The Holocaust saw the dispossession, deportation and systematic murder of more than half of the Hungarian Jews, primarily after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Before that, several incidents took place, including The Raid in 1942, the murders of the majority of Jews in Novi Sad and south-eastern Bačka.
At the time of the German invasion, Hungary had a Jewish population of 825,000, the largest remaining in Europe, further swollen by Jews escaping from elsewhere to the relative safety of that country. The Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Kállay had been reluctant to deport them. Fearing Hungary was trying to pursue peace with the Allies (which the diplomat László Veress secretly did in the September of 1943), Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion. New restrictions against Jews were imposed soon after Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. The invading troops included a Sonderkommando which was led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Budapest in order to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival. The quick progress of the deportations was enabled by close cooperation between the Hungarian and German authorities.
Diplomatic pressure and the Allied bombing of Budapest persuaded Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, to order a halt to the deportations on 6 July. By the time they had stopped three days later, almost the entire community of Jews in the Hungarian countryside had gone.
The mass deportation of Hungarian Jews was the largest Holocaust killing after 1942. It took place as World War II appeared to be drawing to a close — and world leaders had known for some time that Jews were being murdered in gas chambers. The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians. Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft.
Jews in Hungary
In the 1941 census, the population of Hungary was 14,683,323. Of these, 725,005 regarded themselves as Jews (4.94 percent) and another 100,000 were Jewish by descent who identified as Christian. Over 400,000 lived in post-Trianon Hungary and another 324,000 lived in territories acquired by Hungary since 1938: Northern Transylvania from Romania (164,000), part of Upper Hungary from Czechoslovakia (146,000), Carpathian Ruthenia (78,000), and Bácska and other areas that had been part of Yugoslavia (14,000).
Anti-Jewish Laws (1938–1942)
Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germany's Nuremberg Laws.
- The "First Jewish Law" (May 29, 1938) restricted the number of Jews in each commercial enterprise, in the press, among physicians, engineers and lawyers to twenty percent.
- The "Second Jewish Law" (May 5, 1939), for the first time, defined Jews racially: individuals with two, three or four Jewish-born grandparents were declared Jewish.
- The "Third Jewish Law" (August 8, 1941) prohibited intermarriage and penalized sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews.
- The "Fourth Jewish Law" (September 6, 1942) banned Jews from owning or purchasing land.
Their employment in government at any level was forbidden, they could not be editors at newspapers, their numbers were restricted to six per cent among theater and movie actors, physicians, lawyers and engineers. 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: before the second Jewish law, about 31% of the Jewish population of Borsod county (Miskolc excluded), 2496 people had this right. At the next elections, less than a month after this new anti-Jewish legislation, only 38 privileged Jews could vote.
Labor battalions
Jewish men were excluded from serving in the Hungarian military and were instead conscripted into forced labor service units called munkaszolgálat. These labor battalions operated under the authority of the Hungarian military and were deployed in various areas of the war effort.
Conscripted servicemen were assigned to physically demanding tasks such as bridge building and road construction. However, they were also assigned more dangerous tasks such as transporting ammunition, clearing minefields, and burying the dead near battlefields.
German occupation
Invasion
On 18 March 1944, Adolf Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Austria, where he demanded greater acquiescence from Hungary. Horthy resisted, but his efforts were fruitless. While he was at the conference, German tanks rolled into Budapest, and on 23 March the government of Döme Sztójay was installed. Among his first moves, Sztójay legalized the Arrow Cross Party, which quickly began organizing. During the four days' interregnum following the German occupation, the Ministry of the Interior was placed in the hands of László Endre and László Baky, right-wing politicians known for their hostility to Jews. Their boss, Andor Jaross, was another committed antisemite.
Adolf Eichmann
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, sent to Hungary to supervise the deportations, set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel in Budapest. The Yellow Star and ghettoization laws, and the deportations, were accomplished in less than eight weeks, with the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség). The plan was to use 45 cattle cars per train, four trains a day, to deport 12,000 Jews from the countryside every day, starting in mid-May; this was to be followed by the deportation of Jews from Budapest from about 15 July. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, returned to the camp between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as the local SS garrison commander to oversee the Hungarian Jews' arrival and gassing. As a result, the Germans called the murders Aktion Höss ("Operation Höss").
Deportation to Auschwitz
First transports
The first train left Budapest on 29 April 1944 carrying 1,800 men and women aged 16–50 who were deemed fit to work. A second train left Topolya on 30 April carrying 2,000. The transports went through "selection"; 616 women (serial numbers 76385–76459 and 80000–80540) and 486 men (serial numbers 186645–187130) were chosen to work, and 2,698 were gassed.
Mass transports
The mass transports, the first organized by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office or RSHA), began leaving Hungary for Poland on 14 May 1944. The Hungarian government was in charge of them up to the northern border. The commander of the Kassa railroad station kept a record of the trains. The first freight train passed through Kassa on 14 May. On a typical day, there were three or four, each carrying 3,000–4,000 people. There were 109 trains for 33 days, until 16 June. On several days, there were six trains. From 25–29 June, there were 10, then 18 on 5–9 July. Another 10 trains were sent to Auschwitz via other routes.
The first three trains, each consisting of 40–50 cars, arrived at Auschwitz on 16 May. After unloading their belongings, the deportees were organized into rows of five, then led to the crematoria. According to Danuta Czech, it was from this night onward that smoke became visible from the crematoria chimneys. The camp resistance referred to the deportations in a report covering 5–25 May 1944:
Auschwitz: Operation Höss. Since the middle of May, numerous transports of Hungarian Jews. Each night, eight trains arrive; every day five. The trains consist of 48 to 50 cars each, and in each car are 100 people. "Settlers" arrive with these transports. Each train of "settlers" also has two freight cars of lumber, which the "settlers" unload on the "death ramp", bring to another site and stack in piles ... that are intended for them. In order to simplify the work, the people arrive already separated, for example, children in separate cars. The closed trains wait for several hours on the special track to be unloaded. They stand in the nearby small forest.
From 3 June, the electric fence was kept switched on during the day, instead of only at night (as there were guards during the day), because of attempts by Hungarian Jews to escape from the crematoria. The camp resistance reported on 15 July that there had been a pause of several days in the transports after 13 June, and that between 16 May and 13 June, over 300,000 Jews from Hungary had arrived at the camp in 113 trains. According to Höss during his trial, the facilities at Auschwitz could not cope with the numbers, and he had to travel to Budapest to re-organize the transports, so that two or three trains would run on alternate days. Altogether, 111 trains were to be used. According to Höss, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wanted the deportations to speed up.
By 9 July 1944, 434,351 Jews in 147 trains had been deported, according to László Ferenczy of the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie. According to Edmund Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, the figure was 437,402. About 80 percent of deportees were gassed on arrival. Because the crematoria were unable to cope with the number of corpses, pits were dug where bodies were burned. Photographs taken at Auschwitz (the Auschwitz Album) were found after the war showing the arrival of the Hungarian Jews at the camp.
While the majority of Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, approximately 21,000 individuals were diverted to the Strasshof concentration camp in Austria as a result of negotiations between the SS and the Aid and Rescue Committee. These prisoners were used for forced labor in agriculture and industry around Vienna, and their survival rate was significantly higher than those sent to extermination camps.
Selection
The 20 percent of new arrivals from Hungary selected as prisoners were used as slave labourers or in medical experiments. On 22 May and again on 29 May 2,000 were selected for admission. On 28 May, 963 were transferred from Auschwitz I to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; and on 5 June 2,000 were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. The following day, Hungarian inmates with A-series serial numbers were transferred to Auschwitz III, a labour camp for IG Farben, and another 2,000 were sent to Mauthausen that day and on 13 June.
On 29 May, Miklós Nyiszli, a doctor who later worked for the camp's doctor, Josef Mengele, was admitted with his wife and daughter, although they were sent to different parts of the camp. Any twins within the transports were selected; Mengele was notorious for his medical experiments on twins. On 17 May, any boys on the Hungarian transports born as a twin were admitted as prisoners (so-called "depot prisoners") and given serial numbers A-1419–A-1437. On 18 May, 20 females who were twin sisters were selected and given serial numbers A-3622–A-3641. Twins were picked out repeatedly, including on 19, 20 and 21 May.
Vrba–Wetzler report
Just before the deportations of Jews from Budapest began, the Vrba–Wetzler report reached the Allies. The report provided a detailed description of the gas chambers, and what was happening inside the camp; it had been dictated in April 1944 to the Slovak Jewish Council by two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. Horthy's son and daughter-in-law both received copies of the report in early May, before mass deportations began. Information from the report about the murder of Czech Jews in Auschwitz was broadcast in German by the BBC World Service on its women's program at noon on 16 June 1944, with a warning that the Germans would be held responsible after the war. It was also published by the New York Times on 20 June.
The Western Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944. On 14 June, the Mayor of Budapest, Ákos Farkas, designated around 1,950 yellow-star houses to which Jews had to move to. The authorities believed that the Allies would not bomb Budapest as the houses were scattered around the city. On 15 June, American bombers dropped leaflets over Budapest threatening punishment for those involved in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. On the basis of the Vrba–Wetzler report, world leaders, including Pope Pius XII on 25 June, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on 26 June, and King Gustaf V of Sweden on 30 June, appealed to Horthy to stop the deportations. Roosevelt threatened military retaliation, and on 7 July, Horthy ordered an end to them.
Rescue efforts
Aid and Rescue Committee
Carl Lutz
Carl Lutz was a Swiss diplomat. He served as the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest, Hungary, from 1942 until the end of World War II. He is credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War, marking the largest diplomatic rescue mission of the Holocaust.
Due to his actions, half of the Jewish population of Budapest survived and was not deported to Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust. He was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Joel Brand
Joel Brand, a leading member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, became known for his efforts to negotiate with Eichmann to stop the deportations. In a meeting with Brand in Budapest on 25 April 1944, Eichmann offered to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks from the Allies, to be used exclusively on the Eastern Front. Eichmann called the proposal "blood for goods". Using German travel documents, Brand travelled to Turkey to transmit the offer to the Jewish Agency, but the British government put an end to the talks by arresting Brand and leaking details to the media. On 20 July The Times called the proposal by the Germans "one of the most loathsome" stories of the war and that Germany had reached a "new level of fantasy and self-deception."