The Deportation of the Hungarian
Jews
Hungarian Jews arriving
at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 26,1944
It was not until May 1944, when the Hungarian
Jews were deported, that Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of
the largest mass murder in modern history and the epicenter of
the Final Solution. Almost one half of all the Jews that were
killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within
a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it
had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec
and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the
Jews, not Auschwitz.
In 1942, there were 2.7 million Jews
murdered by the Nazis, including 1.6 million at the Operation
Reinhard camps, but only 200,000 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz
that year in two old converted farm houses. This information
is from the book "Auschwitz, a New History" by Laurence
Rees, published in 2005.
In October 1940, Hungary had become allies
with the Axis powers by joining the Tripartite Pact. Part of
the deal was that Hungary would be allowed to take back northern
Transylvania, a province that had been given to Romania after
World War I. Hungarian soldiers participated in the German invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
On April 17, 1943, after Bulgaria, another
ally of Germany, had refused to permit their Jews to be deported,
Hitler met with Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian leader,
in Salzburg and tried to persuade him to allow the Hungarian
Jews to be "resettled" in Poland, according to Martin
Gilbert in his book entitled "Never Again." Admiral
Horthy rejected Hitler's plea and refused to deport the Hungarian
Jews.
From the beginning of the persecution
of the Jews by the Nazis in 1933, until March 1944, Hungary was
a relatively safe haven for the Jews and many Jews from Germany,
Austria, Slovakia and Poland sought refuge within its borders.
However, in 1938, Hungary had enacted laws similar to the laws
in Nazi Germany, which discriminated against the Jews.
On September 3, 1943, Italy signed an
armistice with the Allies and turned against Germany, their former
ally. Horthy hoped to negotiate a similar deal with the Western
allies to stop a Soviet invasion of Hungary.
"Sonderkommando Eichmann,"
a special group of SS soldiers under the command of Adolf Eichmann,
was activated on March 10, 1944 for the purpose of deporting
the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz; the personnel in this Special
Action Commando was assembled at the Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria and then sent to Hungary on March 19, 1944 during
the celebration of Purim, a Jewish holiday.
Famous photo of Hungarian
Jews walking to the gas chamber
On March 18, 1944, Hitler had a second
meeting with Horthy at Schloss Klessheim, a castle near Salzburg
in Austria. An agreement was reached in which Horthy promised
to allow 100,000 Jews to be sent to the Greater German Reich
to construct underground factories for the manufacture of fighter
aircraft. These factories were to be located at Mauthausen, and
at the eleven Kaufering subcamps of Dachau. The Jews were to
be sent to Auschwitz, and then transferred to the camps in Germany
and Austria.
When Horthy returned to Hungary, he found
that Edmund Veesenmayer, an SS Brigadeführer, had been installed
as the effective ruler of Hungary, responsible directly to the
German Foreign Office and Hitler.
On March 19, 1944, the same day that
Eichmann's Sonderkommando arrived, German troops occupied Hungary.
The invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union was imminent and
Hitler suspected that Horthy was planning to change sides. As
it became more and more likely that Germany would lose the war,
its allies began to defect to the winning side. Romania switched
to the Allied side on August 23, 1944.
After the formation of the Reich Central
Security Office (RSHA) in 1939, Adolf Eichmann had been put in
charge of section IV B4,the RSHA department that handled the
deportation of the Jews. One of his first assignments was to
work on the Nazi plan to send the European Jews to the island
of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. This plan was abandoned
in 1940.
According to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant
of Auschwitz, "Eichmann had concerned himself with the Jewish
question since his youth and had an extensive knowledge of the
literature on the subject. He lived for a long time in Palestine
in order to learn more about the Zionists and the growing Jewish
state."
In 1937, Eichmann had gone to the Middle
East to research the possibility of mass Jewish emigration to
Palestine. He had met with Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah,
with whom he discussed the Zionist plan to create a Jewish state.
According to testimony at his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Eichmann
was denied entry into Palestine by the British, who were opposed
to a Jewish state in Palestine, so the idea of deporting all
the European Jews to Palestine was abandoned.
At the Wannsee Conference on January
20, 1942, at which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question
was planned, Eichmann had been assigned to organize the "transportation
to the East" which was a euphemism for sending the European
Jews to be killed at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Hungarian Jewish children
walk to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau
The next day after German forces took
over Hungary, Adolf Eichmann arrived to oversee the process of
deporting the Hungarian Jews. There were 725,000 Jews living
in Hungary in 1944, including many who were previously residents
of Romania, according to Laurence Rees, who wrote "Auschwitz,
a New History." The Jews in the villages and small towns
were immediately rounded up and concentrated in ghettos.
Hungarian Jews walk
toward the gas chambers in Krema IV and Krema V
The photo above shows Hungarian Jewish
children, too young to work, who are on their way to be gassed
immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz on May 26, 1944.
They are walking along an interior road that runs north and south
through the middle of the Auschwitz II camp, also known as Birkenau.
In this photo, taken by an SS soldier, the subjects have turned
around to face the camera; the Krema IV and Krema V gas chambers
are on the north side of the camp, behind them.
The Jews who were selected to work in
the camp took this same interior camp road to the Central Sauna
where incoming prisoners were given a shower, their heads were
shaved and a number was tattooed on their arms.
The photo below shows Hungarian women
who have been selected to work.
Hungarian women who
have just arrived on a transport train
Hungarian women who
have been selected to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau
The photo above shows Hungarian women
walking into the women's section on the south side of the Birkenau
camp after they have had a shower and a change of clothes. Behind
them is a transport train and in the background on the left is
one of the camp guards. The woman with dark hair in the center
of the photo is Ella Hart Gutmann who is in the outside row facing
inward. Next to her is Lida Hausler Leibovics; both women were
from Uzhgorod. Their heads have been shaved in an attempt to
control the lice that spreads typhus.
Rudolf Höss was relieved of his
duties as the Commanant of the Auschwitz complex in November
1943 and promoted to a position in the Economic Administration
Head Office (WHVA) in Oranienburg. On May 8, 1944, he was brought
back to Auschwitz to supervise the gassing of the Hungarian Jews.
Höss wrote the following in his autobiography, with regard
to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews:
On Pohl's orders I made three visits
to Budapest in order to obtain an estimate of the number of able-bodied
Jews that might be expected. [...] Eichmann was completely obsessed
with his mission and also convinced that this extermination action
was necessary in order to preserve the German people in the future
from the destructive intentions of the Jews. Eichmann was also
a determined opponent of the idea of selecting from the transports
Jews who were fit for work. He regarded it as a constant danger
to his scheme for a "final solution'' because of the possibility
of mass escapes or some other event occurring which would enable
the Jews to survive.
Yet in spite of Eichmann's disapproval,
"tens of thousands of Jews were removed from Auschwitz for
the armaments project," according to what Höss wrote
in his autobiography.
Hoess complained about the selection
process at Auschwitz, during which Jews who were not strong enough
for work, in his opinion, were saved from the gas chamber. He
wrote the following in his autobiography:
If Auschwitz had followed my constantly
repeated advice, and had only selected the most healthy and vigorous
Jews, then the camp would have produced a really useful labor
force and one that would have lasted, although it is true that
it would have been numerically smaller.
According to Höss:
The sick cluttered up the camps, depriving
the able-bodied of food and living space and doing no work, and
in fact their presence made many of those who could work incapable
of it.
This page was last updated on January
29, 2007
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