Hungarian Forces

Hungarian Jewish Boys at Auschwitz, 1944

In interwar Hungary, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews worshipped in peace, the Jewish population was highly integrated into the life of the country, and occurring interfaith tensions were handled by non-violent means. Later, during the war, hundreds of thousands Jews (and non-Jews) were conscripted into Hungarian military labor battalions serving at the front. With Hitler's occupation of Hungary in the spring of 1944, the rounding up and expatriation of the Jews commenced and Horthy even employed his gendarmerie in the sordid process. But when the Regent temporarily succeeded in regaining more control in August, 1944, by then apparently aware of what was really taking place, he ordered his gendarmes and military to stop the ghastly shipments, particularly from the city of Budapest. When Horthy was deposed in October, the extremist Arrow-Cross government of Szalasi resumed and accelerated the tragic deportations, with the insane exterminations taking place mainly at Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. Here we see two well assimilated Hungarian Jewish boys experience the frightening shock of arrival at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944.