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• Pecs, Hungary: collision point between
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• Alexander the Great's Greek descendents in Pakistan?
• Visual History of Yugoslavia and its breakup (1918-2008)

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The Jews and synagogues of Hungary, and their disappearance under the

Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross regime
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Bibliography/Sources

This analytical essay is divided into several parts: a brief history of the Jews of Hungary in the 19th century, their experience under Hungary's close alliance with the Third Reich during the war, their total genocide under the Hungarian Nazis of the Arrow Cross, a brief tour of the Terror House museum in Budapest, and lasty a visual walkthrough of the precarious status of the Jewish community of Budapest today amidst a growing inter-ethnic conflict from my research trip.

The Jews of Hungary amidst a war between Fascism and Communism, and Hungary's alliance with Nazi Germany

Jews lived in Hungary and Eastern Europe for many centuries. However, they remained a small community that was typically divorced from assimilating into native Hungarian society by being segregated into ghettos. Despite their lack of social or ethnic franchise, Jews became a highly wealthy, intellectual, and mobile community for their small size. When Hungary was a constituent of the German Habsburg Empire from 1526 until 1918, Hungary endured large immigration of ethnic Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russia and eastern Ukraine due to Austria-Hungary's comparatively liberal society. Throughout the 19th century, Jews immigrated to Hungary so rapidly that their growth rate surpassed that of the native Hungarians, becoming as high as 5% of the population [1] within the Hungarian crown (although this included Croatia, Slovakia, and northern Bosnia). The rapid immigration of Jews into Austria-Hungary does not imply a society tolerant of its Jewish minority. Antisemitism was and has remained rife in Hungary (as shown at the bottom of this essay). German emperors and Hungarian grandees exploited the economic abilities of the Jews and then expelled them entirely in the next moment. Joseph II (1765-90), Maria Theresa (1740-80), and Leopold I (1770-92) expelled tens of thousands of Jews from Vienna and other major cities due to their attachment to liberal intellectual movements and a perceived threat to the Habsburg monarchy. The Jews of Hungary proper, too, had a very precarious situation. Most of the Jews were transit populations with the ultimate destination of ending up in the United States or the United Kingdom due to those nations' greater tolerance and intergration. As a result, Hungarian sovereigns and authorities were increasingly petulent that they were obligated to house, support, and monitor this transient population that ultimately engrossed other nations. Additionally, aside from the very foreign and non-Catholic culture of the Jewish immigrants to Hungary, Hungarians had spent the last 400 years struggling to gain co-equal ethnic franchise rights with the Germans in the Habsburg Empire, and greatly discriminated against Croat, Slovak, and Jewish minorities as a result. As is apparent, despite the longstanding role of the Jews in Hungary and Budapest, their social station remained uncertain and volatile irrespective of their tremendous achievements as artists and literati.

After World War I, Austria-Hungary dissolved. Hungary lost almost half of the land it had ruled for nearly 1,000 years, including Slovakia, Transylvania, and Croatia. Hungary became a bankrupt, broken, and unstable republic that was rife with infighting between Communists, anarchists, liberal democrats, Fascists, and monarchists. Ethnic and political minorities (like the Jews) seized the opportunity to assert their own ethnic franchise and political ideologies. This created an atmosphere of brutal competition and violence. In 1919, the shattered Hungarian Republic was overthrown by an uprising of Communists and anarchists led by the ethnic Jew Bela Kun to form the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Marxist regime proceeded to impose the so-called "Red Terror," including a forced crackdown on religion, the upper-class, mass arrests and executions of political opponents, and the compulsory redistribution of land for collective farming. Fearing a proliferation of Marxist rebellion into Romania via Transylvania's large Hungarian population, the Romanian army invaded Budapest with ultra-right militias and obliterated the Communist regime. Romania and Hungary both became close members of the Axis.

The conservative Fascists and monarchists took power in Hungary and re-established the Kingdom of Hungary that survived until its destruction by the Soviets in 1945. This state was led by Regent Admiral Miklos Horthy, a beloved war hero from the first World War. The monarchists then countered the Red Terror of Bela Kun with the so-called "White Terror," a strict campaign against political opponents, the far-left, Communists, and threatening political parties. Hungary thus became a full Fascist dictatorship under Horthy that promoted Hungarian ultra-nationalism, militarism, and centralization. Hungary was one of Nazi Germany's closest allies until 1944. Because Bela Kun was an ethnic Jew (as opposed to a follower of the Jewish religion), and because (as in Germany and the Soviet Union) a disproportionately large percentage of the small Jewish population was involved in far-left movements and Communist revolution, intense discrimination against Jews became the norm in Hungary. Although Hungary did not directly impose race-based laws against the Jews, they remained a greatly discriminated minority that was subject to frequent displacement, purges, and attacks when the government perceived a threat or profit. Their very distinct and foreign culture in this ethnic nationalist Fascist state further marginalized them.

