. Wallenberg and Langfelder arrived later with an armed gendarme to guard the house. At that time, Wallenberg was forced to spend most of his time in hiding, and was constantly preoccupied with survival, his plans for Hungary and making the earliest possible contact with the Soviet forces. A few days later, a further five gendarmes were added and had served there for scarcely a fortnight when a further order sent them into the firing-line. No more was heard of them. With Wallenberg’s permission, Langfelder brought his two-year-old niece, Éva Simon there. Until then the child had found shelter and a home with a friendly Christian family in central Pest, an action which was strictly forbidden by decree. The house had been bombed, and so she had to be moved and from then on had remained with her parents.

On 5 January, following direct orders from the Szalási government, police and Arrow-Cross irregulars began emptying out the remaining ‘international houses’, those under the protection of the various neutral countries’ governments, most notably the Swedish and the Swiss. When the news reached Raoul Wallenberg, he offered a bribe of food and medications for them to leave his charges where they were.

On the night of 7 January, armed raids took place on the occupants of Jókai utca 1 in Terézváros where the Swedish Embassy had rented the second floor the previous autumn. Ten groups of activists operated in the rooms under the direction of Dr Béla Forgács and Dr Antal Léderer, caring for the Swedish protégés. The ever-more savage Arrow-Cross could not tolerate the Swedish presence any longer and meant to mop it up, paying no attention to the protected status of the various rented properties. In the raid, the first part of the nightmare was total plundering. Then, some two hundred people were turned out into the street, some of them being marched away, the women and children escorted to the ghetto, where ninety of them were crammed into the flats within a house in Akácfa utca.

Some of the men were tortured and shot on the way in the streets and squares or on the Danube embankment. Wallenberg searched for the kidnapped people but without success. Imre Nidosi, commander of the Arrow-Cross guard on the Pest side simply denied all knowledge of Swedish-protected persons being in his custody.

The Arrow-Cross marauders’ atrocities also struck at the Swedish embassy offices in Üllői út. On the evening of the 8th, they intimidated and robbed a hundred and fifty persons – for the most part, embassy employees – and then marched them off to the Mária Terézia barracks. Hans Weyermann, the active agent of the International Red Cross on the Pest side, made an interesting special report of that day. According to this, an agent of the Soviet State Security Police had dropped by parachute and appeared at his office. Asking to see Weyermann in private, he told him that he was expected to speak to the commander of the German defenders about avoiding needless bloodshed. The Germans were to spare hostages, political prisoners and occupants of the ghettoes, and in return, the Red Army would not trouble the civilian population and any calling to account would be done exclusively through the law and the courts. According to Lévai’s Wallenberg, Langfelder’s sister and brother-in-law, Dr Gyula Simon, last spoke to him on 10 January. He dashed in to see them for a few minutes in the Swedish Embassy building at Révai utca 16. His brother-in-law had been second-in-command of the building on 1 January at the time of the Arrow-Cross attack. Lévai tells us that on the evening of 10 January Károly Szabó reported that…

… the front was on Thököly út by the the Millenáris Sports Ground. There he had had a word with a captain, a friend of his, who was quite prepared to let him and his wife through, so he would gladly take Wallenberg and … Langfelder, as that was what Wallenberg wanted. Szabó said that that he too would go through with them and come back next day.

On the same night, Wallenberg took further steps and made preparations to travel. With the help of György Szöllősi and Langfelder, he secretly made the touring car ready for a long journey in the garage, hiding a large sum in gold and jewels in a petrol can. According to Szöllősi, their idea was first to go to Debrecen, and from there to Sweden, for Wallenberg to make his report. These details are confirmed in the memoirs of the gendarme, Lajos Bajusz, who also recalled that both men were very nervous before the journey. Sándor Erdey, a war reporter, later recalled that he had been asked by the restauranter of the ‘Paprika csárda’ (where he was a regular customer) to help a Jewish family to get to Pannónia utca. Erdey promised to do so, but immediately declined the “generous return favour” that was offered. Next morning, during an air-raid, he managed to transport the family, with the help of his brother. He went back to the restaurant for lunch, where he was spoken to by a ‘stranger’ according to his memoirs, which continued:

The well-dressed young man introduced himself, and it was Raoul Wallenberg, embassy counsellor. He too wanted to reward me, and was offended when I declined. As he put it, that would mean that he couldn’t ask me to do something else. With great difficulty he made his request known, and it was the same as the day before. I gave my consent, but asked that we should start within hours. Again, I asked for my brother’s help. I took the man entrusted to me and his fiancée from the address given to the Pannonia Hotel …

It’s not clear how Erdey recognised the ‘stranger’ as Wallenberg, especially as he does not record the language of the conversation. Since both men spoke good German, they would have had little difficulty in communicating. Neither is there any mention of Langfelder, Wallenberg’s ever-present driver. But the incident shows that the rescue of several people by car from Jókai utca by car was successful, and the Pannonia Hotel was indeed where several Jewish families found shelter, along with many other persecuted people. The manager, Sándor Kaufmann, succeeded, by much ingenuity and even more risk (later honoured at Yad Vashem), in protecting to the end those hiding from the persistent ‘Jew-hunt’ of the Arrow-Cross. On 11 January, Wallenberg and Langfelder said goodbye to their closest colleagues at the Hazai Bank. The secretary could now see that he no longer had the ways and means to continue his work. That night, they slept once more at László Ocskay’s roomy flat in Benczúr utca, which was in a building under Red Cross protection. Next day they set off by car, but turned back, presumably due to the Soviet advance. On the 13th, the front line reached the mid-point of Andrássy út and the parallel Benczúr utca. It was at this point, in both space and time, that Wallenberg tried to make contact with Marshal Malinovski. He reported personally to the Russians in Benczúr utca, using a note which apparently read, in Russian, ‘I come over’. He was then taken behind the Russian lines with a major and military escort, accompanied by Langfelder.

At about this time in Berlin, Wallenberg was under consideration in Berlin by the ‘Jewish expert’, a leading figure in the campaign for the destruction of the Jews of Europe. He had followed attentively the activity of Eichmann and knew a great deal about the diplomatic rescue attempts in Budapest. In a telegraphic summary, he informed Eichmann, then in Berlin, that ambassador Danielsson had gone into hiding and that Wallenberg had been placed under German protection. Although the precise details are still unclear, it seems that the Soviets intercepted this message, leading to Wallenberg’s arrest as a ‘suspected spy’ and his imprisonment by the Soviets.  By this time, Eichmann had become an embarrassment and encumbrance to the upper echelons of the SS. The next day, the 14th, the main military hospital in Budapest received a direct hit. Dying soldiers were left in destroyed buildings and the wounded piled up in makeshift hospitals, without medicine or nurses, lying in the cold cellars of the burned-out Parliament building and the Museum of Military History. A retreating German army unit blew up the Petöfi Bridge, then known as the Horthy Bridge. An Arrow-Cross group advanced into the ghetto and murdered several people they encountered before bein routed by Miksa Domonkos, a Jewish Council member with good contacts in the gendarmerie, together with a couple of policemen. In the streets, the advancing Soviet soldiers used captured civilians to shield them from enemy fire. In short order, the German military also adopted this tactic, but the strategy was ineffectual for both armies.

The Collapse of the Reich & Liberation of Auschwitz:

The collapse of the Reich was accelerating and every initiative of the German military leadership was a failure. The inner circle of the Nazi chiefs of staff clung on in blind faith that Hitler’s wonder-weapons would yet save them and their families from ignominious invasion and defeat. They wove fantasies, as the Hungarian political élite had done the previous year,  about making a separate peace, based on the mistaken belief that in no way would the West allow Stalin to penetrate deep into central Europe. Several saw the series of nightmare acts as the consequence of the fanatical genocidal activity of Eichmann. He was aware, as were the other Nazi leaders, that he occupied a prominent place on the Allies’ list of war criminals. The other SS leaders kept their distance from Eichmann as catastrophe loomed. They sat apart from him in the dining room of Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin and did not invite the Obersturmbannführer to join them. The mass murderer pondered: Am I supposed to be the blackest sheep in the flock?

The deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz had begun in March 1944, almost as soon as the SS arrived in Budapest (I have written elsewhere on this site about these) Eichmann led the special task force that gathered them in concentration camps and then loaded them in cattle trucks, deporting 437,000 of them there in just eight weeks. He later boasted to a crony 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 of genocide, Eichmann wrote:

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.

The numbers of SS camp guards, Lagerschützen, at Auschwitz varied: very roughly in 1944 there were only 3,500 guarding the 110,000 inmates. There were also usually around eight hundred Sonderkommando prisoners at any one time. Out of the estimated seven thousand men and two hundred women guards who ‘served’ at Auschwitz during the war, only eight hundred were ever prosecuted. The rest merely disappeared into private life, and very many must have been able to escape with valuables stolen from the inmates. As the Russians advanced in the winter of 1944-45, Auschwitz was evacuated westwards in a terrible ‘death march’ of more than fifty miles in sub-zero temperatures. Those who could not keep up were shot and in all, around fifteen thousand died. Nor was the horror over even when the camps were liberated. Despicably, Polish villagers even killed some Jews after the end of the war in Europe when they returned to claim their property, as happened at the village of Jedwabne. We have no evidence of this happening in Hungary, but we know that very few of the Auschwitz survivors returned, and even fewer did so to resettle. This was certainly the case in the village of Apostag, where out of some six hundred Jews deported, fewer than six returned before emigrating (I have written about this elsewhere on this site).

