The Jewish Question in Hungary
It was almost impossible to distinguish between the Hungarian Jew and the Hungarian gentile. They mingled indiscriminately, they both gloried in the traditional freedom and patriotism of the Magyar, for in Hungary the Jew had never been persecuted. When driven from western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews found refuge, security and, to a greater extent than before known, freedom, in the Alfold towns and villages. In the eleventh century King Koloman issued several decrees allowing them to acquire land and regulating their commercial relations with the Christian inhabitants, and in the thirteenth they not only occupied important positions in the administration, but two of them obtained the title of Count. Bela II. (1251) gave them many valuable privileges ; among others that of having their own courts of justice and of exercising exclusive control over their schools. He also decreed that when a Jew is the defendent in a civil or criminal action, the testimony of a Christian against him shall not be received unless it is confirmed by a Jewish witness.
These privileges had been continued to the Jews, notwithstanding the prejudice with which they had always been regarded by the lower classes In Hungary. Mattheus Corvinus appointed a Christianized Jew as Ban of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia; and Ferdinand VI. permitted the Hungarian Jews to hold a council at Nagy-Ma, which was visited by great numbers of Jews from various parts of Europe and Asia.
Anti-Semitism appeared in Hungary early in the 19th Century as a result of fear of economic competition. In 1840 a partial emancipation of the Jews allowed them to live anywhere except certain depressed mining cities. The Hungarian Jews had long ago given up the dream of a new Jerusalem ; not one of them attended the Jewish meeting assembled in New York in 1824, for the purpose of establishing au independent Jewish state. In 1847 the great majority of the Jewish population of Hungary were active supporters of Kossuth, who, they hoped, would give them the same rights as those enjoyed by the Christians.
By the mid-19th Century the number of Jews in Hungary was three hundred and thirty thousand, and they claimed to be placed in all respects on an equal footing with the Christians. This claim was favorably received in the Hungarian Diet, where steps were taken to give it effect. The Jewish Emancipation Act of 1868 gave Jews equality before the law and effectively eliminated all bars to their participation in the economy; nevertheless, informal barriers kept Jews from careers in politics and public life. And in an 1882 "blood libel" trial, residents of Tiszaeszlar accused the local Jewish community of killing a 14-year-old Christian peasant girl in order to use her blood for a religious ceremony.
In the early 20th Century the Hungarian Jew still clung tenaciously to the belief of his fathers, but unlike the Russian, he regarded Judaism as a religion, not as the mark of a distinct nationality. In all but creed he was a Magyar.
Hungarian Jewry was called upon, since 1914, to deal with more refugees than any country in the war-stricken area. People driven from every part of Europe have made Hungary their haven of refuge. Until 1919 the conditions were such that the Hungarian people were in a position to give these unfortunates food and succor. The conditions since then had become materially altered, and by 1920 it was no longer possible for the Jews of Hungary to support their own, let alone give aid to the thousands of refugees. There were at that time e, about 700,000 Jews in the new Hungary to which must be added about 400,000 in territory which was formerly Hungarian. Many thousands of these men, women and children, the aged and the ill, were on the verge of starvation.
A militantly anticommunist authoritarian government composed of military officers entered Budapest on the heels of the Romanians. A "white terror" ensued that led to the imprisonment, torture, and execution without trial of communists, socialists, Jews, leftist intellectuals, sympathizers with the Karolyi and Kun regimes, and others who threatened the traditional Hungarian political order that the officers sought to reestablish. Estimates placed the number of executions at approximately 5,000. In addition, about 75,000 people were jailed. In particular, the Hungarian right wing and the Romanian forces targeted Jews for retribution. Ultimately, the white terror forced nearly 100,000 people to leave the country, most of them socialists, intellectuals, and middle-class Jews.
Hungary was the first country in Europe to adopt an anti-Jewish law after World War I, a short-lived measure that restricted the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning. The Hungarian Home Office issued a decree according to which all foreigners "belonging to the Jewish race" who immigrated to Hungary since 1914 must leave the country. Exception was made only if the Jew was a member of a foreign mission, or came on business only for a very short period. Those Jews who had entered Hungary since 1914 were to be collected in different internment camps and then exiled to their country where from they emigrated to Hungary. Most of them were Poles, who came as refugees after the Russian offensive in 1914. Jews who were "busying themselves with profiteering" were to be the first to go.
Although the interwar years witnessed considerable cultural and economic progress in the country, the social structure changed little. A great chasm remained between the gentry, both social and intellectual, and the rural "people." Jews held a place of prominence in the country's economic, social, and political life. They constituted the bulk of the middle class. During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Jews made up more than one-fifth of the population of Budapest. They were well assimilated, worked in a variety of professions, and were of various political persuasions.
After 1938 Hitler used promises of additional territories, economic pressure, and threats of military intervention to pressure the Hungarians into supporting his policies, including those related to Europe's Jews, which encouraged Hungary's anti-Semites. The percentage of Jews in business, finance, and the professions far exceeded the percentage of Jews in the overall population. The 1930 census showed that Jews made up only 5.1 percent of the population but provided 54.5 percent of its physicians, 31.7 percent of its journalists, and 49.2 percent of its lawyers. Jews controlled an estimated 19.5 percent to 33 percent of the national income, four of the five leading banks, and 80 percent of Hungary's industry. After the depression struck, anti-Semites made the Jews scapegoats for Hungary's economic plight.
