Hungary under German occupation: from Operation Margarethe to the siege of Budapest

From Klessheim to Operation Margarethe (March 1944)

Suspecting that Hungary was seeking peace with the Allies, Hitler ordered its occupation in March 1944; in fact László Veress, a diplomat of Miklós Kállay’s government, had secretly signed an agreement to surrender unconditionally to the Western Allies in September 1943. Horthy was summoned to Schloss Klessheim in Austria and pressed for greater acquiescence; when the talks ended on 18 March, persuaded by his chief of staff Ferenc Szombathelyi and by Hitler’s promise that “the German troops shall be withdrawn as soon as a new Hungarian government that has my confidence has been formed”, he signed the protocol. The Germans kept side-tracking Horthy’s train home, and meanwhile, on 19 March, German troops crossed the border. The generals Kállay called to an emergency meeting told him that resistance was futile, and Szombathelyi telegraphed that there was to be no resistance until Horthy returned. 1 2) 3

The occupation, a complete surprise, was quick and nearly bloodless: a few frontier guards opened fire and the railwaymen at Bicske went on strike, and Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, who directed the operation, reported that “in Budapest there is quiet”. At the Budapest station Horthy was told that Hungary would stay sovereign only if he removed Kállay and installed a government that would co-operate fully with Germany. At the Crown Council Kállay and the interior minister Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer said that Hungary was no longer independent, and Kállay and the former prime minister István Bethlen urged Horthy to abdicate rather than lend the occupation legitimacy. Jewish leaders, fearing that someone worse would replace him, asked him to stay, and Horthy remained regent, saying that “the captain cannot leave his sinking ship” — a decision still debated by historians. 2)

The Germans wanted Béla Imrédy as prime minister, but Horthy refused him. Given an ultimatum to form a government acceptable to the Reich by 6 p.m. on 22 March or see the Royal Castle stormed, Horthy agreed that afternoon to a government under Döme Sztójay, the minister in Berlin, who was sworn in as prime minister and foreign minister on the 23rd. Imrédy himself was left out, but members of his Party of Hungarian Renewal took agriculture, finance and industry, and in place of Keresztes-Fischer the radical antisemite Andor Jaross became interior minister, controlling the State Police and the gendarmerie. Jaross’s two state secretaries, László Endre and László Baky, were enthusiastic antisemites from the Hungarian National Socialist Party. Because the Germans wanted a “respectable” government, Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross was kept out of the cabinet. Hitler’s man in Budapest was SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer, installed as Reich plenipotentiary. 2) 3 4 5 1

Mass arrests accompanied the occupation. When the SS broke down his door on the morning of 19 March, the opposition politician Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky fought back with his pistol and was carried off wounded. Keresztes-Fischer was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau; Kállay took refuge in the Turkish legation, and Bethlen, disguised as an officer, went into hiding in Transylvania. The Social Democratic leader Károly Peyer gave himself up after the Germans took his family hostage. By 28 April the Germans had arrested 8,240 people in Hungary, many of them escaped Allied prisoners of war and Polish soldiers who had found sanctuary under Kállay. When parliament met on 22 March, 13 members of the lower house and 9 of the upper house were absent under SS arrest, and Sztójay adjourned it indefinitely and ruled by decree. The government banned the opposition parties and the trade unions and censored the press, and by April Veesenmayer had replaced 29 of the 41 lord lieutenants. 2) 6

The yellow star and the ghettos (March–May 1944)

At the time of the occupation between 760,000 and 780,000 Jews lived in Hungary, the largest Jewish community still alive in Europe. Sztójay’s government issued dozens of antisemitic decrees designed to isolate, stigmatise and impoverish them. Jews had to hand over cars, telephones, radios and bicycles, were barred from films and plays with non-Jews, and had their food rations cut. A decree of 31 March required every Jew aged six and over to wear a yellow Star of David, ten centimetres across, on the left breast from 5 April. Sztójay legalised the Arrow Cross, and on 5 April told the Prince Primate, Cardinal Jusztinián Serédi, that Jewish converts to Catholicism would be subject to the racial laws, with exemptions only for priests, monks and nuns. 7 4 1 3

