Aleksandar Pavlović and Srđan Atanasovski

From Myth to Territory: Vuk Karadžić, Kosovo Epics and the Role of Nineteenth-Century Intellectuals in Establishing National Narratives*

 

In this article, we argue that the nineteenth-century Serbian scholars had a pivotal role in establishing Kosovo as the crucial subject of Serbian literature, culture, and politics. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in the collections of Vuk Karadžić, the founder of modern Serbian culture, we trace his role in making Kosovo the foundational myth of the whole Serbian nation from the nineteenth-century surge in Romantic nationalism onwards. In particular, we scrutinize Karadžić’s editorial procedures as parts of a process of cultural inscription representing a cultural transformation that made the Kosovo epic an instance of the invention of national tradition in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms.

 

Keywords: Kosovo epic, Serbian oral tradition, Vuk Karadžić

Introduction

This article examines the role of nineteenth-century Serbian scholars, and in particular Vuk Karadžić, in establishing Kosovo as the key theme of Serbian literature, culture, and politics. The Kosovo myth was established by Serbian folklorists in the early nineteenth century. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in the collections of Vuk Karadžić, the founder of modern Serbian culture, we trace the transformation of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Weltanschauung of the Serbs of the Habsburg Empire (especially of southern Hungary, where Karadžić collected most of the Kosovo songs). In particular, we examine Karadžić’s editorial procedures as instances of a process of cultural inscription that transformed the Kosovo epic into a typical example of invented tradition in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms.

Serbian oral songs about the Kosovo battle published by Vuk Karadžić are generally still perceived as having been collected rather than invented. This long-established conviction in the secondary literature has primarily been the result of two principal underlying presumptions: that Karadžić was a reliable collector and editor who refrained from altering or adding to the texts he published and that the Kosovo songs were popular and widespread among the Serbs for centuries. This view also has the support of the glorifiers of the Serbian Kosovo epic and, more recently, those who see it as the source of conflicts in the Balkans.1 Focusing on the “universal” or “eternal” qualities of the Kosovo epic, both approaches fail to identify Karadžić’s interventions as cultural inscriptions representing a cultural transformation which makes the Kosovo epic in his edition an instance of invented national tradition in Hobsbawm’s terms. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in Karadžić’s collections, we trace his contributions to the establishment of the Kosovo epic in its present form. We make two principal arguments: first, Karadžić secured for the Kosovo epic songs a far more prominent role than the role they appeared to occupy within the oral tradition itself; and second, he shaped their published form, modeling them to fit the existing model of folk songs at the time.

Intellectuals and Nation-building

The role of intellectuals in promoting national agendas has been recognized in the existing scholarship. In the wake of the publication of the works of Benedict Anderson,2 Anthony D. Smith,3 Ernest Gellner4 and others in the early 1980s, it became a commonplace in the humanities to refer to the idea of the nation as a late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European invention, closely related to the emergence of the modern state, grounded in popular sovereignty after the French Revolution.5 Meanwhile, the pivotal role of intellectuals as the true creators of the “imagined communities” in the nation-formation process has been systematically studied.6 What such studies reveal is that intellectuals did not merely reveal or discover facts about a nation, they also created or simply fabricated these facts and “truths,” thus “traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and often invented.”7 Specifically, in the context of East Central Europe it has been observed that the intellectuals strived to establish “national history” both as a scientific discipline and as a volume of texts marketed towards popular audiences, thus blurring the border between science and the national imagination and the border between academic and lay readers.8

In the processes of inventing (“discovering”) their national traditions, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals delegated a role of particular importance to their oral traditions and folklore. To be sure, Romantic nationalism promoted by Johann Gottfried Herder, the Grimm Brothers, and other European scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century already established folklore and folk songs in particular as the “soul of the nation” and the greatest expression of the national spirit.9 However, these ideas and publications of Herder and the Grimm Brothers had a particularly strong impact on the cultures and nations of Eastern and Northern Europe. As Guiseppe Cocchiara argues, Eastern and Northern Europeans had a relatively modest literary tradition in comparison to the French, English, or Italians, for example. Without strong roots in written literature, national intellectuals thus turned to oral literature as “a rich intellectual, moral, and social fortune, both the document of their traditions and the monument of their language.”10

Under such circumstances, the folk epic was more than likely to attain a privileged position in society. Epic songs typically focus on national heroes, battles against invaders, and the glorious deeds of ancestors, and thus often serve as confirmation of a glorious national past and a source of identity representations. As John Miles Foley reminds us, “for national identity, epic is a foundational genre.”11 According to Beissinger, Tylus and Woofford, this peculiar and complex connection of epic to national and local cultures or, as they call it, the “political explosiveness” or “political potency” of epic is most evident “in the intense reimagining of epic undertaken by most emerging European nations as a means of coming to self-knowledge as a nation.”12 Michael Branch and Vilmos Voigt also view this exceptional early nineteenth-century interest in epic poetry in Eastern Europe as a part of the process of national formation and self-affirmation. As they emphasize, oral poetry often served as “a convenient substitute for written history” for Eastern European nations, and the epic was the only proper form for this subject. Voigt describes this as “the constant urge to establish or re-establish a heroic past from and in the form of heroic songs as part of the cultural tradition and identity.”13 Branch conveniently labels this practice “the invention of national epic” and “the patriotic imperative to produce an epic,” and he follows the birth of several mystifications published as “ancient” epic poems that were “discovered” in the first half of the nineteenth century.14

Vuk Karadžić and the Making of the Kosovo Epic

The aforementioned scholars also consider Serbian epic songs collected and edited by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) throughout the nineteenth century as especially relevant and illustrative examples of the importance and exceptional role of epic poetry in these processes.15 Born in a rural family of what at the time was the Ottoman Empire, Karadžić came to Vienna in 1813 after the collapse of the first Serbian uprising against the Ottoman rule, where he played a major role in the modernization of Serbian literature and culture. He reformed the language and orthography by promoting the vernacular instead of the Slavonic-Serbian language used at the time. He also collected the folklore of Serbian peasants and herders and is considered to have been the first Serbian folklorist, ethnographer, and literary critic.16 Throughout his life, Karadžić meticulously collected Serbian oral epic and lyric songs, and he published three editions with ten volumes altogether between 1814 and 1862. In addition, through his acquaintances with leading scholars of the time, such as Jacob Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Leopold Ranke, and his many publications, Karadžić drew the attention of scholars and lay readers to Serbian folk poetry and Serbian culture in Europe. Two of his younger friends and associates, the prominent Serbian poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and Montenegrin ruler and writer Petar II Petrović Njegoš, soon followed Karadžić’s founding work and published their editions of epic songs, mostly collected in the territory of present-day Montenegro. Milutinović printed his A Montenegrin and Herzegovinian Songbook (Pjevanija Crnogorska i Hercegovačka) in 1833 and 1837, and Njegoš edited The Serbian Mirror (Ogledalo srbsko) in 1846. During the second half of the nineteenth century, comprehensive collections of the oral traditional poetry of other South Slavs, such as Jukić-Martić’s Bosnian and Herzegovinian Folk Songs (Narodne pjesme bosanske i hercegovačke), Kosta Hörmann’s The Folk Songs of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims (Narodne pjesme Muhamedovaca u Bosni i Hercegovini), and the first four volumes of Croatian Folk Songs (Hrvatske narodne pjesme), were published.17 The oral tradition documented by these collectors thus corresponded to their ideas about the Serbian (Croatian, Muslim, South Slav...) folk epic as a narrative that contained the national past and preserved a living memory of the former national heroes and glory. This notion of the folk epic as the expression of popular and collective views of national history was codified and canonized by Karadžić’s and Njegoš’s followers during the second half of the nineteenth century.18

The Kosovo epic published by Karadžić in the early nineteenth century had all the virtues required of a national tradition. It comprises a separate and distinct cycle of some 15 related epic songs describing the events of the Battle of Kosovo, fought in 1389 between the Serbs and the Ottomans. Over the centuries, the battle acquired mythical status and evolved into one of the central national symbols in Serbian culture, referred to as the Kosovo tradition or the Kosovo myth. These oral epic songs about Kosovo are by far the most important source of the myth, and both Karadžić himself and later scholars in particular appreciated and praised this cycle as central to the entire Serbian oral tradition.19 In these songs, the Battle of Kosovo is depicted as the decisive one that saw the downfall of Prince Lazar, the Medieval Serbian Empire, and Serbia’s independence, while at the same time it established the Ottomans as the new masters. The Kosovo epic contains various elements of literary, religious, and popular origin, such as the last supper on the eve of the battle, the treason of Lazar’s brother-in-law Vuk Branković, the heroic death of Miloš Obilić, who killed the Ottoman Sultan Murad, Lazar’s deliberate choice of death and the kingdom of heaven over earthly fame, the sorrows of mothers and maidens who lost their sons and grooms, etc.

As far as the selection of the material is concerned, it has long been established that Karadžić’s collections are anthologies rather than collections.20 His manuscripts, for example, show that he published only a small percentage of all the songs that he had at his disposal. Karadžić himself was ready to admit that his publications were not representative of the whole of Serbian oral tradition, but rather contained only its best achievements. Responding in 1833 to a comment about his exclusiveness in publishing the songs, he explained his views: “I believe it to be foolish not to choose, if one can, [and I believe] that our folk songs would not get such praise and glory if I had published them all, and without any order.”21

Karadžić’s particular interest in the songs that celebrated the heroes from the times of the Medieval Serbian Empire and the Kosovo battle forms another important aspect of his editorial approach. For instance, in his earliest (1814) songbook, he stressed the particular importance of these songs that “preserve former Serbian being and name.”22 Such an attitude had significant implications with regards to his editorial practice, since in the first decades Karadžić focused mainly on documenting these songs and heroes at the expense of other popular subjects. For example, more than half of approximately twenty-four songs that he collected from Tešan Podrugović (1783?–1820?), who was Karadžić’s favorite source for Serbian epic poetry, are about medieval heroes and subjects, and Marko Kraljević alone appears as a hero in nine of these songs.23 However, these older subjects and heroes were far less prominent if placed in the context of Podrugović’s entire repertoire, which is due to Karadžić’s selective process of collecting songs. As Karadžić himself noted, Podrugović knew “at least one hundred of songs such as this one that I wrote down from him, especially about certain highwaymen from the [Dalmatian] Coast, Bosnia and Herzegovina.”24 In accordance with his editorial preferences, however, Karadžić collected and published all Podrugović’s songs about Marko Kraljević, but very few about more recent heroes. Another similar example is his transcription of Starac Milija’s (?–after 1822) songs, who was another important source for Karadžić. For years, Karadžić persistently tried to arrange a meeting with this singer, because he had heard that Milija knew two songs about medieval Serbian aristocracy exceptionally well, The Wedding of Maksim Crnojevic (Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića) and Banović Strahinja (Banovic Strahinja). Again, it shows his special interest in the songs about subjects and heroes from the times of the Serbian Empire. In total, Karadžić managed to write down three songs about older heroes from this singer, and only one about a more recent local character, but he left testimony that Milija knew many more songs about these newer events.25 In both cases, therefore, the bulk of the singer’s repertoire consisted of songs about relatively recent local characters and events. Karadžić, however, documented and published only those describing the exploits of older heroes, thus giving the songs about the “former Serbian being and name” a more prominent position in his early collections that they appear to have had in the early nineteenth-century Serbian oral tradition.

The case of the Kosovo epic is equally telling. Karadžić appreciated these songs in particular and made efforts to collect all the songs available at the time. For instance, upon hearing that a blind female singer from Fruška Gora near Novi Sad performed a song called The Downfall of the Serbian Empire (Propast carstva Srpskoga), he immediately wrote to Lukijan Mušicki, the prior (iguman) of the nearby monastery, and asked him to collect Kosovo songs about Lazar from a particular blind singer. As Karadžić explicitly says: “we will hardly find these songs anywhere else.”26 This statement was logical, given that he had collected practically all the songs about Kosovo in this narrow region of Fruška Gora, and perhaps even suspected the tradition was not present anywhere else. Thus, in the following period, he persistently reminded Mušicki to collect three Kosovo songs from the blind woman from Grgurevci; finally, in late 1816, Mušicki informed Karadžić that the woman had been brought to the Šišatovac monastery, and that deacon Stefan had written down the songs she had sung.27 During these years, Karadžić collected several other songs of the Kosovo epic, as a rule from the blind singers whore sided and performed in the area of Fruška Gora.

Apparently, Karadžić suggests that these particular songs about Lazar were neither widely popular nor widely known. His later collections confirm the point made in this letter. Namely, although in the following decades Karadžić established a network of associates in Serbia proper, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, he later published only one more song about Lazar, which describes the building of Ravanica, a Serbian Orthodox monastery in the Kučaj Mountains that was constructed as an endowment of Prince Lazar.28 Other collectors who published songs from the mountainous regions where the Serbian oral epic tradition was practiced, such as the aforementioned Sarajlija and Njegoš, also found no instances of the Kosovo epic. Even in the early twentieth century, Slovene folklorist Matija Murko studied contemporary oral tradition in Bosnia and Herzegovina and reported that the Kosovo songs did not feature prominently among the repertoires of the local singers:

 

I was surprised that the Bosnian and Hercegovinian Orthodox did not know the magnificent songs relating to the ancient history of Serbia as well as I had expected, any more than did the Orthodox people of Montenegro. When I collected recordings in Sarajevo, the Serbian intellectuals present asked a singer from the region if he knew the poems about Prince Lazar, Miloš Obilić, and Vuk Branković. He answered: “No, I’m illiterate.”29

This indicates that, rather than being widely popular at the time, the songs about Prince Lazar were mostly confined to the Srem region surrounding the monasteries of Fruška Gora.

This is hardly surprising. After the so-called Great Migrations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the centers of the Serbian Orthodox Church moved from Kosovo and central Serbia to the north, and Fruška Gora, with important Orthodox monasteries, became the center of Serbian religious life. Moreover, in 1697 the monks from Ravanica moved Lazar’s relics to the Vrdnik monastery in Fruška Gora. The monastery annually commemorated the day of Lazar’s death, and medieval texts, such as the aforementioned Slovo o knezu Lazaru, were read on the occasion.30 This shows both how the local cult of Lazar found its way into this local oral tradition and how Karadžić significantly contributed to the establishment of this tradition as a (and almost the) national tradition.