Rationality might have dictated that, once the war looked as if it might be lost, the rail, military and human resources put into the Holocaust ought to have been immediately redirected to the military effort instead, and the Jews who could have been forced into contributing to the war effort ought to have been put to work rather than exterminated. This, after all, had been what had happened before March 1944 in Hungary. Yet a quite separate, entirely Nazi rationale argued that the worsening situation on the Eastern Front required if anything an intensification of the Holocaust, rather than a winding down. As Saul Friedlander has written:

Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance … the Jews were the hidden link that kept Capitalism and Bolshevism together.

Furthermore, he asserted, if ‘Fortress Europe’ was about to be invaded, the domestic danger posed by the Jews in his diseased imagination needed to be eradicated as soon as possible. Finally, with the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January, his Final Solution to the Jewish ‘problem’ was brought to an end.

The Final Fight for Survival:

Yet, in Budapest at least, many of the Jews had survived, thanks largely to the letters of protection provided them by the Swedish and Swiss diplomats and their brave Hungarian colleagues and volunteers. The last few weeks of the siege were some of the most difficult to survive, however. None of the ‘safe’ houses protected by the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross was truly safe from the Arrow-Cross any more. The thundering sound of cannons was heard all the time and huge bombers flew low in the sky.

Nearly all of the people of Pest were starving, but especially the Jews, who were either in the ghettoes or in hiding, trying to get food without ration cards and only able to buy it after 5 p.m. By this time, Daisy Birnbaum (see her ‘letter of protection’ below) was back with her parents, unafraid even of the bombs, although they were walled in her uncle’s cellar. There were five of them, and their daily ration was a small slice of bread with margarine, so they were hungry all the time. They lived in what Daisy describes as a ‘nook’ behind a makeshift toilet wall for close to seven weeks with the help of neighbours and friends of her father. No other Jews remained in the house because they had all been taken to the ghetto. However, the few gentile families that remained soon moved down permanently to the cellar, due to the constant bombing of the nearby ‘Nyugati’ (Western) Railway Station.

Eventually, the Russian soldiers found them when they were searching for German soldiers by pressing stethoscopes to the walls. Hearing the hollow sound, they did not wait for a response but kicked the ‘communal’ toilet apart. They greeted them with machine guns at the ready as they crawled out from behind the destroyed wall, giving them part of their square-shaped black bread and bacon to eat. To begin with, the Russian soldiers behaved like liberators and were greeted as such, especially by the Jewish survivors, but that soon changed. Nevertheless, when the siege was finally ended in February 1945, it must have felt that, as it does so often in that part of central Europe, spring had come early, in both a physical and spiritual sense. Daisy Birnbaum recalled mixed feelings as most, though not all of her family were reunited:

During the spring of 1945, like the rest of the survivors, we tried to live as if those terrible months could have been erased from our memories. And we had not yet given up the hope that the deportees would return. The renewal of the Sunday lunches of the past also belonged to this noble effort. For about three years, Aunt Juliska appeared at our Sunday table. The poor thing wept every Sunday; from the soup until the end of the meal, her tears were flowing copiously. And she kept repeating to my mother: “You see, my dear, every stinking kike is back, only my darling Lajoska was killed”. Later she moved to her sister who lived in the countryside. 

Three other brief stories of survival remain to be retold here from Daisy’s little book about 1944, which many of her friends and their relatives sadly did not survive. The first is of her first ‘boyfriend’, György. His mother was one of those deported to Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war who did not return and after the later liberation of that camp, Gyuri went to live with his aunt Ilus while his older brother, Pista, who had spent 1944 in Eger with false documents, moved in with another ‘survivor’ sister and her family. By the time Gyuri turned ten, his father, inforced labour in the army, was reported ‘missing’ before the German occupation. From then on, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’, waiting to be deported. Probably with the help of their ‘Uncle Béla’, the family received the Swedish protective papers, Schutzpasse, and with about twenty strangers they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus. There Gyuri survived the siege and the continuous Arrow-Cross raids. Almost daily, the thugs looked for any reason to take people out from the houses and shoot them into the Danube. In 1945, already free, but fully orphaned, Gyuri found himself in the same apartment in Pozsonyi út which he shared with Aunt Ilus and Ági, waiting for the return of Uncle Béla who was ‘spending time’ in the Soviet Union.

Above: Pista and Gyuri c. 1937.

Dr László, the father of Mihály or Misi (pictured above at Balassagyarmat in 1938), held the rank of lieutenant and worked as a physician in the First World War and also served in the Second. His maternal grandparents lived in Balassagyarmat, the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a member of the ‘Jewish gentry’, a well-to-do, respected landowner. Although he lived in Budapest with his family for most of the year, “Gyarmat” was his paradise where he, his mother and his sisters spent their summers. When his grandfather died in 1943, aged 62, the family ‘council’ decided that Misi’s mother should move back ‘home’ to manage the estate, as both uncles were in serving in forced labour camps. So Misi and his sister also stayed in Gyarmat and went to the Jewish school there. With the German occupation, the estate was confiscated and the family was required to return to Budapest. Those of the family who remained in Gyarmat, their friends and the rest of the Jews were crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. Misi lost his maternal grandmother there, together with all his schoolmates from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid a similar fate, during the summer of 1944, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches had openly stood up for the persecuted, both children were saved by members of Catholic orders. Misi found refuge with the Collegium Josephinum whose Prioress was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for the nunnery’s role in saving sixty Jewish children and twenty adults from the Gestapo in 1944. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns of Kőbánya. Béla and Pali, his paternal uncles both wound up as forced labour soldiers on the Russian front, the former ‘disappearing’ and the latter surviving the siege of Stalingrad. Pali’s wife was deported to Auschwitz but, miraculously, both of them survived, as did Misi’s paternal grandmother who had remained in their Budapest apartment. She did not wear a yellow star and neither did she move into the ghetto, but somehow got through the war alive. It took thirty-five years for Misi to gather enough strength to visit Balassagyarmat, a similar story to many others who were forced to leave their beloved Hungarian villages. Many others never went back, and those still alive probably never will.

The final ‘survivor’s story’ recorded by Daisy Birnbaum is that of Ágnes, who was born in Endrőd, a small town in eastern Hungary, although her happiest summer memories were of her grandmother’s home at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Ági’s much-adored father left their flat in Budapest for the forced labour camp ‘one evening in November’ and she never saw him again. She wrote the following piece of prose (an extract from which is given here) recalling the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, including her return to Endrőd:

New Year’s Eve, someone tells fortunes from the residue of some black liquid. Everybody prognosticates. The key turns to the right in the prayer-book: We will survive. Wedding band in the bottom of a glass of water. What do you see? A cross. Your father will not return. Tell us, dear spirit, when will the ghetto be liberated? Slowly, the name of a month appears on the paper: January.

In January, a Russian soldier enters the building and points toward the exit. Marching columns. We break into a yarn depot and on the way back we exchange thread for bread. I drop the ten rolls of machine twist I am supposed to carry. The snow is knee-high on the road; the soles of my shoes are of cardboard. I walk the distance of Monor to Szolnok, practically unconscious. From Szolnok on, there is a train, a beautiful, uncovered cattle-car, one can sit down in, and we reach the village in a day.

Returning to Endrőd was anything but simple for Ági. She couldn’t walk as her toes were frost-bitten. She was given two wooden planks by a local peasant. Fastening them to her feet, she practised walking. Her mother is suffering from scurvy due to vitamin deficiency; She worked on a hand-driven carding-machine, torturing her body to provide milk, bread and soap for them. There was no husband or father left in their lives. A small kitchen was to be their home; there they lived, unaware even of what was happening in the village. There were no newspapers, no radio. She wrote that: It might be three months before we learn what had happened beyond the borders of the country.

Their apartment in Budapest had been ransacked, therefore they tried to resume life at Endrőd, but after a while it became unbearable. They first moved to Szeged, and finally returned to Budapest. Of her relatives in the countryside, Ágnes’ uncle died of starvation at Kőszeg and her paternal grandparents were deported together with her father’s sister. They were put to work on a farm in Austria, where Ági’s grandfather drove a tractor. They survived, despite the ‘disappearance’ of their son, Ági’s father. Being Jewish was never a simple issue in her life because she would always remember the gigantic capital Zs in her father’s military record book, and that she had to grow up fatherless. However, she always felt that she was Hungarian, even if she had only by chance. She never left Hungary, because she chose to be a Hungarian … Like nearly all Budapest children of that time, and especially those of the Jewish elementary school on Hollán utca, Ágnes was just a generation away from country life, having relatives in the countryside. The deportations of 1944 fractured that connection forever for Hungary’s Jews. Outside the capital, all Jews were deported, and Jewish children survived the Holocaust just by chance, whereas after the war, Budapest was full of Jewish orphans and half-orphans, because from there the adults were taken to various forced labour camps and sent on death marches.

From February 1945, the children remained largely silent about the recent past, and only by coincidence did they learn that a classmate lived with her aunt or just with her mother. Daisy has written that they didn’t want to remember, just as the adult survivors hesitated to face the memories of the previous terrible years:

We who survived have survived, but there are events in life that one cannot really survive. We try not to think of them all the time, but they are there and rule our lives, and our basic reactions to most things. …

I am writing of middle-class families who were not particularly broad-minded, polished people, but who worked hard, reared their children and were happy when their small savings increased. Many remained in towns and villages in the countryside where they had always lived; from there they were carried off to various extermination camps. These were simple people: even their dreams were grey. But they died incredible deaths, prepared for them by diseased minds. Millions shared their fate but each suffered death individually, death that  would have been unimaginable if they ever contemplated the end of their lives: Killed by gas, shot in the head, death by starvation.

