Miron on Vági and Csősz and Kádár, 'The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide'

Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, Gábor Kádár. The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2013. 510 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7591-2198-0.

Reviewed by Guy Miron (Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)
Published on H-Judaic (April, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus

The Hungarian Holocaust: Documents and Context

This volume is the sixth in the series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, which is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and edited by Jürgen Matthäus. It begins with a long historical introduction by the authors and is followed by ten chapters chronologically and thematically arranged from the late 1930s "Jewish laws" to Jewish life in postwar Hungary. Each of the chapters provides a historical narrative that contextualizes the documents.

The events of the Holocaust in Hungary took a different path from other Eastern European countries. Despite the fact that Hungary was ruled by a pro-German regime which had initiated anti-Jewish legislation as early as 1938, most of its Jews lived in relative safety until its occupation by the Germans in March 1944. From that time, however, as the authors state in the introduction, Hungarian Jews became the victims of the quickest and most efficient mass-murder campaign in the Holocaust.

The introduction gives background on the origins of the diverse Hungarian Jewish community and local anti-Semitism since the late nineteenth century. It then addresses the consequences of WWI for Hungary--a background crucial to explaining the later collaboration of Hungarians with the Nazi anti-Jewish mass murder--and the first years of the war, which included reannexations of "lost" territories (where hundreds of thousands of Jews lived) to Hungary. The introduction concludes with an overview of the consequences of the March 1944 German occupation, the decision-making process of the deportations, and the fate of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz and those, mostly from Budapest, under the Arrow Cross Regime (from October 1944). A series of historical maps helps the reader follow the complicated historical path.

The first two chapters cover the pre-March 1944 era. Chapter 1 is devoted to the "Jewish Laws" from 1938 to 1942. It gives some background on the legislation process. This process reflected the struggle between the Christian conservative establishment, which had its own traditional anti-Semitic agenda, and the radical Right (mostly the Arrow Cross), which always pushed a more extreme anti-Jewish campaign. At the end of this legislative campaign, which reached its peak in the "aryanization" process, Hungarian Jews were in a situation quite similar to that of German Jews on the eve of WWII. The editors include here excerpts from three personal testimonies of Hungarian Jews that relate the impact of the laws on their daily life, accompanied by photographs of two of the witnesses. This adds the important dimension of individual victims' voices to the legal and political discussion.

In addition to the anti-Jewish legal campaign, Hungarian Jews were exposed in the pre-March 1944 era to various forms of administrative anti-Semitic measures and from 1941 also to forced labor and even certain cases of mass murder. The second chapter is devoted to these developments. The chapter ranges from nationwide to locally initiated anti-Jewish measures--a reflection of a major tendency in current Holocaust research at large. Hungarian anti-Jewish policy was more radical in the regions reannexed to Hungary between 1938 and 1941. It included round-ups, mass expulsions, and, from summer 1941, some instances of mass murder. Most of the victims at this stage were Jewish refugees who had arrived more recently to Hungary. Here also, as the documents in the book show, the local authorities had a major role. The book emphasizes the importance of the Kamenets-Podolski operation--the first mass murder of the Holocaust in which the number of the victims was over ten thousand. Almost three years before the German occupation, Hungarian authorities were deeply involved in this and other genocidal acts (p. 41). The chapter covers also the development of the Hungarian Labor Service--a major tool in the anti-Jewish campaign. This is another good example of balancing sources related to the official policy with those reflecting the individual perspectives of the victims.

The next three chapters (chapters 3 to 5) deal in chronological order with the events of the Holocaust in Hungary following the March 1944 German invasion: the blitzkrieg against the Jews and ghettoization (March to May-June 1944, chapter 3), the deportation of Jews from the province and the fate of the Budapest Jews (June to August, chapter 4), and the Arrow Cross regime (October 1944 to April 1945, chapter 5). The narrative and the integrated documents expose the close and systematic cooperation of various Hungarian authorities and individuals--on both the national and the local levels--with the swiftest murderous anti-Jewish campaign perpetrated by the Nazis. In less than ten weeks--between April and June--the Hungarians organized 215 ghettos and collection camps in addition to 100 to 150 temporary collection sites (p. 82). In certain cases one encounters local complicated situations. In Debrecen, for example, the mayor tried to secure relatively humane accommodations in the ghetto. The county prefect, however, who represented the central government, insisted on adhering to the harsher directives of the Ministry of the Interior. Jewish internal life in the short-lived ghettos is also treated through various case studies.

From May 15 to July 9, 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, the vast majority of them (422,000 to 423,000) to Auschwitz and the rest to eastern Austria. The mass deportations from Hungary's periphery were conducted by the Hungarian and the German police. Chapter 4 documents this mass-murder operation and then illuminates the suspension of the deportations from July 9, a consequence of international pressure on the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy. A few months later, following Horthy's unsuccessful attempt to exit the war, the Arrow Cross movement took over Hungary and renewed the anti-Jewish murderous policy. Chapter 5 deals with the death marches and the final dramatic weeks of the Budapest Ghetto. The reader is exposed also to the perspective of the ghetto's Jews on these events.

Following the chronological presentation, the book turns in the next chapters to various thematic discussions: plunder (chapter 6), the Nazi camps (chapter 7), and Jewish and non-Jewish reactions to the persecution (chapters 8 and 9). Chapter 8 opens with a critical note regarding the tendency of research on Jewish responses to focus on the question of Jewish resistance or lack thereof. The conditions in Hungary in 1944-45, the authors assert, did not enable the development of Jewish armed resistance (p. 243). As in other occupied countries, they add, the vast majority of the Jews in Hungary accepted the sharp persecution in a seemingly passive manner (p. 244). This is true, of course, but it seems to me that a more critical discussion about Hungarian Jewish political culture could have been very helpful in this context. The chapter brings rich documentation of individual Jewish responses, the Jewish council, and Zionist activities. Chapter 9 adds important detail about non-Jewish Hungarian reactions, namely bystanders (including collaborators, benefactors, and rescuers), as well as the intervention of the international community. The book concludes with chapter 10 about Jews in postwar Hungary.

As a whole, the book is a very significant contribution to the topic of the Holocaust in Hungary, which is relatively underrepresented in research literature about the Holocaust in English. It deals with the most central topics in depth and brings a rich panorama of documentation. Important concepts and persons appear in the text in bold type and the reader can find basic information about them in the rich glossary. The chronology that concludes the book is another helpful tool that orients this complicated historical narrative. 

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Citation: Guy Miron. Review of Vági, Zoltán; Csősz, László; Kádár, Gábor, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. April, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41458