From the Unified Lazarica Poem to the Separate Kosovo Songs

The arrangement of the Kosovo songs in Karadžić’s collections forms another important element of his influence over the Kosovo epic. The Kosovo tradition in Fruška Gora existed in the form of one long poem about Kosovo. Karadžić’s awareness of this fact is corroborated in his Serbian Dictionary (Srpski rječnik) from 1818, in which he acknowledges the existence of a long poem sung by the blind singers who called it Lazarica and specifies that “all other Kosovo songs are only parts of Lazarica.”31 Moreover, Karadžić’s manuscripts contain one instance of such a lengthy Kosovo epic poem. In 1820, a local priest informed Karadžić that he had collected one large Kosovo song from a blind singer residing in the same area in which other Kosovo songs had been collected.32 The manuscript of the song, called About the Battle of Kosovo (O Boju Kosovskom), contains exactly 2,439 decasyllables,33 which is approximately twenty times more than an average Serbian oral song and over twice the length of The Wedding of Maksim Crnojević (Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića), by far the longest song published by Karadžić.

So, why did Karadžić publish the Kosovo epic as separate songs if he apparently knew that they form one long poem? This editorial choice may seem unlikely, even counterintuitive, if one keeps in mind the fact that the early folklorists as a rule approached their material in the opposite way. James Macpherson and Elias Lönnrot, for example, typically regarded the Iliad as the role model of an oral tradition, and they unified short Scottish and Finnish oral songs to form long, narrative poems (The Works of Ossian and Kalevala).

The rationale for Karadžić’s approach is that he wanted to accommodate the Kosovo epic into the existing model of a Serbian folk song. He had started his folkloristic career in 1814 in Vienna under the influence of the Slovene scholar Bartholomeus (Jernej) Kopitar and Jacob Grimm, who preferred the songs collected from illiterate, common people in rural areas, which they regarded as true, genuine, and authentic folk songs. Grimm, for example, recommended to his correspondents and associates that they collect songs in remote regions uncorrupted by urban civilization and education. According to Grimm, “On the high mountains and in the small villages, where there are neither paths or roads, and where the false Enlightenment has had no access and was unable to do its work, there still lies hidden in darkness a treasure: the customs of our forefathers, their sagas and their faith.”34 According to him, the creativity and imagination characteristic of folk poetry spring and originate from these deepest and most conservative parts of the peasantry.35 For him, therefore, the notion of the folk as a creator was collective and limited to a particular background and particular class, specifically the rural population living in remote areas detached from the influence of official literature and civilization.

It is precisely for this authenticity that Karadžić’s early collections, conveniently published at the peak of scholarly interest in folk poetry, almost instantly gained international repute and unanimous recognition among leading scholars of the time as great achievements of “natural poetry.” The collections offered a number of folk songs “uncorrupted” by literacy and scholarly influence, as Karadžić wrote in his first short collection from 1814.36 In his lengthy review of Karadžić’s edition of Srpske narodne pjesme in 1823, Jacob Grimm similarly emphasized that the songs had been collected directly “aus dem warmen Munde des Volkes,” and he wrote that the works were the most important and valuable epic songs for an understanding of heroic poetry since the Homeric epic, and Kopitar claimed that no European nation could match the Serbs in the quality of their folk poetry.37

The “problem” with the Kosovo epic was that it hardly met these standards. Not only was it apparently not so popular “on the high mountains and in the small villages,” but it had been sung by a professional guild of blind singers located around Fruška Gora.38 As shown by scarce bits of evidence from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, blind singers were trained to sing epic and other songs in the town of Irig at the center of Fruška Gora, and they had the assistance of the local community and nearby monasteries.39 According to the few available sources, the “school” actually consisted of a basement or an abandoned building where blind singers practiced during the winter. A report from 1826 testifies that “these blind singers form a sort of a guild among themselves, like the German Meistersingers; older singers educate the younger ones, and that is how these wonderful songs are preserved. Those blind singers perform mostly at fairs, gatherings, and other similar occasions.”40 Scholars have explained why Karadžić himself makes no mention of the “Irig School”: any emphasis on this institutional and professional manner of epic singing would compromise the idea of the collectivity of the oral tradition and its popular basis.41 The oral technique and repertoire were not the manifestations of a living oral tradition, as in Montenegro and Herzegovina, but were part of a professionalized and institutionalized procedure. Consequently, Karadžić decided to divide Lazarica into separate songs and present it as other short songs collected from the highlanders from Montenegro and Herzegovina, “where almost every house has a gusle” (the traditional one-string instrument that typically accompanies the oral epic performance).42

A detailed philological analysis would likely reveal other, less prominent forms of Karadžić’s interventions in the Kosovo epic. For instance, in his earliest collections he published some words originally performed by singers in the ekavian dialect used in Fruška Gora in the ijekavian that was spoken in Herzegovina and Montenegro, for instance using bijelo and vjerna instead of belo and verna. While this may not appear terribly significant, it was in line with his belief at the time that the songs that were of Herzegovinian origin but had been collected in southern Hungary should be published in the Herzegovinian dialect. This gave the impression that the songs had been collected from the rural mountainous parts of the central Balkans, rather than from the areas of what at the time was southern Hungary, the culture of which was strongly influenced by literacy and Serbian Orthodox church. These changes could serve as fabricated arguments in support of his view according to which hall Serbian heroic songs originated from Herzegovina, while the culture of the more urban and literate Serbs from the Habsburg Empire was not of great value. Thus, he wanted to ground new Serbian culture on an illiterate oral and epic tradition and hence presented the Kosovo epic as the highest expression of this illiterate rural population. But the high ethical values and expressions of advanced culture in the Kosovo epic were made possible precisely through combinations of oral and written, urban and rural, European and Orthodox cultures.

In addition, although Karadžić declared that the songs he published had been collected directly from the singers as part of the living oral tradition, he did occasionally use existing written sources. Thus, in his first collection he published Hasanaginica not, as he claims, on the basis of his childhood memory, but on the basis of Alberto Fortis’s book Viaggio in Dalmatia, published in Venice in 1774, and he continued to reprint it regularly in the later editions. The same applies to several other songs for which Karadžić claimed to be part of the living oral tradition, but which in fact were taken from printed sources.43

Svetozar Matić and Miodrag Maticki also suggested that several of Karadžić’s Kosovo songs and songs about older subjects from Montenegro had not been collected directly from oral singers, but rather had been taken from earlier manuscript collections.44 According to their suggestions, in addition to transforming certain ekavian dialectical forms into ijekavian, Karadžić made other changes when editing the Kosovo epic. For instance, he inserted some verses from other songs, relied on the Kosovo songs available in unpublished manuscripts of the educated Serbs of the time, and even possibly falsely attributed some fragments of the Kosovo epic which he took from the manuscripts to his father, Stefan. However, without Karadžić’s original manuscripts, these contentions remain a matter of dispute.

Finally, although Karadžić demanded that his associates write down the songs accurately, he did not always respect these high methodological demands and principles himself, and quite often he made certain changes and corrections or altered certain phrases in the texts he published. The difficulty with identifying these changes, however, lies in the fact that Karadžić did not keep the manuscripts of the songs he published. As Živomir Mladenović indicated, this might be a consequence of his intention to shrink his voluminous archive, but he also may have sought to conceal the actual amount of editorial changes he had made.45 Karadžić’s manuscripts thus consisted mostly of the songs that he received from his associates after 1832 and which remained unpublished during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his archive still contains some writings made in the earliest period of his work which enable us to create a provisional image of his overall editorial procedure. Živomir Mladenović’s comprehensive analysis of Karadžić’s manuscripts identified three basic types of changes in the texts that Karadžić had published.46 The songs that Karadžić personally wrote down from his best singers, such as Filip Višnjić, he edited practically without any changes, apart from punctuation and minor corrections. The preserved part of the manuscript of the song “Knez Ivan Knežević,” collected from Filip Višnjić in 1815, for example, contains only two slight divergences from the published texts. Karadžić published the verse Pred bijelu pred Brodačku crkvu as Pred Brodačku pred bijelu crkvu, and he changed Ni Ivanu kogodi zavali to Ni Ivanu kogodi zafali. These changes thus only affect word order or orthography in some cases, which has little to do with folklore and has relevance in the context of his efforts to reform Serbian grammar and orthography. In the songs that Karadžić himself had written down on the basis of renditions by less accomplished singers, Mladenović observes that he intervened more frequently, often changing the word order, substituting phrases, or inserting certain verses.47 Finally, in the songs that Karadžić received from his associates, Mladenović argues, he felt free to intervene aggressively and add or remove whole verses or even series of verses.48

Conclusion

In conclusion, Karadžić’s editorial method and procedure should not be judged too severely, especially when placed in the context of his time and compared with the methods used by Macpherson and Lönnrot. In general, Karadžić collected many oral songs himself, and he persistently searched for the best singers and quite successfully avoided obviously literary epic songs and poems that some of his contemporaries considered oral songs and published as examples of the purest folk poetry. Foley’s conclusion that “his editing was light in comparison with the usual practice of the time”49 thus appears justified.

Nevertheless, when talking about the Kosovo epic, we believe that the aforementioned analysis exemplifies the impact of Vuk Karadžić and the nineteenth-century conceptions of folklore and folk songs on editing, codifying, and interpreting the Kosovo epic at the time. Most importantly, Karadžić separated an existing long Kosovo poem into smaller epic songs dedicated to particular events and parts of the legend. In addition, we revisited the commonly held idea about the Kosovo songs being widely popular among the Serbs for centuries, which persists to this day in the “glorifying” and “critical” approaches to the Kosovo legend, and we suggested that Karadžić and later scholars contributed substantially to this exceptional status of the Kosovo songs. Thus, we argued that Karadžić, though his interventions are certainly not as drastic as those made by many of his contemporaries, had a distinguished and formative role in the codification of the Kosovo epic in its present form.

The impact of Karadžić’s Kosovo epic on the formation of Serbian nationalism is hard to overemphasize. Since its inception, the Kosovo myth has been one of the cornerstones of the discourse, which is due not only to its purported vernacular popularity, but primarily because of the political potency of the myth. Namely, the story of the Serbian medieval state provided an enviable legitimacy to the current political claims of Serbian nationalism, especially in order to vindicate specific territorial claims. This comes as no surprise, since European national movements of the day generally relied heavily on medieval history for legitimacy, particularly in order to define themselves in spatial terms. As Patrick J. Geary argues, the Middle Ages were in the nineteenth century seen as a time of “primary acquisition,” when the European lands were supposedly rightfully parceled out by the historic nations.50 Since the Kosovo epic made it possible to see the vast swathe of land in the hands of Ottoman Empire at the time as the “primary acquisition” of the Serbian nation, the myth served not only as a literary achievement, but also as a veritable battle cry and a trump card of Serbian expansionistic politics.51 Its popularity has been fostered through various adaptations since the mid-nineteenth century up to the recent times. One of the early and most influential was the publication in 1871 in Belgrade of the poems arranged by the “epic alignment” by Stojan Novaković, followed by an edition in Zagreb the following year, and entitled simply Kosovo, in an effort to present a comprehensive and succinct plotline.52 The Kosovo epic has won praise the world over, as during the first half of the twentieth century, the poems were typically included in the anthologies of world epics and singled out as one of the great folk epic achievements in general.53 More recently, the tale has featured prominently both in the agenda of Serbian nationalists, who saw in it the nation’s commitment to metaphysical values and heroism,54 and to Western authors, who referred to it as the source of an explanation for much of the troubles and atrocities in the Balkans.55 Perhaps shifting the focus from allegedly centennial and metaphysical features of the Kosovo myth to the contributions made by Karadžić and other nineteenth century figures to the Kosovo epic and its establishment as invented tradition will bring some welcome moderation into discussion of its present contested status.

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Hrvatske narodne pjesme [Croatian folk songs]. 4 vols. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1896–99.

Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Jukić, Ivan Frano, and Grga Martić, eds. Narodne pjesme bosanske i hercegovačke [Bosnian and Herzegovinian folk songs]. Osijek: 1858.

Kamenetsky, Christa. The Brothers Grimm & Тheir Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica (1814); Narodna srbska pjesnarica (1815) [Little simple folk Slavonic-Serbian songbook (1814); Folk Serbian Songbook (1815)]. Vol. 1 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića [The collected works of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić], edited by Vladan Nedić. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1965.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Prepiska I (1811–1821) [Correspondence]. Vol. 20 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, edited by Golub Dobrašinović. Belgrade: Prosveta 1988.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Srpske narodne pjesme I [Serbian folk songs]. Vol. 4 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, edited by Vladan Nedić. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1975.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Srpske narodne pjesme II [Serbian folk songs]. Vol. 5 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, edited by Vladan Nedić. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1976.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Srpske narodne pjesmeizne objavljenih rukopisa Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića [Serbian folk songs from the unpublished manuscripts of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić], edited by Živomir Mladenović and Vladan Nedić. Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1974.

Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović. Srpski Rječnik 1818 [Serbian dictionary]. Vol. 2 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, edited by Pavle Ivić. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1966.

Lavrin, Janko. “Historical Preface.” In: Kosovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs, edited by Helen Rootham, 9–20. Oxford: Blackwell, 1920.

Malcolm, Noel. Kosovo: A Short History. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Matić, Svetozar. Naš narodni ep i naš stih: ogledi i studije [Our folk epic and our verse: Essays and studies]. Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1964.

Maticki, Miodrag. “Jezik u jeziku slepih guslara” [A language in the language of the blind singers”]. In Sima Milutinović Sarajlija: Književno delo i kulturnoistorijska uloga, edited by Marta Frajnd, 169–74. Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1993.

Maticki, Miodrag. Istorija kao predanje [History as oral history]. Belgrade: Rad, 1989.

Mladenović, Živomir. Traganja za Vukom [In search of Vuk]. Tršić–Belgrade: Vukovsabor–Rad, 1987.

Mojašević, Miljan. Jakob Grim i srpska narodna književnost: Književno istorijske i poetološke osnove [Jacob Grimm and Serbian folk literature: Literary-historical and poetical foundations]. Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1983.

Murko, Matija. “The Singers and their Epic Songs.” Oral Tradition 5 (1990): 107–30.

Murko, Matija. Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike: Putovanja u godinama 1930–1932 [In search of Serbo-Croatian folk epics: Travels from 1930–1932]. 2 vols. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1951.

Nedić, Vladan. “O prvoj i drugoj Vukovoj Pjesnarici” [On the first and the second Vuk’s Songbook]. In Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica (1814); Narodna srbska pjesnarica (1815) [Little simple folk Slavonic-Serbian Songbook (1814); Folk Serbian Songbook (1815)]. Vol. 1 of Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića [The collected works of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić], edited by Vladan Nedić, 367–80. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1965.

