It was the habit of the writers and publishers of patriotic children’s books in the late nineteenth century to produce richly illustrated volumes describing the beauties of the fatherland. This they did through the eyes of, for example, two little wandering orphans who had fled German-occupied Alsace-Lorraine, or those of a big brown bear who had come down from the Carpathian ranges to take in the spectacular sight of towns, villages, old forts and the glorious capital of what was then called the “Hungarian Realm”. The book here reviewed also describes all the cities and many of the villages in that latter country, and if published more than a century ago, it may well have been dedicated “to our Israelite youth on the occasion of our beloved Hungarian fatherland’s millennial celebration in 1896”. Indeed in that year, Jews felt more than ever at home in Hungary; at last, the law treated them as full-fledged citizens whose only—legally insignificant—distinction was that, rather than being Hungarians of the Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran or Eastern Christian faith, they were Hungarians of the “Mosaic persuasion”. Moreover, the elite of the Jews were fantastically successful not only in industry, business and banking, or as medical doctors, lawyers, journalists and other professionals, but now also in culture, the arts, the theatre and, increasingly, as landowners, judges, civil servants, university professors, mayors, members of parliament as well as police and army officers. It is true that a baptised Jew had an even better chance of access to positions traditionally reserved for members of the old ruling nobility, but then conversion was understood to be simply the last logical step in the process of assimilation. Some of those, however, who took conversion seriously, became much admired Christian clerics, monks and poets.
The many pictures in The Geographic Encyclopedia of the Holocaust show the often sumptuous synagogues and prayer houses built by the ever expanding and dynamic pre-First World War generations. The houses of worship represented the Jewish community’s boundless self-confidence: no one but Theodor Herzl, the Hungarian-born founder of Zionism, could have imagined that half a century later, the synagogues and prayer houses would become holding pens for members of the Jewish community before deportation and warehouses for their confiscated goods. Nor would it have been easy to imagine that even later, following the end of the Holocaust, most of the religious buildings would be put to secular use or simply torn down. It all reminds one of the famous Zentralfriedhof, the great central cemetery in Vienna, whose Christian section is a marvel of delicate gardening care while its overgrown Jewish section, with its once magnificent but now decrepit crypts, serves as a monument to the Austrian people’s successful effort to rid themselves of their Jewish fellow citizens. The Geographic Encyclopedia, too, serves both as a testimonial to the flourishing of the once nearly one-million-strong Hungarian Jewish community as well as a reminder of its greatest tragedy.
There is one more reason why the Encyclopedia reminds us of the “happy time of peace,” as Hungarians like to call the pre-1914 period; it is that, in 1944, when the Holocaust took place, so-called Rump or Trianon Hungary was at its largest territorial extent. After losing two thirds of its territory and three fifths of its inhabitants following the First World War, Hungary by 1941 had recovered nearly half of the lost lands, and the Hungarian flag was again flying over long sections of the Carpathian ranges. Dörmögô Dömötör, the grumbling Hungarian bear, who was a beloved figure in Hungarian children’s literature created by the Jewish author Zsigmond Sebôk, would have been pleased to see a large part of the “Hungarian Realm” unified again, even though his own den in the Retyezát (Retezat) Mountains of Southern Transylvania remained in Romania. All this meant that, in the spring of 1944, when time came for Hungary to “solve the Jewish Question”, the authorities were able—and generally delighted—to expedite to Auschwitz not only the Jews of so-called Rump Hungary, but also the hundreds of thousands who between the two wars had been citizens of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.

