István Deák

The Holocaust in Hungary

 

The age of hope

Where did it all begin? Historians agree that the unfolding of the intensive Hungarian-Jewish relationship must be sought in early nineteenth century history. Jews had long been living in what is today's Hungary when the conquering Magyar tribes arrived from the east in the ninth century, but originally theirs was a traditionalist and isolated existence. When persecution did occur, it was generally milder than in medieval and early modern Western Europe. The story becomes more exciting, and more complex, with the step-by-step integration of Jews into Hungarian society that began late in the eighteenth century as an integral part of a nation-wide drive for modernisation. Because the landowning nobility that, until the mid-nineteenth century, counted as the embodiment of the nation, was loath to engage in commerce and industry, it needed the services of the Jews. Also, once the ideas of nation and nationality took root, the same nobility became painfully aware that the Hungarian-speakers formed a minority in the country. All the more reason for them to foster the acceptance of the Jews who combined their economic usefulness with a willingness to become patriots and to exchange their German or Yiddish speech for Hungarian.
Understandably, the story was not simple, and one meets with as many signs of anti-Semitism among the reforming nobility as one meets with signs of reluctance on the part of Jews to give up their ancient way of life. Still, one can state with confidence that, in nineteenth century Europe, no country was more hospitable to Jewish immigration and assimilation, and no country won more enthusiastic support from its Jews than the Hungarian kingdom. One might say even that there existed, at least since the liberal, nationalist revolutions of 1848-1849, a tacit agreement between the ruling gentry and the enlightened, educated and patriotic segment of Jewry for a division of labour in modernising Hungary. The Jews would contribute the investment capital, supplied by some great Western banking houses, and their own business acumen, dynamism and diligence. The non-Jewish political elite would provide the legislative and administrative assistance necessary for economic expansion.
The resulting success of Jews was dazzling. Although they constituted less than five per cent of the pre-First World War population, Jews created, owned and managed the majority of Hungarian heavy industry and mining, and nearly every one of the great banks. They were hardly less successful in commerce, small entrepreneurship, crafts, the liberal professions and all aspects of culture and the arts. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they had also made significant inroads into state service, the judiciary, the officer corps and large landownership. Assimilation for the Jewish elite increasingly took the form of intermarriage.
Hungarian Jews were, as a whole, very patriotic; they supported both the Emperor-King Francis Joseph and the governing conservative-liberal parties in Hungary. Of course, not all Christian inhabitants of the country were happy with these developments; those who did not profit from the economic boom, or profited less than the others, for instance members of the ethnic minorities, impoverished gentry, the clergy, small shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, etc. tended to blame the Jews for their misfortune. In 1882-1883, there was a wave of wild anti-Semitic outbursts in connection with the so-called Tiszaeszlár blood libel trial, but the government and the dominant liberal press firmly rejected what they considered a return to medieval obscurantism. The anti-Semitic political party that was set up at that time disappeared from the scene within a few years. Meanwhile, the Jewish elite would not even consider creating a separate Jewish political organization. Although Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest, his calls for a Jewish state met with categorical rejection among Hungarian Jewish leaders and in the press. For educated Jews, Judaism was but a religious denomination; therefore, Zionist nationalism amounted to treason. Few people paid attention to Herzl's warning, in 1903, to a Hungarian Jewish politician:

The hand of fate shall also seize Hungarian Jewry. And the later this occurs, and the stronger this Jewry becomes, the more cruel and hard shall be the blow, which shall be delivered with greater savagery. There is no escape.

If Zionism made no inroads in Hungarian Jewish life, political radicalism and socialist ideology did, mostly among the sons and daughters of assimilated and successful bourgeois, who turned with messianic zeal against the Hungarian ruling elite, which they identified with both retrograde feudalism and oppressive capitalism.7 Truly, for a young intellectual imbued with the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche and Kautsky, it must have been hard to stomach such a surreal spectacle as the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of Hungary at the new and beautiful Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest. Here is the scene as described in a Neolog Jewish newspaper.