Nedić, Vladan. Vukovi pevači [Vuk’s singers]. Edited by Radmila Pešić. Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1981.

Novaković, Stojan. Kosovo: Srpske narodne pjesme o boju na Kosovu: Pokušaj da se sastave u cjelinu kao spjev [Kosovo: Serbian folks songs about the Kosovo Battle: An attempt at unifying them into an epic]. Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1871.

O Vuku Karadžiću: Studije i eseji [About Vuk Karadžić: Studies and essays]. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1968.

Pavlović, Aleksandar. “Rereading the Kosovo Epic: Origins of the ‘Heavenly Serbia’ in the Oral Tradition.”Journal of Serbian Studies 23 (2009): 83–96.

Popović, Miodrag. Vidovdan i časni krst: Ogled iz književne arheologije [St. Vitus and the Holy Cross: An essay in literary archaeology]. Belgrade: Slovo ljubve, 1976.

Samardžić, Radovan, Sima Ćirković, Olga Zirojević, Radmila Tričković, Dušan T. Bataković, Veselin Đuretić, Kosta Čavoški, and Atanasije Jevtić. Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji [Kosovo and Metohija in the Serbian history]. Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1989.

Samardžić, Radovan. Kosovsko opredeljenje: Istorijski ogledi [Decision on Kosovo: Historical views]. Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1990.

Skerlić, Jovan. Omladina i njena književnost: Izučavanja o nacionalnom i književnom romantizmu kod Srba [Youth and its literature: The investigations of Serbian national and literary romanticism]. Belgrade: Srpska Kraljevska Akademija, 1906.

Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Sundhaussen, Holm. Geschichte Serbiens: 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Vienna: Böhlau, 2007.

Šurmin, Đuro. Povijest književnosti hrvatske i srpske [The History of Croatian and Serbian literature]. Zagreb: Lav. Hartman, 1898.

Voigt, Vilmos. “Primus Inter Pares: Why Was Vuk Karadžić the Most Influential Folklore Scholar in South-Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Uses of Tradition: A Comparative Enquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic, and Africa, edited by Michael Branch and Celia Hawkesworth, 179–93. London–Helsinki: School of Slavonic and East European Studies–Finnish Literature Society, 1994.

Weber, Max. “The Nation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 171–79. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.

* This article is based on research that Aleksandar Pavlović conducted during his fellowship at the New Europe College in Bucharest, for which he expresses his utmost gratitude to NEC board and staff, and Srđan Atanasovski’s participation on the project Serbian Musical Identities within Local and Global Frameworks: Traditions, Changes, Challenges (no. 177004 /2011–2016/) funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Republic of Serbia.

András Szécsényi

Development and Bifurcation of an Institution

The University Voluntary Labor Service and the Compulsory National Defense Labor Service of the Horthy Era

 

Previous studies of the Hungarian labor service have been characterized by an exclusive interest in the years between 1939 and 1945. Accordingly, they have tended to focus on its anti-Jewish impetus. However, the emergence of labor service in Hungary goes back to the mid-1930s, when a voluntary system was established. Placing this Hungarian institution into a transnational perspective, I trace the process of its ideological legitimation, its key practices, and its gradual growth and significant transformation over the years. I demonstrate that Hungary actually had two divergent systems of labor services in the war years, and I analyze the ways in which the infamous labor service of the post-1939 years could be seen as a continuation of its less familiar predecessor. I thus make a contribution to the historicization and broader contextualization of a key Hungarian institution of persecution during World War II.

Keywords: Hungarian labor service, history of state institutions, prehistory of the persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic radicalization, interwar Hungary

Introduction

In recent years, a great deal of scholarship has been published in Hungary on the subject of labor service during World War II, some of which goes well beyond description and the cataloguing of facts and reflects on questions of conceptual importance. However, to the present day the vast majority of the secondary literature on the institution of labor service and therefore also most of public discussion on the subject is still under the strong influence of the scholarship of Elek Karsai, Randolph L. Braham, and other historians which began to emerge in the 1960s (though I concede that there are exceptional works of scholarship on the subject worthy of acknowledgment).1 Labor service thus continues to be regarded essentially as a system that was established in the course of the war to effectuate the isolation and later murder of the Jews. The study of the fates of the Jews, Christians who were legally defined as Jews, members of Churches and national minorities that were persecuted by the state, people convicted for so-called crimes against public decency, and in 1944 some of the Roma population, in other words all the people who were forced to endure the humiliation and suffering of being members of the labor battalions and squadrons that were created as part of the Hungarian Royal Army and who in some cases were brutally massacred, was unquestionably one of the most important tasks awaiting historians.

At the same time, until very recently the mainstream historical literature in Hungary has made precious little mention of the fact that forced labor as an institution did not begin with the often cited 1939: II (civil defense) act, but rather had been established years earlier. As early as the summer of 1935, there were so-called labor service camps for college and university students, though they functioned on an entirely voluntary basis.2 I intend to show in this essay that there were significant interconnections between the organization and history of the voluntary labor service for university students in Hungary and the system of compulsory labor that later was to become one of the tools in the virtual annihilation of Hungarian Jewry. The former system served as the basis for the latter during the period that began in the summer of 1939 and ended in the spring of 1944, when the voluntary and compulsory labor service systems existed side by side. The similarities between the two institutions, which shared common roots, were so strong that the same Hungarian term was used to designate them, “munkaszolgálat,” which is a simple translation of the German term “Arbeitsdienst.” Thus, the institution itself was hardly a Hungarian peculiarity, notwithstanding the claims of some historians and scholars to the contrary, and in order to arrive at an understanding of its history one must adopt comparative and transnational perspectives.

Given the aforementioned lacunae in the secondary literature, I begin with a brief presentation of the ways in which the interwar labor service functioned in an international context and then offer a brief summary of the distinctive features of the voluntary labor service that came into being in Hungary in 1935. I then turn to the focus of my inquiry, the interconnections between the system of voluntary labor service and the system of compulsory labor service.

Hungarian Labor Service in an International Context

The shock of World War I dramatically changed the relationships between the old and newly created states of Europe and their respective societies. The different countries adopted varying economic strategies in the fight against rampant unemployment. In the democratic countries, alongside state efforts to revitalize the economies with injections of capital, planned employment, and industrial and economic development, a kind of “self-help” program was also launched in the civil sector. The idea of labor camps began to take form during the great calamity of World War I, and it spread relatively rapidly across Europe.3 For the growing numbers of unemployed who belonged to the middle class, some of the youth groups initiated independently organized enterprises and campaigns that helped put money in the pockets of people who had lost their jobs without taking employment away from people who were seeking work. The participants (women were not allowed to join) worked in labor camps, usually in the countryside, where they took part in projects that were useful to the local communities, such as road construction or repair, regulation of rivers, or logging.4 In many places, university and (even more frequently) college students formed work details on their own, and they sometimes even received modest payment for their work. With the passing of years, a professional system of university or student labor service emerged in many of the countries of Europe.

One of the most effective systems, the so-called Schweizerischen Zentralstelle für Freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst (Swiss Center for Voluntary Labor Service, or SZFA) emerged in Switzerland in 1925. In 1935, the Swiss state even codified it by law and developed it professionally. Federal state, provincial, and student bodies all had representation in the leadership of the SZFA, as did the political parties.5 The institution had appeared in many other places as well. By 1939, it was found in a total of twenty different countries (in Denmark it appeared in 1917, in Sweden and Bulgaria in 1920, in Norway in 1922, in England, Romania, and Holland in 1931, and in Germany in 1933, growing out of initiatives that had been launched in 1931). As was the case in Hungary, in the mid-1930s similar institutions were created in Estonia and Latvia (1934), Belgium (1935), and Greece and Spain (1937).6 Movements similar to the labor service institutions cropping up in the interwar period also emerged in several countries outside of Europe. Though they may have varied in their programs, comparable initiatives were found in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, China, Australia, and Japan.7

Thus, labor service movements were usually successful in Europe in the interwar period and enjoyed popularity as a means of organizing. In their essential developmental and operational structures the various institutions were similar. College and university students created them for the males among them,8 and then, with the passing of time, the ministries of labor and education in the various countries professionalized them and passed laws ensuring their continued operation. The labor camps brought no short term economic gain. At most, they helped strengthen the middle class materially and helped narrow the gap between different social groups. It is worth noting that the labor service programs in most of the countries accepted volunteers from abroad at the time. However, in part precisely because of their success, in some countries the tendency was not to maintain the voluntary nature of the institution but rather to nationalize it and make it obligatory. For instance, in the summer of 1939, forced labor service was introduced in Hungary (as I will discuss in greater detail later).

Since the institution of labor service in Hungary was inspired essentially by the German model, it is worth taking a moment to examine a few details of the latter. The work of Kiran Klaus Patel is of particular significance in the secondary literature of the past fifteen years. Patel has written not only shorter essays and articles on the subject, but also an excellent, balanced monograph.9 While the German cabinets were unreceptive to these kinds of initiatives for a long time, on June 5, 1931, the Brüning government established the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (Voluntary Labor Service, FAD). By 1932, there were 200,000 young unemployed people working as volunteers in the FAD camps (which were separate for men and women).10 The work that they did, however, did not have any significant influence on Germany’s economy, in part because of the failure of the state to show any common resolve. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazis threw themselves into economic planning with an unprecedented zeal. Their initiatives exerted a strong influence on the agrarian sector,11 and they envisioned a central role for the transformed FAD within this framework.12 In 1935, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service, RAD), which functioned as a kind of successor to the FAD, came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior, where it remained until 1943, when it became independent. Field Marshal Konstantin Hierl, the director of the RAD, worked together with the specialists in the Ministry of Interior to develop the Nazi model of the labor service institution, a model based on the notion that participation should be compulsory.

The Nazi leadership saw the practical uses of labor service, which extended beyond the propagation of the notion of a community of the national “Volk” (or Volksgemeinschaft) and the creation of a corps that would provide a useful precursor to military training. The labor service helped take young people off the labor market and thereby ensured that there would be more employment opportunities for married men with children. Later, when large state investments were being made to promote development, unemployment dropped and the task of finding a job was no longer as burdensome as it had been, other volunteer workers were accepted into the labor service in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the rigid, pyramid-like hierarchical structure of RAD differed significantly from the considerably more flexible structures of the other labor service systems, and it was very clearly part of the Nazi state organization. Some historians have contended that in its composition and development it most clearly resembled the Nazi party itself.13

In the meantime, however, RAD represented a significant cost for the state, no less than 1.4 percent of the state budget annually in the period between 1933 and 1944 and rising at times to as much as 2.1 percent.14 According to economic historian Timothy W. Mason, it is not really possible to determine whether RAD actually brought in income for the state or not, i.e. whether or not it was actually an economic asset.15 Even if it did not have any immediate economic use for the state in the years leading up to the war, however, it is quite certain that it at least temporarily led to a clear drop in unemployment. The kinds of projects and endeavors that were undertaken resembled the projects and works done by labor service groups in other European countries, including for instance road construction and repair, swamp draining, flood prevention, and agricultural work. In addition to seasonal work, the tasks performed by labor service groups in cities also had lasting results. Landscaping and the renovation and reparation of public buildings owned by the state or by municipalities, for instance, won the labor service widespread respect and popularity.

As of 1939, participation in work involving the war industry and munitions became increasingly important.16 In 1941, the range of tasks performed by RAD broadened as it undertook projects that provided assistance to the Wehrmacht all over Europe, including road maintenance, repairs to and oversight of the supply lines between the front and the hinterland, and work involving anti-aircraft defense. RAD battalions were even deployed on the Eastern Front. The labor camp inmates (as participation was compulsory it seems reasonable to use this term), who lived in barracks, were required to do ten hours of work a day. In addition to the physical strain of the work, the compulsory national socialist exercises and singing, which were intended to create a sense of communal experience and fate, were also important factors, as was the military training in the interest of ensuring effective preparation for service as soldiers conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In exchange for their service, they were given very modest pay.17

The structure of the women’s camps did not undergo comparable changes, and this was closely tied to the notion of the role women were to play in the Nazi state. Women did not work in labor camps. Rather, in a system that represented a transformation and further development of the FAD system of women’s camps,18 after having presented themselves in a RAD center, women were sent in groups of 5 to 30 people to smaller state farms or peasant families. As a work force, until 1939 they were used exclusively in agriculture, which meant, first and foremost, summer harvest work or, in the case of the women who lodged with peasant families, housework and childcare. Since no changes were made in the development of labor service for females after 1935, the involvement of the private sector in the distribution of work served the needs of the government splendidly. At the same time, the leadership of the RAD, together with the Nazi Party, found the participants in female labor service to be of considerable use from the perspective of the Nazi propaganda, as the institution seemed to symbolize the idea of communal effort in the service of the German nation (or “Volk”).

