the Axis powers, but through latent sabotage indirectly provided a contribution to
the opponents of the Axis powers.’195 Thus it had to be German policy—this is the logical conclusion to be drawn from these trains of thought—to strive to tear up
that ‘guarantee’, if they wanted to keep Hungary on their side.
In late May 1943, however, Prime Minister Kállay demonstrated in a speech that
he did consider the ‘complete resettlement of Jewry’ as the ‘definitive solution’ of
the ‘Jewish question’, but that he would only address this once he had had ‘an
answer to the question of where the Jews are to be resettled to’. So the Germans
could not expect speedy consent to the deportations from the Hungarians. 196
The Germans gradually set about undertaking the solution of the ‘Jewish
question’ in Hungary without Kállay. In a further report about the situation in
Hungary, which he wrote after a further fact-finding trip to Budapest in December
1943,197 Veesenmayer stressed that the solution of the ‘Jewish question’ in Hungary represented ‘a rewarding and compelling task for Reich policy . . . grappling with it
and cleaning it up’. In writing that the ‘cleaning up’ of the ‘Jewish question’ was
‘the precondition for the engagement of Hungary in the Reich’s battle for defence
and existence’, Veesenmayer once again made it clear that the intensification of
the persecution of the Jews in Hungary was the ideal instrument to render their
‘ally’ compliant.
The Hungarian government’s stubborn refusal to hand over the Jews resident in
the country was, from the point of view of the Nazi regime, the decisive gauge with
which the progressive erosion of Hungarian loyalty to the Reich since Stalingrad
could be measured. The German insistence on the issue proved crucial in keeping
the ‘ally’ under control. If the Hungarian government, so the German calculation
ran, could be forced to hand over the Jews domiciled in the country, the Hungar-
ians would lose their ‘guarantee’ vis-à-vis the Western Allies, and would thus be
bound for good or ill to their German ‘partner’.
Murders and Deportations, 1942–3
407
At the beginning of 1944, the German–Hungarian relationship increasingly
deteriorated. In February 1944 Hungarian troops retreated from the Ukraine;
their secret negotiations with the Western Allies were just as well known to the
Germans as the war-weariness and the growing anti-German attitude in the
country. With the occupation of the country by German troops in March 1944,
the formation of the new Hungarian government under Sztojay, previously the
mission head in Berlin, the appointment of Veesenmayer as the new ambassador
and Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary (effectively the
German governor), and the establishment of an SS apparatus in the country, the
political and technical preconditions for the deportations were in place. 198
At Veesenmayer’s instigation, in April the Sztojay government offered 50,000
Jewish workers for armaments projects; a further 50,000, it was agreed, would
follow in May. 199 According to a familiar pattern, ‘labour deployment’ provided the pretext on the basis of which the SS prepared the complete deportation and
extermination of the Hungarian Jews. The perfidious system of concentration and
deportation tested in German-occupied Europe for years was to be installed in
Hungary, with the active support of the Hungarian authorities and without
encountering any notable resistance among the non-Jewish population—in a
form that had been more or less perfected. 200
In March and April the new Hungarian government was induced to introduce
comprehensive anti-Jewish legislation that created preconditions for the deport-
ations. On 23 April the Hungarian trade ministry had all Jewish shops closed and
expropriated, and on 26 April the Hungarian cabinet undertook to send 50,000
Jewish forced labourers (‘with their families’) to Germany, and put the compul-
sory organization of Hungarian Jews, already established by Eichmann, under
Hungarian control. 201
The Germans were not only exceedingly well informed about the legislative and
administrative measures of the Hungarian government, but also exercised, ‘in
constant personal contact’ and ‘in an advisory capacity in the drafting and
implementation of ordinances’, a ‘control’ over the ‘operation of Hungarian
Jewish laws’. 202
On the orders of the Sonderkommando of the RSHA, which had been sent to
Budapest, and of which Eichmann had personally assumed leadership, a Jewish
council was set up, initially for the capital, later for the whole country. 203
On 27 April Goebbels recorded statements by Hitler about Horthy, which reveal
that the Hungarian Reich administrator had become so involved in German
Judenpolitik that he could now to some extent be seen as a relatively reliable
ally: ‘At any rate, he now no longer obstructs the cleansers of public life in
Hungary; on the contrary, he is now murderously angry with the Jews and has
no objections to us using them as hostages. He even suggested the same thing
himself . . . At any rate the Hungarians will not escape the rhythm of the Jewish
question. Whoever says A must say B, and the Hungarians, having started with
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
Judenpolitik, can for that reason not halt it. From a certain point onwards
Judenpolitik propels itself.’ After further anti-Semitic tirades the dictator con-
tinued: ‘By and large one can say that a long-term policy is only possible in this
war if one starts out with the Jewish question.’204
To simplify the deportations, the country was divided into zones. In each
zone the Jews were first brought by the Hungarian police from smaller villages
to the larger towns, where ghettos or camps were set up. After this, zone by zone,
the deportations to Auschwitz occurred, in only a few days in each case. 205 First the territories annexed by Hungary from 1938 onwards, the Carpatho-Ukraine
(Zone I) as well as Northern Transylvania (Nordsiebenbürgen) (Zone II). The
‘concentration’ began in the Carpatho-Ukraine on 16 April, in Northern Transyl-
vania on 3 May, the deportations to Auschwitz from these two zones on 15 May.