In front of the temple, which was decorated with flags, there stood. an entire barricade of coaches that had brought the ladies and the gentlemen in white tie. In some of the more decorative private coaches arrived [Jewish] co-religionaries sporting splendid Hungarian national gala costumes, complete with sword, clasps, egret feathers [on their high fur hats], cocky, with pelisses thrown on one shoulder, frogs and loops laden with jewels, as well as gold or silver spurs attached to long and
dashing cordovan boots. The most dazzling Hungarian national gala costumes were worn by Berthold Weiss, Sándor Deutsch de Hatvan and Lajos Krausz de Megyer.8

Then came the First World War, in which Jews participated en masse, providing, among other things, more than one fifth of the Dual Monarchy's reserve officer corps. But whereas in the armed forces anti-Semitism was not tolerated, in politics, the press and public opinion, it experienced a quick revival. Very simply, scapegoats had to be found for the suffering of the population and the death of half a million Hungarian citizen-soldiers. The defeat of the Central Powers in the fall of 1918 came as a terrible shock to a misinformed public, yet also as a welcome relief from what was perceived to be Habsburg/Austrian oppression. The fact that, in the eyes of the other peoples of the Monarchy, the Hungarians were the quintessentially dominant nationality did not in the least influence the Hungarians' perception of themselves as oppressed victims. Thus the end of the war was celebrated as the beginning of an independent and more progressive Hungary; celebration turned to despair, however, when the terrible costs of war became more visible, and when the armies of Hungary's old and new neighbours occupied much of what in pre-war times had been officially known as the "Hungarian Empire" within Austria-Hungary. For the Jews, the First World War had marked the apogee of their success; in 1944, nothing would symbolise more their fall from grace than the war-time decorations they had to leave on the walls of the houses and flats from which they were deported.

...
Post-First World War Hungary was not only impoverished but was inundated by refugees from the newly lost territories. Many of the refugees were civil servants and professionals, who now engaged in a desperate competition with the Jews for even the lowliest positions in commerce and the professions. This, combined with the country's dismemberment and the frightening experience with the revolutionary Soviet Republic, led to a deepening of middle-class anti-Semitism.
Interwar Hungary stood for a mass of contradictions and so did its Jewish policy. The country was a kingdom without a king; its head of state was Regent Miklós Horthy, a former Austro-Hungarian admiral, of course without a fleet. The system of government was constitutional, but the counter-revolutionary movement that had brought Horthy to power was characterised by violence and terror. Hungary had a parliament in which, as late as March 1944, sat a few Social Democratic and other progressive deputies, but the majority of deputies proclaimed fascist ideas. Both the Lower House and the Upper House were obsessed with the "Jewish question." In fact, pre-occupation with the Jews was akin to a sickness that afflicted all strata of society, but especially the educated classes.
In 1920, the Hungarian parliament adopted a law meant to reduce the presence of Jewish students at the universities to something approximating their presence in the general population, which was a little less than six per cent, but this law was suspended eight years later. What counts is that the old silent contract between gentry and Jews had come to an end. Now even the most moderate counter-revolutionaries expected the majority of Jews to leave the country eventually .
The Horthy regime was desperate to open jobs, especially in industry, commerce, and the liberal professions to Gentiles, yet as late as 1935, the proportion in Hungary of Jewish lawyers, medical doctors, journalists and engineers was higher than even in the pre-First World War period, often approximating fifty per cent. The proportion of Jews among the professionals practising in the capital and among those with the biggest income was higher still. And now just one more data: as late as 1941, the absolute majority of the biggest taxpayers and those with the greatest personal wealth were Jews or baptised Jews.14 These and similar statistics were constantly harped upon up by the press and the politicians but what they failed to say was that the absolute number of Jews was steadily declining because of emigration, a low birth rate and conversions, and that once the economy began to improve, as it did in the late 1930s, there would be ample space in lucrative positions for the newly educated Christian middle class as well.
The counter-revolutionary regime advocated a militant Christian ideology, which meant that it was opposed to free masonry, liberalism, democracy, atheism, secularism, Jewish influence, Marxism, Bolshevism, cosmopolitanism, modernity, abortion, homosexuality, divorce and avant-garde art, yet many of these sinful activities and ideologies flourished in Horthy's Hungary, creating, among other things, a new golden age of literature and the arts. Despite the government's incessant anti-urban and peasantist propaganda, Budapest remained a most sophisticated place in a much poorer and much less develop-ed countryside. In the capital, Jews made up nearly one fourth of the inhabi-tants and nearly one half of those with the right to vote. The press was infinitely freer than in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and the judiciary, although certainly class-based, often ruled in defiance of government interests. The ruling elite was badly divided between those who cultivated old-fashioned conservative values and those with fascistic inclinations, between defenders and critics of the rigid social hierarchy, between moderate and radical anti-Semites, between Anglophiles and the admirers of Nazi Germany. Nor are history books correct which claim that, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the radical right was steadily gaining ground at the expense of the moderate rightists. Rather, things changed all the time; the fascist Arrow Cross Party, for instance, had three times as many members in 1939 than in the fall of 1944 when the Germans put it in power. Also, to give another example, the conservative, Anglophile elite operating under the guidance of former prime minister Count István Bethlen almost completely regained power in 1943 as well as in the weeks preceding the Arrow Cross takeover in October 1944.
The Horthy regime's main domestic policy goal was to avoid such fundamental social reforms as the distribution of the enormous landed estates among the millions of landless; its main foreign political goal was to recover some, if not all the territories that Hungary had lost after the First World War. At stake were two thirds of the old kingdom and over three million Magyar-speakers now living under foreign rule. The government's policy goals were tightly intertwined with the "Jewish question"; after all, the anti-Jewish economic measures were the beginnings of a most unfair but still genuine redistribution of wealth. Also, the recovery of the lost territories required the support of Nazi Germany; Hitler's insistence on drastic anti-Jewish measures was one reason for a series of Hungarian anti-Jewish laws that began in 1938. However, ideology and greed played their part as well.

