APPENDIX A
(The following is based on Appendix A (The Fate of the Jews in Hitler's Europe: By Country) from: The War against the Jews 1933-45 by Lucy Dawidowicz, published by Pelican Books / Penguin Books Ltd. 1975)
HUNGARY.
Hungary's policies before and during the war can best be understood in the light of her revangist goals. In November 1938 Hungary joined Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, annexing some Slovakian districts and a part of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In March 1939, when Slovakia declared itself an independent state, Hungary occupied the rest of Ruthenia. In August 1940 Hungary received northern Transylvania from Romania under the Vienna Award. As repayment Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact on 20 November 1940. In April Hungary occupied the Bácska basin in north-eastern Yugoslavia.
On 22 June 1941 Hungarian forces joined the Germans in invading Russia , though Hungarian military participation was less than whole hearted, with Regent Nicholas Horthy resisting German demands for Hungary's general mobilisation. In March 1942 Horthy replaced Hungary's pro-German Prime Minister László Bárdossy with Miklós Kállay, who sought to disentangle Hungary from the war. Hungarian losses on the Russian front and Hungary's preoccupation with her traditional enemy, Romania, accelerated Hungarian troop withdrawals from the front, to the extent permitted by Germany.
In early 1943, Hungary appeared, in Hitler's eyes, to be acting more like a neutral than a German ally. Consequently, in April 1943 Hitler summoned Horthy to his headquarters in Klessheim Castle near Salzburg and criticised him for Kállay's policies, both as to Hungary's obligations to Germany and as to the need to eliminate Hungary's Jews. Kállay, however, continued his policies and in August 1943 broadcast a peace speech, following the overthrow of Mussolini in Italy, Hungary's traditional ally.
In March 1944, with the war going badly for Germany, Hitler again summoned Horthy and members of his cabinet to Klessheim (Kállay refused to join them). Hitler confronted Horthy with what he regarded as Hungary's treachery, declaring that Germany had to occupy Hungary. Horthy was held incommunicado for a day; when he returned home on 19 March, the German occupation of Hungary had been completed. On 22 March a new Hungarian government was formed under Prime Minister General Döme Sztojay, formerly the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin. The real rulers in Hungary thenceforth were the SS and Reich Plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer. All political parties and trade unions, with their press, were suppressed. The Sztojay government could not, however, maintain itself because of overt opposition from the right - the Hungarian National Socialists and the Fascist Arrow Cross, under Ferenc Szálasi. Romania's surrender to Russia in August 1944 and the stunning defeat of the Germans at that time by Russian and Romanian forces shook Hungary.
Sztojay resigned on 30 August 1944 and Horthy replaced him with General Géza Lakatos in an effort to restore more Hungarian autonomy. In October 1944 Russian forces crossed into Hungary.
On 15th October Budapest radio announced that Horthy was asking the Russians for an armistice. The German SS under Veesenmayer reacted swiftly by kidnapping Horthy's son and holding him under threat. They thereby forced Horthy to appoint Arrow Cross Chief Szálasi as Prime Minister and Leader of Hungary. Szálasi cancelled the armistice, but the Hungarian commander-in-chief and his chief of staff went over to the Russians. By November 1944 the Russians had overrun two thirds of Hungary and had reached Budapest's outskirts. Budapest remained under Russian siege until February 1945, though the Hungarians had signed an armistice a month earlier. Finally, by 4 April 1945 no more Germans remained in Hungary.
JEWS IN PRE-WAR HUNGARY.
In 1930, 445,000 Jews lived in Hungary, about 5 per cent of the population. Half lived in Budapest, where they made up 20 per cent of the population, and in two other large cities. The rest of the Jewish population was dispersed; there were twenty-four communities with about 1,000 Jews each and 180 with fewer than 1,000 Jews each.
In a country with a landed aristocracy and a large peasantry, the Jews were distinctively middle class. Of gainfully employed Jews, 38 per cent were self-employed businessmen in industry (including small craftsmen), commerce and banking, and also professionals; 28 per cent were salaried (white-collar employees mainly in commerce, banking and industry); and 33 per cent were wage earners (worker), though predominantly in commercial enterprises.
Most Jews in Budapest were highly accultured, in contrast to the Jews in the small towns where Orthodoxy prevailed. There were three national religious Jewish communities: the Neologs (somewhat similar to Reform Jews), the Orthodox, and a smaller organisation called "Status Quo Ante Jewish Communities" who stood somewhere between them. Intermarriage and baptismal rates were quite high; in 1938 there were 35,000 baptised Jews in Hungary. Conversions, the declining birth rate and continuing emigration as a consequence of Hungary's anti-Semitic policies reduced the size of the Jewish population of Hungary, estimated at about 400,000 in 1939.
Hungarian Jews had been emancipated in 1867, but resentment on the part of the non-Jewish population - because of the territorial losses after the First World War, chaotic economic conditions and the abortive Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun were vented on the Jews. Horthy came to power as a blaze of pogroms raged in Hungary, particularly in the provinces.
The violence was followed by various administrative measures eliminating most Jews from public service and restricting their admission into universities. From 1924 to 1933, under the conservative regime of Count Stephen Bethlen as Prime Minister, the situation of the Jews somewhat stabilised, but in the mid-1930s, under the impact of National Socialism in Germany and its Hungarian admirers, anti-Semitism intensified.
