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A deserted street in the area of the Sighet Marmatiei ghetto. This photograph was
taken after the deportation of the ghetto population.
Sighet Marmatiei, Hungary, May 1944. (Photo courtesy of USHMM)
On May 15, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials began to deport the Jews of Hungary, predominantly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until that point, Hungary, and Budapest in particular, had been recognized as a secure place for Jews and had served as an escape destination for Jews of other European countries. At the end of 1943, there were 12,000 – 16,000 Jewish refugees in the country who had escaped from Slovakia, the Czech and Moravian lands, Germany and the former Austria, Poland, and Yugoslavia.
When World War II erupted, Hungary initially allied with Germany. Hungary’s autocratic head of state, Miklós Horthy, agreed to pass anti-Jewish legislation but refused to submit to Hitler’s demand to surrender all Hungarian Jews. In 1941 about 825,000 Jews lived in Hungary, with 200,000 Jews in Budapest, Hungary’s capital and Jewish cultural center. Therefore, although under gradually deteriorating circumstances and suffering the loss of tens of thousands of lives due to the so-called labor service system, the Hungarian Jewish community did not face physical annihilation as did the Jews in other areas of Nazi-occupied Europe.
However, on March 19, 1944, the German army occupied Hungary and a new government was established with pro-Nazi General Döme Sztójay as prime minister. On April 16, 1944, the so-called ghettoization of the Hungarian Jews began: in only a few weeks, all Hungarian Jews were forced into ghettos, collection camps, or designated “yellow star houses.” With scarce food and water supplies, no access to medical care, poor sanitation, and overcrowding, life in these sites of detention was horrific.
However, ghetto life was short-lived. These sites served only as temporary locations for Jews, which existed until Adolf Eichmann’s grand coordination for the deportation of Hungarian Jews was finalized. On May 15, 1944, the deportations began, and within two months, 440,000 non-Budapest Jews had been deported. While a few thousand of those Jews were sent to labor camps in eastern Austria, the majority (around 425,000) were sent to Auschwitz. Of those who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, about 300,000 - 340,000 were condemned to immediate death in the gas chambers. The others were forced to perform slave labor in various Auschwitz subcamps or were sent to other concentration camps. For the Nazis, the arrival of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz and their rapid destruction marked the height of German productivity in carrying out the Final Solution.
By July 1944, Jews in Budapest and the labor service were the only Jews who remained in Hungary. In early July, Miklós Horthy declared an end to the deportations, and in August he dismissed Sztójay’s collaborating government. Horthy also attempted to form an armistice with the Soviet army. However, in October 1944 the German army performed a coup and appointed Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the far-right Arrow Cross party, as the new Hungarian leader.
Under Szálasi’s rule, Arrow Cross party members ruthlessly murdered hundreds of Jews and forced other Jews to perform brutal labor. While Jews in Budapest had resided in several buildings throughout the city that were simply marked with a yellow star, by December 1944, Budapest Jews were forced into two ghettos. In the following weeks, the Arrow Cross ordered thousands of Jews to march to the Danube River, and then shot them and discarded their bodies in the river.
Starting on November 6, 1944, about 50,000 Jews in Budapest and labor servicemen were herded toward Austria in death marches. Thousands of Jews died along the way from starvation, exposure to bitter cold, or shootings. Those who survived and arrived in Austria were shipped to the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen or were forced to work on fortifications in eastern Austria.
Budapest and its 100,000 – 150,000 remaining Jews were liberated by Soviet troops in January and February 1945. Many Jews who remained in Budapest had survived by hiding, many with the assistance of Raoul Wallenberg, along with Giorgio Perlasca and Carl Lutz among others. These Righteous Gentiles issued foreign documents to protect individual Jews, provided safe homes for children, and supplied food and medicine to Jews in the ghetto.
Thus, though Germany invaded Hungary toward the end of the war, the effects on the Hungarian Jewish community were catastrophic. Of the approximately 825,000 Jews who lived in Hungary in 1941, about 45,000 – 65,000 perished before the German occupation and 450,000 – 500,000 were murdered under German occupation.
When discussing the deportation of Hungarian Jews with your students, consider the roles and actions of the Hungarian leaders. How did the policies under Miklós Horthy differ dramatically from the anti-Jewish measures under General Dome Sztójay or the Arrow Cross party? What can we learn from the nature of the deportations and the treatment of Jews under these various leaders? What obligations does a leader usually have toward the people in his or her country?
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