The number of Hungarian Jewish victims during the Holocaust exceeds half a million people. Their extermination, however, began years before the spring of 1944, and did not end with the halt of the deportations but with the end of the war.
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The forced-labor service system was introduced in Hungary in 1939. This affected primarily the Jewish population, but many people belonging to minorities, sectarians, leftists and Roma were also inducted.
35-40 thousand forced laborers, mostly Jews or of Jewish origin, served in the 2. Royal Hungarian Honvéd Army. 80 percent of them - that is, 28-32 thousand people - never returned; they died either on the battle-field or in captivity.
Approximately half of the six thousand Jewish forced laborers working in the copper mines in Bor were executed during the German withdrawal (Cservenka, Abda).
One can only estimate the exact number of forced-labor victims. In addition to the above mentioned cases, several thousand people died of weakness or were executed during the death marches in 1944-45.
In the summer of 1941, the Hungarian authorities handed over 18 thousand so-called “homeless” Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia to the German security and armed forces. Most of them were executed by the SIPO and the SD at Kamenets Podolsky, only two thousand people survived the mass murder. Kamenets Podolsky is the first example in the history of the Holocaust when the number of massacred Jews reached a five- digit number.
The largest and quickest deportation action of the Holocaust began on May 15, 1944. By July 9 – that is, within 56 days – the Hungarian authorities deported 437,402 Jews from Hungary according to German records. With the exception of 15 thousand people, all of them were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, not only Jews were persecuted for their race in Hungary during 1944-45. Several thousand Hungarian Roma were killed during the Holocaust.
The largest Nazi camp complex comprised of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Birkenau extermination camp (Auschwitz II), and the Monowitz forced-labor camp (Auschwitz III). During the 56 months between July 1940 and January 1945, 1 million Jews and approximately 100 thousand non-Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. Every third victim was killed as Hungarian citizen. Never did the Birkenau crematoria work as intensely as during those two months in the summer of 1944 when the Hungarian Jews arrived to the camp. Their extermination was directed personally by the founder and, until November 1943, the commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höss. The operation for the murder of the Hungarian Jews in 1944 was named after him (“Aktion Höss”).
The Jews of Budapest had been largely spared from the horrors of the Holocaust until the Arrow Cross reign. After the coup, Arrow Cross thugs shot an average 50-60 Jews per night (approximately 5000 people) into the Danube. Thousands more Jews fell victim to the Arrow Cross terror. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, and patients were murdered in the Jewish hospitals. Jews so far exempt from the deportations were also killed in the western part of the county.
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