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann came to Budapest with a special commando of deportation experts and set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel. His unit numbered only some 200 men; most of the work of deportation was done by Hungarian officials. On 20 March Eichmann summoned the Jewish elite to form a Jewish Council and prepare the community for “resettlement in the East”. A meeting chaired by Baky on 4 April, attended by senior members of Eichmann’s commando, Endre and the gendarmerie lieutenant-colonel László Ferenczy, agreed that Jews would first be stripped of their possessions, then concentrated in urban ghettos and deported to Germany. Baky wrote to Jaross that “the Royal Hungarian Government will soon have the country purged of Jews… irrespective of sex or age”. German and Hungarian authorities divided the country into six operational zones, in each of which ghettoisation preceded deportation. 1 2) 8 7

From April regional and district officials, mayors, policemen and gendarmes set up transit ghettos in towns and cities. They were placed in Jewish neighbourhoods or in large buildings such as factories, warehouses and brickyards, usually near the railway to simplify deportation. Jews from villages were moved into the ghettos of larger towns and held there for days or weeks under Hungarian guard, amid widespread plunder and torture. The plan was to run four trains of 45 cattle cars a day from mid-May, deporting 12,000 Jews from the countryside every day, and to deport the Jews of Budapest from about 15 July. When a Jewish family was taken away, neighbours promptly looted the home; greed for the property of the Jewish middle class sustained the deportations. 7 1 2)

147 trains: the deportations to Auschwitz (May–July 1944)

The first train left Budapest on 29 April with 1,800 people deemed fit for work. The mass transports began on 14–15 May: on a typical day three or four trains passed through Kassa (Košice) towards the northern border, up to which the Hungarian government was responsible for them. The first trains reached Auschwitz on 16 May. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, some 437,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains between 15 May and 9 July, about 420,000 of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There some 100,000 were selected for forced labour, and the remaining 330,000 or so were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. It was the deadliest period in the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. 1 7

László Ferenczy of the gendarmerie counted 434,351 Jews deported in 147 trains by 9 July; Veesenmayer reported 437,402. On 13 June Veesenmayer cabled the Foreign Office that 289,357 Jews had been transported from the Carpathians and Transylvania in 92 trains, and on 15 June told Ribbentrop that some 340,000 had been delivered to the Reich, predicting that the total would reach 900,000. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, returned to the camp from 8 May to 29 July to oversee the arrival and gassing of the Hungarian Jews, and the Germans called the killings “Operation Höss”; according to Höss, Heinrich Himmler wanted the deportations speeded up. In June some 15,000 Jews (about 21,000 according to English Wikipedia) were diverted to Strasshof near Vienna for forced labour, and a much larger share of them survived. 1 5 7

The Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest tried to save Jews by negotiating with and bribing Nazi leaders. In late April Eichmann put to the committee a “blood for goods” offer to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks from the Allies, which the British government blocked. Rezső Kasztner of the committee made a separate deal with Eichmann and the SS officer Kurt Becher: for a ransom of gold, diamonds and cash, a train of 35 cattle wagons carrying Jews left Budapest on 30 June. Diverted to Bergen-Belsen, where 1,684 passengers were registered on 9 July, its 1,670 surviving passengers reached Switzerland in August and December. Kasztner was accused of knowing about the gassings at Auschwitz in April or May without warning the wider community. In an Israeli trial the judge ruled in 1955 that he had “sold his soul to the devil”; after he was assassinated in March 1957, the Supreme Court overturned most of the ruling. 7 1 9

The Auschwitz reports and the halt to the deportations (June–July 1944)

Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two Slovak prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz on 7–11 April 1944, compiled a detailed report on the gas chambers. It was circulated in April by the Bratislava Working Group, and in early May Horthy’s son and daughter-in-law received copies. A summary that reached Switzerland from Budapest was published in June despite Kasztner’s request to keep it confidential, setting off mass demonstrations and some 400 press headlines in Switzerland. The BBC broadcast its findings on 16 June and The New York Times reported them on the 20th. Together with other escapees’ accounts, the documents became known as the Auschwitz Protocols; the US War Refugee Board published them in full in November. 10 1 11

On 15 June American bombers dropped leaflets over Budapest threatening punishment for those involved in the deportations. On the basis of the report, Pope Pius XII on 25 June, President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 26th and King Gustaf V of Sweden on the 30th appealed to Horthy to stop them, and Roosevelt threatened military retaliation. Winston Churchill wrote that the persecution of Hungary’s Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world”. Serédi, head of the Hungarian Catholic Church, condemned attacks on Jews and their deportation on racial grounds in the spring and sought exemptions for converts, but made no public condemnation of the deportations to Catholics at home. Under pressure from his bishops he wrote a pastoral letter on 29 June demanding that the deportations stop, but agreed not to issue it in return for Sztójay’s promise to investigate the reports of extermination and halt the deportations if they were true. 1 11 12 3