The Encyclopedia is an opus considered by Randolph L. Braham to be his final achievement. Braham, the founder of Hungarian Holocaust studies, has changed the way many Hungarians think of the events of 1944. Braham grew up in northern Transylvania under Romanian rule, and is thus familiar with both Romanian and Hungarian culture. He survived the war as a labour service man within the Hungarian army, that strange temporary refuge in 1944 for over a hundred thousand young Jewish men who, just a year or two earlier, would have been much more cruelly treated within the same institution. Having lost his family to the Holocaust, Braham emigrated to the United States soon after the war and is now emeritus professor of political science and Holocaust studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate School. He has written, collected and/or edited over fifty books and hundreds of articles and book chapters on the subject. His chef d’oeuvre is the Politics of Genocide: the Holocaust in Hungary.* All those desirous of an indepth familiarity with the Shoah in Hungary should start with this book.
The Encyclopedia consists of two volumes of text and a one-volume appendix that contains a substantial bibliography, an annotated list of special terms, a chronology of events, an index of names and places (but regrettably not also a subject index) and the biographies of the authors of the individual chapters on Hungary’s then 41 counties. The two volumes of text are preceded by Braham’s ninety-page-long Introduction, which summarises the history of Hungarian Jews and the major stages of their destruction, with as many precise statistics as can be gathered about an event in which the executioners rarely took down the names of their victims.
Braham’s principal collaborator, Zoltán Tibori Szabó, is an historian and journalist originally from Transylvania whose major monograph deals with the flight of Jews back and forth across the Romanian–Hungarian border between 1940 and 1944.** The twenty-two other authors have come from various academic and journalistic backgrounds; clearly, they were given much freedom as to the context of their entries. Inevitably, their contributions are not of equal quality. It would be good to know what explains the devotion of these writers to the subject: family origin, a sense of collective guilt, or simple intellectual curiosity. But in Hungary, where Jewish assimilation has been both a magnificent success and a terrible failure, it would be uncouth to raise such a question.
What is sorely missing from the appendix is a separate listing of the current toponyms and the Hungarian equivalents of the hundreds of localities which in 1944 were within Hungary but today are (again) in Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Croatia, Slovenia or Serbia. It is not enough to add the current name in parentheses to the Hungarian name in the index of names; at the moment, anyone looking for the home of a long-defunct parent in one of the neighbouring states is forced to refer to maps which do not even mention the Hungarian name.
The book moves from county to county in alphabetical order, which provides for the absolute orderliness necessary in an encyclopedia. The trouble is that such historic counties as Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun, which in 1944 included Budapest, are divided, have merged with others, or have disappeared from the map. The county of Gömör and Kishont, for instance, is today (again) in Slovakia and exists neither as a name, nor as a geographic term, nor as an administrative unit. For the coming English-language edition a detailed gazetteer listing the former and the presentday names of the counties as well as their precise locations seems indispensable. Most important will be the cross-references without which no student of the turbulent geographic history of Eastern Europe can function.
Each author begins with the history and destruction of the Jews in the county he or she is describing and then turns to the individual localities, again in alphabetical order. Inevitably, one tends to read first the rich stories of larger and more famous places, yet the few lines dedicated to a small village with, let us say, three Jewish families, none of which survived the Holocaust, make for equally heartbreaking reading.
With some variations, each well-documented entry tells the same story of Hungarian Jewry’s phenomenal rise and fall in less than two centuries. In the eighteenth century, Jews lived mainly on the estates of great landowners, who used the Jews for the collection of taxes and rents, the sale of liquor, moneylending, and cheap artisanal labour. Other Jews vegetated in the outskirts of cities which allowed them into the market place only in daytime and even then not always. In the nineteenth century, at last, Jewry began to expand into other areas of the country. Massive immigration from the Habsburg empire’s western provinces and even more from Austrian Galicia and the Russian empire, as well as edicts of emancipation, especially that of 1867–1868, brought Jews to counties and towns which had never before seen a Jew. Yet until the end, Jews remained unevenly distributed, and perhaps the most discouraging stories of the book are the ones that tell how, in the spring of 1944, the Hungarian authorities made sure that every single Jewish family be brought in by the gendarmes from even the most far-away Transylvanian hamlet; never mind the war and the approaching Red Army.
