In 1944-1945, Hungarian Jewry, one of Europe´s most significant Jewish communities, became the last victim of the Nazi extermination machinery.

Within less than two months - May 15 and July 10, 1944 - some 450 thousand people, almost the entire Jewish population of the countryside, were locked up in ghettoes and with break-neck speed deported mainly to the Auschwitz extermination camp with the collaboration of part of the Hungarian state apparatus, the gendarmerie and the police. In the course of forced labour, deportations, followed by death-marches and the Arrow Cross orgy in Budapest, close to half a million people lost their lives. The number of the Shoah´s European victims is estimated at about 6 million.   
 
The fate of Hungary´s Jews too was decisively affected by the increasing influence of the Third Reich and its racist ideology. German-Nazi influence in Hungarian political life and in public opinion increased in proportion to Hitler´s economic, political and diplomatic successes. The so-called first Jewish Law was passed on May 29, 1938, restricting to twenty percent the number of Jews in liberal professions, administration, and commerce, as well as in financial, commercial and industrial enterprises with a staff exceeding ten. (1938. XV. tc.) Some members of parliament voted against the bill and a group of Christian professionals publicly protested against it.

A second Jewish Law was passed on May 5, 1939, which further reduced the economic participation to five percent. Due to these laws, 250,000 Hungarian Jews lost their source of income. (1939. IV. tc.)

The third Jewish Law, passed on August 8, 1941, changed the definition of Jew according to the Nuremberg racial laws. (Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was regarded as a Jew). The law prohibited intermarriage, as well as sexual relations between Christians and Jews. (1941. XV. tc.)

By the summer of 1941 the anti-Jewish measures had placed Hungarian Jewry in a most disadvantageous position in every sphere of political, economic, cultural, and social life.

At the end of August, 1941 16-18.000 stateless Jews, who had earlier been driven out by the Hungarian authorities to Kamenyec-Podolszkij in German-held Galicia, were massacred by S.S. units, assisted by Ukrainian militiamen. The further deportation of Jews, whose Hungarian citizenship was in doubt, was stopped, due to the objection of some Christian politicians.      In the course of anti-partisan raids in January, 1942, Hungarian gendarmes and soldiers massacred some 800 Jews in the Bácska, mainly in Újvidék. The persons responsible for the murders were court-martialled by the Hungarian military leadership.

 Jews and those regarded as Jewish in accordance with the Law of 1942, could serve only in auxiliary units of the Hungarian Army. They were treated as de facto prisoners-of-war. Some 70 companies of forced labour servicemen were sent to the frontline with the Second Hungarian Army in the war against the Soviet Union. Many of the forced labour servicemen at the front fell victim to the cruelties of the army personnel in charge of them. Many enfeebled labour servicemen died also during the retreat from the front. Only a fraction of the 30,000 ordered to the frontline, managed to return. 

In July 1942 the Hungarian Parliament relegated the Jewish religion to a recognized denomination (1942. VIII. tc.), and gradually put in force further restrictive measures.

In line with the resolutions accepted on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, the Germans became more and more persistent in their demands to the Hungarian government for the ˝final solution˝ of the Jewish question, i.e. the marking of Jews with the Star of David, ghettoizing and deporting them. Despite mounting German pressure and the German´s categorical firmness, the government led by Miklós Kállay consistently evaded fulfilling the German demands, and refused to carry out the ˝final solution˝.

In the course of 1943 and at the beginning of 1944, the Kállay-government pursued secret negotiations with the Western Allies with a view to bailing out of the war. In December 1943 court-martial proceedings were initiated against those military leaders, who had participated in the January 1942 anti-Serbian and anti-Jewish atrocities in the Bácska. The Germans regarded this as a gesture towards the Allies, and became increasingly impatient and distrustful of Hungarian politics. 

On March 19, 1944. German troops occupied Hungary. The most tragic consequence of Nazi military presence was the annihilation of Europe´s largest intact Jewish community. The appearance in Budapest of the Gestapo and Adolf Eichmann´s Special Task Force, specializing in the ˝final solution of the Jewish question˝, spelt the beginning of the Hungarian genocide´s heart-rending tragedy. 

On March 22 a puppet government was set up under the premiership of the former Hungarian minister in Berlin, Döme Sztójay. The new regime´s minister of the interior Andor Jaross was in charge of Jewish affairs; however, actual execution of the anti-Jewish measures was directed by Laszlo Endre and Laszlo Baky, state secretaries of the Ministry of the Interior. Immediately after the entry of German troops into Hungary, hundreds of prominent Jews - mainly opposition politicians - were arrested in Budapest and several other cities.

Jewish organizations were dissolved throughout the country, and on March 20 on orders from the occupying Germans, a Central Jewish Council with eight members, headed by Samu Stern, leader of the Pest Jewish Community, was set up in Budapest. By the end of March, similar Jewish councils were constituted in several larger provincial towns. From the first days of the occupation, Eichmann and his collaborators endeavoured to persuade the members of the Central Jewish Council that deportations were not intended and that Hungarian Jewry would not undergo brutal treatment on condition that they obediently carry out German directives. All of this turned out to be lies. From March 31, 1944, the Sztójay government kept issuing order after order restricting the Jews´ living conditions. They were excluded from all non-governmental organizations, various forms of employment, their shops were closed down, their valuables confiscated, as were their cars, bicycles, radios and telephones. They were ordered to wear the yellow star, and the decision was taken to concentrate the Jews in ghettos and afterwards to deport them. The ghettoization process was entrusted to the Hungarian gendarmerie in collaboration with the local administration, which had by then been stacked with ˝reliable˝ personnel.