Alluding to Fateless, the English translation (2004) of the novel Sortalanság (1975) by Imre Kertész, Daisy comments that their perishing completed their ‘Fatelessness’ because they were robbed of their adulthood or old age, and of death with dignity. Some of her friends never even turned eleven, a fact that she has never been able to assimilate and a crime she cannot forgive.

The ‘Disappeared’ – The Mysterious Fate of Wallenberg & Langfelder:

On 14 January in Budapest, Wallenberg appeared in a Russian car. He said that he had transferred his effects and a briefcase containing 222,000 pengős to his flat in Erzsebét királyné utca in Zugló. This was at the ‘city limits’ and may have functioned as the first Soviet detention and interrogation centre at the rear of the advancing Red Army, but it’s perhaps more likely that he was in the Soviet headquarters which had been established at the Széchenyi baths building where he could have made contact with officers of high rank and position. On 15 January, there was one final attempt to blow up the Budapest ghetto. Kasztner claimed that the destruction was prevented by General Winkelmann, acting under the orders of Kurt Becher, the SS officer with whom Kasztner had been negotiating on behalf ‘the Joint’, the international Zionist organisation. Although Kasztner was in Vienna during the siege of Budapest, making the ‘trade’ of twenty million francs with Becher, he claimed that the high-ranking officer called Winkelmann, who forbade the Arrow-Cross government’s action. The Germans told the Arrow-Cross minister that emptying the ghetto would not be in the best interests of Germany. Of course, many claimed, at Nuremberg, that they had acted ‘heroically’ in terms of humanity in the dying days of the Reich.

On the morning of the 16th or 17th, Wallenberg caused a stir when he appeared at the International ghetto, at the Swedish Embassy office at Tátra utca 6, together with a Soviet lieutenant colonel and Langfelder. At this point, the eye-witness accounts differ, but they agree that he left in a car headed east of the city centre, towards Gödölő and Debrecen. But it seems that the Soviet motorcycle escort took them on a roundabout route through the city, either due to the military operations or to scout out the diplomat’s personal connections and learn of his future plans. It also appears that the promise that he was free to leave was pure bluff. But in 1947, the Soviet authorities issued a statement denying that Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver had been taken away by their forces. They pointed out that:

It must not be forgotten that in an area where the Soviet forces then were, in that period when very heavy fighting was taking place in Hungary, all sorts of possibilties could have arisen. Wallenberg travelled at his own risk in areas controlled by Soviet forces.

On the 16th, before Wallenberg’s putative departure for Debrecen, the quarter containing the ‘protected houses’ was liberated, and the morning of the 18th brought the other tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest release from the Arrow-Cross terror, from mining and from air-raids. Advancing from house-to-house (often from cellar to cellar), the Soviet forces reached the Károly körút end of the central ghetto. They demolished the wooden gates of the ghetto, and in several places the palisades too. Hansi Brand remembered that it had been snowing the night before and, when she looked outside, the smell of fresh snow seemed stronger than the stench of corpses and smoke. She also recalled the few moments of quiet after Pest fell. In front of ‘the Glass House’, the young halutzim ran out to hug and kiss the first Soviet soldiers they saw. Their enthusiasm was so great that some of the soldiers grabbed their guns to free themselves. The houses and gateways in the ghetto, the streets too, presented a lamentable sight, and the sight and stench of death dominated everywhere. Outside the arcade of the Dohány utca synagogue, heaps of corpses lay in the street, frozen hard. Burials began at once in the garden, and the victims lie there to this day. A total of 2,281 bodies were buried in twenty-four common graves, forty-five had been shot – twenty-four women and twenty-one men. The great majority had been dead for weeks and very many were totally naked so that a very large number were unidentifiable. A large proportion of the dead was elderly. Lack of vehicles made the work of burial more difficult, as did the frozen ground and the revulsion felt by the people.

After the Fall – The Battle for Buda:

Along the Danube, the hotels and restaurants were on fire. German and Hungarian troops withdrew from Pest into Buda and the Germans then blew up the five bridges across the Danube that linked the two halves of the city. Remnants of the German and Hungarian armies crossed over the badly damaged Chain Bridge into the ruins of the old Castle District just before the bridge was destroyed. There were thousands of casualties. The narrow streets and burning buildings made it difficult to reach the bridgehead, and the bridge itself was continually bombarded. Within Buda, particularly around the central fortress which was defended by SS troops, the fighting was intense. Buda also came under heavy attacks both from the air and by advancing Soviet troops from the west. Still, the German Command deemed that the hills were defendable. Of the thirty thousand  German soldiers who eventually tried to break out of Budapest, only 624 reached the German lines. On the same day that Pest fell to the Soviets, Domokos Szent-Iványi returned from his ill-fated diplomatic mission in Moscow, arriving in Debrecen, where a provisional Hungarian government had been formed, with the support of the Soviets. He recalled feeling ‘helpless’ as …

… power was already in the hands of the Russian secret service and the power and influence of Gerő, Rákosi … and of the Hungarian Secret Police was steadily growing.

The provisional government, headed by Miklós Béla Dálnoki, a general who had gone over to the Soviets, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in Moscow on 20 January. Under the terms of the agreement, Hungary was to declare war on Germany; evacuate all territory occupied since 31 December 1937, and pay $300 million in reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. An Allied Control Commission was established to oversee compliance, and Soviet troops remained to occupy the country. Major-General William S Key headed the US delegation to the Commission, and arrived in Hungary in February, overseeing a force of thirty-six enlisted men and sixteen officers on the Commission’s staff.

Eventually, worn out by the sheer force of the Red Army attack, the Germans attempted to break out of their stronghold in Buda, and all but a few thousand were killed or captured. Meanwhile, with Wallenberg’s departure for Debrecen, the Swedish humanitarian action was considered finished in the Tátra utca office. The head of the office, Hugö Wohl, prepared a report and inventory. He put the number of the persons provided with protective passes (SP) and other official Swedish documents at four thousand, the number of Hungarian colleagues named as officials at two hundred, and the total number of their family numbers at four hundred. He estimated the number supplied with Red Cross letters of protection at 2,500. On 27 January, the same day as the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, a temporary executive committee made an announcement on behalf of the Royal Swedish Embassy. It addressed all the holders of the SP:

Seeing that persons of Jewish origin are now citizens enjoying equal rights, activity has come to a natural end.

More than two-thirds of the pre-war of Hungarian Jewish population perished in the Holocaust, and it might have been as high as three-quarters had it not been for the work of Wallenberg and the Swiss Vice-Consul, Carl Lutz, who rescued tens of thousands of European Jews, many of whom had found a haven in Budapest as Jewish refugees from all over central-eastern Europe. Lutz, a career diplomat who had been educated in the United States, was a religious man who was a convinced anti-Nazi. Seventy-two buildings in Budapest were declared annexes of the Swiss Legation, with diplomatic immunity. Working from the US Legation, because the Swiss represented US interests during the war, he is credited with saving over sixty thousand Jews.

On 9 February, the Budapest Police HQ announced that after 18 January the Soviet authorities had removed the police from their headquarters and barracks. Policemen had to make their way to work every day, and scarcely half of them reached their stations. They were picked up on such a scale that there were as many as three thousand of them in a prison camp in Gödöllő. Vilmos Bondor summed up the nature of the close of the fifty-one-day Battle of Budapest and the first months of 1945:

In the capital, chaos reigned. Russian deserters formed gangs of bandits and plundered. The pockets of SS did the same. The newly appointed Hungarian authorities looked on helplessly. They lacked manpower and experience. Police appointments were made from among the comrades, and those with any expertise were soon in prison. But what made their work more risible was that they were not to touch Russian soldiers, who did as they pleased.

Buda eventually fell on 13 February. The City finally surrendered. The entire siege of the capital had lasted one hundred days. The combined Soviet and Romanian losses in Budapest totalled more than seventy thousand men; the Hungarian army lost 16,500; the German army, thirty thousand. More than forty thousand civilians had been killed, including some seven thousand Jews.

About forty thousand Hungarian troops were taken prisoner by the Soviets. To round out the numbers, they took fifty thousand civilians as well. Everyone in uniform, even firefighters and postmen, was taken prisoner, as were men lining up for bread or going in search for water.  Around one-third of the soldiers and civilians were returned to Hungary after a few years of forced labour in the Soviet Union. Of the fifty thousand Jews ‘lent’ to the Reich to build fortifications around Vienna, only about twenty thousand were still alive in April 1945. Fewer than one in ten of the men in the Jewish labour brigades survived the war. During the fifty-one day battle, a quarter of the buildings were destroyed and three-quarters of them were damaged. Not a single bridge remained over the Danube. The ruins and rubble of the Chainbrige can be seen on the right. In the background, the effect of the fierce fighting around Buda Castle is apparent.  As at Stalingrad, Hitler did not permit any negotiation by his already completely conquered armies leading to some deal.

