New book portrays a chaotic Budapest just before the Holocaust reached Hungary

LONDON — It was to become the stage for both unthinkable horror and unparalleled heroism.

On March 18, 1944, wartime Hungary was home to the largest surviving Jewish community in Europe, hundreds of thousands strong.

A day later, Adolf Hitler — wary that his unreliable ally, Admiral Miklós Horthy, was contemplating abandoning the Axis — ordered his troops into the kingdom. The Nazis’ final effort to annihilate European Jewry was about to commence.

British historian and writer Adam LeBor’s new book, “The Last Days of Budapest,” is a chilling and magisterial tale of both the victims and the villains — and the many, like Horthy, who appear to have inhabited a moral twilight world.

Its cast includes Zionist forgers, anti-Nazi aristocrats and film stars, and courageous diplomats — as well as sadistic antisemites and murderous priests.

LeBor’s story begins in the middle of World War I. “Judapest,” as it was dubbed by Karl Lueger, the Jew-hating mayor of Vienna, was a thriving, cosmopolitan city; the city’s Jewish community enjoyed full civil rights and a comfortable, prosperous existence.

But the fall of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and its aftermath left a poisonous legacy. A short-lived communist revolution was overthrown by Horthy, whose forces unleashed “the White Terror.” Far-right death squads roamed the country; Jews were often targeted and the new regime introduced modern Europe’s first antisemitic laws, capping the number of Jewish students at universities.

LeBor describes the complexity of Horthy — whose 24-year rule as regent established Hungary as an “island of stability” on a continent wracked by political turmoil — and the “managed quasi-democracy” over which he presided.

The admiral himself was a traditional conservative with an authoritarian streak. He liked and socialized with many of the capital’s wealthy Jews, whom he regarded as “honorary Magyar gentry,” but also believed that alleged Jewish influence and power needed to be curtailed. While the initial anti-Jewish measures introduced in 1920 were relaxed, in the late 1930s further legislation — which was backed by the churches — was placed on the statute books. Horthy’s attitude to the Jews, writes LeBor, was less one of hatred but “fluctuating degrees of distaste.”

Fatally, however, Horthy’s driving ambition — and the key to a string of “blinkered [and] block-headed” decisions that led Hungary into an alliance with Nazi Germany — was to reverse the Treaty of Trianon, the post-World War I settlement that saw the kingdom forced to forfeit two-thirds of its territory.

Horthy’s checkered record after the outbreak of war in 1939 reflected his attempts to sate the demands of Berlin while keeping open lines of communication with London. As a consequence, the fate of Hungarian Jews see-sawed perilously.

Jews were unable to serve in the military, but men were instead drafted into the “labor service,” where tens of thousands were eventually to die on the Ukrainian front after Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941.

In 1941, new legislation, modeled on the Nuremberg laws, was passed barring marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.

“That was really saying that Hungarian Jews were not part of the body politic and not part of the nation,” said LeBor in an interview with The Times of Israel. It was, he believes, “a contributing factor” to the catastrophic events that later unfolded.

In August 1941, Horthy authorized the expulsion of around 18,000 foreign Jews to western Ukraine. Handed over to the SS, almost all were murdered in the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre. Five months later, Hungarian troops themselves were responsible for the atrocity at Novi Sad, northern Yugoslavia, in which over 3,300 Jews and Serbs were killed.

But, as LeBor details, by spring 1942, when Jews in neighboring countries were being slaughtered en masse, those in Hungary who had escaped labor service were still largely safe. A group of Polish Jewish refugee children smuggled into Hungary were astonished by the scenes they witnessed in Budapest during a Jewish festival. “How amazed we were to see Jews, dressed in holiday clothes, crowds of them, praying undisturbed,” one wrote. “This was a sight we had long forgotten.”

