On 15 May 1944, a train left northeastern Hungary carrying more than 3,000 people in sealed freight cars. The passengers had little food, no water, and almost no air. Their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Within hours of arrival, most would be dead.
The train was Hungarian. Its guards were Hungarian. Hungarian officials had organized the deportation, and Hungarian railway workers and infrastructure carried the victims across the country and into the Nazi killing system. In only 56 days, Hungary deported roughly 437,000 Jewish citizens to extermination camps, making the operation one of the fastest mass deportations of the Holocaust.
A National Trauma Becomes a Political Strategy
To understand how this happened, it is necessary to look back to the settlement imposed on Hungary after the First World War. The Treaty of Trianon stripped the country of about two-thirds of its territory and more than two-thirds of its prewar population. Large Hungarian-speaking communities suddenly lived beyond the country’s new borders, in territories assigned to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Trianon became more than a diplomatic defeat. It became the central wound of Hungarian politics. The demand to revise the settlement and recover lost lands united conservatives and radical nationalists alike. It also made Hungary vulnerable to any great power willing to promise territorial revision.
Miklós Horthy, a former Austro-Hungarian admiral, became regent in 1920. His regime was authoritarian, nationalist, and deeply anti-communist. The violence surrounding his rise, known as the White Terror, targeted socialists, communists, and Jews. Although Hungary retained a parliament and the appearance of constitutional government, political life was shaped by hierarchy, repression, and the drive to restore national greatness.
The Bargain with Nazi Germany
Hitler’s rise created a dangerous opportunity. Nazi Germany aimed to overturn the postwar European order, and that objective overlapped with Hungary’s desire to recover territory. Budapest therefore moved into Berlin’s orbit, expanding trade and diplomatic cooperation while accepting the racial and political direction of the Nazi regime.
The First Vienna Award in November 1938 returned parts of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary. The victory produced public celebrations and strengthened the belief that cooperation with Germany worked. But each territorial gain increased Hungary’s dependence on Hitler.
That dependence became clearer in 1940, when Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact. In April 1941, it participated in the invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia despite a recently signed friendship treaty. Prime Minister Pál Teleki, unable to reconcile the betrayal with his sense of national honor, took his own life. Hungary nevertheless proceeded, receiving territory after Yugoslavia was defeated.
War on the Eastern Front
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hungary entered the war on Germany’s side. The decision was driven by ideology, fear of losing German support, and the belief that participation would protect Hungary’s territorial gains. The consequences were disastrous.
The Second Hungarian Army was sent to the Eastern Front in 1942 with inadequate equipment and insufficient preparation. During the Soviet offensive on the Don River in January 1943, the army collapsed in extreme cold and overwhelming combat conditions. Between 120,000 and 150,000 men were killed, wounded, captured, or listed as missing. The disaster revealed the cost of the alliance, but it did not immediately break Hungary’s political dependence on Germany.
By then, the Arrow Cross movement, Hungary’s openly fascist party, had also become a significant force. Led by Ferenc Szálasi, it demanded a more radical alignment with Nazi Germany and regarded Horthy as too cautious. The government was caught between military defeat abroad and fascist pressure at home.
Occupation and the Deportation of Hungary’s Jews
By early 1944, Horthy’s government was exploring contacts with the Western Allies. Hitler responded by occupying Hungary on 19 March. Horthy remained regent, accepted a German-backed government, and appointed Döme Sztójay as prime minister. He believed that staying in office might limit the damage. Instead, the arrangement left the machinery of the Hungarian state available for mass murder.
Adolf Eichmann arrived with a small SS staff and a plan to deport Hungary’s Jewish population. Approximately 725,000 Jews still lived under Hungarian rule, despite years of antisemitic legislation. Germany supplied the overall purpose and pressure, but Hungarian authorities supplied the administration, gendarmerie, local officials, and railway system needed to carry it out.
The deportations began on 15 May. Authorities divided the country into zones, forced Jewish families into ghettos, moved them to collection points, and loaded them onto trains. The process advanced with administrative precision from the provinces toward Budapest. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, those who survived the journey faced selection for forced labor or immediate murder.
By 9 July, about 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported, most to Auschwitz. Approximately 320,000 were murdered on arrival or shortly afterward. The scale overwhelmed the camp’s crematoria, leading to open-air burnings and the use of mass graves. The speed of the operation was not the result of state collapse; it was the result of coordinated state action.
Choices, Warnings, and a Late Intervention
Information about Auschwitz was available while the deportations were under way. The reports produced by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler after their escape described the camp’s killing process and reached Allied and neutral officials. Religious leaders and foreign diplomats also pressed Horthy to act.
On 6 July 1944, Horthy ordered the deportations stopped. The decision helped preserve much of Budapest’s Jewish population, but it came after hundreds of thousands had already been sent to their deaths. It also left the institutions responsible for the deportations in place.
On 15 October, Horthy finally announced that Hungary would seek an armistice with the Soviet Union. The effort was badly prepared and lacked military support. Germany responded with Operation Panzerfaust, led by Otto Skorzeny. German forces abducted Horthy’s son and forced the regent to resign. The Arrow Cross then took power, and the remaining Jews of Budapest faced renewed terror.
The Arrow Cross and the Siege of Budapest
Under Szálasi’s government, Arrow Cross units murdered Jews in the streets and along the Danube. When railway deportations became increasingly difficult, forced marches sent tens of thousands toward Austria. Many died from exhaustion, hunger, exposure, or violence.
Rescue efforts offered a counterpoint to the state’s persecution. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings under Swedish protection. Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz created a parallel protection system, while papal nuncio Angelo Rotta distributed documents connected to the Vatican. Their actions, carried out under extraordinary danger, saved thousands.
Budapest became a battlefield in December 1944. Soviet forces surrounded the city, where roughly 800,000 civilians were trapped alongside German and Hungarian troops. The siege lasted until February 1945, leaving neighborhoods destroyed and civilians dead. Budapest fell on 13 February, and fighting in Hungary continued until April.
Memory, Responsibility, and the Cost of Revisionism
About 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, roughly three-quarters of the country’s prewar Jewish population. Jewish communities that had existed for centuries—of artisans, farmers, professionals, teachers, and families—were shattered. Hungary also suffered immense military and civilian losses, economic destruction, and the eventual loss of every territorial gain secured through its alliance with Hitler.
After the war, several officials involved in the deportations were tried and executed, including László Endre, László Baky, and Döme Sztójay. Yet the broader institutional responsibility of the state, police, civil administration, and railways was not fully confronted. Horthy was never tried for war crimes and spent his final years in exile, maintaining that his decisions had been necessary.
The argument that Hungary was only a victim of German occupation cannot explain the record. Germany imposed the occupation and directed the genocide, but Hungarian authorities had already built an antisemitic legal order, and Hungarian institutions carried out the concentration and deportation of their own citizens. Horthy’s eventual intervention saved lives, but it does not erase his earlier responsibility or the state’s central role.
Hungary’s wartime history is therefore not a simple story of coercion or innocence. It is a study in how grievance, territorial ambition, authoritarianism, and dependence can turn collaboration into catastrophe. The warning is broader than one country: mass violence often advances through ordinary offices, routine paperwork, police units, transport schedules, and officials who persuade themselves that obedience is a form of restraint.
Remembering this history honestly does not diminish a nation. It recognizes the choices made by governments and individuals, preserves the lives of those erased, and keeps open the question every society must ask when injustice is being normalized: what will we do before the machinery becomes too powerful to stop?