The German military command in Budapest asked for reinforcements, but Hitler had none to spare. Ignoring advice from his generals, he had thrown eight divisions into a last desperate counter-attack on the Allied troops in the Saar region in an attempt to retake the Ardennes borderlands in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. The last attempt by the German forces in the capital in the Buda hills and the Pilis forests occurred through contravention of the Führer’s orders; by then it was futile to do so, however. Hitler’s determination to retain the possession of the Vienna Basin and the oil fields in Zala County by holding out in the Budapest area and thus buying time was also doomed to failure. When Hitler finally decided to send a Panzer division to Hungary, it was too late to relieve the besieged forces in Buda and was used instead to hold up the Red Army’s advance into western Hungary, with its important oil-fields. After Budapest was lost, Hitler’s Sixth Panzer Division still tried to hold out west of Lake Balaton against the combined Ukrainian and Russian assault.

‘Potato-peeling’ – The Mass Rapine of the Red Army:

Above: Two Red Army soldiers during the Battle of Budapest in the early weeks of 1945. The behaviour of some of the Soviet troops in the aftermath of the battle became infamous.

For their part, the soldiers of the Red Army, who had been told by Stalin to capture the Hungarian capital in ‘a few days’ had taken more than a hundred days to force a surrender. In the immediate aftermath of their victory, some of the Soviets took their frustrations on the women of Budapest. Ivan Polcz was one of the first to witness what happened. He was thirteen on 11 February, just two days before the surrender, and was the only child of a respectable middle-class Hungarian family. During the siege, he and his parents had hidden in the cellar of a relative’s house in the suburbs. They had all heard rumours of how the Soviets ‘did not respect women at all’ but many people did not believe that the Red Army soldiers would commit rape. Two nights before Ivan’s birthday, everyone in the cellar had heard heavy bombing. And then, he said, all of a sudden two Russian soldiers wearing white stormed into the cellar holding machine guns. The Red Army soldiers shouted that they were looking for Germans. Finding none, they ran back into the street. Horrified, Ivan watched as half an hour later German soldiers came into the cellar. But, not finding their enemy, they rushed away again. Then, on the night of his birthday, …

… an incredible number of Russian soldiers stormed into the cellar with guns. If it hadn’t been so frightening we would have been laughing our heads off because they were dressed with other people’s clothes. Men were even wearing women’s boots … They asked us if we had jewellery, but apart from taking our watches and some of the clothes which they liked they didn’t do anything. … And so we were quite OK with them. And we thought to ourselves that the idea they were aggressive with women, this is probably an invention of the Nazis to threaten us.

But a few days later, the atmosphere changed. At about ten o’clock at night, two Red Army soldiers came into the cellar where, by now, about twenty-five people were sheltering, a mixture of elderly couples, younger couples and children. The expressions on the soldiers’ faces were menacing. One of the young Hungarian husbands acted as interpreter and asked the soldiers what they wanted. When they told him, Ivan remembered, ‘he started to tremble’. They had said that they needed a woman:

Of course, the interpreter got frightened because he was a young man with a wife who was ther on one of those beds … so he said that there were only mothers and elderly people, and they should leave us alone. I was terribly afraid because my mother was … for her age, forty-eight … a good-looking woman. Next to her was her younger sister, and next to them was a counsellor from the embassy with his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter.

When the soldiers reached the far end of the cellar they found a young blonde woman of seventeen, the maid of the couple who owned the villa. This was the woman they chose. They grabbed her and she started crying and pleading, shouting to the rest of the people in the cellar, Please help me! Help me! Ivan went on:

Everybody was frozen – a stone. … This was a terrible moment. I will never forget about it. Everybody knew by then that the women were in real danger. … And then something happened which was at first sight quite strange. The owner of the house, a retired military officer, started to talk to the maid. He said, “Please make this sacrifice for the sake of the country. And with this you will be able to save the other women here who will never forget this.” At the time, I thought this was a very mean statement, that he told her to “make this sacrifice on the altar of the Hungarian nation”, but in a way she did save my mother and all the other young women there. … Then there was quite a lot of crying and the Russian grabbed her and took her upstairs … and after fifteen minutes this girl staggered back down the stairs. She was absolutely collapsing, and she said that she had been the victim of a very fierce atrocity and rape, and this animal even beat her up because she had been crying. And of course everyone else was crying … when the saw this poor girl they didn’t even dare to look at her. … It was a terrible case. … Even today I can still remember it quite vividly and I get gossebumps, even though I am seventy-five years of age.    

The German and Arrow-Cross terror had been ended, but the survivors were already experiencing the first signs of a form of despotism and dictatorship which was just as inhuman in its consequences. In the aftermath of the Red Army’s advance across  Budapest, rape became almost ubiquitous. The pointless struggle had brought upon the country a series of ‘last-ditch’ sufferings, dreadful ruin and destruction. The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women, a contemporary report from the Swiss embassy in Budapest asserted. The supporting evidence for this statement was clear:

Rapes – affecting all age groups from ten to seventy – are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared. … The misery is made worse by the sad fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary.

Having hidden successfully from the Arrow-Cross for months, Jewish women and children were now just as much under threat from the Red Army as their gentile neighbours. One of Daisy Birnbaum’s friends, eleven-year-old Kati, had been hiding for weeks with her mother in the coal cellar of an apartment house where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Daisy commented that her mother saved her from sensing the deadly danger that surrounded them. Their area was liberated on 15 January, but at that point, Kati was not permitted out because her mother feared the Russians. The Soviet soldiers had a euphemism for their actions, which reveals how ‘routine’ and systematic it became. It was called ‘peeling potatoes’, based on the requirement of the subjugated women to help out in the military kitchens. However, they were taken from their homes and raped. Ági, a (then) twelve-year-old Jewish schoolfriend of Daisy’s, who went to live in a villa in Buda after her mother was taken into forced labour, recalled how, after finding her ‘Aunt Joli’, her mother’s friend there, they first came into contact with Russian soldiers:

There was very little to eat; they were all hungry, all the time. However, the sound of cannons was getting closer and, suddenly, Russian soldiers appeared in the street. Fortunately, Aunt Joli spoke Slovak and was able to communicate with them. Nonetheless, the Russians reappeared each night and behaved in a horrendous fashion, trying to carry off Aunt Joli ‘to peel potatoes’. She saved herself by pointing out that she had to take care of the children. The situation became unbearable, and they escaped on foot, until a horse-drawn carriage, heading for Budaörs, gave them a lift. There, they moved into an empty house, sharing it with a large number of refugees. However, just a few hours later, there too Russian soldiers arrived, drunk, threatening them with their machine guns, and wanting to take Aunt Joli with them. The children had to get up from their sleeping places to show how many of them were in Aunt Joli’s charge. The soldiers sobered up by the morning and apologised.

Ági B in 1939.

Hansi Brand, the wife of the Zionist activist Joel Brand, who worked closely with Rezső Kasztner to get the surviving Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Palestine, was also threatened by Soviet soldiers in the cellars, where she hid with her two children. One of her boys, although still quite small, told his mother to hide behind him in the corner. When the Russians told the women to come and help “peel potatoes”, Hansi remained in the corner, hidden by her two little boys while the other women went. She wondered how Dani knew what to do but later realised bitterly that “he had seen so much already, his childhood was lost.” She and her boys survived the siege underground.

Not all the women were able to escape the Russian soldiers, however.  The victims of rape included children like fifteen-year-old Ágnes Karlik, whose harrowing testimony has been recorded on the BBC Behind Closed Doors series which accompanies Laurence Rees’ (2008) book (see the list of sources below). Ágnes had been hiding in a cellar with her family during the siege and she found the first Red Army soldiers she met not unpleasant, … just making sure there were no enemies in the building. They didn’t stay long. They tried, actually, to be friendly. But then ‘these rough type of soldiers’ entered the building and they started to pull women out… to come and help peel potatoes. She and her sister were dragged outside, where there was snow on the ground, and into a tent nearby.  She was raped twice, once in the tent in front of her grandmother, and the second time the following night by two Soviet soldiers in a secluded section of the cellar. Her sister, aged fourteen, was also raped. They were sexually naive, having no idea what was happening to them, and the effect on Ágnes of these rapes was profound and lifelong:

For a long time I felt really resentful against men, being able to do such a thing without any sort of good reason. … It makes you feel really resentful against mankind, more or less.

In the hospital, immediately after the second attack, Ágnes was given an internal examination to check that she was not seriously injured. This was not an uncommon occurrence as a result of the severity and violence of the attacks that many women endured. Neither were these cases confined to Budapest, although – according to this author’s oral anecdotal sources – they seem to have been more common there. Medical student Barna Andrásofszky witnessed a case in a village outside the capital in the spring of 1945. He was called to a house by an elderly woman and was told that there was a sick young girl inside. When he went into the living room, he saw that it was in ‘disarray’ and a young woman of about twenty-five was lying on a bed, covered with a blanket:

I went up to her and took the blanket – it was covered with blood. And she was crying and she kept saying that she was going to die, and that she didn’t want to live any more.

Barna was told that the young woman had been raped by between ten and fifteen men. She was bleeding intensely from internal injuries sustained in the attack. He could not stem the flow of blood, and the woman was taken away to a hospital. He commented on this experience:

It was very difficult to see as a reality what the Nazi propaganda was spreading. But here we could see that in reality. And also we heard about many other terrible situations like this.

