The Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of the Final Solution of the “Jewish question” in Europe. In the fifth year of the Second World War Hungary still had a ...Jewish population of approximately 800,000.Although this large and relatively intact Jewish community was deprived of its basic rights as citizens, had suffered close to 62,000 casualties, had been confronted with the hardships of discrimination, and had endured the vicissitudes of a military-related labor service system, it continued to enjoy relative physical safety under the aristocratic-conservative regime of Hungary until the German occupation on March 19, 1944. How was all this possible? And if all this was possible until March 1944, why could it not continue for a few more months? Was it really inevitable that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would, within a few months, become victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Could the Holocaust in Hungary have been averted and who were responsible for the violent deaths of over a half a million Hungarian Jews in the ghettos, on the deportation trains, in the extermination and concentration camps, during the death marches, and the mass shootings into the Danube? Starting from these difficult questions, the present volume offers readers the most recent scholarship on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Hungary.
Abstract
Randolph L. Braham, the authority on the Holocaust in Hungary, spoke out forcefully against the historical revisionism of the Fidesz government in Hungary. Historians and publicists close to ...that leadership equate the occupation of Hungary by its World War II German ally with its occupation by the Red Army and subsequent decades of Soviet domination. Implying that the Hungarian people suffered at the hands of the Germans just as did the Jews, these writers set forth a nationalist narrative that casts Hungary as a victimized “Christian” nation. Braham submitted this synthetic article shortly before he died in 2018. An introduction by Paul Hanebrink sets Braham’s work in its biographical, political, and historical contexts.
This book presents an overview of the treatment of the Holocaust in the textbooks used in the Federal Republic of Germany, Israel, and the United States. Selection of these three countries was based ...on historical, political, and state administration criteria. All three countries are democratic but vary in terms of history, heritage, and educational system. Each section in this volume presents an overview of the country's postwar system of education with emphasis on the agencies and authorities responsible for the selection, production, and distribution of textbooks. A special effort is made to differentiate among the textbooks used at the various levels of education in the treatment of anti-Semitism, Nazism, and the Holocaust. The bibliographies appended to each of the three essays provide additional sources for the interested reader. The book is divided into three parts with 12 chapters. The parts include: (1) "Federal Republic of Germany: Germans, Jews and Genocide" (Walter F. Renn); (2) "Israel" (Ruth Firer); and (3) "The United States of America" (Glenn S. Pate). (EH)
An attempt at differentiating between the myths and realities of the rescue operations during the German occupation of Hungary in 1944-1945, requires a clarification of the term "rescue" and the ...approximation of the number of Jews who were actually rescued, writes Braham. Here, he discusses the myths and realities of the rescue operation by considering only those Jews who were saved from deportation and the subsequent ordeal in concentration camps by Christian friends, neighbors, anonymous good Samaritans, state officials, members of governmental and ecclesiastical organizations, and fellow Jews under the term "rescue." Subsequently, he excludes from the category of the "rescued" those Jews that were survivors of concentration camps, most of the surviving labor servicemen, Jews who fled to neighboring countries on their own, and those who hid and survived without the assistance of others.
As in many other countries in Nazi-dominated Europe, in Hungary the assault on the historical integrity of the Holocaust began before the war had come to an end. While many thousands of Hungarian ...Jews still were lingering in concentration camps, those Jews liberated by the Red Army, including those of Budapest, soon were warned not to seek any advantages as a consequence of their suffering. This time the campaign was launched from the left. The Communists and their allies, who also had been persecuted by the Nazis, were engaged in a political struggle for the acquisition of state power. To
One of the most bizarre accounts of Jewish collaboration involves the story of Jaac van Harten, a German Jew, who emigrated to Palestine in 1947 and lived in Savyon, a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv, ...until his death in 1973. To the chagrin of his family and many friends, van Harten was identified as a collaborator, who, among other things, was in the employ of the "Abwehr," the Nazi intelligence service, and played a significant role in the Nazis' wartime scheme to undermine the British economy through the production and wholesale distribution of counterfeit British currency.
This study critically reviews We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, a statement the Vatican issued on March 16, 1998. Following a summary of the many positive developments in Catholic-Jewish ...relations since the Second Vatican Council's landmark Nostra Aetate of 1965, the article analyzes the 1998 pronouncement, focusing on a perceived attempt by the Vatican to absolve the Church of responsibility in the Holocaust. The study addresses the distinction the Vatican makes between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi antisemitism, as well as its positive interpretation of the role Pope Plus XII and the German Catholic Church played during the Nazi era. Finally, it summarizes other statements by several national Catholic episcopates since the mid-1960s that address the anti-Jewish stance of their followers during the Nazi era. All of these contributed to a historic reconciliation between Catholics and Jews, but points of disagreement remain to be addressed.
Braham reviews "The Road to Life" by Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, "A zsidosag tortenete Erdelyben, (1623-1944) (The History of the Jews of Transylvania, 1623-1944" by Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger and ...edited by Geza Komoroczy and "Istoria evreilor din Transilvania (1623-1944) (The History of the Jews of Transylvania, 1623-1944)" by Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger and translated by Ladislau Gyemant.