After 1941, when Hungary was in full-scale war with the Soviet Union and the Western Allies alongside Germany, Hungarian labor shortages combined with German pressure that greatly targeted the Jewish minority. In 1941, Horthy expelled 18,000 Jews to Ukraine with conscious awareness that they would be immediately used for forced labor and execution by the SS-Einsatzgruppen killing squads [3]. Hungarians then seized the opportunity of war to massacre Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad and Vojvodina, a territory greatly disputed by mutually-despising Hungarians and Serbs in the region ever since. Jews were singled out for forced labor for Hungary and the Axis (including 100,000 expelled for Albert Speer's industrial projects in Germany), and were treated as a separate racial and ethnic group in this ethnic ultra-nationalist society.

Regent Miklos Horthy, hero of Hungary during World War I and sovereign during World War II with the Axis. He is lionized in Hungary today, and many Hungarians (as I learned in many interviews) tend to ignore Horthy's passive allowance of the slaughter of Jews by emphasizing his refusal to directly feed the death camps in 1944.

The Arrow Cross regime and the rapid expulsion and genocide of Hungary's Jews

Despite the discriminated status of the Jewish community in Axis Hungary, they enjoyed far greater mobility than the Jews of Germany, Croatia under Ante Pavelic, or Romania under Antonescu. Hitler and Goebbels often expressed great irritation that Miklos Horthy was not sufficiently assisting in "purifying" Europe of the "Jewish bacillus." In 1944, as the Holocaust was completely in motion, Hitler directly pressured Horthy to expel all of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps in the General Government of German-occupied Poland. He refused. The reasons for his refusal are hotly debated. Many emphasize his refusal to be complicit in the killing of Jews, but considering his incredibly passive allowance of intense discrimination and slaughter of Jews in Hungary prior to 1944, this theory is rather fanciful. Horthy bitterly hated the unassimilated Jews [4], viewing them as a separate non-Hungarian ethnic group. Rather, it is likely that as Horthy realized by 1944 that Hungary and the Axis were only weeks away from inevitable defeat, he sought to spare Hungary from post-war repercussions towards its massacred Jewish populations similar to those Germany has faced ever since. Horthy was, after all, a far-right nationalist closely allied with Adolf Hitler and Ioan Antonescu since before the war and throughout its entire duration.

In 1944, repeated demands by the Third Reich and Adolf Eichmann for Horthy to expel all of Hungary's Jews to the death camps in Poland were met with refusal repeatedly. He even ordered Hungarian soldiers to stop the trains en route to Auschwitz that were packed with Jews without his approval. Rumors that Horthy was seeking council with the Allies to propose a surrender incensed Hitler, who responded by initiating Operation Margarethe on 15 October, 1944. The near-mythic commando Otto Skorzeny was sent to kidnap Miklos Horthy's son and hold him as a hostage, forcing Horthy to resign and hand over power to more radical Hungarians who readily called for the deportation of Hungary's Jews to oblivion. The Hungarian Nazis of the ultra-nationalist Arrow Cross Party, led by Ferenc Szalasi, were designated by Hitler to be the legitimate government of Hungary. Controlling Hungary from October 1944 until the triumph of the Soviets in the spring of 1945, the Arrow Cross nationalists espoused an ideology based on the German Nazis of extreme racial nationalism, "Hungarianism," messianic Catholicism, and intense racism against non-Hungarian minorities in Hungary, especially ethnic Jews who were deemed to be a "Bolshevik parasite." Arrow Cross uniforms were based on those of the German SS, and Ferenc Szalasi emulated Adolf Hitler in his mannerisms and speeches. The Arrow Cross movement extolled the ancient equestrian heritage and magnificent achievements of the Hungarian people to be proof of their inherent racial superiority. The party was banned by Miklos Horthy since the early 1930's because it was a radical threat to his authority and a critic of his lack of direct action against the Jewish minority.