The Introduction of Labor Service in Hungary

Naturally, these international initiatives and models found echoes in Hungary. In 1929, the so-called Turul High Command19 (the Turul Association was the most significant organization of university youth in the Horthy era) sent János Salló to a work camp in England to persuade him of the potential importance of the institution. In 1930, László Tarnói Kostyál took a similar trip to Switzerland to examine work camps first hand.20 Between 1931 and 1934, Salló visited three other work camps outside of Hungary (one in Switzerland, one in Wales, and one in England) where roads were under construction to gather further information.21 In May 1932, the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education had been presented with a detailed and ambitious plan. 22 In 1935, the Turul member associations began requesting financial support from the Dean of the University of Budapest to cover the costs of work camps.23

Following long negotiations, in June 1935 the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education ratified the final labor service plan.24 According to this plan, 50 students and 50 local unemployed construction workers or day-laborers would work for four weeks along the banks of the Maros River rebuilding the dams and embankments which had been deliberately sabotaged by Romanians during the floods of 1932. This goal harmonized with the visions of a prominent trend in Hungarian culture and public life in the interwar period that focused on both the traditions and the plight of the peasantry, a trend that was influenced in part by so-called “village researchers,” who traveled to rural communities to document the culture of rural Hungary and the circumstances in which people lived. It also served the frequently reiterated propaganda goals of the government. Behind the populist visions, which were unquestionably demagogical to some degree, there was a desire on both sides to address serious social issues. At the same time, the adoption of the German model would not have been possible without the participation of pro-Nazi circles of the coalition. The Turul High Command named Tarnói Kostyál, who was a radical racist, to the position of leader of the Labor Camp Committee and made Mihály Somlai, who was connected to populist writers, his deputy. 25

At the same time, however, the Turul Coalition would not have been successful in these ventures had it not enjoyed the financial support of and connections provided by the governing party, the extreme right wing, and prominent figures of political, economic, and social life. These individuals were given roles in the leading bodies of the labor service.26 While I cannot go into great detail on the subject within the scope of this article, it is worth noting that support for the institution of labor service in Hungary was relatively widespread and included a heterogeneous array of segments of Hungarian society.27 However, despite the support it enjoyed from successive governments and the positive responses from a wide cross-section of society, the system nonetheless was criticized harshly by some circles of the far right-wing and the left-wing of the populists.28

On the basis of the available sources we know that 40 work camps were in operation in Hungary between 1935 and 1939. Until the spring of 1937, the work camps, which were scattered across the country and were active for roughly one month in the summer, were under the supervision of the Work Camp Committee of the Turul Coalition, a committee which was created in 1934. In 1937, in large part because of the enthusiasm that had been created by their successes, the camps came under state oversight, specifically under the jurisdiction of the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education. The Voluntary Work Camp of University and College Students, which was organized by the ministry and which in general copied the goals and the methods of the Turul camps (and which in 1938 was renamed Voluntary Work Service of University and College Students, or EÖM, to use an acronym based on the Hungarian name), was in operation on the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom until the spring of 1944.29

There was substantial continuity between the Turul work camps and the Voluntary Work Service of University and College Students, not only in the ideas on which they were based but also in their organization of work, and the system itself was based on the models of work camps outside of Hungary. Sometime between the beginning of early June and late September, the university and college students, who enrolled voluntarily and in every case as a member of some fraternal society, would do three or four weeks of hard physical labor, usually road construction and repair, swamp draining, logging, soil work, the construction of dams and embankments, digging channels to provide proper drainage in villages, and repairs to buildings in public spaces, such as cemeteries and churches. At the same time, in the camps for men, which were overseen by retired officers, the nature of the work depended in part on the geographical conditions. They strove to perform tasks that would be useful for individual communities without, however, taking away the few modest job opportunities that existed for day-laborers and navvies. In some cases, in the name of “protecting the race,” a notion that was alloyed with the views of some tendencies of populist thought, they managed to transform the ideal of cooperation between “Christian intellectuals” and the peasantry into a reality.

The Turul camps were not given names, but the camps organized by EÖM were given ancient Hungarian names or names that were regarded as illustrious. They were also given numbers, and by 1944, according to my estimate, they numbered over 100. In 1938, a leadership training course was launched in Tihany, which can be interpreted as a step in the direction of professionalization. The work was done in a remarkably rigid manner, according to some people, with an adherence to a kind of strictness borrowed from RAD. For instance, on the first day, during a ceremonial common pledge the participants also took an oath to the regent, Miklós Horthy. In the camps they lived in wooden barracks that could be easily disassembled or (more frequently) in military tents, depending on the local conditions. By the end of the decade, there were some amenities in the barracks.30 The various slogans were a mix of ideology and task to be performed: “Labor Service–Country Building,” “Our goal is to help, our tool is the sport of work,” or “Omnipotent God! Give a task and give bread to every working Hungarian.”31 In the case of women, the salutation “blessed work!” was used, which was expressive of the expectations regarding religious life in the camps. The routines of daily life in the camps over the course of the years took place within essentially similar frameworks.

Interconnections between Voluntary Work and Compulsory Labor Service

Drawing inspiration and energy from the success of EÖM and adopting an old aspiration of university fraternal societies, Béla Imrédy, who was appointed prime minister in May 1938 and who pursued a German orientation by this time, soon saw the potentials of RAD. 32 Given the dearth of sources, we do not know precisely why Imrédy, who initially was known as a pro-British figure, was drawn to the institution, which, though present worldwide, in Hungary bore strong affinities with Nazi models. Whatever the reason, we do know that in 1937, Tarnói Kostyál asked Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi in a memorandum to establish EÖM as quickly as possible and, drawing on the German model, to make it compulsory. Darányi had declined, but the document, which at the time also came into Imrédy’s hands, may have been the first such writing that called Imrédy’s attention to the issue. 33

On May 2, 1938, in the last weeks of Darányi’s tenure as prime minister, Imrédy, the heir apparent to his position as head of government, held a speech in parliament in which he described his vision for the country. He gave voice in this speech—and he was the first prominent figure in public life to do so—to the alleged necessity of labor service on a compulsory basis. According to Imrédy, the importance of social cohesion and unity, which were part of the ideals of the Turul Coalition and EÖM, clearly explained the need to make labor service obligatory, and he pledged to support and strengthen everything for which Miklós Kozma, who had been Minister of Interior from 1935 to 1937, had taken resolute though ultimately unsuccessful steps.

Kozma had been one of the most important proponents of the development on a large scale of the Turul labor service. He had also held the Nazi labor service institution in high esteem, and in December 1936, at the invitation of Wilhelm Frick, he had had occasion to observe the German labor service structures first hand. As Minister of Interior, Kozma had always endeavored to make the voluntary camps compulsory for university students, on the basis of the model of the RAD camps (even if he later denied this after having resigned from his position as minister).34 After having been compelled to resign, he made the following remarks regarding his recollections:

 

Compulsory labor service is a powerful institution for the nurturing of the nation, and it bears not the slightest affinity with slavery. In the work camps, youths who have completed a college education live alongside the simple children of the people in the most comradely spirit and without regard for social differences, and this means a great deal both from the perspective of ethical rearing and discipline. I spent time in places an hour and a half from Berlin, for instance, that were barren, submerged in water, and boggy. […] The work camps are amazingly simple, but they are similarly clean, healthy, and tasteful. It never occurred to me, I said later, that labor service should be made compulsory in Hungary, instead I will attempt to come into contact with the youth groups and societies that have done voluntary work service, and I want to support them in this very useful and beneficial endeavor. […] Naturally, one of the guiding principles is that this work should in no way create competition with the private economy.35

In his speech, Imrédy, alluding to international examples and the ideas of Kozma, made the following proclamation:

 

The unity of the Hungarian people means a fusion in thinking and in spirit. We must further this fusion with institutions that lead the individual layers of national society to love one another. For precisely this reason, one of the essential points of our program, a point that requires careful preparation, is the introduction of compulsory labor service… [noise, cries of approval and dissent] …such that, within the framework of compulsory labor, the youthful intelligentsia comes to know the mentality of the youthful working class and agricultural laborers [noise, cries of approval and dissent] so that the handshake can take place that—I believe and I proclaim—will lead to mutual respect and, through this, unusual spiritual enrichment.36

On May 19, 1938, Imrédy raised the question at a meeting of the leaders of the Hungarian Telegraph Office with regards to preparations for the International Eucharistic Congress. He may have mentioned it because he had already decided to follow the German model and make labor service compulsory. Miklós Kozma wrote the following in his journal at the time:

 

Everyone has read Béla Imrédy’s program. […] When you read this program, you see clearly that no government in Hungary has ever dared come forward with such a right-wing program. Who in Hungary would have dared, even as recently as six months ago, to have thought of creating a national labor service? It is an old idea of mine that is dear to my heart. It could help us overcome a host of Hungarian transgressions and mistakes.37

In the second half of May 1938, Imrédy informed the Minister of Defense of his plans. The Minister of Defense ordered Béla Szinay, commander-in-chief of EÖM (and also a man who bore the title “vitéz,” an honorary title given in the Horthy era), to state his position with regards to the question immediately and to devise a plan for the possible introduction of the program.38 On June 1, 1938, Szinay made the following report to the Minister of Defense:

 

In the near future, labor service in Hungary will become compulsory, and this makes it desirable for the aforementioned Supreme Command to inform itself with regards to the institution of compulsory labor service in Germany and Bulgaria (how many people are involved, how many camps are there, who is obliged to participate and for how long, who are the leaders and permanent commanders and who are the people in temporary leadership or command positions, what pay, provisions, clothing, and equipment is provided for the participants, what are the annual costs and what is the value of the work performed in a year, what kinds of advantages do the participants enjoy when seeking employment or with regards to taxes). I request that undersigned supreme command be provided with the organizational information enumerated above as quickly as possible by the foreign representatives in Germany and Bulgaria. I also note that the supreme command places emphasis on being provided information regarding the reorganization currently underway with regards to labor service in the former German–Austrian territories.39

Following this, the office of the prime minister better informed itself. On August 1, a conference was called at which ministerial advisor István Kultsár, the government commissioner for affairs involving the intelligentsia, reported on the things that had been accomplished by the labor service and the plans for the future. He also announced that the camps would gradually be made compulsory.40 In accordance with Szinay’s request, the presidential division of the Ministry of Defense instructed the military attaché to Sofia to obtain information about the labor service institution in Bulgaria (the so-called trudovak) and prepare a report for the head office of the Ministry of Defense, which indeed he submitted on August 9, 1938. The military attaché in Berlin was also instructed to submit a similar report. The German report was the book (in German) on the subject entitled Arbeitsdienst.41 In the meantime, Dániel Fábry was entrusted with preparing a bill for the transformation of the labor service into a compulsory institution.

According to Fábry, the people who would be obliged to perform the work naturally would be recruited from a different social group, but the goal of promoting the notion of social responsibility would be the same as the fundamental goal of EÖM, namely “to ensure that workers who are performing physical labor and the workers who are engaged in intellectual undertakings be thoroughly mixed together and the blue-collar worker come to know and respect the labors of the white-collar worker, while the white-collar worker comes to respect the physical labor of the blue-collar worker.”42

Szinay prepared the plans with Kultsár, the ministerial advisor and government commissioner for unemployed white-collar workers. The plans made it quite clear that the same types of work were going to be performed in the new system. And as was the case with EÖM, it was considered important to ensure that the projects not exert a negative influence on the opportunities for the unemployed. Thus, road construction and drainage continued to dominate their thinking. On August 7, Szinay informed the press that the government’s labor service program “has been completed.” In a few days they were going to present it to the public. He stated that, “[t]he new labor camp system builds on the structure of the existing system.”43

In what follows, I examine the establishment and evolution of compulsory labor service as an institution of civil defense only from the perspective of its relationship to the voluntary university work service. The 1939: II civil defense bill established the legal foundation for the creation of the institution of labor service in the public interest within the framework of the Hungarian military.44 Paragraph 230 a (1–6) of the law addresses the issue of the establishment of the institution of obligatory labor service in the public interest. According to the law, labor service programs had to be organized for men between the ages of 21 and 24 who were not suitable for military service and people whose citizenship was not regarded as clearly established (the first and second paragraphs).45 The phrasing of the law concerned labor service that was military in nature and compulsory, but to be performed while living in work camps, and it furthermore targeted young people between the ages of 21 and 24, i.e. the average age of college and university students. If one takes into consideration the fact that the Turul labor service programs and the EÖM program had also had a decidedly military character, the connection between them is even more striking. In my view, however, the stipulations in the fifth paragraph were of the most gravity: “With the agreement of her legal guardian, a girl who is at least sixteen years of age and who has completed the fourth year of her secondary schooling or has an educational level of equal value can be enrolled in labor service in the public interest on a voluntary basis. The provisions of paragraphs (1)–(4) with deviations following from this paragraph apply to this case as well.” This statement essentially constituted the incorporation (or even the smuggling) of the university labor service program, now with a lower age limit (though admittedly not compulsory), into the civil defense law. This contention finds further support in a decree that was issued by General Fábry, who at the suggestion of the Ministry of Defense had been named by the Regent to serve under the Ministry of Defense of Károly Bartha as National Supervisor of the Public Interest Labor Service (Közérdekű Munkaszolgálat Országos Felügyelője, or KMOF).46 Fábry had served as a spokesman for the Turul Labor Service in the Ministry of Defense,47 and in 1937–1938 he had accepted a role in EÖM. According to the decree, youths who had taken part in the voluntary university work camps before May 17, 1939 could count the time they had spent there against the obligation to serve in the public interest labor service. Anyone who had done so after this date, however, could not.48

As it so happens, in 1937, as part of a continuing studies program in public administration, Fábry had already spoken on the close link between EÖM and a compulsory labor service envisioned for the future.49 At a similar continuing studies program in public administration in 1938, Szinay built on Fábry’s ideas. We have good reason to think that Szinay’s plans were essentially identical with the ideas outlined in the report he sent to Prime Minister Béla Imrédy in May 1938. Like Fábry, Szinay emphatically called attention to the similarities between the mechanisms, functioning, and goals of the German RAD, the Turul Labor Service, EÖM, and the compulsory labor service program of the Hungarian military (which essentially was built on EÖM). Furthermore, he linked EÖM and the institution of non-combatant labor service with his contention that the two systems were essentially two branches of the “Hungarian National Labor Service.” However, he felt that EÖM would soon cease operations: “With this, I have brought to a close the University and College Student Voluntary Labor Service, because it has been replaced by compulsory labor service.”50 (History, however, did not bear out his words.) Szinay then discussed his plan for compulsory labor service, which would involve an expansion year by year of the EÖM camp system (in 1939, some 4,000 people worked in the labor service programs, but by 1944 this number had grown to 44,000) without, however, any essential change to its structure and operations. The plan did not contain any anti-Semitic discriminatory measures.51 In summary, the leaders of the two labor service systems both gave similar, unambiguous, and persuasive descriptions of the clear relationship between the voluntary and the compulsory institutions of labor service.

The significance of the parallels between the two systems is also illustrated by the comments that were made in the course of a debate in parliament regarding a bill on civil defense. On December 7, 1938, Minister of Defense Károly Bartha introduced a bill which was sent to committee for review. On January 13, 1939, the committee for the armed forces, administration, the economy, transportation and justice submitted its report on the bill to parliament. The bill was modified in accordance with the report and first discussed in parliament on January 17. In the course of the debate, a total of 32 representatives voiced their opinions, only two of whom, the two Social Democrats, were in opposition to the bill. The governing party and the right-wing opposition celebrated the measure and only a few of them actually made observations bearing on the details of its contents. According to Sándor Ember, for instance:

 

We have already experimented with labor service in past decades. A small segment of the college youth tried to further the introduction of this institution in Hungary by organizing voluntary work camps, drawing on models from abroad. The attempts that were made in this sphere amply justified the expectations, and I must express my sincere appreciation and thanks to the Minister of Defense for having thought of this institution when preparing this bill.52

Ember continued, saying that the bill was in no way an obstacle to the voluntary university labor service programs, which he felt were fully justified given the endless public works projects that had been undertaken, which would have been inconceivable if entrusted simply to the private sector. Others emphasized the groundbreaking role of the Turul and the EÖM work camps, which had provided a kind of prototype for the introduction of compulsory military labor service. The Jewish laws (1938: XIV and the 1939: IV) provided a foundation for making labor service compulsory, and using these laws, the parliamentary majority agreed to allow the leaders and divisions of the Ministry of Defense to begin “the solution of the Jewish question in the army.” Thus the first step was taken in the legal prohibition from the armed services of the citizens of Hungary who were defined by the law as Jewish. It seems worth noting, however, that in the initial stages the law was directed against the Jews neither in its provisions nor in its implementation.

This is also indicated by the minutes of a meeting held in March 1939 by the Directorate of the General Staff (the Ministry of Defense, division 1/a). They resolved, in accordance with paragraphs 91 and 230 of the law, to pursue “certain work training” programs. The participants in the meeting saw labor service as a means of addressing the dearth of workers and skilled laborers by drafting people who were not suitable for military service. The proposed plan would have assigned these people, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 in total, to three-month work projects (road construction, railroad work), while the skilled laborers among them would be given work in factories that required training. In the end, division 1/a called on division 10 to organize the statistics concerning the people regarded as unsuitable for military service by line of occupation and provide this information to the Supreme Civil Defense Council, which was to devise a plan that included precise regulations of the two labor services and send it to division 1/a.53

In the course of a meeting of the General Staff on April 24, the participants discussed the concrete steps that were to be taken to achieve the public interest labor service’s large scale development on the basis of the proposal of the prime minister’s office. People fulfilling their compulsory labor service obligations were required to do three months of “public interest labor service.” Following two weeks of preparatory training, males between the ages of 14 and 42 and females between the ages of 16 and 42 could be called up for service. The people responsible for the plans anticipated providing training for 6,000 skilled laborers and 14,000 workers within one year. In the event of war, these numbers could jump to 75,000 and 250,000, in which case one to three weeks of training was to be provided and, as was already the case, males between the ages of 14 and 42 and women between the ages of 16 and 42 could be called up for service. The workers, who lived in camps and were parts of squadrons that functioned under the authority of KMOF (which itself was under the Ministry of Defense), were given uniforms and, like the student workers of EÖM, 200 fillérs per day as pay. The cost of establishing the system was estimated at 2,200,000 pengő and the first round of conscriptions was planned for July 1 and October 1, 1939.54

As a consequence of the council, the Ministry of Defense drew up decree 5070/1939. ME, which established the general principles and organization of the labor service.55 On July 1, 1939, the Presidential Division of the Ministry of Defense gave instructions according to which a meeting was to be held on July 13 under the chairmanship of General Fábry at which, at the request of the Ministry of Defense, the leaders of the relevant Ministry for Religious Affairs and Public Education divisions would be present. The meeting was held and the representative of the Presidential Division had the impression that the institution was “still fighting with initial difficulties.” According to Fábry,

 

the people who perform public interest labor service will be those who have accepted this as their task or are pleased to learn that they do not have to do military service. If the equipment, accommodation, provisions, etc. provided for these individuals do not meet the desired standard, then we will have done more to harm the initiative than to promote it, and we will have awoken antagonistic sentiments in these people with regards to the army. The question of equipment, accommodation and provisions leaves a great deal to be desired.56

 

At the meeting that was held on July 13, however, the decision was reached to have the first shift begin on July 1.57 The presidential division employed retired officers and EÖM officers to do the organizational work.

The contemporary print media reported on the connections between the two labor service systems very much in the spirit of what I have discussed above. This view found expression frequently in the press on the local and national levels, regardless of the political orientation of the publication. It is also worth noting contentions made by László Tarnói Kostyál in his book Magyar munkaszolgálat [Hungarian Labor Service], which was published in the spring of 1939. Tarnói Kostyál, who at the time was already active in the National Socialist movement, regarded the Turul labor service, the EÖM camps, and the compulsory military labor service as essentially the same. He unambiguously asserted that the institution of compulsory labor service had grown out of the other two systems and essentially represented their logical extension through the creation of an institution that could become the site of joyous communal social life. It is true that he did not regard Imrédy’s organization as suitable and thought that it should be transformed in its ideology and its structure to correspond more closely to the RAD model. In the book, he presented his detailed and sometimes rather fantastic visions regarding this transformation.58

A book entitled Munkaszolgálatos kézikönyv [Labor Service Handbook], which was published in 1940, likened both EÖM and the system of compulsory labor service to standard military training, and in doing so elevated the value of the labor service camp. The publication reveals that even in the legally and politically new situation, the work camps were not substantially different from the EÖM camps:

 

according to the executive decree regarding the public interest labor service, the work camp is a workers unit that is organized along military lines; the framework of the labor service obligation. The camp (barracks, tents, etc.) is home to the battalion. Everyday life begins and ends here. Reveille at dawn (roughly 5:00 AM). Suddenly rest and peace are transformed into the pulsing circulation of the blood. After the participants have done their morning exercises, washed, cleaned the area, and cleaned their living quarters, they will find a fresh, hot breakfast steaming in a mess tin. The squadron soon lines up and departs for the work site. The Sun has hardly begun to rise and their muscles are already bulging. The road is being built! The work is at a boil! Hours fly by and soon it is noon. The squadrons return to the areas around their barracks one by one. This is followed by reporting to the commander. Soon the sound of the horn can be heard calling everyone to lunch. Then one or two hours of rest, followed by a dip. Following the short work shift in the afternoon, military training or discipline drills, then a presentation on national defense. Orders are issued and the ill or ailing are examined. Then a period of leisure time begins, which lasts until dinner, or rather until taps. Everyone spends this time as he pleases. You can rest, work, write letters, or have fun. This is how the day is broken up in the work camp. Sundays and holidays, naturally, do not follow the same tempo as weekdays. The piety of the church service in the camps, the great peace and liberating calm, and the songs that rise forth from beside the red flames of the campfire create an unforgettable array of variation. […] The days spent doing difficult, strenuous work are also full of good cheer, joy, and unforgettable experiences. Camp life is the healthiest life for a man.59

Until 1941, the year in which Hungary entered the war, EÖM and the system of compulsory labor service essentially satisfied the same demand.60 This was not changed by the creation of voluntary military labor service for females, in accordance with which, as of December of 1940, females above the age of 16 were given work on a voluntary basis in arms factories.61 In the initial phases, the two institutions were even sometimes mixed up by the press.62

On July 15 and September 20, 1939, the first battalions of people working as part of the compulsory labor service were established in ten settlements (including Zamárdi and Hódmezővásárhely).63 The operation of the battalions was regulated by decree number 5070/1939 ME, which was issued in accordance with paragraph 230 of the law, and the battalions were placed under the oversight of the authorized army corps headquarters.64 On June 27, Minister of Defense Bartha reaffirmed his earlier assertions and informed the army commanders of the following: “[i]ts goal in general is to ensure rearing in the national spirit and also to complete training and work that is in the public interest and is of public use. From the perspective of the army, it ensures the training of Hungarian workers and labor formations.”65 It applied to youths between 21 and 24 years of age who had been declared unfit for military service, some 6,000 people in total.

The first group began work on August 1 in Balatonzamárdi and Makó “amidst celebratory circumstances,” with cries of “to work!” These two battalions did public use projects (swamp drainage and the creation of embankments in order to transform the area into fertile land).66 The other seven did national defense work (they were made into a munitions industry squadron and got training and work at the facilities). It is quite clear that the division of labor was identical to the tasks assigned by EÖM, and indeed this is hardly surprising, since EÖM had organized the first public interest labor service battalions.67 (Béla Szinay had made the work that was done on the Zamárdi swamp part of his plans for work in 1937, at the urging of the local town clerk).68

The fact that Tarnói Kostyál became the editor-in-chief of Tábori Élet [Camp Life], the newspaper of the IX. public interest labor service battalion, also indicates the interconnections between EÖM and the public interest labor service. He was clearly given this position so that the Hungarian army would be able to use his four years of experience.69 The newspaper of the IV. camp battalion of Szigetvár, Tábori Újság [Camp News], borrowed its slogan (“Labor Service–Country Building”) from EÖM. The views of Lieutenant János Haidekker, found in the pages of Tábori Újság, also reveal this continuity:

 

The young people do this admittedly hard physical work with enthusiasm, which is even more amazing if one takes into consideration that they were deemed not suitable for military service, thus they have some kind of physical handicap or ailment. But they were not born to a Hungarian mother to fear rising early or doing hard work, digging the soil with pick and shovel. […] The labor service program is in good hands, the boys are doing good work, work the fruits of which they too will someday gather, because work done under strict, military conditions will have a beneficial influence on their dispositions and physical development as well.70

 

In 1940, the metaphor of building the country, i.e. the use of the EÖM slogan among people doing compulsory labor service, remained a popular turn of phrase. In the spring of 1940, one finds the following comments of an officer in the pages of Tábori Újság, a periodical (copies of which were made using a typewriter) of the V. battalion, which was centered in the city of Técső (today Tyachiv in the Ukraine):

 

and you, worker in the labor service program, who imagined yourself to be a person without worth, you see that you are as useful a citizen of your country as anyone. You donned your uniform, took an oath, you live a life of discipline, in a word, you are a soldier. A useful, working soldier of your poor country. Do not think there is a difference between you and your armed comrades! There isn’t! One builds a country, the other defends his homeland by armed force. No one can say which is more important.71

 

The similarly entitled periodical of the VII. public interest labor service battalion of Makó, which in 1939 and 1940 was edited and written by army officers and workers in labor service, clearly adopted the goals of EÖM:

 

And now the youth of the city and the youth of the village live side by side in a big family. We do service and work in different capacities, but with the same faith and dedication. We strive to understand and respect one another’s values, so that when we return to civilian life we can be the workers and the soldiers of the emergence of a social mentality that will be more harmonious than the mentality of today and have a strong sense of the feeling of unity.72

 

In July 1940, Tarnói Kostyál made one more attempt to become an important figure in the labor service institution. He submitted a request to KMOF for permission to produce a public interest labor service newspaper, and he asked that he be entrusted with the task of editing it. The competent divisions of the Ministry of Defense discussed the question and at first held out the promise of support. Tarnói buttressed his request with the observation that he was working as a newspaper writer and indeed as the editor of the newspaper of one of the battalions and also as a jurist, and furthermore he had made significant contributions to the very emergence of the labor service institution (and with this contention he made explicit the parallel between the Turul labor service and compulsory public interest labor service):

 

With this periodical I wish to further the cause of labor service in Hungary with the weapons of the mind so that the thousands of workers, who are performing compulsory labor for the good of the homeland, will not regard their most solemn duty as a cold obligation, but rather will be made aware of the popularity of the work they are doing, and the leaders themselves will be genuinely enthusiastic about labor service.73

Tarnói Kostyál was willing to invest 5,000 pengős of his own money in the newspaper. According to his plans, the monthly would have been published by KMOF. However, in October the chairmanship of the Ministry of Defense and KMOF changed its mind, as the idea had come up of using labor service in the future to put people classified legally as Jews (and therefore not permitted to join the armed services) to work. Given this, they felt that reports of the labor service in the press “would not be timely […] under the present circumstances.”74

The situation worsened as EÖM strove with increasing resolve to distance itself from the system of public interest (and non-combatant) labor service for Jews. According to a report submitted in May 1943 by form master for physical education and sports Román Tárczay-Felicides, “[t]he term labor service is an offense to the dignity of the university youths, because they understand the term to refer to Jewish labor service. A new name must be found [instead of EÖM], because with this name neither the voluntary labor service for university youth nor anything similar will work effectively. With regards to university labor service for females, a meeting must urgently be held.”75 No new name was ever devised, in all likelihood because by that time EÖM and the leadership of the system of compulsory labor service had already embarked down radically different paths.

Thus I am not contending that the system of voluntary labor for university students and youths of that age was a direct precursor to the system of labor service that was established by the 1939 bill on civil defense (a system which, as of the summer of 1940 and particularly following the active engagement of the country in the war, was used quite directly against the Jewish citizenry of the country, in part as a consequence of the shift to the right in the country’s political orientation). I am contending, however, that it provided a clear prototype.

It is worth considering this question in a broader context. As of the mid-1930s, new kinds of extreme right-wing parties and movements began to appear in Hungary, first and foremost under the influence of Nazi Germany. By the end of the decade, they had become a political force to be reckoned with, and in the parliamentary elections of 1939 they were the largest oppositional force. While the parties differed from one another in numerous details regarding their ideals, their ideologies all shared one important feature: they were all anti-Semitic.76 As early as 1937, Prime Minister Darányi had to face the fact that if he wished his party, the Party of National Unity, to remain in power he had to take measures to appease the increasingly significant body of anti-Semitic voters. As a consequence of the territorial revision that took place in 1938–41, largely under the auspices of Hitler, subsequent governments played the “Jewish card.” The first Jewish law, which was drafted by Darányi and accepted by parliament under Imrédy, only exacerbated this, as did the second Jewish law, passed during the tenure of Prime Minister Pál Teleki. This was followed during the war years by more racially motivated measures similar to the Nuremberg laws. These laws put an end to the equality of Hungarian citizens who were defined as Jews by the law and deprived tens of thousands of Hungarian citizens of their livelihoods.77

The institution of labor service became one of the sites of the racial war against the Jews of Hungary who had been reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Labor service gradually underwent a transformation from the military policy understanding of the institution as providing peaceful physical work for Christian citizens who had been deemed unsuitable for the armed services to a compulsory form of service. The elites of the Hungarian military leadership were deeply anti-Semitic. A transcript of pro-Nazi chief of staff Henrik Werth from April 18, 1940 contains unambiguously anti-Semitic goals: “independent of the political line, the Jewish question must be resolved administratively within the army, radically and urgently.”78 Werth also said that Jews should be used in the armed services in places where the losses would be the greatest. His statements concern efforts he had soon managed to effectuate: “a person determined to be Jewish cannot be granted any of the advantages given to members of the military, nor can a Jew be a reserve officer, a junior officer, or a non-commissioned officer.”79

In the autumn of 1940, the institution of labor service began to undergo a permanent change when the Ministry of Defense realized that it could easily use male citizens who had now been defined as Jewish by law as a work force in the labor service for military purposes. A male between the ages of 18 and 42 and defined under law at the time as Jewish was obliged to enlist in the non-combatant labor service instead of doing service in the armed forces. The inmates worked in labor camps. Initially Jewish inmates wore an armband bearing the national colors, but later they were obliged to wear a yellow armband (in the case of Hungarian citizens who had been baptized but were nonetheless regarded as Jewish by law, the armband was white).

There were three types of squadron: 1. Camp squadrons (which were mixed): Jews who were regarded as reliable. 2. Special work squadrons: Jews whose loyalty was suspected and who were regarded as unreliable. 3. Work squadrons consisting of members of national minorities. While the total number of inmates ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 between 1939 and 1943, by 1944 it had risen to 63,000. According to available sources, on July 17, 1940 there were 60 special (Jewish) workers squadrons. The military leadership planned to raise the number of inmates (in a short period of time) to 90,000 or 100,000. As a consequence of the regulations passed on August 1940, Jews who were regarded as capable of working were enlisted in camp worker squadrons, while elderly Jews and Jews in poor health were enlisted in squadrons that did non-combatant work within the borders of country. In both cases, the enlistment was for a period of three months.

The Directorate of the General Staff drew up many different plans the essential goal of which was the “radical de-Jewification” of the Hungarian armed forces. They made statutory provisions for people who were regarded as politically unreliable or not suitable for recruitment into the armed forces for health reasons and for members of national minorities. Following Hungary’s entry into the war, a series of discriminatory legal measures were taken that made the everyday lives of the compulsory labor camp inmates increasingly difficult. People did labor service in the hinterland, beyond the borders of the country, in the theater of military operations, and even on the front. The regulation concerning compulsory military service for Jews was announced in July 1942 (statute 1942: XIV). According to the law, Jews could not be members of the so-called Levente (a paramilitary organization roughly comparable with the Hitlerjugend) or join the armed forces, but could only do “non-combatant service,” which “is not worthy of a Hungarian man or youths who have grown up in Christian thinking.”80 This phrasing clearly shows that, in comparison with its initial phases, compulsory labor service had undergone a fundamental change, and its ties to EÖM, both with regards to its ideals and its function, had been broken.

Conclusion

The history of voluntary labor service and compulsory labor service split in 1941. The history of public interest and non-combatant labor service is closely intertwined with Hungary’s acceptance of an active role in World War II. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews served as inmates of the compulsory (or forced) labor camps, and this represents a significant aspect of the Holocaust in Hungary. With regards to the history of labor service in its different forms, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, since the 1960s research on the subject has been underway, but one could hardly claim that it has come close to exhausting the topic. The causes for this include an aversion to the use of new kinds of sources (for instance material sources) and a similar aversion to interdisciplinary methodologies, as well as the frustrating dearth of sources. The central documents of the public interest labor service were incinerated in 1944.81 It is also slightly problematic that the research projects and the works that have been published tend to narrate the events from the perspective of political history, i.e. the “perspective of the perpetrators.” Questions regarding motivations on the micro-historical level or from the perspectives of social history or the history of mentalities have thus been rarely raised.82

The history and operations of EÖM after 1941 have been given scant attention at best. The dearth of sources is even more striking and there is virtually no secondary literature on the subject. We do know, however, that during the war the camp system grew, first and foremost in the Székely Land and in the southern parts of the country (a territory overlapping but not entirely congruent with Vojvodina), where the role of men was—in a significant digression from earlier practice—restricted to non-combatant civil defense work (such as digging anti-tank ditches). The roles that were assigned to women who were doing labor service remained essentially unchanged. Labor service camps were established not far from the Székely settlements in Vojvodina in Ófutak (today Futog in Serbia), Hadiknépe (today Sirig in Serbia), Horthyvára (today Stepanovićevo in Serbia), and Hadikföldje (today Temerin-Đurđevo in Serbia) and special camps were set up in Temerin and Szabadka (today Subotica in Serbia). In these special camps “red polka-dotted maidens” collectively took part in the harvest work, together with the female voluntary civil defense labor service and the members of the local Levente.83

Following Hungary’s entry into the war, EÖM continued its operations without interruption or shift of direction. No changes took place in the leadership or in the work that was performed. As was the case with regards to the Hungarian army, however, the rules regarding EÖM underwent two changes. First, the internal regulations concerning voluntary labor service became more strict (more military in nature). Second, as of 1941 the rules concerning eligibility changed and the group of youths who could participate grew. Any student 16 years of age or older who had completed grammar school or at least the second year of middle school and who could demonstrate appropriate progress in studies and in religious ethics was allowed to enlist.

The fate of EÖM in Hungary was sealed by the occupation of the country by the German army in 1944. Though we do not know exactly why, the government under Döme Sztójay saw no reason to maintain the system, presumably in part because of the decline in the quantity and quality of the work performed and the drastically diminished number of people actually engaged in the program.84 At the same time, the Student Civil Defense Labor Service (Diákok Honvédelmi Munkaszolgálata, DHM), which was created in its place in April 1944 (in a building in Klotild Street, which had served as the seat of EÖM), bore some resemblance to EÖM. One might say it was a kind of closing chord, imbued with a simplified and more right-wing rhetoric.

The complex history of the university voluntary labor service is relevant not only to the social history and history of the youth of the Horthy era. While I may have been able, in the modest framework of this essay, to cover only a few of the most important moments in this history, I have placed existing narratives about the evolution of the institution of compulsory labor in Hungary during World War II in a new, larger context. The comparative examination of the two systems offers a foundation for new conclusions and thereby enriches the secondary literature on the history of the Holocaust.

 

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Tharnói [Kostyál], László. Magyar munkaszolgálat: Munkatáborok a magyar nép és föld szolgálatában [Hungarian Labor Service: Work Camps in the Service of the Hungarian People and Land]. Budapest: Turul, 1939.

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The Press

 

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County] (1938), Hungária [Hungária] (1937), Jelenkor [The Present Age] (1937), Magyar Újság Képes Melléklete [Illustrated Appendix of Magyar Newspaper] (1939), Nemzeti Újság Képes Melléklet [Illustrated Appendix of National Newspaper] (1939), Reggeli Hírlap [Morning Newspaper] (1939), Reggeli Újság [Morning News] (1941), Somogyi Újság [Somogyi Newspaper] (1939), Szilágyság [The Szilágy Region] (1943), Tábori Újság [Camp Newspaper] (1939) OSzK H.20.672, 673., 674., Zalai Hírlap [Zala Newspaper] (1938).

 

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Gábor Szegedi

Stand by Your Man

Honor and “Race Defilement” in Hungary, 1941–441

The practice of race defilement in Hungary began following the passage of the 1941 Marriage Law, a comprehensive law on marriage that introduced mandatory premarital health checks, marriage loans and the prohibition of marriage between Jews and non-Jews. In contrast with Nazi Germany, in Hungary non-Jewish men were exempted from the provisions of the law, so only Jewish men could be convicted and only if they had a liaison with “honorable” women. The vague non-legal term “honorable” provided the authorities with the opportunity to limit sexual and other contact between “Jews” and “non-Jews” and also to exert control over female bodies through policing and surveillance, as female “honor” was in most cases crucial in order to determine the course of the proceedings. This paper uses the theoretical framework of the history of emotions to reconstruct the types of “honor” that come to light from an analysis of the papers of these court cases and their importance for sexual politics in Horthy-era Hungary.

Keywords: Racial defilement, honor, anti-Semitism, prostitution, love

Introduction

In Emotions in History: Lost and Found Ute Frevert gives a panoramic history of the concept “honor,” her main claim being that this “lost emotion” was intrinsic to upholding social stratification and gender difference in pre-1945 Western cultures. The custom of duels enabled men of the middle and upper classes to save or redeem their honor in case it was under threat, whereas lower class men were not given access to this organized way of taking revenge on people who had allegedly violated their honor. While working class men could still protect their honor, violently, with their bare fists, women’s honor tended to be deeply sexualized. It was closely linked to their sexual “purity” and put them in positions of passivity, as they did not possess any means of retaining or recovering their honor themselves, but needed male family members as protectors to do that for them. Moreover, lost premarital virginity was the kind of loss of honor that could not be redeemed. Once lost, this dishonor marked a woman forever.2 This resonates with what Luisa Passerini writes in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, namely that transgressions in love can be “dangerous for the oppressive aspects of the existing social and cultural order.”3 In Europe transgressions in love have been historically varied, but Passerini can point to an important aspect of the idea of romantic love: that transgressions are especially dangerous if they involve non-Europeans. Moreover, “love in inter-racial relationships was considered particularly impossible and therefore doomed to a disastrous end.”4 Both Frevert and Passerini aim to historicize emotions, an aspect of history that, due to its seemingly volatile nature, has long been neglected.

In this paper on honor and race defilement in Hungary of the Horthy era, I am going to use a similar theoretical framework. I will draw on Barbara Rosenwein’s definition in particular, according to which emotional communities were “by and large the same as social communities—families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts.” Rosenwein suggests that research on these communities should seek for “systems of feeling” to see “the modes of expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore.”5 Rosenwein’s conception of her research subject closely resembles William Reddy’s idea of emotional regimes, that is “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.”6 Reddy claims that as emotions are “associated with the dense network of goals that give coherence to the self,” it is essential for a community to provide a “coherent set of prescriptions about emotions.”7 Reddy has also introduced further concepts for the study of emotions, such as “emotional refuge” and “emotional liberty,” the former referring to the emotional safe spaces or outlets where those who feel oppressed by the dominant emotional regime can properly express their emotions. Reddy believes that the scrutiny of emotional regimes can be politicized by bringing in the concept of “emotional liberty.” In other words, tyranny can be detected (and critiqued) by examining the pressures that are put on individuals living in a certain emotional regime. If there is strict emotional discipline, then the individuals whose emotional build-up differs from the norm can potentially become subject to physical violence, forced exile, excommunication, etc. or, alternatively, their protests against the norms can take extreme forms.

The author of the most comprehensive monograph on the history of race defilement in Nazi Germany,8 Alexandra Przyrembel, has recently called for the use of the analytic categories of emotional history in analyses of anti-Semitism and, more specifically, race defilement (Rassenschande):

(…) with racist anti-Semitism, hostile emotions were created towards the Jews, which, even if with the opposite sign, could be pursued in the rulings of the courts of the National Socialist justice system on a discursive level. It is through this emotional coding that racial anti-semitism gets its real strength, and not the contemporary biological concepts of purity.9

Przyrembel mentions three tenets of German history-writing that dealt with the National Socialist persecution of Jews from the perspective of collective emotions. One of these, introduced by Michael Wildt,10 dealt with the concept of “honor,” which was given particular significance under National Socialism and which excluded the Jews from “German honor.” The second one focused on a regime of “moral emotions” or “anti-Semitic passions” that Germans were supposed to feel, a mixture of “guilt, shame, resentment and indignation,” these being enforceable and enforced by the regime. Thirdly, Patricia Szobar presented so-called “sexual stories” and their performative effect in race defilement. While studies on Nazi Germany have already produced a range of inquiries in emotional history, Hungarian historiography has dealt only marginally with race defilement and as of yet no analysis has focused on its emotional aspects.11

In this paper, I will discuss, similarly to Szobar, “sexual stories” and their performative effects in Hungarian race defilement court practice. The main questions relate to the concept of honor and how, through the usage of this term, emotional norms were created, reinforced, or challenged by the various actors involved. If we follow Przyrembel’s call, what do we learn about the various emotions and the politics revolving around these emotions when looking at the documents of the various Hungarian courts? I will first briefly discuss the background, i.e. sexual politics in interwar Hungary, and then analyze the various connotations of “honor” for various groups (women, Jews) and for the nation in the last years of Horthy-era Hungary.

Sexual Politics, Sex Education: a Background

In order to improve moral standards on the street and in public spaces in general it is forbidden: (…) to use loud, coarse language or filthy expressions or to make a lewd move or gesture, which may violate the good taste and ethical standards of others. (…) to address an honorable woman (girl or married woman) in a public space with the aim of becoming acquainted against her will or in an inopportune manner. (…) the police are obliged to (…) provide the most comprehensive protection for the public and the woman or adolescent who is in need of protection.

Decree No. 151.000/1927 of the Interior Minister: The protection of public morals12

There was a striking “proliferation of discourse” with regards to sexuality in Hungary after World War I. The number of publications on sex education for young people was in the hundreds, most of the authors being Christian (often linked directly to the Catholic or Calvinist Churches) and representing the dominant sexual ethos, an excellent example of which we find in various “decency regulations,” one of which is quoted above. The sexual normalcy advocated in these texts is not very different from Catholic sex education elsewhere in Europe: Austrian, Polish or German Catholics had similar conceptions of sexual norms, what could be considered deviant, and what was expected from youths.13

The works of Hungarian authors Tihamér Tóth, Ferenc Kiss, Péter Olasz and József Koszterszitz all employ a rhetoric of guilt and are all oriented around “purity,” which is contrasted with “sin.”14 The practices that were to be avoided were numerous: masturbation, homosexuality, any form of premarital or extramarital sex, and consumption of pornography (which was fairly broadly defined). Béla Bangha15 and Ottokár Prohászka,16 two of the most influential Catholic ideologues of the 1920s, had a great deal to say about sexuality, including something they saw as specifically “Jewish sexuality.” These two “dedicated warriors, moreover, program setters for the politics labeled as ‘Christian national’”17 became role models for a middle class that “got drunk”18 on anti-Semitism and also a far right that lauded their racial arguments. Due to their standing within the Catholic Church of Hungary and the respect they enjoyed in Christian national public discourse, their texts importing age-old sexual stereotypes on the lewdness of Jews played a crucial role in setting the scene for Catholic sex education as well.

In addition to emphasizing, often in very abstract and vague terms, that Christian youths needed to remain “pure” (purity being the keyword of Christian sex education) until marriage, it was important to provide them with guidance on how this could be achieved, mostly by listing what and who were to be avoided. Women and adolescent youths (both male and female) were the two groups that were to be protected primarily from the degenerative effects of “excessive” sexuality. These two groups appeared in the sex education material as potential victims, who had to have personal willpower, but also needed special, external protection in the form of well-enforced laws and regulations fending off threats. The sexual dangers allegedly lurking around every corner were embodied in many different forms, including those coming from the inside. However, I would argue that the majority of the authors in this Christian-national setting primarily emphasized external threats that posed a danger for the in-group and argued in support of containing these external threats. Keeping the threat groups on the periphery by segregating them from the majority was recurrently recommended as the primary aim of sexual politics. Prostitutes were the first group, while Jews and, more specifically, Jewish men were the second. Prostitutes were primarily considered a direct health threat, whose scope of activities had to be limited in order to keep the young men of the nation (and their future wives and children) healthy and free of sexually transmitted diseases. The case with Jews is more complicated. They appeared in much of the sex education either overtly or covertly as the possessors of a specific “Jewish spirit,” the representatives of capitalism who also made profit off of sex and thus constituted a more abstract danger. However, Jewish men also represented sexual excess in their bodies; they appeared as bad examples of sexual perversions, as well as bodies that were to be avoided by “honorable” Christian women.

In Christian-national sex education the link between Jews and the exploitative nature of capitalism appears with the concept of sexual capitalism. The authors who spoke up firmly in support of “full sexual purity” until marriage for youth were willing to see adolescents as helpless victims endangered by those who profited from the illicit sexual activities in which these youngsters would engage. In most parables Christian boys were too young to know and too alone to resist. They had to be warned not to become easy prey for sex profiteers. In these texts Jews often appear as seducers; their mere presence on the street, in the city, and in intellectual life was cast as a threat to the innocence and purity of young Christian men and women. Jews were linked directly and indirectly to the production of pornography, pro-sex science (sexology and Freudian psychoanalysis being “Jewish sciences”), and excessive and perverse sexuality (including masturbation and homosexuality). They were also characterized as pimps who attracted girls with money.19

Honor: Three Incarnations

Honor was a constitutive part of the 1935 Nuremberg Law that dealt with marriage and sexuality. It was in fact called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.20 Sections 1 to 3 prohibited intermarriage, sexual relations outside marriage and Jews employing non-Jewish female domestic help. Section 4 forbade Jews to display “national colors.” Instead they were limited to “Jewish colors.”21 Thus, on the one hand there is a biological concept based in a racist anthropology according to which contamination would occur if “pure” Germans were to have children with Jews, and this would lead to the degeneration of the next generation of Germans.22 On the other, we see the idea of a community of German honor, equally powerful, that is meant to exclude Jews symbolically and which requires a more substantial exclusion that goes beyond the formal requirements of anti-miscegenation. Honor was what non-Jewish Germans stood to lose if they were to sleep with Jews, not or not only their biological “purity.”

It thus should come as no surprise that Przyrembel found a court that in a 1936 race defilement case extended the understanding of the race defilement clause well beyond closing down avenues for the conception of mixed-blood children. The court referred to the unity of the 1935 Law, which, in addition to putting up an obstacle to insemination (protecting German blood that is), also aimed to protect German honor. For this reason the court’s interpretation of the prohibition included any type of intimate physical contact, in addition to intercourse.23 Przyrembel documented the fact that in Nazi Germany race defilement went way beyond the legal punishment of sexual affairs: it aimed at a segregation of the Jewish population from regular contact with the rest of the German population, and this included friendships, good neighborly relations, or simple gestures of compassion. This became most evident in the denunciations of the population where those who had “previously made purchases in the Jewish shops, lived together with Jews or were in other business contact with Jews”24 were especially suspicious, and putting these “friendly Germans” under threat served to isolate Jews sexually and socially. People were expected to feel hatred and disgust toward Jews, so individuals who maintained any type of positive contact with them were by default suspicious of race defilement. The Hungarian law of 1941, like its German counterpart from 1935 or for that matter the 1941 Jewish Codex of Slovakia, foreshadowed a mass of denunciations, the isolation of Jews from non-Jewish society and the public humiliation and persecution of mixed couples. There is a substantial difference, however, between the wording of the German and the Hungarian race defilement clause. In Germany, “German honor” had to be protected, in addition to blood, so all extramarital sex was banned. In contrast, in Hungary it was “honorable women” who were made off limits for Jewish men. In practical terms this meant that Jewish women could have sex with non-Jewish men and only Jewish men were threatened with a criminal indictment. Furthermore, in terms of the politics of honor, it allowed for scrutiny of the sex lives of Jewish men and Christian women. It led to a constant defining and redefining of what “female honor” meant, while Christian male honor remained unscrutinized. The anti-Semitic sex education texts by notable intellectuals from interwar Hungary show that sexual anti-Semitism got strong backing from the Hungarian Christian national State and its supporters. It should thus come as no great surprise that by the time Hungary entered World War II on Nazi Germany’s side, anti-Semitic legislation was ready to give formal expression to these well-publicized views. Subsequent to the passage of two major laws (the First Anti-Semitic Law and the Second Anti-Semitic Law) that aimed to contain “Jews” in Hungary in an economic-social sense, in 1941 a new marriage law was adopted that introduced sexual bans. It was also known as the “Third Anti-Semitic Law,” a law on marriage that replaced the 1894 law, introducing, in addition to the anti-Semitic passages, mandatory premarital health checks and marriage loans for eugenically “fit” couples. It is worth examining the wording of the anti-Semitic clauses in Law No XV of 1941, which introduced the concept of race defilement into Hungarian law:

9. § Non-Jews are not allowed to marry Jews (…)

15. § A Jew, who has sexual intercourse with a honorable, non-Jewish woman of Hungarian origin or gets or tries to get an honorable, non-Jewish woman of Hungarian origin to engage in intercourse with him or with another Jew.25

The same category of the “honorable woman” appears in Decree No. 151.000/1927 of the Interior Minister (The Protection of Public Morals). It was the honor of the sexually pure woman that needed to be protected, and with Jews constructed as a threatening group, it was not enough to educate teenagers to keep away from Jews and to prohibit Jews from approaching “honorable” women on the streets, Jews also had to be kept away with more punitive measures.

What exactly did the term “honorable” mean in the context of Hungary? How did the courts deal with such a vague, non-legalistic term, and how was this honor constructed and reconstructed by various actors in the race defilement cases? Can we limit the discussion of honor to women, or did the honor discourses apply to other members of society?

Female Honor

“The woman becomes visible in society primarily through her body, and if she does not fit the norms, she is put under strict regulations,” wrote Zsuzsa Bokor in her discussion of the Hungarian pre-World-War I and interwar discourse on prostitution and eugenics.26 This statement, however, is just as true of post-1941 Hungary and the prevailing concept of race defilement during the war. Female bodies were on display, as they had to undergo the test of honor. The “examination” in many cases involved a range of male expert or non-expert opinion: physicians were asked to ascertain virginity or determined whether or not a woman had any sexually transmitted diseases; the defense often tried to prove that a female witness was not a woman of honor in order to get the defendant acquitted and thus alleged that the body of the woman involved was “unruly”; other men (neighbors, family members, other sexual partners, real or potential) were asked to indicate whether they had information concerning the woman’s honor. One might conclude, as László Josefovits did, the author of the 1944 legal booklet Fajgyalázás [Race Defilement], that the legislator made an omission by not properly defining “honorable woman” when passing the 1941 Marriage Law. This could have been due to the fact that in Hungary prostitution was legal and those who wanted to become prostitutes legally had to register with the authorities. This move, however, had a no-point-of-return moment, as once a woman had registered herself as a prostitute, it was extremely hard for her to return to “honorable” professions or to a marriage partner who would have been able to provide financial security. Most women did not want to risk these, and so the number of registered prostitutes was fairly low. While there were a few thousand registered prostitutes, the authorities believed that many more worked as “clandestine prostitutes.”27 The term “clandestine prostitute” was used by police authorities and was, like the term honor, a very flexible notion used to discipline and assert control over the bodies of females who did not fit the expected norm (e.g. walked alone late at night, had several sexual partners, etc.).28 This may have been because the moral police had already been struggling with the problem of boundaries when defining “prostitute” that the government could not simply put “registered prostitute” in the race defilement clause, as it would have created injustice (within a system of injustice) and also practical complications. If all Jewish men paying for sex had been forced by the heavy hand of the law to turn to registered prostitutes, these prostitutes would have been too busy to provide for other clients, hence non-Jewish men would have been forced to turn to “clandestine prostitutes” en masse. On the other hand, this would have been an easy solution that would have drastically limited Jewish men’s contact with non-Jewish women. However, it was probably too narrow a category for “dishonorable woman,” and this would not have left room for the policing and surveillance of women “on the margins.” It seems, therefore, that the legislator left the definition of honor open and free-floating. Because they did not have a clear legal concept, the police, the attorneys, the defendants, and, most importantly, the judges were encouraged to ask for additional information on the past emotional and sexual history of the woman involved. This additional knowledge made it possible to exert greater control over these unruly female bodies and emotions. In his aforementioned booklet, Josefovits dealt separately with the issue of female honor and quoted a number of court cases in which such dishonor was underlined by the fact that the women in question had acquired sexually transmitted diseases in one of their many encounters. Having extramarital sex and being infected with a sexually transmitted disease certainly constituted transgressions of sexual normality. As Sander Gilman has repeatedly shown, for a long time sexually transmitted diseases were the “glue” that connected Jews and prostitutes in the public imagination. In some cases mention is made of the detail that the encounters took place “on the highway” or “at the counter of the cinema,” which, based on the 1927 law on public morals, were public spaces and thus not sites where decent women could be addressed.29 Josefovits quoted a ruling of the Supreme Court (Kúria), which established a definition of dishonor that in various court cases was later used as a standard: “A woman who, without the slightest hesitation or resistance that would indicate female shame and good morals, upon mere prompting is ready to have an intimate encounter, cannot be considered honorable from a race protection point of view.”30

Since only honorable women could be accused of the crime, the vagueness of the concept of female dishonor also enabled acts of resistance; there were certain cases in which women were able to use their dishonor to their or their lover’s advantage. The opposite was possible as well. If a woman had a reason to hold a grudge against a Jewish man, she could try to fight for her honor; going for self-declared dishonor was, however, a much more common strategy. The law, like the Nazi German one, stipulated that only the man could be convicted of an act of “defilement,” a detail that exemplifies contemporary ideas about the active and passive roles of men and women, respectively, in sexual contact. Since the forced registration of women as prostitutes was also forbidden, the stakes for a self-claimed dishonor were rather moderate. I found only a single instance in which, subsequent to the affirmation of dishonor, a woman was sent to the moral police (erkölcsrendészet) for “administrative measures.” It was a case in which the woman and three witnesses, including her own mother and the defendant, all claimed that she had had sexual intercourse with several men for money.31 Such “administrative measures” amounted to a day or a couple of days of detention and possibly a medical check-up, a humiliating procedure all in all, even if not comparable to months or years of imprisonment (the maximum one could get for race defilement was 3 years, or 5 years in certain cases).

Thus, one must take into consideration that in many cases women would be motivated to define themselves as dishonorable, for instance a woman who claimed, “it seems I am someone who just goes off with anyone at a whistle,”32 or another who said “when I am on the street and a man asks me to have intercourse, I go with him to have intercourse for money.”33 In one case the defense attorney in the same case tried to argue that she had already been penalized for abortion. He probably hoped that given the strict moral denouncement of abortion, this would establish dishonor, but it did not. In the same case the woman admitted to having had sex occasionally with men who paid her, but added that she liked them as well, and so the court qualified her conduct as honorable.

Stories of love and despair were the types of narratives that could convince the court of one’s high morality if a woman’s honor was at stake. In the numerous cases in which it was clear that the woman did not have many lovers or had not accepted money in exchange for sex, the question of honor was cleared up easily. But for women who came from poor families and were likely to have accepted financial compensation for sexual favors, honor could still be saved if they were shown to have been what I have labeled as “in despair” or “in love.”

Despair was very often constructed using the stereotypes mentioned in anti-Semitic texts by Bangha, Prohászka and others: the village girl versus the Jewish seducer. According to this narrative, poor girls from rural areas who came to big towns to find work were especially susceptible to the temptation/danger posed by Jewish men. As this danger was external to them, their honor could and had to be saved. Despair was not necessarily measured on the basis of what one did, but focused rather on “character,” which was in turn based on assumptions rooted in Christian national popular culture. In fact, when the courts discussed the character of the “village girl” and the “seductive Jews,” trying to look for a story of personality leading up to the deed, their work resembled what Michel Foucault refers to as the “psychological-ethical double of the offense.”34 This, Foucault claims, went hand in hand with the appearance of the psychological expert opinion, which analyzed the psychological profile of the accused, and from the eighteenth century on, the judiciary gradually started to rely heavily on these expert opinions. The “double” is a delegalized version of the deed. It likens the person to his crime. In other words, the commission of a crime is characterized as the natural outcome of the alleged criminal’s irregular personality, which also found manifestation in extravagant, noncriminal behavior.35 In the race defilement cases, this double seems to appear without the need for psychological expert opinion. The judiciary often seemed ready to indulge in the construction of psychological profiles of both criminal and victim, and the “psychological expert knowledge” was found in the works of anti-Semites.

Despair was especially credible if the woman showed signs of hesitation (as opposed to “without slightest hesitation”), since that proved that she was not well-versed in the prostitution business and was possibly simply defenseless.36 One such case was that of a 24-year-old factory worker girl who initially refused to go with a Jewish man for 5 pengő. When he raised the price to 10 pengő, she agreed. In the appeals court’s explanation of their verdict (1 month and 28 days prison) they made the following claim:

it can be established that accused knew very well that T.J. was not a prostitute, because one does not need to do advance courting of a prostitute. The moral police found nothing on T.J. in its investigation, and as a factory worker she has a normal profession, but the 18–20 pengő she earns is so little that—already excited by the hugs and kisses of the accused—she did not have the fortitude to reject the sum, which was so big compared to her earnings (….) T.J. is a girl who came to Budapest from a village not much before this incident, and these are the people whom, due to their lack of experience, the law primarily wants to protect for the sake of racial purity.37

Both the concept of hesitation and the narrative of the village girl have an important place in the Budapest Appeals Court’s argumentation. Members of this court, namely Dezső Ottrubay, Ernő Lengyel, and Elek Pálffy, otherwise did not appear markedly anti-Semitic in their decision-making. In dozens of other cases they mitigated the sentences of the Budapest District Court, acquitting a large number of men who had been convicted based on insubstantial evidence. There is another case worth mentioning in this context, when the Budapest District Court’s ruling, which was quite severe (one year of imprisonment), began with a passage that resembled an excerpt from a sentimental novel: “F.G. factory worker was employed in the Kárpátia sewing factory as a seamstress until September 26, 1941. She then lost her job, and on October 8, 1942, without any income, she bought ¼ kilos of cheap black grapes with the last of her money and was eating this for lunch on a bench in Mária Terézia square, reading a book.”38

The ruling continued with the story, according to which a 68-year-old man approached her and sat down beside her. Allegedly, they had chatted for one and a half hours, and in the course of their talk the 21-year-old girl had told him about her financial distress. He had offered her 6 pengős to have intercourse with him and, “after lengthy persuasion,” she had accepted the offer. In the court hearing the man claimed that the girl had approached him and offered her services, while the girl presented the version that was accepted as the truth by the court. This case shows that “personality” did in fact matter, and in this case of an allegedly sex-hungry old Jewish man versus an innocent, young village girl, the representatives of power sided with her in terms of credibility and honor.

