Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (90 page)

death marches implemented after the dissolution of the concentration camps.

Hungary

During 1943 the Nazi regime continued its policy of exerting pressure on the

Hungarian government to persuade it to deport its Jews. In January Luther

attempted to influence the Hungarian ambassador to this end,
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while in March 1943 the Foreign Ministry asked Bormann
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once again to inform his guest, a Hungarian minister, about German requests: the exclusion of the Jews

from the cultural and economic life of Hungary.

At what became known as the first Kleßheim Conference on 17 and 18 April

1943, Ribbentrop responded to Horthy’s question about ‘what he should do with

the Jews’ (‘he couldn’t kill them, after all’) quite unequivocally that they must

‘either be exterminated or taken to concentration camps’. Hitler interjected that

Jews were ‘to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, which could affect healthy

bodies’.
192
At the end of April, Ribbentrop told the Hungarian ambassador, Döme Sztojay, that Germany planned to deport all Jews from the area under

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

German control, and that it expected its allies to participate in these measures.
193

Hitler’s strong personal interest in this matter is also revealed by a passage in

Geobbels’s diaries from early May. According to this, Hitler had told the Reichs-

leiters and Gauleiters that the ‘Jewish question’ was being resolved ‘worst of all by

the Hungarians’; Horthy, who was ‘extraordinarily strongly enmeshed with the

Jews through his family’, would fight tooth and nail against really tackling the

Jewish problem.
194

In his report of 30 April Veesenmayer, who had been sent to Hungary to

investigate the situation in the country, established a close connection between

the Hungarian reticence concerning Judenpolitik and the expectations prevailing

in the post-war era. He wrote that the government and wide sections of the

bourgeoisie expected ‘clemency and benevolent treatment’ from the British and

the Americans ‘because of their hospitable attitude towards Jewry. They see Jewry

as a guarantee of “Hungarian concerns” and believe that through the Jews they can

demonstrate that it was only under duress that they waged this war alongside

the Axis powers, but through latent sabotage indirectly provided a contribution to

the opponents of the Axis powers.’
195
Thus it had to be German policy—this is the logical conclusion to be drawn from these trains of thought—to strive to tear up

that ‘guarantee’, if they wanted to keep Hungary on their side.

In late May 1943, however, Prime Minister Kállay demonstrated in a speech that

he did consider the ‘complete resettlement of Jewry’ as the ‘definitive solution’ of

the ‘Jewish question’, but that he would only address this once he had had ‘an

answer to the question of where the Jews are to be resettled to’. So the Germans

could not expect speedy consent to the deportations from the Hungarians.
196

The Germans gradually set about undertaking the solution of the ‘Jewish

question’ in Hungary without Kállay. In a further report about the situation in

Hungary, which he wrote after a further fact-finding trip to Budapest in December

1943
,197
Veesenmayer stressed that the solution of the ‘Jewish question’ in Hungary represented ‘a rewarding and compelling task for Reich policy . . . grappling with it

and cleaning it up’. In writing that the ‘cleaning up’ of the ‘Jewish question’ was

‘the precondition for the engagement of Hungary in the Reich’s battle for defence

and existence’, Veesenmayer once again made it clear that the intensification of

the persecution of the Jews in Hungary was the ideal instrument to render their

‘ally’ compliant.

The Hungarian government’s stubborn refusal to hand over the Jews resident in

the country was, from the point of view of the Nazi regime, the decisive gauge with

which the progressive erosion of Hungarian loyalty to the Reich since Stalingrad

could be measured. The German insistence on the issue proved crucial in keeping

the ‘ally’ under control. If the Hungarian government, so the German calculation

ran, could be forced to hand over the Jews domiciled in the country, the Hungar-

ians would lose their ‘guarantee’ vis-à-vis the Western Allies, and would thus be

bound for good or ill to their German ‘partner’.

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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At the beginning of 1944, the German–Hungarian relationship increasingly

deteriorated. In February 1944 Hungarian troops retreated from the Ukraine;

their secret negotiations with the Western Allies were just as well known to the

Germans as the war-weariness and the growing anti-German attitude in the

country. With the occupation of the country by German troops in March 1944,

the formation of the new Hungarian government under Sztojay, previously the

mission head in Berlin, the appointment of Veesenmayer as the new ambassador

and Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary (effectively the

German governor), and the establishment of an SS apparatus in the country, the

political and technical preconditions for the deportations were in place.
198

At Veesenmayer’s instigation, in April the Sztojay government offered 50,000

Jewish workers for armaments projects; a further 50,000, it was agreed, would

follow in May.
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According to a familiar pattern, ‘labour deployment’ provided the pretext on the basis of which the SS prepared the complete deportation and

extermination of the Hungarian Jews. The perfidious system of concentration and

deportation tested in German-occupied Europe for years was to be installed in

Hungary, with the active support of the Hungarian authorities and without

encountering any notable resistance among the non-Jewish population—in a

form that had been more or less perfected.
200

In March and April the new Hungarian government was induced to introduce

comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation that created preconditions for the deport-

ations. On 23 April the Hungarian trade ministry had all Jewish shops closed and

expropriated, and on 26 April the Hungarian cabinet undertook to send 50,000

Jewish forced labourers (‘with their families’) to Germany, and put the compul-

sory organization of Hungarian Jews, already established by Eichmann, under

Hungarian control.
201

The Germans were not only exceedingly well informed about the legislative and

administrative measures of the Hungarian government, but also exercised, ‘in

constant personal contact’ and ‘in an advisory capacity in the drafting and

implementation of ordinances’, a ‘control’ over the ‘operation of Hungarian

Jewish laws’.
202

On the orders of the Sonderkommando of the RSHA, which had been sent to

Budapest, and of which Eichmann had personally assumed leadership, a Jewish

council was set up, initially for the capital, later for the whole country.
203

On 27 April Goebbels recorded statements by Hitler about Horthy, which reveal

that the Hungarian Reich administrator had become so involved in German

Judenpolitik that he could now to some extent be seen as a relatively reliable

ally: ‘At any rate, he now no longer obstructs the cleansers of public life in

Hungary; on the contrary, he is now murderously angry with the Jews and has

no objections to us using them as hostages. He even suggested the same thing

himself . . . At any rate the Hungarians will not escape the rhythm of the Jewish

question. Whoever says A must say B, and the Hungarians, having started with

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Judenpolitik, can for that reason not halt it. From a certain point onwards

Judenpolitik propels itself.’ After further anti-Semitic tirades the dictator con-

tinued: ‘By and large one can say that a long-term policy is only possible in this

war if one starts out with the Jewish question.’
204

To simplify the deportations, the country was divided into zones. In each

zone the Jews were first brought by the Hungarian police from smaller villages

to the larger towns, where ghettos or camps were set up. After this, zone by zone,

the deportations to Auschwitz occurred, in only a few days in each case.
205
First the territories annexed by Hungary from 1938 onwards, the Carpatho-Ukraine

(Zone I) as well as Northern Transylvania (Nordsiebenbürgen) (Zone II). The

‘concentration’ began in the Carpatho-Ukraine on 16 April, in Northern Transyl-

vania on 3 May, the deportations to Auschwitz from these two zones on 15 May.

They were gradually followed by the Old Hungarian Provinces (Zones III–V),

where the concentration process was completed on 3 July and the deportations on

6 July. The final zone was to be Budapest, and the deportation of the 200,000 or so

Jews living there.
206

The first two trains carrying almost 4,000 people, officially presented as the first

contingent in the context of the agreed allocation of Jewish workers to the Reich,

had already left Hungary at the end of April for Auschwitz, where 2,700 deportees

were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival.
207

In early May, the pace of the deportations was considerably accelerated: at a

timetable conference on 4/5 May, aiming for a target set no later than the start

of the conference,
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it was established that 12,000 Jews should be deported per day rather than the 3,000 originally agreed.
209
From 14 May, four transports a day left Hungary, each carrying 3,000 Jews. By the time the deportations were

halted in early July, a total of 437,000 people had been deported from the five

zones, almost exclusively to Auschwitz. There were two exceptions: at the end

of June around 15,000 people were brought to Strasshof near Vienna and

deployed in forced labour so that, as Eichmann put it, they could be ‘put on

ice’.
210
This statement of Eichmann’s is connected with the negotiations that had begun in the spring between the SS and the Jewish rescue committee,

Vaada, about buying the freedom of Jews. We shall examine this more closely

in the next section. As a concrete result of these negotiations 1,684 people were

deported to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen, also in June, from where they

were able to travel to Switzerland over the next few months. The remaining

Hungarian Jews, 433,000 in all, were deported to Auschwitz in transports lasting

three to four days;
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of these some 10 per cent were deemed to be fit for work, the rest, far more than 10,000 people per day, were murdered immediately on

arrival.
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At the beginning of July, preparations were already under way to deport the

Jews living in Budapest, who had already been forced to move into houses marked

with yellow stars.
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In the face of the worldwide protests against the imminent Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

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deportations,
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Sztojay informed Veesenmayer on 6 July that Horthy had ordered a halt to the deportations.
215

In response, the Germans tried to enforce the resumption of the deportations.

On 8 July, when Sztojay asked Veesenmayer whether they could accept offers from

various states to grant a certain number of Jews permission to enter or to pass

through, Hitler, when asked about this, replied that they could accept these offers,

as long as ‘the transport of Jews to the Reich, temporarily stopped by the Reich

governor, be brought quickly and immediately to an end’.
216
On Ribbentrop’s instructions, in mid-July Veesenmeyer gave Horthy an ultimatum to resume the

deportations.
217

After Eichmann, on his own responsibility, had more than 2,700 Jews

deported to Auschwitz from two Hungarian internment camps
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in the second half of July, the Hungarian government, under severe pressure from the

Germans, agreed to the resumption of the deportations from the end of the

month.
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A few days later, however, Horthy declared himself in agreement only with the imprisonment of the Jews in special camps, but not with their deportation.
220
What was decisive for this step was that on 23 August Romania had declared its secession from the Axis alliance, and joined the anti-Hitler coalition.

On 29 August Horthy gave the newly formed Hungarian government under

Prime Minister Lakatos express instructions—kept secret from the Germans—to

end the persecution of the Jews. Surprisingly, however, Himmler had already

issued the order for all further deportations from Hungary to be suspended,
221
and in September the Sonderkommando, Eichmann, also left Hungary.
222

At first glance, Himmler’s attitude seems surprising in view of the stubborn

German efforts over the previous few months to set the deportations in motion.
223

But if we adopt the perspective of the Nazi regime, for whom the deportations

represented an important political instrument to bind the Hungarian allies to the

Reich, for good or ill, as accomplices of an unparalleled crime, it becomes clear

that at the end of August the Germans must finally have become aware that