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.
The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Condensed Edition is an abbreviated version of the classic work first published in 1981 and revised and expanded in 1994. It includes a new ...historical overview, and retains and sharpens its focus on the persecution of the Jews. Through a meticulous use of Hungarian and many other sources, the book explains in a rational and empirical context the historical, political, communal, and socioeconomic factors that contributed to the unfolding of this tragedy at a time when the leaders of the world, including the national and Jewish leaders of Hungary, were already familiar with the secrets of Auschwitz.
The Politics of Genocide is the most eloquent and comprehensive study ever produced of the Holocaust in Hungary. In this condensed edition, Randolph L. Braham includes the most important revisions of the 1994 second edition as well as new material published since then. Scholars of Holocaust, Slavic, and East-Central European studies will find this volume indispensable.
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.
The Nazis' Last Victims articulates and historically scrutinizes both the uniqueness and the universality of the Holocaust in Hungary, a topic often minimized in general works on the Holocaust. The ...result of the 1994 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, this anthology examines the effects on Hungary as the last country to be invaded by the Germans. The Nazis' Last Victims questions what Hungarians knew of their impending fate and examines the heightened sense of tension and haunting drama in Hungary, where the largest single killing process of the Holocaust period occurred in the shortest amount of time. Through the combination of two vital components of history writing—the analytical and the recollective—The Nazis' Last Victims probes the destruction of the last remnant of European Jewry in the Holocaust.
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.