Unmatched betrayals

The antipathy and mistrust between Hitler and Horthy were mutual. The Nazi leader, a German intelligence officer based in Budapest later recalled, regarded Horthy as “a fossilized old Austrian admiral, completely in the hands of his Anglophile and Jewish entourage.” Horthy, in turn, repeatedly rebuffed Hitler’s demands to hand over Hungary’s Jews.

Hitler was fully aware of discussions between the Hungarians and the British about defecting from the Axis. In March 1944, he tired of them. With his country occupied by German forces, Horthy appointed a new pro-Nazi prime minister, Döme Sztójay, and, as LeBor writes, “gave the … government a free hand.” Anti-Jewish edicts were issued, Jews were finally forced to wear yellow stars, and the Jews’ natural allies in the liberal and aristocratic opposition were imprisoned.

Deportations — which began in the rural provinces — followed swiftly. In less than a month, nearly 290,000 Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, where most were murdered on arrival. LeBor quotes the grim description of Hungarian historian István Deák, who terms it “probably the smoothest administrative operation in Hungarian history.” Horthy’s response — he “simply stepped aside and turned his face to the wall, completely abnegating his responsibility as head of state,” writes LeBor — was pitiful.

But there was plenty of responsibility to go around. There was little resistance to the round-ups from the Hungarian public. Instead, an estimated 30,000-35,000 people denounced their Jewish neighbors and acquaintances to the authorities — a betrayal unmatched in any other occupied country. And, in the new far-right interior minister, Andor Jaross and his two top aides, László Endre and László Baky, Adolf Eichmann found willing executioners.

Could the tragedy that befell Hungary’s Jews have been avoided? LeBor dangles the tantalizing prospect that it might have been. Two years earlier, Horthy had appointed his eldest son, István, as vice-regent. The move immediately attracted the ire of the Germans, who correctly assessed him to be pro-British, anti-Nazi, and, in the words of Josef Goebbels, “even more pro-Jew than his father.”

Together with his wife, Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, István had been appalled by the Novi Sad massacre. Serving on the Eastern Front, he witnessed firsthand the suffering of Jews in the labor service, writing to his father: “It’s awful that this could happen even in the 20th century… I’m afraid we will have to pay a heavy price for it sometime.”

Correctly convinced that the war was lost, István confided in his wife a plan to fly to Britain or the US to attempt to negotiate for Hungary to change sides. But, before he could act, the vice-regent was killed in a suspicious plane crash, the finger of blame for which LeBor points firmly in the Nazis’ direction.

“István Horthy was beloved across the country,” said LeBor. “If he had been appointed Horthy’s successor and said, ‘We’re going to change sides now,’ much of the country would have gone with him.”

From near-miraculous escape to massacre

By July 1944, the deportations were coming perilously close to Budapest. Coming under huge pressure from the Pope, neutral Sweden and US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who warned him he faced trial for war crimes, Horthy finally ordered a halt to the round-ups. Ilona, who had remained in close contact with the Jewish community, later claimed that Horthy acted immediately after she had passed her father-in-law a copy of a clandestine account of Auschwitz. What Horthy knew about Auschwitz and when may never be proven.

However, said LeBor, “the details of the industrial extermination may have come as a shock, but it was not news that Jews were being ghettoized, tortured, put on trains and taken out to Poland.”

For a brief moment, the Jews of Budapest — who had largely escaped the deportations — appeared to have been granted a miraculous escape. Horthy fired Sztójay and his accomplices, while his son, Miklós Jr., met Jewish community leaders to discuss removing anti-Jewish measures, admitting: “It should not have gone the way it has.”

That September, uniquely in a Nazi-occupied country, the capital’s 200,000 Jews were able to openly celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

However, days later, on October 15, disaster struck. As Horthy prepared to announce Hungary was, at last, changing sides, the Germans struck again, kidnapping Miklós Jr., toppling the regent and installing a puppet regime under the Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi.