They were gradually followed by the Old Hungarian Provinces (Zones III–V),
where the concentration process was completed on 3 July and the deportations on
6 July. The final zone was to be Budapest, and the deportation of the 200,000 or so
Jews living there. 206
The first two trains carrying almost 4,000 people, officially presented as the first
contingent in the context of the agreed allocation of Jewish workers to the Reich,
had already left Hungary at the end of April for Auschwitz, where 2,700 deportees
were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival. 207
In early May, the pace of the deportations was considerably accelerated: at a
timetable conference on 4/5 May, aiming for a target set no later than the start
of the conference, 208 it was established that 12,000 Jews should be deported per day rather than the 3,000 originally agreed. 209 From 14 May, four transports a day left Hungary, each carrying 3,000 Jews. By the tim
e the deportations were
halted in early July, a total of 437,000 people had been deported from the five
zones, almost exclusively to Auschwitz. There were two exceptions: at the end
of June around 15,000 people were brought to Strasshof near Vienna and
deployed in forced labour so that, as Eichmann put it, they could be ‘put on
ice’. 210 This statement of Eichmann’s is connected with the negotiations that had begun in the spring between the SS and the Jewish rescue committee,
Vaada, about buying the freedom of Jews. We shall examine this more closely
in the next section. As a concrete result of these negotiations 1,684 people were
deported to the exchange camp of Bergen-Belsen, also in June, from where they
were able to travel to Switzerland over the next few months. The remaining
Hungarian Jews, 433,000 in all, were deported to Auschwitz in transports lasting
three to four days; 211 of these some 10 per cent were deemed to be fit for work, the rest, far more than 10,000 people per day, were murdered immediately on
arrival. 212
At the beginning of July, preparations were already under way to deport the
Jews living in Budapest, who had already been forced to move into houses marked
with yellow stars. 213 In the face of the worldwide protests against the imminent Murders and Deportations, 1942–3
409
deportations, 214 Sztojay informed Veesenmayer on 6 July that Horthy had ordered a halt to the deportations. 215
In response, the Germans tried to enforce the resumption of the deportations.
On 8 July, when Sztojay asked Veesenmayer whether they could accept offers from
various states to grant a certain number of Jews permission to enter or to pass
through, Hitler, when asked about this, replied that they could accept these offers,
as long as ‘the transport of Jews to the Reich, temporarily stopped by the Reich
governor, be brought quickly and immediately to an end’. 216 On Ribbentrop’s instructions, in mid-July Veesenmeyer gave Horthy an ultimatum to resume the
deportations. 217
After Eichmann, on his own responsibility, had more than 2,700 Jews
deported to Auschwitz from two Hungarian internment camps218 in the second half of July, the Hungarian government, under severe pressure from the
Germans, agreed to the resumption of the deportations from the end of the
month. 219 A few days later, however, Horthy declared himself in agreement only with the imprisonment of the Jews in special camps, but not with their deportation. 220 What was decisive for this step was that on 23 August Romania had declared its secession from the Axis alliance, and joined the anti-Hitler coalition.
On 29 August Horthy gave the newly formed Hungarian government under
Prime Minister Lakatos express instructions—kept secret from the Germans—to
end the persecution of the Jews. Surprisingly, however, Himmler had already
issued the order for all further deportations from Hungary to be suspended, 221 and in September the Sonderkommando, Eichmann, also left Hungary. 222
At first glance, Himmler’s attitude seems surprising in view of the stubborn
German efforts over the previous few months to set the deportations in motion. 223
But if we adopt the perspective of the Nazi regime, for whom the deportations
represented an important political instrument to bind the Hungarian allies to the
Reich, for good or ill, as accomplices of an unparalleled crime, it becomes clear
that at the end of August the Germans must finally have become aware that
further insistence on a continuation of the deportations threatened to become
counter-productive, as it must inevitably lead to the end of the Horthy regime and
possibly to the loss of their Hungarian ally.