Although led by ethnically-Hungarian National Socialists (Nazis), Hungary was essentially an occupied country that had been robbed of its proud sovereignty that was guaranteed since 1919 under Miklos Horthy. Whereas before, German troops and SS units were seldom stationed in Hungary due to that nation's close alliance with the Third Reich, now German police and killing squads roamed the streets of Budapest. As a result, Hungarians today view this as a period of occupation that was little different than the hated occupation of the Soviets (see below). Once in power, Ferenc Szalasi immediately ordered Hungarian soldiers, police, and volunteer militias to round up the Communists and the Jewish minority for either immediate execution or deportation to the death camps in Poland. Although only in power for less than a year, the Hungarian Nazis of the Arrow Cross regime exterminated nearly the entire Jewish population of Hungary. Emulating the SS-Gestapo of Germany, Hungary shipped over 438,000 Jews to Auschwitz. 50,000 were marched in lines by Hungarian troops towards the Polish border towards Krakow and Auschwitz [5]. 10-15,000 Jews and Communists were killed almost immediately, and thousands more deported [6]. A whole community disappeared.

By the spring of 1945, the Red Army of the Soviet Union obliterated the Third Reich and its allies of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The Arrow Cross government was forcibly dissolved by the new Communist regime, Ferenc Szalasi and the party leaders were executed by either hanging or firing squad, and the many supporters of the far-right in Hungary were silenced or purged rapidly. Hungary then endured its second phase of occupation. The Arrow Cross symbol today remains banned in Hungary. The Soviet armies demolished the ghetto walls that had secluded Jews in Hungary for centuries.

The "Terror House" (Terror-Haza) in Budapest today (my photos shown below) commemorates two phases of terror inflicted against the Hungarian people: the Arrow Cross and the brutal Communist regime that followed it. The museum devotes only a small portion to the Arrow Cross regime, and very rarely mentions the fate of the Jews. The Arrow Cross section includes their uniforms with a looping incendiary speech of Ferenc Szalasi. The only other depictions of the Arrow Cross era are a series of videos of goose-stepping Germans, the Jews of Auschwitz, and speeches by Adolf Hitler. The vast remainder of the museum is devoted to the Communist dictatorship that held Hungary in close vassalage to the Soviet Union from 1945 until 1990, as emphasized by Khrushchev's invasion of Hungary in 1956 for its divergent ideology under Imre Nagy. What was blatant to me was the museum's emphasis not on slaughtered Jews, but on the denial of Hungarian sovereignty. The Arrow Cross and the Nazis were eschewed because they deposed the Hungarian hero Miklos Horthy and occupied Hungary. The Soviets were derided because they blocked Hungary from self-determination. Almost no mention of Hungary's involvement in anti-Jewish purges, forced labor, and the Holocaust was demonstrated, nor the sizable public support of the Arrow Cross in Hungary that made them complicit. Like the Italians and Austrians, the Hungarians have done an excellent job in deflecting blame for their attacks against the Jews onto an occupying force from Germany. The Jews, as shown below, have remained a largely marginalized and separated minority in Hungary despite the regime change. So too, even the Communist regimes disavowed Lenin's maxims of multi-cultural inclusion and actively persecuted intractable Jews (especially Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland) despite their longstanding involvement in liberal and far-left movements that was used as an excuse to exterminate them. The museum even has the clothing of a rabbi who was persecuted -- not by Nazis or the Arrow Cross, but by the Communists.

the flag and armband of the Arrow Cross government of Hungary. The Arrow Cross is an ancient ethnic symbol of Hungarians prior to Christianization and settlement in Hungary after the 9th century

Ferenc Szalasi emulated Adolf Hitler much like the French did during their alliance with Nazi Germany (the Vichy regime)

Ferenc Szalasi with Adolf Hitler

My photo of the entrance of the Terror House in Budapest, emphasizing two phases of occupation and terror (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

The lower level of the Terror House in Budapest, emphasizing the many victims of Soviet Communist terror (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

A small photo of the Terror House in Budapest from the official website (I was disallowed from photographing). In the center stands a mannequin with a projection of Ferenc Szalasi's face on it surrounded by Arrow Cross uniforms.

A small photo from the official website showing the terror of Lenin and the Communist occupation. Very little mention of the Jews.

