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USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945

Hungarian Jews Arrive at Auschwitz II-Birkenau (May/June 1944)

" Over the course of the 1930s, the conservative-nationalist government of Admiral Miklós Hothy (1863-1957) came under the growing influence of the Nazi regime and the position of Hungary’s approximately 700,000 Jews became increasingly precarious. In the late 1930s, the Hungarian government issued a series of anti-Jewish laws that denied Jews civil rights and severely restricted their economic and professional opportunities. After Hungary joined the war on the side of the Axis in November 1940, Jewish men of military age were drafted into mobile labor battalions and forced to work on war-related projects under perilous conditions. This program claimed at least 27,000 Jewish lives. Moreover, in the summer of 1941, approximately 20,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to German-occupied Ukraine and shot by members of the so-called Special Operation Units [Einsatzgruppen], mobile killing squads tasked with “cleansing” the newly occupied territories of Jews. Still, for a time, most of Hungary's Jews believed themselves safe from the Nazi annihilation machine. But after the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, it became clear that they had been mistaken. The newly installed collaborationist regime demanded that the country's Jews be rounded up and handed over. In mid-May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, working in close collaboration with Adolf Eichmann and the German Security Police [Sicherheitspolizei] began systematic deportations. Over the next two months, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported. Most were sent to Auschwitz, where the majority were killed shortly after their arrival. This photograph shows the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews from Subcarpathian Rus, which became part of Hungary after the signing of the Munich Agreement. The selection process, whereby new arrivals were designated as either "fit" or "unfit" for forced labor, began as soon as they stepped onto the train platform. Those deemed "unfit" were brought to the gas chambers. The photograph comes from the "Auschwitz Album," a collection of 193 photographs documenting the arrival and selection of one or more transports of Hungarian Jews in May/June 1944. The photographs were taken by SS Hauptscharführer Bernhardt Walter and his assistant, Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann. (The two worked as photographers for the camp’s Identification Service [Erkennungsdienst] and were responsible for photographing and fingerprinting the prisoners who were selected for work.) Members of the SS put Walter and Hofmann's photos of the Hungarian Jews into an album that bore the innocuous sounding title "Resettlement of the Jews of Hungary." Eighteen-year-old Lili Jacob (1926-1999) and her family were among those Hungarian Jews from Subcarpathian Rus who were deported to Auschwitz. From there, Jacob was sent to the Dora-Mittelbau camp, where she worked as a forced laborer until her liberation in April 1945. It was there that she found the album in an abandoned SS barracks. She recognized herself and various family members (e.g., two of her brothers and her grandparents) in certain photographs. She was eventually called as a witness in the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-65), where she presented the album to the court. In 1980, Lili Jacob donated the "Auschwitz Album" to Yad Vashem." http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=3764

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The Holocaust
The most notorious event within the broader landscape of the Second World War is without doubt the Holocaust, the name collectively given to the Nazi drive to rid Europe of Jews through mass murder of an entire group of people, which would come to be known as “genocide.”

We have already spoken about the role of radical anti-Semitism in the building of Nazi ideology, the development of the Nazi movement, and the creation of the Nazi state, including the development of the organization of Nazi vanguard, the SS. Just as the invasion of Soviet Russia was not a mistake but a core part of the Nazi war strategy, the attempt to eliminate the Jews was a core piece of the Nazi vision for a future German-dominated Europe. War was, in many respects, a means to this end.

The Holocaust was a vast and incredibly complex series of events—ranging from the mass murder of over one million Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland to the removal and deportation of small numbers of Jews from villages in Greece, Italy, Hungary, France, and so on. The murderousness ranged from gas chambers to mobile killing squads to death by forced labor under appalling conditions. The murderers were also manifold: SS sadists, ordinary German police units, members of the German army, foreign collaborators in Croatia, Hungary, Romania, etc. If the number of victims reached about six million, the number of perpetrators and passive bystanders who did nothing to help friends and neighbors was far beyond this. The killing of the Jews was a German program—but it was one that found active support and general apathy throughout the continent. Europeans did precious little to save the Jewish people among them.

For brevity’s sake, we can divide the execution of the Holocaust into five phases. The first phase, which lasted from the 1930s until the invasion of the Soviet Union was one of planning, testing and laying the foundations for genocide. It is during these years that the Nazis implemented regimes of forced sterilization, began the “Action T4” of forced euthanasia, developed the concentration camp system, and systematically marginalized Jews from German society.

The second phase of the Holocaust came with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Armed units of SS were sent in the wake of the German army with the express orders to find and murder Jews. These Einsatzgruppen killed millions of people, including around 1.3 million Jews. These murders were not part of the extermination camp system.

The third phase of the Holocaust was the period of ghettoization and the development of the mass extermination camps in the east. These camps, each a symbol of horror and inhumanity, included Treblinka, Belzec, Sobidor, Majdanek, and Chelmno. These camps operated mostly between 1942 and 1943. By this time, they had succeeded in killing most of the Jews in German occupied eastern territories.

The fourth phase of the Holocaust is its most infamous. By 1944, the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was running at full capacity. Auschwitz contained a highly efficient extermination camp (Birkenau) as well as a large forced labor camp that was being used for German industrial production. For the most part, Jews from Western Europe were being deported here to be worked to death or to be killed immediately. Unlike the other extermination camps, which were meant to clear large numbers of Jews from the immediate region and the eastern ghettos, Auschwitz was the receiving point for Jews from a multitude of nations, including France, Holland, Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and of course the hundreds of thousands from Hungary. Auschwitz represented the pinnacle of Nazi destructive capacity and has become shorthand for the Holocaust as a whole, capturing its size, international scope, murderous efficiency, sadism, and even its heroism.

Finally, the fifth phase of the Holocaust was the period of German collapse, which saw the Nazis attempt to retreat from the Auschwitz and other camps into the heart of Germany and destroy evidence of the crimes. The famous “death marches” took place in this short, chaotic period. When the allies liberated camps in Germany, they had little idea that many of the survivors they encountered had been prisoners in the east.