The phenomenal rise of Hungarian Jewry in the nineteenth century was based on the decision of reforming nationalists within the ruling landowning nobility to develop the economy quickly before agrarian and feudal Hungary would fall hopelessly behind others in the expected race for national survival. The best candidates for developing the economy were the non-status-bound, footloose Jews as well as non-Jewish immigrants from the West. Closely connected with the programme of modernisation was the desire to expand the number of Hungarian speakers in a country where non-Hungarians formed an absolute majority. German- and Yiddish—speaking Jews without an outside power to protect and incite them seemed eminently amenable to conversion into Hungarian nationals. On their side, the Jews—at least the more educated and more ambitious among them—had every reason to subscribe to this unwritten contract with the political elite, and did so with enthusiasm.
The outcome was an economic revolution and a rapid process of integration, even of assimilation, symbolised by the new synagogues which on national holidays were richly decorated with Hungarian national flags. The most successful among the Jews received noble, even baronial patents from Franz Joseph, the emperor-king. In 1910, when Jews made up less than five per cent of the country’s population, fifteen per cent of the large landowners were Jews as were the vast majority of those leasing large estates from the titled nobility and the Church. And yet these figures do not include the converts to Christianity who were most numerous among the Jewish elite. The majority of the medical doctors, journalists, lawyers in private practice, factory owners and businessmen were also Jews. The Neolog movement among Jews was a supreme expression of this trend to assimilate, but even the status-quo conservatives, and many of the Orthodox professed to be dedicated Hungarian patriots. Only the Hassidim, mostly in northeastern Hungary, and the handful of Zionists were of a different opinion. Add to the three mutually suspicious main Jewish religious movements the growing number of secular Jews and the not-very-numerous but highly active radical Jewish intellectuals, and it becomes clear that Jewry was far from united at that time—or at any time later. The radicals themselves were assimilated to the point of thinking of themselves as the best of Hungarians, but they repudiated the liberal-conservative Hungarian government as feudal-capitalist oppressors of workers, poor peasants and the ethnic minorities.

On the Christian front, not all were satisfied with these developments. Many in the Churches blamed the Jews for the state’s arrogating to itself the education of children and the licensing of marriages. Simultaneously, members of the new non-Jewish urban middle class, realising that they could not easily compete with the Jews in business and the professions, demanded the state’s help in the matter. There were also in Hungary, as elsewhere, plenty of those who harboured old-fashioned religious and new-fangled racial hatred toward the Jews. The Hungarian government vigorously suppressed all manifestations of extreme anti- Semitism but only as long as the Habsburg Monarchy lasted.
As testified by accounts in the Encyclopedia, the First World War brought the apogee of Jewish successes with thirty thousand Jews—one out of every five reserve officers—wearing the emperor’s golden sash, but the war also brought accusations of Jewish draft dodging, shirking, cowardice, spying, black marketeering and revolutionary agitation. Scapegoats had to be found for the suffering, the death, the hunger, the defeat and the truncation of the country. Besides, it is true that because so many Jews belonged to the intelligentsia, they harboured a relatively high number of political activists and white-collar criminals.
Military defeat and the Monarchy’s dissolution were followed by revolutions, in which the Hungarian Soviet Republic became the most notorious, especially as much of its leadership consisted of politicians of Jewish origin. Their often mindless politics and occasional ruthlessness left behind indelible hatreds for which all the Jews would have to pay the price. It is hard to say whether the Final Solution would have been such a popular undertaking without Béla Kun and company, but the Jewish people’s commissars certainly provided the excuse for Christian revenge twenty-five years later.
Thanks to French and Romanian military intervention, the Communists’ Red Terror was replaced, in the fall of 1919, by a far more brutal White Terror. In 1920, the former Austro-Hungarian admiral and White counter-revolutionary Miklós Horthy was proclaimed Regent of Hungary. Jewish communities were desperate to see in him a replica of the benevolent Franz Joseph, but he himself constantly hesitated between old-fashioned correctness and fascistic tendencies. Under Horthy as a semi-strong man, periods of right-wing radicalism alternated with periods of consolidation and the revived memories of the “happy time of peace.” On his official travels, Franz Joseph had insisted on paying hommage to every major synagogue; Horthy never went to one, but his county prefects, police captains and city mayors generally attended on the major Jewish holidays.