In early June Horthy wrote to Sztójay that he had heard of inhumane treatment of the Jews and asked him to remove Endre and Baky from the Interior Ministry, to no effect. He proposed halting the deportations at a Crown Council on 26 June, but they continued; when Baky tried in early July to bring thousands of gendarmes into the capital to deport the Jews of Budapest, Horthy, fearing a coup, sent armoured units to stop them. On 6 July (7 July according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) Horthy ordered the deportations halted; transports from the towns around Budapest stopped only on the 9th, by which time almost the entire Jewish community of the countryside was gone. Eichmann and his Hungarian allies still carried out a few deportations from internment camps in late July and August. Budapest’s 200,000 or so Jews had been ordered by the mayor in June to move into some 1,950 designated “yellow star houses”. 3 4 1 7

Romania’s switch and the Lakatos government’s armistice attempt (August–October 1944)

On 23 August 1944 King Michael I of Romania dismissed Ion Antonescu, concluded an armistice with the Allies and declared war on Germany and Hungary. Germany lost its main source of oil, and Soviet and Romanian forces pushed into Northern Transylvania, which Hungary had gained in 1940. On 25 August Horthy, Bethlen and General Géza Lakatos decided to remove Sztójay, and on 29 August Horthy made Lakatos prime minister; Bethlen saw Lakatos, an obscure but loyal conservative general, as the right man for an armistice. Lakatos refused Veesenmayer’s demand to include Endre in his cabinet, and Jaross, Endre and Baky were all pushed out between the summer and autumn. The acting interior minister, Béla Horváth, ordered the gendarmes to use deadly force against any attempt at deportation. 13 14 15 8

On 6 September, when the Red Army broke through the German–Hungarian lines in the Carpathians, Lakatos told Horthy that an armistice could not wait. But pro-German ministers promptly informed Veesenmayer, and a demand that Germany send five panzer divisions within 24 hours — which Germany accepted — delayed the decision; Lakatos later called it his worst mistake: “With this we delayed the step for an armistice. At the same time we drew the Germans’ attention to our preparations.” At the Crown Council of 10 September Bethlen said that the war was lost and an armistice must be signed at once, but most generals objected that it would bring a Communist regime. Horthy still hoped for an Anglo-American occupation, but General István Náday, sent to Italy, came back with the answer that Hungary must sign with all three Allied powers or none. On 22 September Horthy accepted that he would have to sign with the Soviet Union; that same day the Red Army entered the Great Hungarian Plain. 13

On 28 September a three-man delegation led by General Gábor Faragho, a former military attaché in Moscow, left for the Soviet capital. In talks that began on 1 October and dragged on for ten days, the Soviet side demanded unconditional surrender, a declaration of war on Germany, withdrawal behind the 1937 frontiers and transit for the Red Army, and insisted that Northern Transylvania go back to Romania. Churchill and Anthony Eden, then in Moscow for talks with Stalin, backed the Soviet terms. Horthy accepted them on 9 October, and on the 11th Faragho and the Soviet foreign commissar Vyacheslav Molotov signed a preliminary armistice. The same day Veesenmayer met Szálasi and told him that Germany had decided to depose Horthy and that the Arrow Cross should prepare for a coup. 13 16

15 October: the armistice proclamation, Operation Panzerfaust and the Arrow Cross takeover

When Hitler learned that Horthy was secretly negotiating with the Soviets, he sent the SS commando leader Otto Skorzeny to Hungary. On the morning of 15 October Skorzeny’s men lured Horthy’s son to the offices of the Danube ports administration with a promise of a meeting with envoys of Tito, seized him after a gunfight, rolled him in a carpet and flew him to Vienna, from where he was taken to Mauthausen. At the Crown Council that morning Horthy announced that he had asked for an armistice, and threw German cartridge cases from the scene onto the table before Veesenmayer, who claimed to know nothing of the kidnapping. Around 1 p.m. the radio broadcast three times the regent’s proclamation that Germany had lost the war and that “we are asking our enemies for an armistice and ceasing hostilities against them”. It did not mention that a preliminary armistice had already been signed on the 11th, and at Lakatos’s insistence the sentence “from this day Hungary considers herself to be at war with Germany” had been deleted. 17 16 13

