The Holocaust in Hungary was the dispossession, deportation, and systematic murder of more than half of the Hungarian Jews, primarily after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.
At the time of the German invasion, Hungary had a Jewish population of 825,000, the largest remaining in Europe, further swollen by Jews escaping from elsewhere to the relative safety of that country. The Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Kállay had been reluctant to deport them. Fearing Hungary was trying to pursue peace with the Allies, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion. New restrictions against Jews were imposed soon after Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. The invading troops included a Sonderkommando led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Budapest to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival. The quick progress of the deportations was enabled by close cooperation between the Hungarian and German authorities.
Diplomatic pressure and the Allied bombing of Budapest persuaded Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, to order a halt to the deportations on 6 July. By the time they had stopped three days later, almost the entire community of Jews in the Hungarian countryside had gone.
The mass deportation of Hungarian Jews was the largest Holocaust killing after 1942. It took place as World War II appeared to be drawing to a close — and world leaders had known for some time that Jews were being murdered in gas chambers. The expropriation of Jewish property was useful to achieve Hungarian economic goals and sending the Jews as forced laborers avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians. Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft.
Jews in Hungary
In the 1941 census, the population of Hungary was 14,683,323. Of these, 725,005 regarded themselves as Jews (4.94 percent) and another 100,000 were Jewish by descent who identified as Christian. Over 400,000 lived in post-Trianon Hungary and another 324,000 lived in territories acquired by Hungary since 1938: Northern Transylvania from Romania (164,000), part of Upper Hungary from Czechoslovakia (146,000), Carpathian Ruthenia (78,000), and Bácska and other areas that had been part of Yugoslavia (14,000).
Anti-Jewish laws
Labor battalions
German occupation
Invasion
On 18 March 1944, Adolf Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Austria, where he demanded greater acquiescence from Hungary. Horthy resisted, but his efforts were fruitless. While he was at the conference, German tanks rolled into Budapest, and on 23 March the government of Döme Sztójay was installed. Among his first moves, Sztójay legalized the Arrow Cross Party, which quickly began organizing. During the four days' interregnum following the German occupation, the Ministry of the Interior was placed in the hands of László Endre and László Baky, right-wing politicians known for their hostility to Jews. Their boss, Andor Jaross, was another committed antisemite.
Adolf Eichmann
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, sent to Hungary to supervise the deportations, set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel in Budapest. The Yellow Star and ghettoization laws, and the deportations, were accomplished in less than eight weeks, with the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség). The plan was to use 45 cattle cars per train, four trains a day, to deport 12,000 Jews from the countryside every day, starting in mid-May; this was to be followed by the deportation of Jews from Budapest from about 15 July. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, returned to the camp between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as the local SS garrison commander to oversee the Hungarian Jews' arrival and gassing. As a result, the Germans called the murders Aktion Höss ("Operation Höss").
Deportation to Auschwitz
First transports
The first train left Budapest on 29 April 1944 carrying 1,800 men and women aged 16–50 who were deemed fit to work. A second train left Topolya on 30 April carrying 2,000. The transports went through "selection"; 616 women (serial numbers 76385–76459 and 80000–80540) and 486 men (serial numbers 186645–187130) were chosen to work, and 2,698 were gassed.