...
But why did the Hungarian authorities obey Eichmann and his minuscule crew of a few dozen specialists? Clearly, there remained only a few months before the arrival of the Red Army when those who had collaborated with the Germans were likely to be punished. The answer can only be that those who participated in the Final Solution found the threat of eventual punishment less compelling than the immediate satisfaction of seeing the Jews go away and of being able to acquire houses, apartments, shops and well-paying positions-or for a shoeless poor peasant to acquire a pair of good boots. One thing is certain: even those who bemoaned the fate of the Jews did not expect them ever to return. There is a shattering passage in Imre Kertész's Nobel-Prize-winning novel, Fateless, on the last encounter between the deported Jews and a Gentile Hungarian. Kertész's hero, the boy George Köves, reaches the Polish border in a crowded railroad car when a Hungarian gendarme appears at the entrance, offering to relieve the suffocating passengers of their hidden jewels, gold and money:

"Men," he said to us, "you've reached the Hungarian border." He wanted to use this occasion to make an appeal to us. it was his opinion that we had no need of these where we were going. everything we might still hold on to would be taken from us by the Germans anyway. why shouldn't these things find their final resting place in Hungarian, rather than German, hands?

The gendarme's appeal got him nowhere because the inmates of the car demanded water first and only then would they give up their valuables; he, on the other hand, insisted on a reverse order of proceedings. "After all, you are still Hungarians," the gendarme exclaimed.

Finally the furious military policeman concluded: "Stinking Jews, you make a business out of even the holiest of things!" And in a voice choking with outrage and disgust, he added this wish: "Die of thirst, then!"