Hungary's Jews suffered the first blows of this renewed anti-Semitism during the government of Kalman Daranyi, who fashioned a coalition of conservatives and reactionaries. After President Horthy publicly dashed hopes of land reform, discontented rightwingers took to the streets denouncing the government and baiting the Jews. Daranyi's government attempted to appease the anti-Semites and the Nazis by proposing and passing the first socalled Jewish Law, which set quotas limiting Jews to 20 percent of the positions in certain businesses and professions. The law failed to satisfy Hungary's anti-Semitic radicals, however, and when Daranyi tried to appease them again, Horthy unseated him in 1938. The regent then appointed the ill-starred Bela Imredy, who drafted a second, harsher Jewish Law before political opponents forced his resignation in February 1939 by presenting documents showing that Imredy's own grandfather was a Jew.
Hungary allied with Nazi Germany early in the war. From 1939 on, Germany allowed Hungary to share in some of her booty. To Hitler, the Hungarians, who were removing troops from the Russian front and not willing to deal harshly with the Jews, seemed more like a neutral than Germany's ally. Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Kallay refused to deport Jews to Poland when requested to do so. In April 1943 he summoned Horthy to his presence and severely criticized him, explaining Hungary's obligations to Germans and the need to eliminate the Jews.
Szekely Nep, a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American newspaper in Nazi-allied Hungary, was responsible for the publication of some 200 racist articles which helped create a climate in Hungary in which the Nazi persecution of Jews became acceptable. Szekely Nep portrayed Jews as "alien elements with diabolical skills" and as being "traitorous, unscrupulous, cheating. . . throughout. . . Hungarian history," and advocated the "de-jewification of Hungarian life" since "a final solution may be achieved only by deporting Jewish elements."
On March 19, 1944, Adolf Eichmann and a group of SS officers arrived in Budapest to take charge of Jewish matters and ten days later anti-Jewish legislation was enacted, calling for the expropriation of Jewish property. Eichmann then set in motion machinery to round up and deport the Hungarian Jews to extermination camps. Between May 14 and July 18, 1944, over 430,00 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 48 trains. Most of them were gassed.
When the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews became widely known in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board to take action to rescue Jews from Nazi extermination. The Board's representative in Sweden, Ivor Olsen, identified Wallenberg as a person who could lead this effort in Hungary with funding and assistance from the U.S. Department of State. Wallenberg agreed to go to Budapest to undertake this task.
More Jews would have perished had not it been for the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who arrived in Hungary on July 9, 1944 with the mission of saving as many Jews as possible. By various means, including issuing special Swedish passports and bribing guards and officials, as well as setting up a program for feeding the Jews of Budapest, it is estimated that his actions saved between 30,000 and 100,000 from extermination. In September 1944 he was forced to go into hiding to avoid the Gestapo.
Carl Lutz was the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest from 1942 until the end of World War II in 1945. Together with diplomats of neutral countries, such as the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg, the Apostolic Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, and others, Lutz worked relentlessly in his office set up in the U.S. Legation building for many months to prevent the planned death of innocent people. He created safe houses by declaring them annexes of the Swiss legation and eventually extended diplomatic immunity to 72 buildings in Budapest, saving as a result of it more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews.
Learning in July of the actions against the Jews, Horthy ordered the deportations to stop. Prime Minister Lakatos asked the Germans to removed Eichmann's men and the Hungarians lifted some of the restrictions on the remaining Jews.
With the Germans suffering military setbacks, Sztojay resigned on August 30, 1944, and Horthy replaced him with Geza Lakatos. In October 1944 Russian forces entered Hungary and it appeared to the Germans that Horthy was about to ask for an armistice. The SS under Vessenmayer then kidnaped Horthy's son and held him under threats of dire consequences if Horthy to did not comply with the Nazi's wishes. Horthy, was therefore forced to appoint Arrow Cross Chief Szalasi as Prime Minister. Some 35,000 Jews were rounded up to be sent to Auschwitz, but since that camp was being liquidated, the Jews were used as slave laborers. The remaining 160,00 Jews in Budapest suffered at the hands of the Arrow Cross, with about 20,000 perishing during the winter because of cold, hunger, disease, and Russian bombardment.
Szalasi could not gather support to stop the oncoming Russian Army, which by November 1944, controlled two-thirds of Hungary and were on the verge of taking Budapest. A siege for Budapest lasted until February 1945 and it was not until April 4, 1945, that the Germans departed Hungary.
In January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the city of Budapest and Nazi troops withdrew to the West. Wallenberg was directed by the Soviet commander in Hungary to come to the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen, where his headquarters was located. The day he left Budapest, Soviet leaders issued a secret order for Wallenberg's arrest. He was taken to Moscow's infamous Lubyanka Prison, and he was never seen outside prison after that time. In 1956, Soviet officials requested a report on the fate of Wallenberg. The report said he had died of a heart attack in 1947. It also indicated that he had been arrested for spying for Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, additional intelligence information was made public, but no satisfactory explanation of his fate has been forthcoming.
In all, it is estimated that 450,000 of Hungary's estimated 650,000 pre-Final Solution Jewish population were exterminated. By 1989 the country's 150,000 Jews formed the third largest Jewish community on the European continent, being smaller than the Jewish communities in the Soviet Union and France. They maintained a high school, library, museum, kosher butcher shops, an orphanage, a home for the elderly, a rabbinical seminary, a factory producing matzo, and about thirty synagogues. Several publications, including newspapers, served the Jewish population. By the year 2010 the Jewish population was estimated to be between 80,000 and 100,000. Anti-Semitic incidents, including vandalism, continue.
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