Black Earth(100)

Budapest passed anti-Jewish legislation on the German model as a signal of its loyalty to Berlin, but this did not, in itself, lead to mass killing. The Jews in greatest danger were the ones who inhabited territories newly acquired by the Hungarian state. Hungarian authorities deported Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia across the Soviet border just as Germany was invading the Soviet Union. These Jews were then the victims of the first large-scale shooting of the Holocaust, at Kamianets’ Podils’kyi in August 1941. Hungary joined its German ally in the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, and Hungarian forces shot a certain number of Jews there. The army also forced Jews into labor battalions, which then worked in dreadful conditions in the occupied Soviet Union. Some forty thousand Hungarian Jews perished in these units. All the same, the Hungarian leadership never showed any interest in deporting its Jewish citizens to Auschwitz. The government’s general attitude was that a purge of national minorities could follow a victorious war.

As a result, some eight hundred thousand Jews were still alive on Hungarian territory in 1944. Since the vast majority of the three million or so Polish Jews had already by this point been murdered, Hungary’s was now the most significant Jewish community of central and eastern Europe. In January and February 1943, the Hungarian army suffered huge losses as the Red Army retook the city of Voronezh. The Hungarian government began some clumsy attempts to make contact with the western powers. Learning of this, Hitler blamed the Jews of Hungary. On March 19, 1944, German troops entered Hungary; a few days later D?me Sztójay, who had been serving in Berlin as Hungarian ambassador, was named prime minister. It was this government, created in the unusual circumstances of German occupation and constrained in its freedom of action, which undertook to deport Hungarian Jews to German death facilities.

The German invasion of Hungary was a strange operation, since its purpose was to keep an allied state, and an allied army, in the war on the German side. The point was not to force Hungary to carry out the Final Solution, but rather to swing the balance of Hungarian politics sufficiently so that it might be carried out. The government that the Germans introduced in March 1944 was ideologically more antisemitic. The calculation of the new government, perhaps more important than its ideology, was that the deportation of Hungary’s Jews was the price to be paid for the preservation of a Hungarian state. The German occupation was not meant to exploit Hungarians economically, but to divert economic calculations in such a way as to endanger Jews. Nazi ideology presented the murder of Jews as an end in itself. But the strategic calculation was that a Hungary culpable of murdering its Jews would be unable to switch sides.

The expropriation of Jews, as both the German occupiers and the Hungarian government understood, was an opportunity to gain a certain amount of support from the majority population in the strange new situation. That spring the Hungarian government announced a series of reforms that depended, as everyone could tell, on the robbery, and thus indirectly on the disappearance, of the Jews. The property of more than four million dead European Jews having changed hands by this point in time, the connection between expropriation and murder was clear to everyone; and if businesses and apartments were to be transferred, the government wanted to make the arrangements and get the credit. German state destroyers entered Hungary: a Higher SS and Police Leader alongside an Einsatzgruppe, the forces that organized the Final Solution in the East, as well as Adolf Eichmann, the SS deportation specialist. In practice, however, the work of deportation depended upon the records of the Hungarian interior ministry and the work of Hungarian local policemen. What this all meant was hardly a secret: On May 10 a New York Times headline read “Hungarian Jews Fear Annihilation.” Between May and July 1944, some 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, of whom about 320,000 were murdered.

Like all of Germany’s allies, regardless of their actual policies towards Jews, Budapest considered the treatment of its own citizens to be a matter of its own sovereign choices. This was true even of the Hungarian rulers that the Germans chose in spring 1944, when Hungarian sovereignty had been compromised but not eliminated by the German invasion. In summer 1944, as circumstances changed, calculations changed as well. That June, the western allies landed in Normandy and the Red Army routed Germany’s Army Group Center in Belarus. The Americans, after a series of warnings about Hungary’s treatment of Jews, bombed Budapest on July 2. Horthy had remained head of state despite the German intervention and the change of government. He now halted the deportations, thereby sparing most of the Jews of Budapest. He tried again and failed again in October 1944 to change sides. Even as Budapest itself was besieged by the Red Army, the Germans wanted the city’s Jews deported. A new fascist Arrow Cross government marked Jewish houses in the capital and created a ghetto; the advance of the Soviets made further transports to Auschwitz impossible. About a hundred thousand Jews were forced to leave Budapest, thousands of whom died in labor battalions. The Arrow Cross murdered about fifty Jews a day by the Danube River.