World War II Day by Day

Budapest, Occupied Hungary • October 17, 1944

On this date in 1944 Adm. Miklós (Nicholas) Horthy, regent of the Kingdom of Hungary since 1920, left his native country as a prisoner of Nazi Germany. Horthy had angered Adolf Hitler after the latter had received confi­den­tial reports that the 76‑year-old Hunga­rian head of state was secretly nego­ti­ating to surren­der his coun­try to the Soviets. If Horthy had succeeded, more than a million German soldiers could con­ceiv­ably have wound up as prisoners of the Red Army, now closing in on Hungary’s eastern border. Only the kidnap­ping at gun­point of Horthy Sr.’s son, “Miki” Horthy Jr., who two days earlier had been captured meeting with envoys of anti-Nazi Yugo­slavian leader Josip Broz Tito in Buda­pest—a “snatch oper­a­tion” (Oper­a­tion Panzer­faust, aka Oper­a­tion Mickey Mouse) engi­neered by Hitler’s swash­buckling com­mando, SS Major Otto Skor­zeny—con­vinced the regent to abdi­cate in favor of a pro-German puppet govern­ment of Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross.

In the summer of 1944, after 11 divisions of the Wehr­macht had crossed into Hungary on March 19 (Operation Marga­rethe) and while Horthy was still head of state, the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and their Hun­garian accom­plices had succeeded in deporting half a million Jews to the Auschwitz ovens in neigh­boring Poland. Under the post-Horthy Arrow Cross govern­ment, the round­up, depor­ta­tion, and killing of Hun­gary’s remaining Jews, esti­mated at a quarter mil­lion, shifted into high gear under the watch­ful eye of SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eich­mann. (Eich­mann and his SS detach­ment facili­tated and managed the logistics of the mass depor­ta­tion of Hungary’s Jews to ghettos and Nazi concen­tra­tion and death camps in Poland and Austria.) Gangs of trigger-happy Arrow Cross youths armed with auto­matic weapons pulled hun­dreds from their homes or off the streets, beat and plundered them, and exe­cuted them in broad day­light. Jewish corpses lay pooled in blood on Buda­pest’s streets. Other Jews were marched to bridges across the Danube or to the river­bank, cursed at and shot, their bodies tossed into the swirling gray water or onto floating ice. Some Jews preferred sui­cide; others were success­ful in dodging Arrow Cross gangs to find refuge with Christian friends who bravely agreed to hide them or in “safe houses” estab­lished and pro­tected by human­i­tar­ian organi­za­tions and net­works such as the one established by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

The fortunes of the Nazi-client Arrow Cross govern­ment were being reversed even as the reigns of power shifted from Horthy to Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946) and his viru­lently anti-Semitic thugs. Their neme­sis was the Red Army and its (now) Roma­nian ally, whose com­bined forces began encircling the Hun­ga­rian capital on Novem­ber 19, 1944. During the 102‑day siege of Buda­pest, German and Hun­ga­rian armies fell back from Pest across the Danube to Buda. Szálasi escaped the city on Decem­ber 9. Eich­mann was gone by December 24. Despite a lack of supplies, Axis troops refused to surren­der and defended every street and house. Finally, on the night of Febru­ary 11, 1945, some 28,000 des­per­ate German and Hun­ga­rian troops attempted a break­out. The majority of the escapees were killed, wounded, or captured. The remaining defenders surren­dered on Febru­ary 13, 1945. The Soviet-led Battle of Buda­pest and the ensuing Vienna Offen­sive were dress rehears­als before the final Battle of Berlin (April 16 to May 2, 1945) and the apocalyptic collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich.

Timeline: Liquidating Hungary’s Jews, 1941–1945

Left: Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) and Adolf Hitler in Nazi puppet state Slo­vakia (the eastern half of the former Czecho­slo­vakia), 1938. For half a decade Horthy had hitched his coun­try’s for­tunes to Hitler’s Germany. He allowed the Wehr­macht (German armed forces) to stage units on Hun­garian soil that over­threw govern­ments in Yugo­slavia and Greece in April 1941; he sent well over 160,000 Hun­garians, among them tens of thou­sands of Jewish forced laborers, to their death or into brutal cap­tiv­ity in the Soviet Union in 1941–1943 (Oper­a­tion Bar­ba­rossa and Battle of Stalin­grad); and he dispatched half a million Hun­garian Jews to die in Nazi exter­mi­na­tion camps in neigh­boring Poland, chiefly at Auschwitz. Even before then Horthy had come to realize he’d made a poor wager and looked for ways to extri­cate his nation from the predic­table cala­mity that the Allied armies would inflict—indeed, were already inflicting—on their enemies. As it turned out, it was all too late.