There have been many Red Army veterans who have tried to contextualise these crimes as a common, if regrettable, historical occurrence in times of war. But in the context of the Second World War in Europe, this excuse is not sustainable. As far as the crime of rapine was concerned, the Soviets were ‘in a league of their own’ according to Laurence Rees and other historians. The Western Allies committed no comparable crimes of this enormity, and mass rape was not tolerated either as a ‘weapon’ of war or as one of the ‘spoils’ of war. In Hungary, both were used to excuse it, as it began before the surrender and continued long after. There are no accurate numbers for the overall number of women raped by Soviet men in Hungary, but the crime was clearly conducted on a massive scale. One estimate is that around fifty thousand were raped in Budapest alone, and, even today, the silence from the countryside can be interpreted as the result of the understandable reluctance of young women and their families to report the crime unless it resulted in a medical emergency, as in the case ‘coincidentally’ reported to Barna Andrásofszky. From the capital itself, some cases were reported to the Soviet military authorities in 1945. The report came from the Hungarian Communists in Köbánya, a suburb on the eastern approaches to the city. They claimed that when the Red Army arrived, they committed a series of sexual crimes in an outbreak of …

… mindless, savage hatred run riot. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as twelve were dragged from their fathers and raped in succession by ten to fifteen soldiers and often infected with venereal disease. … We know that intelligent members of the Red Army are communists, but if we turn to them for help they have fits of rage and threaten to shoot us, saying: “And what did you do in the Soviet Union? You not only raped our wives before our eyes, but for good measure you killed them together with their children, set fire to our villages and razed our cities to the ground.”

As a result, nothing official was said about the crimes. Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, never referred to them. Although there were occasional attempts to enforce the official line that rape committed by Soviet soldiers was a crime, so few cases were prosecuted that it is impossible not to conclude that the offence was often tolerated by the Soviet authorities. One of the few Red Army soldiers prepared to acknowledge that rapes occurred at all in occupied eastern Europe, Fiodor Khropatiy, remarked that:

… no-one paid attention to these things. On the contrary, soldiers gossiped about it, and they were proud, they felt like heroes, that he slept with such and such a woman, one or two or three. This is what soldiers shared with each other … it was normal behaviour. Even if somebody was killed, such a thing wouldn’t be reported, to say nothing of the fact of a soldier sleeping with a girl. … I feel hurt, because our army earned itself such a reputation, and I feel angry about the people who were acting that way. I am negative about such things, very negative. … To some extent, I can understand the soldiers. If you are at war for four years, and in the most horrible conditions, this … violent behaviour can be justified. I can justify the sodiers’ desire to rape a woman, but not … the actual performance. Of course, it’s natural to understand the desire to have a woman, because officers and soldiers, for four years, were deprived of any sex.

Fiodor Khropatiy estimated that a sizeable minority, perhaps as great as thirty per cent, committed rape. Stalin himself justified this crime on more than one occasion when it was brought to his attention, in public, including in the winter of 1944-45, claiming, angrily, that his eastern European allies ought to understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle. On another occasion, when he was told that Red Army soldiers were sexually mistreating German refugees, he is reported to have said: We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative. The frustrations of the Red Army besiegers were first taken out on the women of Budapest in acts of mass rapine, but they were then repeated all across eastern Europe as 1945 progressed, especially in Germany.

The ‘Changing of the Guard’:

Aside from the physical and psychological toll on Hungary taken by the last year of the war in Eastern Europe, forty per cent of the national wealth, accumulated by the work of generations, had also been lost. Meanwhile, society had fallen apart, and it quickly turned out that it was incapable of resisting the new tyranny, the Stalinist dictatorship. On his return from Moscow to Debrecen on 18 January, Domokos Szent-Iványi had written in his manuscript journal of the desperate, almost hopeless situation in which Hungary found herself in 1945. He felt that the country had once again been ‘sacrificed by the West’ and that the dismemberment of Central and in particular East-Central Europe made possible the extension of Nazi and later of Soviet domination in Europe. In February, Colonel-General Gábor Faragho, one of the three original members of the Hungarian Delegation to the Kremlin, where he had signed the provisional armistice terms on 11 October, and who had now been made Minister for Food and Supplies, drove from Debrecen to Budapest, escorted by the Soviet military. Szent-Iványi asked Faragho to contact members of the “intelligentsia” to establish a liberal democratic Party, thus completing the political basis for a pluralist national assembly and interim government, since four parties had already been formed. Out of these conversations, ‘a rather non-viable political Party’ was formed.

But, in these early months of 1945, a coalition of parties, the National Independence Front had brought together the leading parties including the Smallholders, Communists and Social Democrats. Despite their conflicting outlooks and endeavours, consensus still prevailed as to the most immediate tasks. Its goals were to establish independence and break with Hitler; reconstruct the war-torn economy through land reform and some nationalisation of industry; encourage the efforts of private enterprise; maintain close co-operation with the neighbouring countries, with the United States and the Soviet Union. The first task in achieving these was to sign an armistice with the allies which took place on 20 January, requiring Hungary to liquidate all pro-German and Fascist organisations and to accept the supervision of the Allied Control Commission as to the execution of these stipulations. As the latter body was under the direction of Marshal Voroshilov, this last clause in effect legalised Soviet influence, especially as it was in the authority of the Commission to ban political parties, to arrest people and to exercise censorship.

The ‘changing of the guard’ also started at the differing levels of administration, and special committees were charged with ascertaining whether the post-1939 conduct of officials violated Hungarian interests. The gendarmerie was dissolved and its tasks transferred to a reorganised and enlarged police force. As both of these operations took place under the auspices of the Communist-dominated Ministry of the Interior, the results were quite predictable. Simultaneously with the banning of twenty-five parties and associations qualified as ‘extreme rightist’, the ÁVO (State Security Police) started to make arrests, and ‘people’s courts’, each consisting of lay members and a trained judge, began to prosecute those charged with war crimes. Similarly to 1919-20, among the sixty thousand who were charged and the ten thousand who were sentenced by summary procedures, there were many victims of a political showdown, and those who could not be brought to court but were considered as personae non-gratae were interned by the police without further ado. Nevertheless, the majority of those who received sentences were indeed guilty of crimes against humanity.

Of the wartime political leaders, Horthy was in exile in Portugal, where he eventually died, and Kallay and Lakatos were spared because of their anti-German stance, though it had been somewhat equivocal. But Bárdossy, Imrédy, Sztójay, Szálasi and the Arrow-Cross ministers were among the 189 executed. The Provisional Government also undertook land reform. All of the coalition parties agreed that the system of latifundia would be liquidated and that Hungary would be transformed from a country of three million landless labourers or peasants with seven acres or less into one whose agrarian sector was dominated by prosperous peasant farms or ‘small-holdings’, but also including collective large holdings.

The land reform had far-reaching social, economic and political consequences, not least because the Communist Party was able to use the glory of satisfying the hunger for land to win support in rural Hungary.  Their Minister for Agriculture in the coalition government, Imre Nagy, became especially popular, remembered from then on as ‘the land distributor’. Meanwhile, the Communists began to fill the political vacuum in Budapest, creating a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Among other social groups, some among the decimated Jewry joined out of gratitude to the liberators and a search for a new sense of community, while their previous tormentors, the Arrow-Cross men, were rewarded with impunity if they exchanged their green party membership card for a red one.

Village people recalled how at least one of their number, who had helped terrorise and deport the Jewish community in Apostag (whose synagogue, now the Village Hall, is pictured on the right) before its deportation, was not only able to escape justice for his crimes but also became a local policeman. Obviously, by the spring of 1945, the wheel of fate had come full circle. When the Soviet forces eventually ‘liberated’ the last Hungarian town in early April 1945, barely a month was left of World War II in Europe. Even before it had ended, the Hungarian people had been forced to exchange one form of dictatorship for another.

 

 

Sources:

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (eds.) (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-46. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

 

Raoul Wallenberg’s Protective Passports:

After a month in the Hungarian capital, the Secretary of the Swedish Embassy there, Raoul Wallenberg, had to decide quickly on the form of Schutz Pass, or ‘protective passport’ (‘SP’) he would use in his humanitarian relief work with the Jews of Budapest. He attached a specimen to his report to Stockholm of 16 August. It was an important part of his assignment to provide 1,500 Hungarians with temporary passports as protective documents. These could be persons with very close family links with Sweden, or who had been for a long time closely connected to Swedish commercial life, a number that rose later to 4,500. The issue of the new Swedish protective document came with a structure:  a long-term Swedish connection had to be proved documentarily, while the Schutzbrief issued by Langlet had no such condition attached. Wallenberg quickly perceived the scope of humanitarian action. He was a good organiser and had numerous Hungarian colleagues in the accomplishment of tasks. He soon appreciated the unreliability of the Hungarian political élite and its tendency to vacillate, experiencing the many ways in which responsibility could be evaded. Most of his Hungarian acquaintances were ashamed of what was happening to the Jews but insisted that the brutality was exclusively the work of the Germans. Unlike them, he saw clearly what could be described as the Hungarian hara-kiri, and stressed the responsibility of Hungarians, making it clear that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Hungary. He pointed out that Jews on forced labour were not allowed to take shelter during air-raids, leading him to the conclusion that the Christian population evinced only a very luke-warm sympathy, and that it would be very difficult for the Jews to avoid their doom by flight.