However, the situation changed fundamentally in mid-October, after Horthy
had declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the war as the result of secret ceasefire
negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the Arrow Cross Party under Ferec
Szàlasy seized power with German support. 224 Now the Germans tried once again to set the deportations in motion: their new Hungarian partners were to
be irresistibly bound to their allies as accomplices of mass murder. But, as the
complete deportation of the Budapest Jews to Auschwitz could no longer be
carried out because of the transport situation and the destruction of the gas
chambers in Birkenau undertaken in the autumn of 1944, 225 Eichmann, who had returned to Budapest immediately after the putsch, now once again demanded
410
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
that Hungary put 50,000 workers at the disposal of the Reich, although he in fact
intended to double this figure at a later date. 226 In negotiations with the Hungarians, an agreement was reached for 25,000 Jewish ‘loan workers’, then revised to
50,000, and, at the end of October, the people in question were marched to the
Austrian border in the most cruel and extreme conditions. 227 However, because of the high death rate, Szàlasy had the marches suspended on 21 November. On
the same day Ribbentrop instructed Veesenmayer, at his next meeting with the
Hungarian prime minister, to urge him to ‘press ahead energetically with the
evacuation of the Budapest Jews’. 228 In December the Jews who had remained in Budapest were confined in a ghetto. There, along with the inhuman living
conditions, they were exposed to the terror of the Arrow Cross supporters, until
Budapest capitulated in February. 229
The End of the Holocaust
Removal of Traces
In 1942 the SS initiated the strictly secret ‘Action 1005’. The goal of this enterprise
was to destroy the traces of the mass murders, in particular to remove the human
remains of the victims in the mass graves. 230 The man appointed to lead the action was Standartenführer Paul Blobel. As a pioneer officer in the First World War, as
well as a former Einsatzkommando leader, he no doubt appeared well qualified for
the task. The Sonderkommandos under him consisted of members of the Security
Police and the SD as well as the Order Police. The removal of the corpses
themselves had to be undertaken by prisoners, who were in turn murdered after
a certain amount of time and replaced by new prisoners. In June 1942 the
first attempts were made to burn the remains in Chelmno extermination camp,
and this activity was then extended to the other extermination camps as well.
In Sobibor this had been happening since the summer of 1942, and in Auschwitz-
Birkenau, where the first crematoria had not been built until July 1942, in the
autumn of 1942, in Belzec, which had been closed in December 1942, between the
end of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and in Treblinka since the spring of 1943. 231
In June 1943 the commandos began to open the mass graves in the occupied
Soviet territories, first in the Ukraine, then in White Russia, and finally in the
Baltic states. To remove the traces of the murders in occupied Poland, in 1944
Sonderkommandos were established under the five commanders of the Security
police and the SD in the General Government, and under the HSSPF responsible
for the annexed Polish territories. Aktion 1005 Sonderkommandos can also be
identified in Yugoslavia. 232
The Sonderkommandos were extraordinarily thorough in the removal of the
corpses: the mass graves were opened up, the corpses were burned on piles of
Murders and Deportations, 1942–3
411
wood or steel grilles, then the ashes were examined for valuable objects, gold teeth
above all, before the bones were ground and the ashes scattered or buried. Then all
other traces that could have indicated the places of execution were removed, and
the murder scene dug over and planted.
According to the wishes of the perpetrators, no traces of the extermination
camps themselves were to remain either. The so-called palace, in which the
installations of Chelmno extermination centre were housed, was blown up in
the spring of 1943. 233 On the grounds of Belzec and Treblinka, all buildings were removed after the end of the mass murders, the grounds were planted, and a farm
was built. The same was done in Treblinka, where the murders in the gas
chambers continued until August 1943. In summer 1943, after the mass murders
there were ended, Sobibor was temporarily turned into a concentration camp,
where the prisoners were deployed in the sorting of captured ammunition. After
the uprising of October 1943 this camp too was closed, and here too the grounds
were planted and an agricultural establishment constructed. 234
During the German retreat in July 1944, Majdanek was set on fire, but the gas
chambers and other traces of the mass murders remained, so that as early as the
summer of 1944 the Soviets could begin to document the procedures in this
extermination camp, the first to be seized by Allied troops. In Auschwitz in
November and December technical installations were removed from the gas
chambers and crematoria; the crematoria were blown up and the remains covered
with soil and planted. 235
The fundamental intention of the SS was to clear not only the mass murder sites
but the concentration camps, and where possible to destroy them; all proof of the
crimes was to be destroyed, no witnesses were to fall into the hands of the Allies.
That meant that the prisoners were either to be murdered or ‘evacuated’ from one
camp to the other. The SS saw the prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ as living
capital that would be exploited to the bitter end.
Himmler reserved a special policy for the Jewish prisoners: beginning in mid-
1944 he offered them to the Western Allies as barter, presumably to open up
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 73