Beginning in 1938 (if we discount the numerus clausus law of 1920 regarding university attendance, which was made much milder a few years later) increasingly severe anti-Jewish laws were introduced, but they were often disregarded in order to assure continued economic development and to prevent the anarchy threatened by the far-right opposition to the right-wing government. Until March 19, 1944, when the German army marched into Hungary with the purpose of mobilising the nation for a last-ditch effort against the Red Army, the chances of Jewish survival looked favourable. It is true that about 60,000 of them had already been killed for various reasons which are well explained in Randolph Braham’s Introduction, but there were still 760,000 Jews alive—a hundred thousand of them converts to Christianity—who had been living a fairly normal life. The big industrialists among them had made enormous profits by manufacturing arms for the German and Hungarian armies whereas many shopkeepers, artisans and employees had lost their licenses or positions. The entries in the Encyclopedia point clearly to the gradual impoverishment of the Jews in the provinces, mainly because governmental measures discriminated in favour of Christian shopkeepers, artisans and professionals. The Encyclopedia entries show that the Jewish population greatly declined in the rural areas during the inter-war years. As emigration was near impossible, Jews tended to flock to the cities.
Still, up to 1944, hardly any Jew was starving, and the Hungarian government stubbornly refused to hand over its Jews to the Third Reich. It is small wonder then that, following the German invasion, the Jewish congregations obeyed the German-Hungarian orders to provide the Central Jewish Council, and thus the state and municipal authorities, with a detailed account of every Jewish community in the country. The truly terrible thing is, as the Encyclopedia demonstrates, how greatly the reports submitted by the Jewish congregations contributed to the “success” of the Final Solution.
The Encyclopedia entries are nearly identical in their description of the deportation of nearly half a million Hungarians Jews, the great majority of them women, children and old people. Men between 18 and 48 had been called up for labour service, a still unexplored military measure that spared their lives at least until the Arrow Cross takeover in October; it also prevented any kind of violent resistance to the deportations. Besides, the Jews had been given a false sense of security by Adolf Eichmann, the Hungarian authorities and the Central Jewish Council. How to judge the actions of the Council is one of the most hotly disputed issues of the history of the Holocaust. I am afraid that the information the Encyclopedia entries offer on the subject does not help us in answering the question as to whether the Council had deliberately or inadvertently misled the Jewish masses by insisting that the orders from above be obeyed. We must always remember, however, that the government had hitherto generally protected Jewish lives.

The story of the deportation itself could not be more dismal. No sooner did the Regent appoint General Döme Sztójay, a German protégé, as prime minister on March 22, 1944, than the new government issued an avalanche of anti-Jewish edicts, all aimed at humiliating, debasing, despoiling and ultimately annihilating the Jews. At a time when it should have been clear to all that Germany had lost the war, that the Red Army would occupy Hungary, and that it would wipe out the Hungarian ruling elite, the government and the administration spent most of its time and energy on devising edicts for the confiscation of Jewish telephones, radios, horses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, jewelry, stamp collections, bank accounts, furs, as well as licenses to practise any trade or profession. Jews were given reduced rate ration cards; they were excluded from all clubs, cinemas, theatres, swimming pools as well as from most restaurants, and were allowed into public baths only when no Christian was there. But even the latter privilege was of little value because in many cities either the mayor’s office or the directorate of the public baths decided that at no time should Jews be allowed to take a bath.