The general staff never passed the armistice order to the troops, and at 3 p.m. the chief of staff, János Vörös, issued a “clarification” that the regent had merely announced armistice talks and that the fighting must go on. With German help the Arrow Cross seized the radio station and broadcast a proclamation in which Szálasi, calling himself “leader of the nation”, ordered the armed nation to fight on, while German tanks occupied the bridges, the post office and other strategic points in the capital. Skorzeny advanced on Castle Hill behind four Tiger II tanks; only some 300 guards were left with Horthy. Early on the 16th, when Veesenmayer and Lakatos promised his son’s life and gave him twelve minutes to surrender, Horthy signed a document revoking the armistice proclamation, abdicating and appointing Szálasi prime minister. “I neither resigned nor appointed Szálasi Premier,” he later wrote, “I merely exchanged my signature for my son’s life.” Horthy was held in a castle near Weilheim in Germany, and his son remained in a concentration camp until the end of the war. 13 16 17

Few officers rallied to the regent. Colonel General Béla Miklós, commander of the First Army since August, supported leaving the Axis; ordered on 16 October to report to German headquarters and suspecting arrest, he crossed the front with an aide and two sergeants and went over to the Soviets. On the morning of the 17th, at the Soviet headquarters in Lesko, he appealed by radio to the commanders of the First Army to bring their units over, but only one regimental commander did so, and he was arrested and executed by the Germans. General Lajos Dálnoki Veress of the Second Army, who tried to come to Horthy’s aid, was arrested by the Germans. Talks with the Soviets on a Hungarian counter-government came to nothing; on 21 December the Provisional National Assembly at Debrecen elected Miklós head of the Provisional National Government. 18 16 13

Szálasi’s “Government of National Unity” was formed on 16 October. Parliament set up a three-man Council of Regency, and in early November Szálasi took his oath before the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen at the Royal Castle as “Leader of the Nation”, combining the offices of head of state and head of government. Only 55 of the 370 members of the lower house attended, but most civil servants and officers accepted the new regime. Half of his sixteen ministers were Arrow Cross members. Szálasi raised the monthly payment to the Reich from 200 to 300 million pengő and handed the former prime minister Kállay over to the Germans, who put him in a concentration camp. The regime used martial law and courts martial to execute those it deemed dangerous, shipped cattle, machinery and raw materials to Germany, and conscripted young and old for hopeless battles against the Red Army. Even Veesenmayer later called Szálasi “a buffoon who alternatively swaggered and grovelled”. 19 20

Arrow Cross terror and rescue (October 1944 – January 1945)

On 20 October Arrow Cross militias began rounding up Jews for forced labour, and the next day the government made forced labour compulsory for Jewish men and women. Tens of thousands were seized and at first made to dig anti-tank ditches around the capital. From 6 November they were sent on foot some 160 kilometres west to Hegyeshalom on the Austrian border; many died or were shot on the way. Those who survived the march were handed over to the Germans, supposedly “on loan”. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were handed over in November and December to dig defences, thousands of them died, and many more perished on the death marches of spring 1945. The English Wikipedia article on the Arrow Cross puts at 80,000 the number deported from Hungary to camps in Austria during its rule. 7 1 20

In autumn 1944 there were no more than 4,000 Arrow Cross members in Budapest, yet they terrorised a city of a million. They seized Jews in the streets, marched them to the Danube, made them take off their shoes and shot them so that the bodies fell into the river; to save ammunition they sometimes wired three people together and shot only the one in the middle. The German commander Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch ordered his troops not to take part in the killings, but Veesenmayer was instructed to give the Arrow Cross as much help as he could. Szálasi, mindful of neutral diplomats, merely ordered that the killings be carried out more discreetly. Estimates of the victims differ: English Wikipedia states that 10,000–15,000 Jews were shot on the banks of the Danube between November 1944 and February 1945; the historian Krisztián Ungváry puts the victims of Arrow Cross mass executions during the siege at 15,000; and some estimates of Arrow Cross killings run as high as 38,000. The Shoes on the Danube Bank, set up on the embankment in 2005, commemorate them. 20 1 21 22

The Arrow Cross regime created two ghettos in Budapest. Jews holding protective papers of neutral powers were gathered in the “international ghetto” in Újlipótváros; Switzerland was allowed to issue 7,800 protective passes, Sweden 4,500, and the Vatican, Portugal and Spain 3,300 between them. Officially 15,600 people lived there, but thousands more, some with forged papers, sought safety in it. A government decree of 29 November created the large fenced ghetto in the old Jewish quarter around the Dohány Street Synagogue; sealed in December, it held about 70,000 people. No food was allowed in, the dead piled up in the streets and typhoid spread; some 3,000 people died there, and both ghettos suffered Arrow Cross raids and executions. In December Szálasi refused an offer of help from the International Red Cross because the aid would also reach the ghetto. 1 7 23 19