The Swedish protective passport in Hungarian and German, with the holder’s photograph, was not acknowledged in international law and had no force. Nonetheless, its influence could not be underestimated. In the summer of 1944, it commanded a certain respect and carried a message. In the presence of immediate lethal danger, many saw in it the chance of escape, of organised defence and the embodiment of their hopes of survival. In August more and more groups of Jews in fear of deportation came to him. The news of his protective passport spread like wildfire and long queues waited on Gellérthegy outside the Humanitarian Section of the Swedish Embassy. From 16 August, a further building was rented and applicants were received from 4 p.m., with questionnaires filled in and six photographs. These were the conditions imposed by the Hungarian government for asylum documents. On the 22nd, the Ministry produced an order on the subject of the exemption of individuals from the regulations relating to Jews. By mid-September, the strength of Wallenberg’s Hungarian apparatus was approaching a hundred. He provided extra accommodation for them at Gellérthegy and also on Naphegy, where ten rooms and a cellar were rented, and round-the-clock shift-work was instituted.

The taking on of colleagues, the formation of an effective organisation and the thorough checking of the data submitted in applications for the Swedish document all took time. The apparatus required for this grew constantly. On 29 September, he reported to the Swedish Foreign Ministry that the entire staff including families number about three hundred persons and are exempt from wearing stars and forced labour. By that time 2,700 letters of protection had been issued and the numbers of those who had gained exemptions from wearing stars exceeded the original 4,500 by a further 1,100. For the first four months of the humanitarian action, it would have been impossible for the Swedish passport of protection to be handed out as a gift to those who did not have clear Swedish connections. That came later when the Arrow Cross reign of terror meant that people were in fear for their lives in an imminent sense. Then, resourceful Jews would copy names (similar to their own) and addresses from the Swedish telephone directories held in the Budapest head post office and send a ‘reply paid’ telegram. Kind-hearted Swedes, realising that the sender was pleading for his or her life, would then confirm the ‘relationship’ by return telegram. Wallenberg’s biographer, Jenő Lévai, has concluded that very many obtained protective passports and escaped through letters or reply telegrams from complete strangers.

The embassy’s work offered reasonable security against the constant threat of deportation. Those employed on humanitarian work received a legitimising card from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Budapest and a special personal card from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. This exempted them from wearing the yellow Star of David and from the ever-more widespread duties of forced labour within the army. Wallenberg had essentially established a system of dual nationality, and this repeatedly aroused the suspicion of both the SS and the Hungarian authorities. According to a German Embassy note of 29 September, the director of the Budapest political section of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry was thinking that the Swedish Embassy should be called to order in a responsible, clear and sharp tone.

By mid-October, Vilmos Langfelder’s family had come under the protection of the Swedish Embassy and he moved to the central office of the Humanitarian Section at Űllői út on the Pest side of the city. Langfelder probably came into contact with Wallenberg because of his knowledge of German and his ability to drive. Within a short time, he had become the Swedish diplomat’s close associate as his chauffeur. His SP had been issued on 20 August, when he had belonged to a forced labour unit under Swedish protection. Langfelder took charge of Elek Kelecsényi’s Steyr car for the purpose of life-saving work. According to Lévai, Wallenberg sent out an Instruction which set out what had to be done to save holders of Swedish protective documents from the clutches of armed bandits, potentially a lethal undertaking. This summed up the dramatic essence of the immediate life-saving work:

Members of this section must be on constant duty day and night. There are no days off. If anyone is arrested, let them hope for much help, and if they do good work let them not expect thanks.

Langfelder frequently found himself driving Wallenberg, at night, to someplace where people needed his protection. Among the couriers and agents, disappearances were frequent, especially when they went into one of the Arrow Cross houses to inquire about a missing person, exposing themselves to a world of pain and indescribable horrors. Increasingly, abductions and murders were carried out in broad daylight. László Hollós and Ödön Ullman were on their way to inform Wallenberg of an Arrow Cross assault on a hospital when they were arrested and murdered.  In the countryside, the role of the Hungarian actress Vali Rácz has also been recognised by Israel. She hid many families from Budapest 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 on what became known as ‘Kastner’s train’, which by the beginning of August had left Bergen-Belsen with its human ‘cargo’ bound for Palestine.

Those left in the ‘Jewish houses’ and the ghettoes were increasingly targeted for forced labour gangs. They were lined up in the streets, marched off, ceaselessly shouted at, trudging off to Óbuda in broad daylight. Klára Tüdős’ recollection draws a concise picture for posterity:

Dreadful rumours circulated about Jews interned at brick-works and cattle-trucks with barbed wire on them, and as dawn broke processions of people wearing stars would set off in the streets of Pest. These things are mixed up inside me together with the wailing of sirens, like a delirious dream.

The Extreme Right’s Reign of Terror begins:

The coming to power of Ferenc Szálasi and his followers on 15 October through the armed intervention of the SS was the nadir of the Horthy régime, its bloodstained final act. Under the Arrow Cross Party, terror became the tool of the totalitarianism of the extreme Right. Its ranks were swelled in particular by the lumpen elements of the underworld and misguided youth that could recognise the chance for unrestrained robbery and violence. On 15 October, Daisy Lászlo’s father, the tallest man in the apartment block, removed the yellow star from the front door. By the afternoon, however, he realised that with this act he had risked his life again. Since he was aware of the politics of the janitor’s wife, he secretly left the house in the dark, but before the doors would have been locked. She must have said something to the Arrow Cross thugs, however, because the following evening a heavily intoxicated young man, wearing the party uniform, kept banging on the Lászlo family’s door, looking for Mr Lászlo. The story continues below, in Daisy’s own words:

He searched every room, causing terrible alarm among the families placed there because he pushed and shoved everybody, shouted and took whatever he laid his eyes on. He was brandishing his revolver, and we were scared that he would start shooting. There was a large table in the entrance hall of the apartment, around which we took our meals, mostly together. He dragged off the tablecloth and packed in it the stuff he had collected from the various rooms. It seemed that he had forgotten why he had come and we were hoping that he would take the bundle and leave. He was proceeding toward the front door when he changed his mind, returned and demanded a drink. Jews were not permitted to purchase alcohol, but somebody must have had something stashed away, because after a short discussion, a bottle appeared on the table. While he was sipping from the bottle, he … informed us that he was an actor. He jumped on the dining room table, and began reciting Petőfi’s poem, ‘The Lunatic’. 

He got totally carried away, stomping with his feet, his face distorted; he seemed in a trance. I do not know how much of the poem he had recited, whether he knew it by heart, or made mistakes, but when he finished there was a thunderous applause and … bows on the table, surrounded by his terrified public. … He told us that he would go home … but would return the following day and continue the recital. He threw the bundle over his shoulder and staggered out the front door. … stumbling toward the street corner. He did not return, neither the following day, nor ever. We did not know what had happened to him, but for days we feared that he would reappear. 

After Szálasi and his men took over the government a rapid series of changes of personnel took place in the organisations providing the protection of the regime. New organisations were formed including, on 17 October, the State Security Police, the Hungarian Gestapo, was re-formed. Its activity extended to all opponents of the Germans and the Arrow Cross, irrespective of rank or status. On the 26th, the ‘National Unit for Accountability’ came into being, responsible for extinguishing the lives of many civilians. In the implementation of its laws, decrees and orders, the régime could rely on the gendarmerie, the police and the armed formations of the Arrow Cross Party. In what followed, those that belonged to the service slaughtered a large number of army deserters, Jewish forced labourers and people arrested during raids, increasingly and frequently on the spot. Apart from the scale of the violence, the deluge of accompanying decrees, renewed orders and contradictory instructions increased the turmoil. A wholesale breakdown occurred in the army, the police and public administration. From 28 October, Arrow Cross members received regular payments from the state to carry out robbery and murder on a grand scale. They not only had the right to bear arms but also formed the local detective, investigative, interrogation and enquiry squads. They could act on their own authority to create the ever more tragic and corrupt conditions which they considered ‘order’. In the practice of totalitarian dictatorship, the paramilitary members of the Party knew no bounds.

A typical element of the Hungarista programme was the widespread persecution and terrorising of the Jews. Following the assumption of power, party terrorists attacked starred houses in Budapest and Jewish forced labour barracks. For example, one of Daisy’s schoolfriends, Marika, lived with her mother in what became a ‘Jewish house’ after 19 March. Marika’s biological father was not Jewish but he refused to marry Marika’s Jewish mother because he was a close crony of Miklós Horthy, entitled as vitéz (‘man of valour’), a title he would have lost if he had been known to have married a ‘Jewess’. In June, Marika had been sent to a summer camp in Balatonboglár, run by Sisters in the Catholic Church. She was given a fictitious name and false papers, along with two other girls. One night they were awakened by gendarmes and pulled out of bed. She was so traumatised by this that thereafter she frequently peed herself. She ‘escaped’ and left for Budapest on foot, where she eventually returned to her house where she fell into the arms of her mother, kissed and cried, and ate sausage in the pantry. Her return lasted until 15 October, when her mother greeted Horthy’s abortive proclamation by opening a bottle of champagne. Happiness lasted a very short time. Marika’s mother helped to forge documents, while her mother was placed in one of the ‘protected houses’. Once, when Marika was visiting her with her aunt Duncy, Arrow Cross soldiers raided the area. Her aunt yelled at one of them, outraged that he had dared to ask for her papers.

Meanwhile, Marika’s mother became seriously ill with meningitis, and her sister arranged for her to be taken (with false papers) to the Szent István Kórház. Marika could still visit her there, where she eventually died. One night her uncle urged them to leave their new house in Benczúr utca, and they found refuge in the cellar of a nearby pharmacy owned by a relative. Next day the Arrow Cross raided the house, ordered everyone in it down to the courtyard and shot them all dead. When the siege of Budapest began, Marika, her aunt and her grandmother did not dare go down to the air-raid shelter. By that time, they were living in hiding alongside Polish and Czech refugees. One day the Arrow Cross soldiers marched the refugees down to the bank of the Danube and shot them into the river. Daisy herself narrowly escaped a similar fate during that autumn, when she spent several days wandering alone, stealing her food from outside grocery stores. She found herself in Szent István Park and was thrown into a column of thirty people being marched towards the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. She recalled:

We progressed silently, adults and children, without anyone protesting or crying. But when we reached the small underpass, and I was hit by the familiar stench of urine, without thinking about the consequences, I simply turned right and left the group.