Jews were obliged to wear a “canary yellow” star whose size, form and precise location on the left chest were described with loving bureaucratic accuracy. Several categories of Jews were exempted from the decrees, such as war widows and their children as well as veterans who had lost an arm, a leg or their eyes in fighting for the fatherland. But the exemptions too were of limited use because by the time the war hero’s petition for exemption was granted, he had often been taken to Auschwitz while the post office returned the letter with the stamp: “Addressee moved without leaving a forwarding address.”
Were the authorities playing a cruel game? In some cases, certainly; in other cases they might have ponderously collected evidence for their decision, not knowing that the ghettoes would close down within a few days.
The process was incredibly rapid indeed. Following a rigid timetable, which had been jointly set by Adolf Eichmann, the two Hungarian deputy ministers in charge of deportations and a Hungarian gendarmerie lieutenant colonel, the country’s ten gendarmerie districts proceeded to assemble the Jews in hastily created ghettoes. They then moved them to brick factories or lumber yards outside the larger cities and finally took them to railroad stations where they were crammed 70 to 80 in a boxcar. The conditions in the ghettoes were generally atrocious—often far worse than the cruel conditions the governmental decrees had prescribed: too little water; too little food; extreme overcrowding in some of the worst flats and houses of the city. Yet this was paradise compared to conditions in the brickyards where the sheds had no walls, latrines had to be dug, and health care was non-existent. Torture and robbery by the authorities were routine. In nearly every ghetto, brickyard and railroad station the gendarmes operated a so-called mint at which wealthier Jews were thrashed until they gave up their hidden gold. Beatings were not a part of the governmental programme either but were practised with abandon and can be explained at least in part by the anti-Semitic propaganda of the previous decades which had insisted that Jews were hoarding ill-gotten Hungarian wealth.
Nothing, I believe, illustrates better the hopeless immorality of the period than the fact that hundreds of licensed midwives and student-midwives, as well as many medical doctors, assisted the gendarmes in performing vaginal and anal searches on Jewish women for hidden jewels. It does not seem that a single midwife refused to perform the task, yet their punishment would have been none or very mild; just as there is no evidence that more than a handful of Christians hiding a Jew or his goods were sent to an internment camp with which the authorities threatened at that time. (Under Arrow Cross rule, this too would change.) Note that, according to official entries reproduced in the Encyclopedia, both doctors and midwives were paid a modest honorarium.
We note in the Encylopedia that besides Adolf Eichmann and his few dozen Gestapo “specialists” other SS men as well as some German soldiers participated in the deportations. Still, the main part of the job was performed by Hungarians, according to some estimates 200,000 of them, from the county prefects down through the crucially important deputy prefects and district sheriffs all the way to railroad officials and their crews, village clerks, teachers, members of the state youth organisation and volunteers. As for the rest of the population, eyewitness accounts vary; I have often read of crying peasant women and of locals trying to smuggle food into the ghetto for their former neighbours, but the Encyclopedia itself tells mainly of jeering villagers, an occasional stone thrown at the column of Jews, and mostly, boundless looting. The Jews were obliged to lock their houses and to hand over the keys to the authorities, but the villagers broke in anyway carrying off paintings, books, gramophones, pillow cases, whatever the rich Jews had and their neighbours at least claimed never to have had. But then such scenes occur everywhere at all times when the authorities incite the population against a section of their neighbours. More important and sadder were the many “humble petitions” requesting Jewish flats, houses, fields, shops, horses, dogs and businesses.
Fortunately, the Encyclopedia also tells other stories as that of the servant girl at Zalaegerszeg, Zala County, who stated that she would rather wear the yellow star than abandon her Jewish employers, for which she was sent to an internment camp. As the local newspaper commented: “Shouldering the fate of the Jews is to deny one’s Hungarianness.” (p. 1363) There was also the Catholic Bishop of Transylvania, Áron Márton, who in his sermons and in his letters to the authorities vigorously protested the persecution and the deportations of the Jews. But post-war stories to the contrary, there is no evidence of other bishops having attempted to celebrate the mass in a ghetto for their co-religionaries. In general, the Churches maintained a deafening silence.