Many of the Arrow Cross were, as LeBor writes, “still teenagers, feral psychopaths.” Fueled by “fury and hate,” they wanted “nothing more than to torture and kill Budapest’s Jews, or work them to death, as rapidly and as efficiently as possible.” It was, he writes, as if “a demon had been unleashed.”

Thousands were murdered on the banks of the Danube, tortured and detained at the Újpest sports arena, and forced on “death marches” to Austria in the bitter winter cold. The deportations to the concentration camps resumed.

“There was just a complete collapse of any semblance of normality or morality,” said LeBor. “It was hell for the Jews of Budapest, and for the whole city.”

One of the most bestial Arrow Cross characters was the Catholic priest, Father András Kun, who led a Hungarian Einsatzgruppen which targeted and murdered hundreds of the most vulnerable in meticulously organized massacres at Jewish hospitals and nursing homes. “Kun reveled in his quasi-religious role as he led his killers,” writes LeBor. “A former monk, he wore a cassock, a priest’s collar and a crucifix and always carried a pistol.”

The few and the brave

Even as the Red Army closed in on the city, the Arrow Cross launched murderous raids on the “International Ghetto,” where the flags of neutral states flew over apartment blocks in which diplomats from Spain, Sweden and Switzerland attempted to shelter thousands of Jews in grossly crowded conditions.

The names of some of those diplomats, such as Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz, are well-known. LeBor highlights others, such as Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca. Once a staunch fascist, he worked with the Spanish chargé d’affaires, Ángel Sans Briz, issuing protective diplomatic papers to Hungarian Jews of Sephardic descent. In reality, few Jews qualified, but Perlasca proved a consummate bluffer, persuading the Arrow Cross that there should be no limit to the number of Spanish documents issued.

There were, of course, individual Hungarians who showed enormous courage in resisting the Arrow Cross and protecting Jews. Katalin Karády, one of Hungary’s most popular and glamorous film stars, was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis and a staunch friend of the kingdom’s Jews. Arrested, tortured and imprisoned for a time by the SS after the occupation, she went into hiding when the Arrow Cross took power. But that didn’t stop her efforts to help Jews: on one occasion, she used her gold and jewelry to bribe Arrow Cross gunmen who were about to murder a group of Jewish children. Karády took the children to her villa, where they lived until the end of the war.

Perhaps the most significant opposition to the Arrow Cross’ genocidal ambitions came from a highly organized movement of Hungarian Zionists, who turned the “Glass House,” a building under Swiss protection, into the headquarters of Jewish resistance. From this “mini-kibbutz transplanted to the heart of downtown Budapest,” the Zionists oversaw an escape line that smuggled some 15,000 Jews to Romania, ran educational programs and taught Hebrew.

The Zionists, including 18-year-old David Gur, also ran a remarkable, but little-known, operation producing fake documents. It was, said LeBor, a form of “asymmetrical bureaucratic warfare,” with the Zionists exploiting the Hungarian and German authorities’ obsession with paperwork. Gur’s workshop churned out fake Hungarian and German government documents, birth and marriage certificates, ration cards, Arrow Cross and Gestapo papers, and some 120,000 neutral state safe passes. The operation — which, LeBor believes, was unparalleled anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe — saved thousands of lives.

“Very few people have heard about it. I was amazed when I read about the bravery of these people,” LeBor said. “When you see copies of these documents in museums, you think it’s just a bit of paper and ink, but it’s the difference between life and death. It’s not a gun. It’s not a uniform. It’s just a sheet of paper.”

By the end of the war, around half of Budapest’s pre-war Jewish population – some 120,000 people – had survived. The city’s Jewish community was the largest single group of survivors in occupied Europe.

Horthy deserves some credit for stopping the deportations from Budapest in July 1944, believes LeBor. But this provokes a haunting question.

“If he could do that, then why didn’t he stop the deportation of the Jews of the countryside and the other towns and cities?” asks LeBor. “And that is the question for which there is no answer.”