A visual walkthrough of the Jews and synagogues of Budapest today and growing Antisemitism (with my photos below)

Despite the fact that Hungary and Budapest were virtually completely devoid of Jews by 1945 (and the few who survived largely fled to more liberal Allied occupation zones), Budapest today has two massive and resplendent synagogues with shockingly ornate beauty that would lead one to believe that the Jewish community here was never disrupted. In reality, this is merely the result of post-war resettlement of a far-smaller Jewish population and the symbolic effort of Jewish communities abroad to invest in the construction of synagogues and the commemoration of the Jewish genocide to emphasize their disenfranchised role in Hungary's history. Jews are a very small population in Hungary today (less than 1%), but still one of the largest of any European capital [6]. Most of the synagogues and Jewish interest groups are brand new. The only synagogue that survived (Dohany Street Synagogue) -- one of the most unique and beautiful buildings I've ever seen -- only survived because the Arrow Cross symbolically defiled it by converting it into a radio station. Post-war investment has adorned it with radiant gold and beautiful artistic decoration. The other synagogue is new and is undergoing intensive construction that renders it inaccessible.

The Dohany Street Synagogue is the center of the surviving or resettled Jewish community in Hungary. The remainder of Hungary very homogeneously consists of ethnic Hungarians. As most of Hungary's Jews have been immigrants from Russia and most liberal Jews left for England and the United States, Orthodox Judaism pervades. Rabbis, scholars, and students with traditional Jewish dress can be seen entering the synagogue throughout the day from expensive cars in this poor nation. The interior is tremendously ornate, decorated in Moorish style with elaborate red, gold, white, and yellow colors that illuminate the room. The synagogue has two floors for each gender, as Orthodox Jewish communities strictly segregate women and men just like the Muslims. The side of the synagogue contains an original Jewish cemetary, with nearly all of the inhumed bodies having the year "1945" as the date of their deaths for obvious reasons. As emphasized throughout this essay, the Jewish minority has been unable to gravitate towards total equality despite their intellectual contributions to history. There still remains much Antisemitism in Hungarian society that was not assuaged during the supposedly more inclusive Communist regime. Hungary is riddled with graffiti all across the country that includes Swastikas, the Arrow Cross "rune," the Celtic cross (often used as a racist symbol), and the Star of David crossed out (as is ubiquitous in much of Eastern Europe and especially Poland). Phrases are seen all across Budapest and Hungary like "88" (the eighth letter "H" twice for "Heil Hitler"), "F*CK JEWS" and "F*CK ISRAEL." As I learned from several casual interviews, a variety of factors have contributed to a noted rise in Antisemitism in Hungary: the languishing poverty of ethnic Hungarians in comparison with the blatantly wealthier and long-disliked Jewish minority, a perception of a supposedly high proportion of Jews in Hungary's wickedly corrupt government, and the identification of Jews with the foreign Communist ideology under which Hungarians suffered for more than four decades. The Jewish-owned businesses around the synagogue all had racist graffiti on their exteriors and their windows were shattered by rocks or bricks (photo below). The synagogue has guards with guns, a stiflingly-strict surveillance by the employees over the behavior of visitors, and a thorough inspection through metal detectors (shown below) to prevent the synagogue from being blown up or burnt down by Hungarian nationalists and Antisemites. The Jewish guards, students, and employees were very apprehensive. As is apparent, the Jews of Hungary have yet to attain full integration into Hungarian society.

My photo of the synagogue that is largely inaccessible due to reconstruction. The interior is in ruin (Click to enlarge)

A large and unique monument outside of the large synagogue built largely by investment from Jews abroad symbolizing the tears and sorrow of the Jewish community (Click to enlarge)

This sign marks where the Jewish ghetto used in Hungary for centuries was demolished by the Red Army. The sign (according to online translators) roughly translates: "here under Fascism was the gate to the [Jewish] Budapest ghetto. The Soviet army's liberation in 1945 destroyed the ghetto walls." (Click to enlarge)

My photo of the Dohany Street Synagogue, tremendously beautiful, huge, and unique (Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

Antisemitism is still present and growing in Hungary and much of Europe. The nearby Jewish shops all have graffiti on them. In this photo at the bottom of the window, you can see the glass has been shattered and the door boarded up with graffiti on the wall. Much of the city's graffiti consists of Arrow Crosses, Swastikas, and racist words. (Click to enlarge)

My photo of the metal detectors at the entrance of the synagogue to prevent Hungarians from blowing it up (Click to enlarge)

A magnificent interior (Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

The central bima and holy of holies of the synagogue (Click to enlarge)

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

-personal photos, observations, and interviews

-official pamphlets from synagogues and the "Terror Museum" in Budapest, Hungary (official website)

[1] Kann, Robert A. A Hstory of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Page 453.

[2] Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2001. Page 770.

[3] Burleigh 2001, 771.

[4] Burleigh 2001, 772.

[5] Patai, Raphael. The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology. Wayne State University Press, 1996. Page 730.

[6] http://www.nepszamlalas.hu/eng/volumes/18/tables/load3_12.html