The Gestapo had already arrested hundreds of anti-Nazi politicians back in March 1944, many of them conservative aristocrats; also, several high state officials, especially among the county prefects, resigned or went into retirement, but this made no difference because their deputies took over immediately.
Individual decency aside, the springtime deportations show that Hungarian society in the provinces generally agreed with the proposition that Jews be made to disappear from the country. We do not know how many of the “onlookers” guessed or knew that the deportation amounted to a death sentence, but there seems to have been a consensus that “they would never again come back.”
And yet, all was not unmitigated tragedy, just as it was not in all such countries within Hitler’s Europe where there functioned a government allied to Germany and thus able to mould its Jewish policy to fit its own strategic goals. Only in Poland, German-occupied Russia, the Baltic countries and the Netherlands, where there were no such governments, did the Final Solution lead to almost total annihilation. In France, the Vichy government efficiently protected most of its native Jews. In Belgium, whose government was in exile, the presence of the king (and a relatively lenient German military administration) may have favourably influenced the situation of the Jews. In Italy, the Germans were able to grab Jews only following the collapse of Mussolini’s original fascist regime, and even then the municipal authorities, clerics, nuns and the general population successfully hid the great majority of Jews. In Bulgaria, another ally of Germany, every single one of the country’s fifty thousand Jews was protected, but the same government sent the Jews in the Bulgarian-occupied parts of Greece and Yugoslavia to Auschwitz. Slovakia delivered the absolute majority of its Jews to the gas chambers, but more or less successfully preserved the survivors. Romania at first engaged in its own horrendous Final Solution, but ended up protecting not only the survivors but also refugees from Hungary. Previously, it was Hungary that had harboured Jewish refugees from Austria, Poland, Slovakia and Romania.
In Hungary, following the partial completion of the deportation, there followed a crazy dance forward and back regarding the Final Solution, which is well related in the Encyclopedia. First, Horthy decided, for reasons much too complex to relate here, to forbid the deportation of the Jews of Budapest. Meanwhile, the Jewish labour service men were declared prisoners of war (!) which more or less guaranteed their safety. While their families were being gassed at Auschwitz, labour service men received ample food and the pay of ordinary soldiers. Back in 1942–1943, Jewish labour service men had been brutalised, even killed by their guards; in 1944, Jewish men between 18 and 48 were often taken off from the deportation trains and enlisted in the labour service. It is as if, in that year, the civilian and the military administrations—men basically of the same Christian middle-class background—exchanged their personalities: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had changed roles.

In August 1944, the Regent replaced the radically anti-Semitic and pro-German Sztójay government with a new cabinet, several members of which favoured Horthy’s plan to surrender to the invading Red Army. All this brought further improvement in the treatment of the surviving Jews. Inevitably, there ensued, on October 15, 1944, a coup d’état by a few SS men and parachutists; the Regent was forced to resign and to appoint the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi as prime minister.
In October, as earlier in March 1944, the condition of the Jews worsened radically; Eichmann came back to direct the death march of some fifty thousand labour service men and Budapest Jewish civilians to the Austrian border, there to build tank traps and be killed in the process. The Jews who were left in Budapest, perhaps 120,000 strong, were either placed under the shaky protection of neutral legations, or were forced into a newly established ghetto. In addition, some thirty thousand Budapest Jews were hiding with Christians. Now the latter, too, often went into hiding because few had the inclination to die for Szálasi and his fascist regime. So there came into being some sort of complicity between Jews and Christians. In any case, Budapest had always been the “sinful city”, that is, more liberal, more modern and less traditional than the provinces.