The deportations did not remain a secret and Horthy soon began to receive messages from István Bethlen, who was in hiding, as well from other such conservative, mostly aristocratic politicians whom the Gestapo had not been able to arrest. Now, at last, Pope Pius XII, King Gustav VII of Sweden, President Roosevelt, and other world leaders also began to send messages, urging the Regent to act to protect the remaining Jews in Hungary. Deeply impressed by Allied successes in Normandy, Horthy on July 7, 1944, forbade further deportations. The interdiction came when the gendarmes gathered in Budapest to begin deporting the 200,000 odd Jews in the capital. Persuaded by his conservative friends that the gendarmes and some far right politicians were planning a coup d'état against him, the Regent ordered some armoured units to Budapest.
The smoothness and speed of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews from the provinces was unique in the history of the Holocaust; but so was Horthy's decision to order military forces to prevent the deportation of Jews. Although Eichmann subsequently managed literally to smuggle a few thousand more Jews to Auschwitz, in July the deportations came to an end, not to be renewed until after Horthy's overthrow in October.
Now came another surreal period in wartime Jewish history when those in Budapest were quartered in so-called Yellow-Star houses and suffered from many humiliating restrictions but were also able to make plans for the opening of schools for Jewish children in September, and when it was relatively easy to obtain a certificate from the Regent's office exempting one from the anti-Jewish laws. Also, the Swedish, Swiss, Portuguese and Vatican representatives began to hand out papers, which offered a degree of personal protection with the vague promise of post-war immigration to their country or else emigration to Palestine. Moreover, those in labour service were generally decently fed and could feel quite safe; at the time of the deportations to Auschwitz, many of the men of military age had been literally saved in the last minute by the military authorities. Considering that, before March 1944, the army was notoriously more anti-Semitic and more pro-German than the civilian leadership, its relatively lenient behaviour in the spring and summer of 1944 belongs to the many unsolved mysteries of the period.
Early in September 1944, following Romania's sudden defection to the Allied side, the Red Army invaded Hungary. Horthy had already dismissed his pro-Nazi prime minister and he now began to negotiate an armistice with the Soviet Union -hoping for an agreement which would allow the German troops to withdraw unmolested-but discussions proceeded slowly. The Germans knew about these plans; they began to prepare for a coup d'état and, as a first step, on October 15 they kidnapped Miklós Horthy, Jr., the Regent's surviving son, whose older brother had been killed when his plane crashed on the Russian front. Horthy announced his intention to surrender to the Red Army that same day, but the army high command, imbued with the fanatical anti-communism which Horthy himself had encouraged, refused to follow his instructions and the surrender attempt failed. German SS and paratroopers arrested Horthy and, in order to secure his son's safety, the old man signed a piece of paper which made his archrival, the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi, his successor. Horthy and his family were then put on a train to Bavaria where they were held under house arrest.
A few military commanders went over to the Soviets; the army as a whole, however, swore loyalty to Szálasi-not that its fighting ability was of high quality.