In line with Order No. 1540/1944, issued on April 26, the Jews of the provinces were crammed into ghettos. Ghettoization was started in the Eastern border regions, in Sub-Carpathian-Ruthenia.

Deportation of the majority of provincial Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp started on May 15.  At the same time as the Carpatho-Ruthenian action, ghettos were set up in different parts of the country. In the large Jewish population centres, ghettos were established in the vicinity of the towns, mainly in brickyards, barracks, or out in the open. Ghettoization was immediately followed by an inventory of the movable property and the sealing of the houses that had belonged to Jews. The Jews were permitted to add only a few items of food and clothing to their scanty baggage during the inventory. The living conditions of Jews forced into makeshift ghettos were characterized by overcrowding and lack of elementary hygienic facilities. There were numerous cases of suicide. Only men ordered to perform forced labour-service were exempt from deportation.

After the tragic completion of the deportations of over 400,000 victims from the provinces, preparations went under way for the deportation of Budapest Jews. All Jews obligated to wear the distinguishing sign had to move to designated houses in Budapest marked with a yellow star.
In May 1944 the Auschwitz memorandum, which made it clear that the Germans were killing the Jewish prisoners en masse in the gas chambers, reached responsible quarters in Budapest. By then a number of prominent people had protested to Regent Miklós Horthy about the deportations. Among others, President Roosevelt, Pope Pius XII the International Red Cross, the king of Sweden, foreign diplomats in Budapest, representatives of the Churches, such as Prince-Primate Justinianus Serédi and the Protestant Bishop László Ravasz.

Informed of the Auschwitz memoranda, and on the advice of his closest circle, and as a result of these interventions Regent Horthy brought a halt to further deportations on July 6. At the same time Baky and Endre, the chief Hungarian organizers of the ˝Entjudung˝, were dismissed. Meanwhile, as many Jews as possible were successfully placed under the protection of some neutral states (e.g., Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal), which supplied them with papers and safe-conduct passes (Schutzbrief).

On October 15, the fate of the Budapest Jews took a dramatic turn for the worse. After Horthy´s unsuccessful attempt to extricate Hungary from the war, the Germans activated the Arrow-Cross Party of Ferenc Szálasi, which immediately initiated an unprecedented reign of anti-Jewish terror. Eichmann, who had been obliged to leave Hungary on August 24 (after succeeding in deporting the inmates of the Kistarcsa and Sárvár camps, against Horthy´s orders), returned to Budapest on October 17 and resumed his activity for deporting the capital´s Jews. As a preliminary step in the deportations, a few days after the Arrow Cross putsch, the Jewish male population aged 16 to 60 was ordered out to work in fortifications around the capital. At the end of October and the first half of November, some 50,000 Jews, men and women, were driven toward the Austrian border to work on fortifications. A high percentage of persons on this ˝death march˝ perished on the way due to hardship and brutal treatment.  Members of the neutral diplomatic corps in Hungary tried to put pressure on the Szálasi-government. The luckier Jews, in possession of genuine or forged safe-conduct passes, were placed into the so-called international ghetto, while the others were forced into the proper ghetto. From the Arrow-Cross seizure of power until the liberation of the Pest ghetto, about 98,000 of the capital´s Jews lost their lives in further marches and in train transports, as well as through Arrow-Cross extermination squads, starvation, disease, and cases of suicide. Some of the victims were shot and thrown into the Danube. Tens of thousands of the persecuted were helped by the capital´s citizens and the Christian Churches.

The Pest ghetto was liberated on January 18, 1945. On February 13, 1945, all of Budapest was occupied by the Red Army.  Government Regulation No. 200/1945 issued by the Provisional National Government in the spring of 1945, repealed the earlier discriminative regulations and the disgraceful Anti-Jewish Laws.
          
Inscriptions in the hall:

˝he willingly killed for pleasure not only on command˝ (Miklós Radnóti: Fragment) 

˝The antithesis of the Teutonic cross [swastika] is the simple cross˝  (Sándor Márai: The Catholic Front; In. Újság, June 25. 1933.) 

Rescuers in the Holocaust - photomontage Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?) Swedish diplomat
Béla Varga (1903-1995) parish priest of Balatonboglár, parliamentary deputy, Speaker of the House 1946-47
Antal Uhl (1902-1982) Hungarian pastor in Paris
Gábor Sztéhló (1909-1974) Lutheran pastor
Margit Slachta (1884-1974) nun, politician
József Éliás (1914-1995) reverend
József Pór (1883-1964) abbot of Bonyhád
Sándor Pintér (1910-1987) parish priest of Balatonalmádi
baron Vilmos Apor (1892-1945) diocesan bishop Righteous of the Nations The list of the Righteous of the Nations has been provided by the Yad Vashem Institute.