On 24 May 1938, a month after Hitler's annexation of Austria, the Hungarian parliament, in an effort to appease Hitler and prevent seizure of power by the Hungarian Nazis, enacted its first anti-Jewish law, prepared by the Horthy government, despite the bitter opposition of the Smallholders and Socialist parties and Bethlen's conservative followers. The law limited employment of Jews in private business firms to 20 per cent. A year later, a more far-reaching anti-Jewish law was passed, defining the status of Jews, barring them from leading positions in the media, prohibiting the issuance of new trade licences to them or the renewal of old ones. The law also barred further admission of Jews to the professions until their share fell below 6 per cent.
It authorised the government to expropriate, with compensation, Jewish landed property. Jews could no longer acquire Hungarian citizenship by naturalisation, marriage or adoption. Voting rights of non-native Jews or those whose forebears were not permanently resident before 1868 were cancelled.
JEWS IN WARTIME HUNGARY
After Munich and the Vienna Awards, Hungary added another 250,000 to its Jewish population of 400,000: 75,000 Jews in former Slovakian territory, 25,000 in the Bácska basin of Yugoslavia and 150,000 in Transylvania for a total of 650,000 Jews in Greater Hungary. There were, besides, some 100,000 Christians, who were regarded as "racial" Jews and subject to anti-Jewish laws. (In August 1941 a more stringent law was enacted, defining who was a Jew.)
In August 1941 the Hungarian government rounded up some 17,000 stateless Jews in its annexed Ruthenian territory and pushed them over the border to Kamenets-Podolsk in the German-held Ukraine, but the Germans complained that the Jews disrupted their military communications. After the Hungarians drew off several thousand to be used as slave labourers, the German Einsatzkommandos massacred the remaining 11,000. Several thousand Yugoslav Jews were also massacred by the Hungarian occupying forces at Novi Sad.
No further deportations took place and when the Kállay government took over in March 1942 Jews were subject only to tightening employment restrictions, forced-labour conscription and more extensive expropriations. Some 16,000 Jews from Austria, Slovakia and Poland even found refuge in Hungary and were not handed over to the Germans. At the end of 1942, Kállay rejected German demands to introduce yellow badges for Jews and deport them to Poland. In May 1943 Kállay, in a public speech, rejected "resettlement" of the Jews as a "final solution" so long as the Germans were giving no satisfactory answer about where the Jews were being resettled.
The virtual German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 and the installation of the pro-German Sztojay government drastically transformed the situation of the Hungarian Jews. On 19 March, the very day of the German take-over, Adolf Eichmann himself came to Budapest with a battery of SS officers in charge of Jewish affairs. Eichmann ordered the Jewish community leaders to appear for a conference the next day, when they were told to establish a Judenrat which would have to carry out German orders. Meanwhile, on 29 March new anti-Jewish legislation was enacted, forcing Jews entirely out of the professions, ordering the registration of their property and arranging for its almost instant expropriation. The yellow star was introduced and the Jews were concentrated in designated places.
To carry out the deportations of the Jews, Eichmann divided Hungary into six zones:
Zone I = Carpathians;
II = Transylvania;
III = Northern Hungary;
IV = Southern Hungary east of the Danube;
V = Transdanubia,
including the suburbs of Budapest;
VI = Budapest.
With the participation of a Sondereinsatzkommando (special duty commando) that Eichmann had brought from Mauthausen and with the help of Hungarian police, the Germans began to round up the Jews, concentrating them within the designated zones and deporting them in rapid order.
By 7 June Zones I and II had been cleared of nearly 290,000 Jews. By June 30 over 92,000 Jews had been deported from Zones III and IV. By 7 July over 437,000 Jews, including some 50,000 from Budapest, had been deported to Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, the Jewish relief committee in Budapest, following up earlier initiatives of Slovakian Jews, began negotiations with SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny about ransoming the remaining Hungarian Jews from deportation. On behalf of the Jewish relief committee, Joel Brand was sent to Turkey to contact the Allies about the possibilities of exchanging goods for Jewish lives. Negotiations were protracted and complex, but Eichmann never halted the deportation trains. Finally, nothing substantial developed in the rescue of the Jews, except for one trainload of Hungarian Jews who were saved.
In July 1944, after news about the Hungarian deportations had been sent abroad, various high-level interventions on behalf of the Jews began to dismay the Hungarians. Horthy ordered the deportations halted.
When the pro-German government was toppled in August, the new Prime Minister Lakatos asked the Germans to remove Eichmann's Sondereinsatzkommando. Some anti-Jewish restrictions began to be lifted, but after the German "coup" in October 1944, with Arrow Cross leader Szálasi as Prime Minister, the Jews again fell into German hands for deportation. By 26 October some 35,000 Jewish men and women had been rounded up, but since Auschwitz was then being liquidated, these Jews were to be used as slave labourers. The exigencies of war rendered railway transportation almost impossible and so the Germans marched off 27,000 Jews on a terrible trek of over 100 miles to Austria. But Szálasi soon stopped these marches because of the high death rate. Some 160,000 Jews remained in Budapest, subject to terror and murder at the hands of the Arrow Cross, suffering cold, hunger and disease in their ghetto-like quarters, under the rain of Russian bombardment. About 20,000 died that winter in Budapest. On 14 February 1945 the Russians took Budapest.
Over 450,000 Jews, 70 per cent of the Jews of Greater Hungary, were deported, were murdered or died under German occupation. Within the boundaries of lesser (pre-1938) Hungary, about half the Jews were annihilated. Some 144,000 survived in Budapest, including 50,000 "racial" Jews, and about 50,000 to 60,000 survived in the provinces.