Nothing happened and no one called out. I turned around the corner … Only after the Liberation did I hear that Jews had been shot into the Danube from the lower embankment of the Pest side … I never mentioned this episode to anyone fearing that people would think I had made it up out of a need to create a heroic story; that I was ashamed that while so many from our family had been murdered, I had not come close enough to death.    

Another of Daisy’s friends, Vera S, had already lost her relatives in the countryside to Auschwitz in the summer, but she still lived in Budapest with her parents and grandparents, where their apartment building had become a ‘Jewish house’ and their apartment filled up with strangers. The residents were ordered down into the courtyard several times and were threatened with deportation. On one such occasion, when they were permitted to return to their apartment, they found the rooms ransacked and most of their belongings missing, even Vera’s dolls were gone. Then, shortly after 15 October, the men in the house were rounded up. Running to the balcony, Vera and her mother tried to see where the group was being taken, but Vera’s father, looking up and fearing for their safety, motioned with his hand, urging them to go back inside. That was the last time they saw him. A postcard arrived from Valkó, where they had been taken on foot. From there, Vera’s father was deported to a concentration camp. They knew nothing more of his fate.

Shortly after that, Vera’s mother had to report to the Óbuda brick factory and the children were placed in a Jewish orphanage. Vera escaped and rejoined her brother when their grandparents found shelter in a Swedish ‘protected house’. Their mother escaped from the brick factory, bought false papers from their former janitor, and went into hiding. The following day, the Arrow Cross took the orphans from the ghetto and shot them all into the Danube. Thereafter, Vera and her brother stayed with their grandparents where they lived with twenty other surviving children, in one room. These children knew nothing of their parents and were starving. One day, Vera’s mother arrived at the ‘protected house’ but Vera couldn’t recognise her because she had dyed her hair to fit her false papers. Vera later recalled:

She said that when the Russians fully surround the city, and we will have to die, she will return that we should die together. She did come back, but fortunately we did not die.

On 30 October, German soldiers arrived in the house on the Pest side of the Danube where Iván lived with his family. They entered their apartment in the company of Miki, the janitor’s son who was wearing his Arrow Cross uniform. Although Miki had been Iván’s friend and playmate for the past decade, that did not prevent him from handing him over to the Nazis. Requiring additional labourers, the Germans had the help of the Arrow Cross in collecting men over sixty and boys under sixteen from the surrounding ‘starred houses’. By then Iván’s father had been away for years in a forced labour camp, and after their paint shop had been closed under anti-Jewish legislation, his mother had supported their two boys, her mother and herself by making artificial flower arrangements. Iván and his group of conscripted labourers were taken to Lepsény in western Hungary where they were made by the Wehrmacht to organise a military depot next to the local railroad station. They worked there throughout November, emptying trains that carried military supplies and filling military trucks with winter clothing for soldiers. Iván later learned that his brother Ervin, who had a weaker constitution, had also been sent to Transdanubia and had died while digging ditches. He was buried in a mass grave near Győr. Iván was the only survivor from those who were taken from his apartment house.

Ágnes B, another of Daisy’s friends was just ten years old when her father was drafted as a forced labourer. Soon after 15 October, Arrow Cross soldiers came to their apartment house, where they lived with her mother’s sister’s family. They rounded up all the women under forty, including her mother, who did not resist, despite being only weeks away from her fortieth birthday. Ági recalled her leaving:

My mother put on a fur-lined coat because it had been very cold. I followed her across the yard until the gate and I watched as she joined the group of Jewish women. She wrote one card from the road to Austria, telling me that they had been placed in a pigsty overnight. I never saw her again…

Life for all the remaining Jews in Budapest became increasingly difficult, but the access to Swiss and Swedish protection documents could provide some amelioration. Daisy’s friend’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late to use them because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives, where she got false papers and a new name to learn, along with the names of her seven new ‘sisters and brothers’. She was with relatives, but still felt ‘terribly alone’. Although she looked ‘Aryan’ (see the picture below), she was not allowed out on the street. Another friend, Tomi, was twelve in 1944, by which time his entirely assimilated family had decided to convert to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions placed upon Jews. In June, they had been forced to leave their apartment on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa and moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By this time, Tomi’s father was in a forced labour camp and after 15 October, all three had to report to the brick family of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto.

Wallenberg’s Responses and Reports:

The sudden turn of events took the Swedish embassy organisation by surprise, as it did the humanitarian activists too. Wallenberg himself had been expecting Hungary to pull out of the war, which had been much talked about in Budapest social circles as the government’s intention. He was also calculating when the Red Army would reach Budapest, and was thinking of going back to Stockholm a few days before it happened. Up to 15 October, the Swedish Embassy had received eight thousand applications and 3,500 had been granted the SP. A week after Szálasi’s rise to power Wallenberg reported that armed bandits have attacked those in possession of protective passports and torn them up. The Hungarian staff had reacted to this unexpected turn of events by going into hiding, as he noted:

The events have had a catastrophic effect on the section, the entire staff has absented itself, and a car which was placed at our disposal free of charge, together with the keys of various locked places and cupboards etc., have vanished.

In order to put some spirit and courage back into his dismayed colleagues, Wallenberg cycled through the bandit-infested streets in order to pick up the threads of his work again, a procedure which was fraught with risks. Instead of the peace that many had yearned and hoped for a fresh wave of destruction began. On 16 October the head of the Arrow Cross Party staff decreed that Jews were not to leave their homes until further notice. Buildings designated by stars of David were to be kept shut day and night. Until further notice, only non-Jews might go in and out. Non-Jews were not allowed to visit Jews. On 18 October, one of his Swedish officers reported that the new government had introduced strict anti-Jewish regulations and that the entire Jewish staff of the Embassy was in mortal danger. A crowd of Jews seeking revenge was besieging the embassy, which was incapable of accommodating them.

In the course of renewed the renewed persecutions, the previous forms of protection lost their usefulness. Beginning on 20 October, armed Arrow Cross men lined up tens of thousands of men aged between sixteen and sixty, on two trotting-tracks, dividing them into labour-companies and took them off. The one suburban sports ground, in Zugló, became the mustering place for Jewish women, as directed on posters. The assigned Jews of the city were made to work on fortifications, digging defensive ditches. Renewed talks with the black-uniformed, green-shirted Arrow Cross leaders were required, as were new methods of saving people. Wallenberg quickly made contact with Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Baron Gábor Kemény. In matters of the “Jewish Question” and other ‘Jew-related’ topics he later had to deal with the Foreign Ministry. On 21st, he reached an agreement with Kemény that the Hungarian authorities would give the staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and members of their families exceptional treatment. They were exempted from wearing the yellow star; from all kinds of forced labour; they were not obliged to live in starred houses, and allowed to go out onto the streets without curfew. This rapid agreement gave hope to several hundred people by officially extending the scope of Swedish protection. It also gave Wallenberg the room to prevent the complete destruction of the Budapest Jews.

This became known, along with the change of régime in Budapest, on 24 October in Bern, Washington and New York (World Jewish Congress), at the Red Cross International Council centre in Geneva and elsewhere. However, the Szálasi government quickly realised its mistake, and drastically reduced the scope of the exemption by the end of October. On 29th, it restricted the circle of those exempted by a ‘variation of decree’. For his part, Wallenberg worked at adding to the exemption that had been obtained and at retaining the greater and lesser fruits of the talks. Protection from the embassy was, in reality, frequently nothing more than a thread of hope. The ‘protected’ houses offered an unstable, relative refuge. Security and day-to-day survival were unpredictable and depended on luck and the movements and whims of the armed Arrow Cross men. Exactly a year later, on 24 October 1945, Béla Zsedenyi, President of the Provisional National Assembly, meeting in Debrecen, thanked King Gustav V of Sweden, the Swedish people and the Swedish diplomatic mission in the name of the Hungarian nation for their help in the humanitarian activity in 1944. He described the defensive stand taken by embassy secretary Wallenberg as “invaluable service”, emphasising that…

… he had taken a selfless and heroic part of decisive significance in warding off the acts of mass muder planned against innocent and defenceless citizens, and by his resolve had succeeded in saving the good name of the Hungarian people from further stain.

By that time, Wallenberg had disappeared at the end of a bitter winter during which he and his staff at the Swedish Embassy Annex had succeeded in saving the lives of thousands more, enabling them to survive the war and the terror in Budapest.

Return to Auschwitz:

Those already deported from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau had no means of protection, of course, and continued to face ‘extermination’ in the camps. Daisy Lászlo’s Uncle Samu and his family had been deported to Auschwitz from Dunaszerdahely in the summer. His wife, Aunt Berta was his second cousin, a fact which was constantly mentioned on the fringes of family visits and gatherings because both of their boys had disabilities. The older son, Nándi, had a speech impediment, and the younger one, Ármin, was almost totally deaf. All that was learnt of the family in 1945 was that they were among the hundreds of thousands of victims, but neither the place nor the time of their deaths was known. In 2010, an Israeli relative found the story of Ármin’s last months among the files of the International Tracing Service in Germany. This showed that on 25 October, he was transferred from Dachau back to Auschwitz.

During the last months of the war, thousands of Jews were returned to Auschwitz for extermination because they were considered too weak to work. As is shown below, Ármin’s physical description (including height, eye colour, the shape of mouth and ears) accompanied the transfer. His mother’s maiden name, his permanent domicile were also recorded. His signature at the bottom of this document led Daisy to believe that Ármin’s had been a special case, perhaps because of his deafness. However, she then found out that during the autumn of 1944, over five hundred inmates were returned to Auschwitz within a few weeks, accompanied by the exact same documents. Clearly, the Nazi coup in Budapest had had indirect effects in quickening the death machine of Auschwitz.

Sources:

Andrew J Chandler (2012), As the Land Remembers Them. Kecskemét: self-published, http://www.chandlerozconsultants.wordpress.com.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable (2008).

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.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

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.

Marianna D. Birnbaum & Judith Flesch Rose (ed.)(2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

hmd_2013_-_vali_racz_case_study

Four years ago, the 19th March was officially designated as Hungary’s day for remembering the victims of the German occupation of Hungary which began on that day in 1944, following an agreement between its then Regent, Admiral Horthy, and the ‘Führer’ of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, two days earlier. The first implication of the current Hungarian government’s decision to commemorate the Holocaust on a different day from the rest of the world (which does so on Holocaust Memorial Day in January) was that the whole Hungarian people were just as much victims of this ‘invasion’ and the atrocities which followed, as the Jews and Roma who were murdered under the authority of the Nazi régime, or who somehow survived them in the last year of the war. The second was that the ‘Hungarian Holocaust’, to give it the title widely used by historians, had little to do with the anti-Jewish motivations and actions of the Hungarian governments of 1944-5, and those which had led up to them in the previous six to eight years, and that those actions in which they participated, were only undertaken by them under the extreme duress applied by the SS. Statues have recently been erected in Budapest and elsewhere which seek to symbolise this lie. The fact that, this year, there have been no published statements by or on behalf of the current state ministers or President, only goes to confirm that they have no wish to court controversy by repeating the lie, though they continue to seek to rehabilitate proven active collaborators by initiating, sponsoring and supporting the erection of statues of these public officials who took part in the deportations and murders of more than six hundred thousand Hungarian citizens and refugees from other countries who sought asylum in Hungary from 1936 onwards.

 

I have, for my part, continued to educate myself about these sufferings by reading Anna Porter’s book on (probably) the most famous of these refugees, the Transylvanian Jewish journalist, Rezső Kasztner. If there were any doubt about the guilt of the Hungarian state in 1944, the quotation she makes at the end of her chapter on Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann should answer this unequivocally. Although it took nearly three weeks for the ‘orders’ to be transmitted from State Secretary László Baky to the local authorities, marked “secret”, they clearly bore his signature and 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. 

In making so clear an anti-Jewish statement, Baky was clearly not acting under orders he disagreed with. In her previous chapters, Porter points out that Baky had served in both the Hungarian military and gendarmerie, from which he had retired with the rank of major, in order to devote himself to politics. He had joined the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1938, then switched to the Hungarian National Socialist Party in which he had used the Party’s newspaper, Magyarság, for his tirades against the Jews. He had been an informant for the SS before Hungary’s entry into the war and, in 1940, had once more joined the Arrow Cross, under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, to whom he was reported to remark:

We are going to have some hangings, aren’t we, Ferenc? 

When Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest in late March 1944, he had been expecting some resistance to his plans for The Final Solution from the new Hungarian government and authorities. Instead he was offered immediate, enthusiastic assistance. A week after he arrived, he had asked for a meeting with Baky and the other newly-appointed state secretary, László Endre. It was held over bottles of wine and pretzels in the garden of the Majestic Hotel in the Swabian Hill District, where Eichmann had taken over a villa owned by a recently-interned Jewish businessman. Eichmann informed the two secretaries that he had orders directly from Himmler himself for the ghettoisation and deportation of all Hungarian Jews. They greeted this statement with wholehearted support, eager to begin the task of concentrating the Jews the very next day, starting with the hundred thousand plus refugees without Hungarian citizenship, most of whom had already been ’rounded up’. Eichmann himself had to restrain them on practical grounds, because he needed time to organise the transportation system which would be used to deport the Jews to Auschwitz. This could only handle twelve thousand Jews a day, he told them, and added that the gas chambers and crematoria in the camp could not handle the numbers they were proposing, either.

They therefore accepted Eichmann’s more gradual plan, offering that the Hungarian state would provide the gendarmerie and pay for the fees of the transports and guards to the border, just as the Slovak government had done. Eichmann agreed with them that Budapest’s large, wealthy Jewish community would be the last to be deported, but that they too would be gone by the end of June. Since most of the young Jewish men were already serving at the eastern front, in labour battalions, the state secretaries could assure Eichmann that there would be little resistance and, if any did materialise, it would be firmly dealt with by the gendarmes, who would be faced with unarmed older civilian men  and women with children. Eichmann asked that a member of the Hungarian government should submit to him a request for the evacuation in order to maintain the thin veneer of independence. Baky then left, elated, to meet with Lieutenant Colonel László Ferenczy of the gendarmerie, who would need to execute the order. Ferenczy claimed that the five thousand men under his command would only be too willing as well as able, to carry out the ghettoisation and deportation of the Jews. Many of them were of Swabian origin and viewed the Jews as enemy aliens. Many years later, Eichmann gave an interview to a Dutch journalist in Argentina in which he recalled his meeting with Baky and Endre.  He was reported as saying:

On that evening, the fate of Jews of Hungary was sealed.

The country was divided into six ghettoisation and deportation zones, each of which would be handled separately and in strict order, in agreed turns, beginning with Carpathian Ruthenia and Transylvania. All communication between the zones would be cut off. On 22 March, Prime Minister Döme Stojay informed the government that Dr Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, had insisted that Jews throughout the country should wear a yellow star. Regent Horthy ‘washed his hands’ of responsibility for this, stating that, in future, such “requests” regarding the Jews should not be presented to him. He later told Samuel Stern, with whom he had regularly and recently played cards in the Buda castle, that his hands were tied in the matter, under threat of total exclusion from power. He had, he said, held out for as long as he could on “The Jewish Question”. The order went into effect on 5 April, with only Stern and his newly Nazi-appointed ‘Jewish Council’ exempted.

On 31 March Eichmann summoned the Jewish Council to his offices on Swabian Hill. Eichmann’s men had surrounded the buildings around the Majestic Hotel with three rings of barbed wire. Eichmann’s office was on the second floor, while Baky had installed himself in an office on the third so that he and his staff could plan mass murder without interruption from other pressing matters, such as the conduct of the war on the eastern front. Eichmann sat in the only chair in the meeting room and told the Council members that he was not in favour of executions, except of those Jews linked with resistance movements. His job was to raise the output of the war industries, he lied, and the Jews, except of course for the Council members, would have to work in them. He shouted at them:

I am a bloodhound! All opposition will be broken. If you think of joining the partisans, I will have you slaughtered. I know you Jews. I know all about you. I have been dealing with Jewish affairs since 1934. If you behave quietly and work, you’ll be able to keep your community and your institutions. But… where Jews opposed us, there were executions… I will make no distinction between religious Jews and converts. As far as I’m concerned, a Jew is a Jew, whatever he calls himself.

Later the same day, the Hungarian government issued several new decrees regarding the Jews: they were prohibited from employing non-Jews; they could no longer work as lawyers, journalists, or public servants, or in theatrical and film arts; they were not allowed to own or even drive motor vehicles, including motor-bikes. They were even banned from riding bicycles. They had to hand in their radios and telephones to the authorities in charge of Jewish affairs. Above all, they all had to wear the yellow star of David, marking them out clearly for purposes of differentiation.

On the morning of 3 April, British and American planes bombed Budapest for the first time. Whole buildings collapsed along the main routes into the city centre and in the Castle District. In response, the Hungarian security police demanded that the Jewish Council provide five hundred apartments for the displaced ‘Christians’. Peter Hain, the chief of Hungarian Intelligence, decided to relocate influential Jews near to industrial and military installations, believing that they would somehow be able to warn the British and Americans not to bomb these targets. The Jewish Council was expected to provide five hundred of these hostages. Samuel Stern gave Hain a list which contained only eight names, all of whom, including himself, were members of the Jewish Council. The Germans told Hain to drop this ‘crazy plan’, realizing that they still needed the Council’s cooperation.

On 4 April, László Baky met with Lieutenant-Colonel Ferenczy and members of the Sonderkommando and Weirmacht, to firm up the plans for the ghettoisation and deportation of all the Jews of Hungary. All Jews were, irrespective of age, sex, or illness, were to be concentrated in ghettos and schedules would be set for their deportation to Auschwitz. Only the few still employed in mines or factories were to be temporarily spared until they could be replaced. Each regional office was to be responsible for its own actions. The directive read:

The rounding up of the Jews is to be carried out by the local police or by the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie units… If necessary, the police will 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 the mayors and prefects in the provincial towns and villages, but the ghettoisation was already underway on 7 April. In under three weeks, the Hungarian holocaust had been set in motion, and its success, at least in the rural areas, depended almost exclusively on the enthusiastic collaboration of the Hungarian authorities. In that respect, it was unique among the deportations of The Final Solution.

Source:

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train. London: Constable & Robinson.

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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