Arrow Cross rule

The pre-March and post-March 1944 political leadership did not differ socially from one another; they were all products of the counter-revolution and had their origins in the old aristocracy, gentry and the civil service; only in that they held differing views on Hungary, its Jews and the war. Even the conservative and liberal critics of the Horthy regime originated from the same counter-revolutionary elite. But those whom the SS now entrusted with mobilising the country for a last-ditch defence were different, not because they had no titled aristocrats and old gentry among them (in Hungary nothing ever happened without a few counts and other noblemen) but because they included many people drawn from other classes of society, even from the Lumpenproletariat.
The Arrow Cross has been judged harshly; for instance, while the people's courts tried members of the Horthy regime as individuals, members of the Szálasi regime were branded collectively as traitors and war criminals. The politics of the group was described as of hare-brained ideas and extreme violence; today, Hungarian nationalist circles routinely blame the Arrow Cross for all the crimes of the period; indeed, Szálasi has become the supreme alibi of Regent Horthy and his cohorts. It is currently quite common to hear a younger generation of Hungarians, nay even some confused Jewish survivors, stating that Szálasi had come to power in March 1944 and that the Arrow Cross militia was at least partly responsible for the brutalities of the deportation to Auschwitz. In reality, the latter was the work exclusively of the old administration under Regent Horthy.
Following Horthy's overthrow, Eichmann came back to Hungary to complete his deportation project, but things had changed substantially. The SS Führer Heinrich Himmler no longer allowed deportations to Auschwitz and, in any case, the Red Army was approaching. So late in November, 50,000 Budapest Jews, mostly women, as well as nearly the same number of labour-service men were marched off to the Austrian border, there to build fortifications. The monstrosity of the Arrow Cross militia and the soldiers who guarded the deportees was surpassed only by the monstrosity of the Austrian Hitler-Jugend and other local uniformed formations that took over the deportees at the border.29 The behaviour of the peasant population ranged from the helpful through the indifferent to the murderously hostile in both countries.
Amazingly, thousands of Jews, especially among the old, were turned around and brought back to Budapest through the decision of Himmler and through the efforts, especially, of Raoul Wallenberg, who was a delegate of the American War Refugee Board, acting under the protection of the Swedish Legation in Hungary. The activities of Wallenberg, the Swiss Consul Carl Lutz, the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the pseudo-Spanish Consul (in reality an Italian anti-Nazi) Giorgio (Jorge) Perlasca, and the International Red Cross representative Friedrich Born constitute perhaps the best-known chapter of the Hungarian Holocaust.30 These courageous men used mainly the promise of diplomatic recognition by their own governments to impress the Arrow Cross leaders; as a result, they were able to distribute protective passes to thousands of Jews as well as to bring back others from the road to Austria. Most importantly, the consuls caused the creation of a number of so-called Protected Buildings in a once heavily Jewish upper-middle class area of Budapest. But before we accept the claims of the enthusiasts that Wallenberg, for instance, saved the lives of one hundred thousand Jews, we have to consider that were all the claims true, the consuls would have saved more lives than there were Jews left in Budapest. We must also consider that Wallenberg and Co. owned at best a few pistols among them, and that they would have been powerless to save any lives had some Arrow Cross leaders, as for instance the Foreign Minister Baron Gábor Kemény, not been willing to co-operate with them. Ultimately, the decision not to have all the Jews of Budapest killed was that of the Szálasi government. Of course, there is no particular merit in not committing even more murders, but the fact of Arrow Cross co-operation with the consuls must be registered.
The most important of the regime's decisions was to set up a Ghetto in Budapest, late in November, which ended up housing nearly a hundred thousand Jews. This was at that time a unique institution in Europe.32 Conditions inside the wooden-board fence were atrocious, but the Budapest municipality fed the inhabitants so long as any food could be found and a mixed crew of policemen and Arrow Cross militiamen offered some degree of protection against roving bands of other Arrow Cross militiamen and SS men; such protection was something sorely missing at the Swedish, Swiss and other Protected Buildings. As conditions in Budapest worsened and the Szálasi government took off to Western Hungary towards the end of December, the capital remained in the hands of local Arrow Cross leaders, who terrorized the entire population and, among other things, regularly took out inhabitants of the Protected Buildings to shoot them into the nearby Danube River. Meanwhile, however, small units belonging to Zionist organizations had installed themselves under the protection of especially the Swiss Consulate and forged thousands of papers, birth certificates and whatever one needed to hide in the city. This, of course, often devalued the real documents, and Arrow Cross authorities tore up such papers as often as they accepted them. The Zionists had long concluded that there was no point in trying to offer armed resistance; this was left to a handful of Communists and other armed partisans; nevertheless, the Zionists' efforts were invaluable.
The Red Army reached the southeastern outskirts of Budapest at the end of November 1944 and, on December 24, in a dashing move, Soviet tanks surrounded the entire capital. The chaos and the hardships in the place are impossible to describe in a few sentences. Before the siege began, the Arrow Cross regime attempted to mobilise the entire population, or at least to force everyone to move to the West. Ever more bloodthirsty proclamations threatened recalcitrants with immediate execution. Because almost no one obeyed the mad orders, the city was now hiding thousands of deserters and draft dodgers, which meant that the population at large had become accomplices, in a way, with the Jews in the ghetto and, even more, with those in hiding. It seems that about 25,000 Jews and baptized Jews survived the war and the siege disguised as Gentiles. Considering, however, that in Budapest almost everyone was capable of detecting a Jew and also that most of those in hiding were not denounced, it is likely that at least a hundred thousand Gentiles gave active assistance to the Jews, while many more simply looked the other way. The tragedy is that such popular solidarity was all but inconceivable in the spring when the deportations to Auschwitz took place.
Because of the furious madness of roving Arrow Cross bands, it was now truly risky to hide a Jew. In this connection, let me name only three of the saviours, the Catholic Grey Sister Margit Schlachta, the Lutheran minister Gábor Sztehló and the journalist Béla Stollár. The first repeatedly intervened on behalf of the Slovak Jews during the war as well as journeying to see the Pope on their behalf; in 1944, she mobilised her entire order to assist the Hungarian Jews. The second harboured hundreds of Jewish children in different homes. The third hid many Jews as well as providing others with forged papers; he also set up a small resistance group made up of deserters and Jewish escapees from labour-service.
On Christmas Day of 1944, Béla Stollár and his companions were killed in a gunfight with the gendarmes and the Arrow Cross militia. That there were many others equally brave is shown by the hundreds of Hungarian names among the Righteous Gentiles listed at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem.

István Deák
is an American historian born in Hungary. He teaches modern Central and East European history at Columbia University. His books on Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals, the 1848 Revolution in Hungary and the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy have appeared in English, German, Italian and Hungarian.