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At the beginning of 1944, approximately 800,000 Jews still lived in Hungary. The Hungarian authorities forced them into grueling labor battalions. Yet despite these hardships, Hungarian Jews were still considered "relatively" protected from the Nazi extermination machinery. All of this changed with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Hungary in March 1944. Two months after the invasion, the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau began. Within just eight weeks, approximately 430,000 Jews were crammed into cattle cars and deported—almost all of them were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. The war was nearing its end, but the suffering of the Jews was far from over. At the end of that same year, after the fascist Arrow Cross party seized power, more Jews were murdered—this time by the Hungarians themselves. Thousands were shot to death on the banks of the Danube River, and tens of thousands were sent on death marches to the Austrian border. In total, approximately 565,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust.