The Holocaust in Hungary: The Last Great Deportation

By the spring of 1944, the Allied armies were advancing on every front and the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. Yet the machinery of the Holocaust did not slow down. In Hungary, home to the largest Jewish community still alive in Axis-controlled Europe, it accelerated. In less than two months, more than 430,000 people were deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was among the fastest and most concentrated deportation operations of the entire war.

A Community That Had Survived So Long

Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, but for the first years of the war it kept its Jewish citizens within its borders. Before the German occupation, roughly 825,000 people were classified as Jews under Hungarian law, a figure that included many who had converted to Christianity. They were not safe. Hungary had passed a series of anti-Jewish laws beginning in 1938, restricting Jews in the professions, in commerce, and in public life. Thousands of Jewish men were conscripted into forced labor battalions on the Eastern Front, where tens of thousands died. In 1941, Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship were expelled to German-occupied Ukraine, and many were murdered near Kamianets-Podilskyi.

Still, the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, and his governments resisted German demands to hand over Hungary’s Jews wholesale. By 1944 Hungarian Jewry had become an isolated survivor: Poland, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and nearly every other European community had already been devastated.

The German Occupation

On 19 March 1944, German troops occupied Hungary. Berlin had grown concerned that its ally was seeking a separate peace with the Allies. Within days a new, compliant government took office, and the Arrow Cross and other extreme right-wing groups gained ground. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a small staff of SS specialists. The Germans needed little manpower of their own, because Hungarian officials, gendarmes, and police carried out most of the work.

The process followed a pattern perfected elsewhere. Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star, their property was registered and seized, and their telephones, radios, and cars were confiscated. From April, Jews in the provinces were forced into ghettos, often set up in brickyards or on the edges of towns. A Jewish Council was created in Budapest, as in other occupied countries, and was used to transmit German orders.

Eight Weeks in the Summer of 1944

The deportations began on 15 May 1944. Working region by region, starting in the Carpathian territories in the east and moving westward, Hungarian gendarmes packed people into freight cars, often 80 or more to a wagon, with little water and no sanitation. Between 15 May and 9 July, about 147 trains carried more than 434,000 Jews out of the country. Most went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where an expanded railway ramp allowed trains to arrive directly inside the camp. SS doctors selected the strongest arrivals for forced labor; the great majority, including nearly all children, the elderly, and mothers with young children, were killed in the gas chambers within hours.

Budapest was deliberately left for last. The provincial Jewish communities, which included the families of villages, small towns, and cities across the countryside, had almost no warning of what awaited them. Reports about Auschwitz, including the detailed account compiled by escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, had reached Jewish leaders in Hungary, but they did not reach most ordinary people in time to change what happened.

The Halt, and the Arrow Cross

Pressure on the Hungarian government mounted from abroad. Appeals came from the Vatican, from neutral Sweden and Switzerland, and from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who warned that Hungarians responsible for the deportations would be held accountable. In early July 1944, Horthy ordered the deportations stopped, and the transports from the provinces ended. Roughly 200,000 Jews remained in Budapest, which now became a refuge of sorts, though a precarious one.

That fragile safety collapsed on 15 October 1944, when the Germans backed a coup that placed Ferenc Szalasi and the fascist Arrow Cross Party in power. Terror followed immediately. Arrow Cross gangs shot Jews in the streets and on the banks of the Danube, forcing victims to remove their shoes before they were killed. Tens of thousands of Jews, including women and older people, were sent on foot toward the Austrian border in November, in bitter weather and with little food. A walled ghetto was created in Budapest in late November, and conditions there became desperate.

Rescue in Budapest

In the midst of this terror, a number of diplomats and individuals acted. Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg, Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz, and representatives of other neutral states issued protective passes and established safe houses that sheltered tens of thousands of people. Jewish and Zionist youth movements forged papers and hid children, and some Christians sheltered neighbors at great personal risk. Separately, negotiations led by Rezso Kasztner with the SS allowed a train carrying roughly 1,700 Jews to leave for Switzerland, a deal that remains controversial today.

Soviet forces liberated the main Budapest ghetto on 18 January 1945. Of roughly 825,000 Jews in Hungary at the time of the occupation, historians estimate that more than half a million were killed. Hungary’s Jewish community, once among the most vibrant in Europe, was shattered, and many survivors chose to leave.

Why It Matters

The Holocaust in Hungary is a reminder that the catastrophe was not only the product of German planning. It required the cooperation of local officials, police, railway workers, and neighbors. It also shows how late the end came: those deported in May and June 1944 were killed after the Allied landings in Normandy, with liberation within sight. And it shows, once more, that even in the final months a handful of individuals who chose to act were able to save lives.