Right: SS-Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Otto Skorzeny (left) and two SS col­leagues on Castle Hill, the govern­ment dis­trict in Buda, Octo­ber 16, 1944. Hitler entrusted Skor­zeny with kid­napping Miklós (“Miki”) Horthy, Jr., and forcing the abdi­ca­tion of his regent father as head of state (Oper­a­tion Panzer­faust) following the pre­lim­i­nary surrender terms Hungary had eked out with the Soviet Union on Octo­ber 11. (Horthy Sr. abdi­cated in exchange for his son’s life.) Skor­zeny took father and son back to Germany, where the senior Horthy lived under round-the-clock SS guard until freed by elements of Lt. Gen. Alexander Patch’s Seventh U.S. Army. The younger Horthy survived his imprisonment at Dachau concentration camp.

Left: A gendarme from the Hungarian Interior Minis­try assists in sweeping up Buda­pest’s Jews. In the middle of June 1944 the Jews of Buda­pest, who made up just under one-quarter of the capi­tal’s popu­la­tion, were forci­bly relo­cated and required to reside in desig­nated “yellow-star houses,” 1,944 single-building mini-ghettos identi­fied by a yellow Star of David over the entrance. In the first days of the Arrow Cross coming to power in mid-Octo­ber, thou­sands of Jews were forced to move again, this time into two ghetto districts, where neutral states (Sweden, Switzer­land, Portu­gal, Spain, and the Vati­can) and the Inter­national Red Cross pro­vided protec­tion for those holding Schutz­paesse, or protec­tive pass­ports. Issued by employees of the neutral lega­tions, these pass­port-like docu­ments with official-looking stamps fre­quently saved Jews from deportation to the death camps.

Right: Arrow Cross militiamen cross St. George Square in the Castle Hill district of Buda near the Royal (Buda) Castle, the former resi­dence of the deposed Hunga­rian regent and head of state, Adm. Miklós Horthy. Photo probably taken on Octo­ber 15 or 16, 1944, when the Arrow Cross Party seized power in a German-engineered coup d’état.

Left: Jewish victims of Arrow Cross militia lie strewn in the court­yard-cum-ceme­tery of the Dohány Street Syna­gogue, which anchored the southern end of Buda­pest’s sealed-off General Ghetto of 70,000 Jews. The largest syna­gogue in Europe and the second-largest Jewish place of wor­ship in the world, “The Great Syna­gogue” (or “Tabak­gasse Syna­gogue” by which it was also known) was used as a base for Ger­man radio broad­casts and as a stable during the war. Over 2,000 ghetto residents who died from hunger and cold during the harsh winter of 1944–1945 were buried here. A rear court­yard a short distance away holds the “Memorial of the Hun­garian Jewish Martyrs”—at least 400,000 Hun­garian Jews were mur­dered by the Nazis and their Hun­garian col­labo­rators. The memo­rial is a polished metal sculp­ture resembling a weeping willow whose leaves bear inscriptions with the names of victims.

Right: “The Shoes on the Danube Promenade” memorial on the Pest (eastern) bank of the river in Buda­pest not far from the Hun­garian Par­lia­ment building. Executing the capital’s Jews on the blood­stained bank of the Danube was con­ven­ient because the river carried the bodies away. The Arrow Cross mur­derers—many of them still in their teens—would often force their victims—men, women, and children—to remove their shoes before shooting them. After all, shoes were a valu­able com­modity that could be used imme­di­ately or else traded on the black market. During the Arrow Cross Party’s reign of terror (mid-October 1944 to late January 1945), the Danube was known as “the Jewish Ceme­tery.” Installed in 2005, the poign­ant cast iron memo­rial of 60 pair of owner­less shoes commem­o­rates the 38,000 victims of such unimaginable hatred, brutality, and immorality.

Scenes from the Battle of Budapest 1944–1945 Set to Music and Words