Now was also the time for the Hungarian resistance movement to flourish. Led by the politician Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, several in the movement were martyred under the Arrow Cross regime. Individuals in the Churches, the army and civilian life risked or even gave their lives for their Jewish compatriots. The list of Hungarian Righteous Gentiles is not at all short at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
By the Christmas of 1944, the Red Army was besieging the city in which Arrow Cross fanatics and ordinary criminals engaged in terror. But the municipal authorities, the police and even individual Arrow Cross members tried and often succeeded in protecting the Jews. The so-called international and the main ghetto were liberated in Pest in mid-January, and the last German-Hungarian stronghold in Buda fell to the Russians on February 13. Nazi and Arrow Cross terror continued in Western Hungary until the beginning of April when the last Germans and several hundred thousand Hungarians left the country. Survivors of Auschwitz and of later deportations were freed only in May from the most varied concentration camps.
The Encyclopedia tells well the story of the return of the survivors; the arrest, the trial and the exemplary punishment of many Nazi war criminals; and the Communist takeover in 1947–1948 which brought many persons of Jewish origin—but of the Marxist-Leninist persuasion—to absolute power in Hungary. The Encyclopedia also tells of the flaring up of anti-Semitism after the war. Postwar pogroms in Hungary were not as bad as those in Poland; they fit into the picture of general European unease with the return of the Jewish survivors and their possibly asking for the return of their stolen homes, jobs or silver spoons. In the following years, the majority of Hungarian Jews chose to emigrate; the last great group fled following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 revolution.

Today, most of the perhaps one hundred thousand persons who are of Jewish origin are assimilated to the point of non-recognition. Yet there is also a flourishing Jewish literary, cultural and political life as well as an ever more aggressive right-wing anti-Semitism. Clearly, the Jewish story is not over in Hungary.
We are, however, left with a major dilemma which the Encyclopedia does not attempt to answer. Why did it all happen? Why did police officers who had been sitting at the same table with wealthy Jewish citizens at municipal festivities turn against them with furor in 1944? Why did city mayors and midwives find pleasure in debasing people to the point of suicide? Part of the answer lies in religious and ideological anti-Semitism that emancipation laws and Jewish successes had actually aggravated. Another reason may be found in envy and greed, both that of the state and of many among the public. There was definitely a class-warfare character to the violent execution of the Final Solution in Hungary as there was to the post-war expropriation of the Hungarian-Germans and, subsequently, of the old Hungarian social elite and bourgeoisie. However, the ultimate answer lies, in my opinion, in the Europe-wide desire to put an end to the presence in their midst of ethnic and other minorities. In Western Europe, this had been achieved earlier, and mostly through assimilation. In addition, all Western European countries, except France, had kept most refugees, especially Jews, out of the country in the inter-war period. But Eastern Europeans had to cope in the same time frame with masses of refugees, and even those who were not refugees seemed to want to move constantly from one impoverished country to another, from city to country and then back to the city again.
Even bigger than the question of the refugees loomed that of the ethnic and religious minorities, their sum total often surpassing the number of the so-called dominant nation within the country. Most politicians and perhaps most people saw no room for a peaceful solution; force was to be used to rid the nation of the most uncomfortable and most defenseless minority, the Jews, but also of Ukrainians in Poland, Poles in Ukraine, Hungarians in Slovakia, Turks in Greece and Bulgaria, Greeks in Turkey, and Germans everywhere in Eastern Europe, at least eleven million of whom were expelled or killed after the war. Lately, we have witnessed how Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians have got rid of each other.
Because of its liberal noble tradition and generous policies in the nineteenth century, Hungary could have been an exception and it was—more or less—until 1944. But then the same people who had been quite humane before, competed with each other in showing who could be more cruel to his Jewish fellow-citizens before sending them away to never-never land. So Hungary fared no better than other European countries; in fact, it was among the very poor performers. The crimes perpetrated in 1944 are unredeemable and still haunt the nation.

István Deák,
an American historian born in Hungary, is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at
Columbia University. His books on Weimar Germany’s left-wing intellectuals,
the 1848 Revolution in Hungary, the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy and Hitler’s
Europe have appeared in English, German and Hungarian.