Neutral diplomats saved people with protective documents and safe houses. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, recruited by the American War Refugee Board, arrived in Budapest on 9 July; he issued “protective passports” identifying the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation, and rented 32 buildings that he declared extraterritorial, eventually housing almost 10,000 people. Claims that he saved 100,000 Jews are regarded by historians as an exaggeration; Yad Vashem estimates the number granted his protective paperwork at about 4,500. The Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz treated a permit for 8,000 emigrants as applying to families and issued tens of thousands of protective letters, and declared 76 “safe houses” annexes of the Swiss legation; some 3,000 people found refuge in the Glass House alone, and in November Veesenmayer asked Berlin for permission to assassinate him. Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman posing as the Spanish consul-general, saved 5,218 Jews. Accounts differ over who stopped a plan to destroy the large ghetto in January 1945: testimony crediting Wallenberg conflicts with Perlasca’s. 11 7 24 25 23

Resistance and the siege of Budapest (October 1944 – February 1945)

After Romania’s switch, Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front and Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front pushed into Hungary. In the Debrecen operation of 6–29 October the two sides fought “one of the wildest tank battles of the war”, and Debrecen was taken on 19–20 October by Romanian divisions attacking alongside the Soviet 27th Army. On 28 October Stalin personally ordered Malinovsky to take Budapest within five days; the offensive launched on the 29th reached the eastern suburbs, some 20 kilometres from the centre, on 7 November, but could not take the city. In December Tolbukhin’s front, fresh from the liberation of Belgrade, advanced west of the Danube, making a two-pronged attack around the capital possible. Meanwhile, on 21 December, a Provisional National Assembly met in Debrecen and formed a new government. 26 21 27 18

Released on 11 October at the demand of the Lakatos government, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky met leaders of other parties at a Budapest factory on 9 November and founded the Liberation Committee of the Hungarian National Uprising, with himself as president. The committee, which aimed to drive out the Germans in co-operation with the Soviet army and overthrow Arrow Cross rule, issued a proclamation on the 10th, and the retired lieutenant general János Kiss headed its military staff. Bajcsy-Zsilinszky met the Communist László Rajk to seek Soviet help; it was agreed that the Communists would wage guerrilla war while Kiss prepared an armed force to rise when the Red Army drew near. But on 22 November, after a betrayal, a meeting was raided and the leaders arrested, and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky was seized that evening. A special court of the Arrow Cross regime sentenced him and three officers to death on 6 December; the officers were executed on 8 December, and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky on 24 December at Sopronkőhida prison. 6 28

The encirclement was completed on 26 December, when Soviet troops cut the road to Vienna; Szálasi had already left the capital in early December. Hitler refused a withdrawal and declared Budapest a fortress to be defended to the last man, with Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, commander of the IX SS Mountain Corps, in charge of its defence. Some 33,000 German and 37,000 Hungarian soldiers (about 79,000 by another count) were trapped, along with more than 800,000 civilians. On 29 December two Soviet envoys sent to call for surrender were killed in circumstances that remain unclear. Three German relief operations stalled 20–25 kilometres from the city. On 17 January Hitler allowed the evacuation of Pest, completed by the next morning, and the Germans blew up the bridges, including the Chain Bridge. Soviet troops liberated the international ghetto on 16 January and the large ghetto on 17–18 January; some 119,000 Jews survived in Budapest. 21 29 27 7 1

On 17 January Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH on suspicion of espionage and disappeared; in 1957 the Soviet authorities said he had died of a heart attack in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947, but the cause and date of his death are still disputed. When Gellért Hill in Buda fell on 11 February, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch defied Hitler’s ban and that night led a breakout of some 28,000 German and Hungarian troops, with civilians among them. Soviet artillery killed thousands; between 5,000 and 10,000 people reached the wooded hills north-west of Budapest, but only 600–700 soldiers got through to the German lines. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch was captured, and the rest of the garrison surrendered on 13 February. In 108 days of fighting the Soviet forces suffered 320,082 casualties, and Ungváry estimates that some 38,000 civilians died during the siege. More than 80 per cent of the buildings were destroyed or damaged, and every bridge over the Danube was down. 11 21 30 31