Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

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 time 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

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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

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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