photo #5846319

Hungary was the last country to be taken over by the Germans, who until that winter were content to let the government headed by Miklos Horthy do its job of enforcing its anti-Jewish measures, while he resisted their pressure to deport Jews to extermination camps. Highly assimilated Jews throughout Hungary were lulled into a false sense of security. But that changed when the tide of war shifted, and the German advance into Eastern Europe and Russia was permanently stalled in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. The Hungarian government, sensing it might be on the losing side, began negotiating with the allies. To stop the defection, the Germans rolled their tanks into Budapest on March 19. They were, accompanied by the Nazi’s chief deportation officer, Adolph Eichmann, who, between mid-May and early July 1944, helped execute the most efficient mass murder in the history of the Holocaust to date. Eichmann had plenty of support. Hungarian authorities and citizens acted with stunning efficiency, helping the Germans identify Jews in the provinces and countryside, herd them into ghettos, transport them in crammed cattle cars, and deliver them to the death camps at Auschwitz. On a typical day in May, there were three or four trains, with up to 4,000 people on each, easily meeting the 12,000 per-day quota. In the fall of 1944, Hungarian Jews in Budapest became the targets. Power was now in the hands of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, which comprised far-right fascists and was more anti-Semitic than the Germans. When Romania swung to the Allied side in October, the situation became dire. There was no longer time to put Jews in ghettos and transport them. Instead, Hungarian Nazis corralled thousands, and took them on a 120-mile freezing trek to Austria, where they would ostensibly defend Vienna. As winter set in, young gang members in the Arrow Cross Party turned their venom on the remaining Jews in Budapest: dozens died daily, shot execution style, their bodies dumped into the Danube River. Forged identification papers, issued by the Swiss & Swedish governments & distributed by members of Zionist youth movements, had protected thousands of Jews during recent months, but even they were worthless by the end of the war. When the Russians liberated Budapest on February 13, 1945, the Jewish population of Hungary was decimated. According to various estimates, some 424,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz between May and July. After October 1944, nearly 150,000 more Jews lost their lives on death marches and random murders.