It was, however, not just the courts and the police who determined female honor. Women themselves could also get actively involved in the process. A successful and highly intelligent attempt to manipulate the system was made by Mrs. V., a 25-year-old waitress, who was married but was found during a night police raid in bed with a Jewish colleague of hers. Initially, it looked like relationship based on mutual love. The man and the woman were of the same social class, and they both confessed to the police that they had had a continuing relationship. The man (Mr. M.), even though it would certainly have meant having to spend months in prison if not years, maintained this version of their relationship, but the women retracted on the day of the court hearing:

Mr. M.: I understand the charge and I plead guilty. I had a relationship with Mrs. V. for 4 years, and on December 12, 1941 in the morning, when the detectives, who were investigating another case, appeared in the rented room in which I live, they found me in bed with Mrs. V. By that time I had been living together with her for two months, and we had a relationship based on love (…)

Mrs. V.: As far as I know, the defendant was cognizant of the fact that I am not an honorable woman. I had been taken into custody several times after police raids and I had been in a youth detention center as well. This happened because on some occasions I was caught red handed when I received male guests. I am not registered as a prostitute. I only received male guests on occasion, from whom I accepted money. (…)

Defendant (Mr. M.) in response to the Prosecutor’s question: I knew that Mrs. V. was not to be considered a decent woman. If I remember well, I gave her money in exchange for intercourse as well, but I don’t remember how much.39

Thus, Mr. M. quickly understood Mrs. V.’s intentions and helped her establish her own legal status as a woman of dishonor. However, at the same time she positioned herself quite well in this “system of female dishonor,” as she painstakingly explained that she had only had “temporary male guests” (átmenő férfivendégek). She limited their number to two and added that for months she had not had sex with them. That is, she presented an image of herself according to which she was not a health or a “public morals” threat, and thus she had a chance of avoiding any kind of administrative measures for clandestine prostitution. Her intervention was successful partly because records on her were found by the moral police and Mr. M. was acquitted a couple of months later.40 What I call “love”—in court cases one finds phrases like “I love him” (szeretem) and “I liked them” (kedveltem)—could take several forms. In most cases, however, it referred to the fact that the woman might have had motivations that were not purely materialistic or carnal. Giddens contends that in romantic love relationships, which over the course of the twentieth century rose to a place of unprecedented social prominence, “an element of sublime love tends to predominate over that of sexual ardor,” adding that “love breaks with sexuality while embracing it.”41 That is, if the usual dishonorable conduct the goal of which was money or sexual satisfaction was to a certain extent elevated to this “sublime” level, this may well have changed the whole story, including the perception of female honor. It is true that if a woman’s honor was satisfactorily established in the eyes of the court, this was usually bad news for a Jewish defendant. In certain cases, women very clearly tried to save their lovers by making up fictional clients (usually in vain). However, taking into account the importance of retaining honor, especially for women in middle-class couples, declarations of love (especially if they were mutual) can be seen not as a way of creating greater problems for the defendant, but as expressions of defiance to the law, which tried to serve by force relationships that were founded upon intimate feelings. Below are some cases from court decisions that touched upon this rather vague issue. In one case, the defense underlined that the Christian woman was in an adulterous, extramarital relationship, but the court dismissed their claim, contending that, “an extramarital liaison conducted with a single man and with no financial implications, purely based on attraction, cannot be termed dishonorable from an implementation point of view, even though it is in conflict with good morals.”42

This was a ruling the court had some trouble justifying, as in light of contemporary sexual mores an adulterous relationship with a Jewish man was certainly not an honorable deed. In a “Solomon’s decision,” they scolded her for this relationship, but found a way to distinguish her from the prostitutes whom they believed the makers of the law had sought to target with allegations of “dishonor.” Another case was somewhat similar: a woman was categorized as an “ex-clandestine prostitute,” and she had had issues with the police for some time for having worked as a clandestine prostitute. However, when she met the Jewish man, she decided to give up her previous life as a prostitute and remain faithful to him. The court, probably motivated by anti-Semitic convictions, acknowledged that he “converted” her into an honorable woman and at the same time gave him a 4-month prison sentence for sleeping with a Christian woman of honor.43 In another case a woman admitted to having had sexual relations with several men, but she contended that she was honorable, since according to her, “I have not had intercourse for income with anyone ever and I would not be prepared to do this. I only had sex out of love, when I liked the man.”44 The court of first instance accepted her claim and decided that she was indeed honorable.

Jewish Honor

Unsurprisingly, there was considerable variety in the forms of sexual conduct and sexual proclivity revealed by the race defilement proceedings, and these forms of conduct and desire were not always in line with contemporary stereotypes of Jewish sexuality. The types of relationships, the sexual habits and practices, the confessions and acts of various actors in some cases rather seem to have worked against the schematic stereotypes of the authorities. Like “female honor,” Jewish sexuality was a construct molded by various expectations and norms, and it worked more or less as a superimposition of a “Christian national” morality on Jewish men. In other words, the more Jewish men conformed to the ideal of “Christian purity” or “true love,” showing devotion to their (honorable) partner, the less likely they were to be subject to harsh treatment. Calling it “Jewish honor” might seem misleading at first glance, but I would argue for retaining the expression with the above meaning, i.e. as an honor “awarded” to some Jews and refused to others.

I will start with a case that could have been written personally by Prohászka or Bangha, as it was so much in line with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Gy. N., a conductor from Budapest, was, like many other people of Jewish origin after 1939, fired from his job. He found refuge in the orchestra of the mining town, Mátranovák, where he pretended to be Roman Catholic (although his religion was “Israelite” according to official documents). He soon met a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of a miner. A court ruling describes the meeting, in which “he started leading the girl on by standing in front of her when she approached with her bicycle.” Even though the ruling acknowledges that the meeting “was not against the will of the girl, because she did not go elsewhere to ride her bike,” there is a suggestion of force in the phrasing: “in the end, the accused grabbed the girl’s bike and made her stop and get off, and then he introduced himself.”45 Gy. N. was a married man, and he spoke about this to the girl, but he did not inform her that he was Jewish. As the ruling notes, “he even went to the church with her and made the sign of the cross there. Moreover, when there was talk about Jews, he too scolded them. Also, even though he did not make a formal promise that he would marry her, he talked about divorcing and making her ‘a very happy girl.’”46 It was in light of this information that, the court notes, the girl repeatedly agreed to have intercourse with him. There is mention of a trip to Budapest, where he was supposed to introduce her to his (Catholic) parents, but instead he took her to a hotel where he “got the young girl to do perverse things (fajtalanság, which literally translates as “contrary to the race”),” which probably referred to oral sex, on the basis of the use of the expression in other cases. The liaison turned into a scandal once it became public, and some local men wanted to beat up the conductor. He ended the affair, but then started a new one, again with a Christian woman, once more “hiding his identity.” In retrospect, at court he claimed that he wanted to emigrate and marry the woman in question in America. The court’s ruling becomes most indignant in its tone when it discusses female honor and how this honor was affected as a result of his conduct:

If the accused had had honorable intentions with R.Zs., if he had loved her seriously and honestly, he would not have approached her in such a deceitful and conscienceless way, as being a learned and well-read person he must have known that on the one hand his Jewish origins could be revealed very easily, and on the other, if his Jewish identity were revealed, this would bring shame on R.Zs. and dramatically reduce her chances of finding a husband, thus it could completely ruin her future.47

As for the 17-year-old girl’s honor, they arrived at the following conclusion:

with this, she started her ride down the slope, and afterward it was easier just to follow the accused than to stop and turn back, and this is how he took the girl with him down the slope to the state of moral debauchery that obviously felt like home for him (perversity (fajtalanság) in the Budapest hotel, etc.).48

Lastly, the ruling included a general legal consideration on female honor:

It is a constitutive part of the crime one is charged with that the woman, with whom the accused had sexual intercourse, is honorable, but in addition to this, from the point of view of the gravity of the crime, it is important to determine the moral value that the woman had before the act of intercourse and the extent of the moral devastation cause by the accused’s deed.49

Without much effort, one can spot all the negative stereotypes regarding Jewish sexuality and how they were subsequently connected to seduction and to pushing innocent village girls down the slippery slope from which there was no return. No wonder then that the conductor received the most severe of all the sentences that I found in the material of the Supreme Court, 18 months in prison, upheld by both appeals courts. The fact that having had intercourse with a Jewish man would “decrease any woman’s value” is notable. Thus, a Jewish man’s honor would have entailed stepping away from Christian girls in order to maintain their “market value.” There are numerous cases in which having obstructed a girl’s access to “normal life” was cited as an aggravating circumstance: “for the sake of a friendship with an honorable Hungarian girl, that is for egoistic reasons, he tried to stop the impending marriage of a young Hungarian couple with all his means, and as part of this he tried to stop a wayward girl from finding the right path again.”50

Two other rulings scolded Jewish men for having remained intimately associated with a girl for a longer time: “the defendant (...) committed the crime over an extended period of time, and with this deed he seriously impeded the fulfillment of the natural female role of R.T. and her search for a place in non-Jewish society via marriage.”51 And “aggravating circumstances are the extended time period and that the defendant committed the crime with a married woman, inhibiting her from fulfilling her female role based on her origins, either by making up with or legally divorcing her husband.”52 That is, if the woman was unmarried, being with a Jewish man would mean both shame and a cul-de-sac, and if she were to marry him, similarly this would have been a deviation from her “natural role.” However, in the above cases the relationships were relatively fresh and the girls clearly had other options (a Christian suitor or husband). Other rulings show that consistency and exclusiveness were mitigating circumstances, as in the case of a couple who had been together since 1930. They could not get married, as the woman already had a husband who had, however, disappeared abroad, thus depriving her of the chance to obtain a divorce. The Budapest District court sentenced him to four months imprisonment, which was upheld by the appeals court, but the Supreme Court reduced it to one month. The fact that they had sex even after the Marriage Law took effect was evidenced by a witness considered credible by the court, and the medical expert refuted their main argument that she had been ill and unable to have sex. The court of second instance did not accept the contention that “the sexual relationship, with regular intercourse, that was upheld up to now would have transformed into an ideal, spiritual bond,” but it did regard the “spiritual connection (lelki kapcsolat) that was rooted in long years of a love relationship” as a mitigating circumstance. The Supreme Court added in its ruling that this mitigating circumstance mentioned by the appeals court “carries such great weight in favor of the accused that the original sentence seems disproportionately severe.”53 The appeals court reduced the sentence to two months.

The various ideas concerning Jewish sexuality, female honor and Christian national sexual morality could emerge as factors in one and the same case as well. A Jewish man met a non-Jewish woman in the early 1920s, and they moved in together in the mid-1930s. They planned to marry, but were unable to arrange it; first the man’s father opposed it and, after his death, the woman’s birth certificate could not be found. After 1941, there were obvious legal obstacles. They both claimed to be in love with each other, but the Budapest District Court refused to take this into account:

(…) if the accused loved and loves the aggrieved party (the girl – G.Sz.) as much as he says, the objection of accused’s father should not have been a serious obstacle to marriage, and if this was the real reason why the wedding did not take place, then the accused’s deed confirms the racial overconfidence, according to which a non-Jewish woman is only good for an extramarital relationship, for the satisfaction of sexual instincts, and not for the establishment of a legal, family relationship.54

This explanation and the ruling that sentenced the man to one year in prison shows that the judges of this district court did not take into account what in the previous case had been a significant mitigating circumstance. The overt anti-Semitism present in the ruling was topped by the claim that the accused had “irreparably distracted her from fulfilling her female role according to her origin.”55 She was at the time 44 years old, so this referred to the fact that she was already beyond the age at which women are or were commonly held to be capable of bearing children. The man was also scolded for his “decided criminal will, with which he not only repeatedly committed the crime during the proceedings, but explicitly decided to repeat it in the future.”56 The court of second instance dismissed all aggravating circumstances in its ruling (one month in prison), as they believed that the woman had not been prevented from fulfilling her female role, a future violation of the law could only be the basis of another criminal investigation and not the one in question, and as regards the “explicit decision to repeat the deed,” they believed that this was “rather a result of internal despair than evil passion (indulat).” Furthermore, according to their ruling, the fact that “discontinuing their life together [had] created serious difficulties for the accused” was a mitigating circumstance.57 This was in fact one of the cases in which both the woman and the man openly confessed their relationship and also their love and did not change their confessions, even though this would unquestionably put him at risk. He said that he “had been and was cognizant of the legal ramifications, but after having known each other for almost a lifetime they have become so used to each other and they loved each other so much that they could not and did not want to live without each other.”58

She also mentioned the duration of the liaison. According to the police report, she said

for me he is not a lover but a husband. I am not responsible for the fact that his parents did not give their consent for us to marry as we had planned. I cannot give him up, because I love him and no other man will be born who would respect me as much as he does.59

National Honor

One of Father Koszter’s post-1941 writings, Sátán tőrvetése (The Intrigue of Satan), perfectly encapsulates the stereotypes connecting money, Jewish sexuality and female dishonor:

The kept women, maitresses who live off the pockets of their wealthy accomplices, are the victims of wretched voluptuaries; while their lives seem carefree from the outside, actually they are bleak, joyless and hopeless. These women will never become a “wife” and “mother,” the holy dream of a real woman. These are the ones who, since the passing of the 1941 Marriage Law, have converted to Judaism by the hundreds in order to continue to secure for themselves the money of their “friends.”60

It logically followed that women who had consciously remained or engaged in sexual or matrimonial relations with Jews were doing it for money: they could only be prostitutes. If they were honorable women, then they did not belong to the Jews. Either they had been deceived or they were not yet fully cognizant of the dangers Jewish men posed and had to be shown a way back to “normality.”

But what kind of code of honor needed to be protected here? What was the normality, the “national honor” that was to be saved by these race defilement regulations? Again, the various actors had different ideas of what was at stake, but it is possible to delineate certain recurring patterns. Firstly, there is the idea of winning, of gaining the upper hand. If national honor is maintained and promoted by Christian national men, then public life, including the most respected professions, the media, public administration (all that makes a man proud of himself) must be in the hands of non-Jews. In this respect the 1941 Marriage Law is very much in line with the so-called First and Second Anti-Semitic Laws from 1938 and 1939, which limited the employment of Jews in certain professions and aimed at an “economic changing of the guards.” However, by 1941 changing of the guard meant that Jewish men had to give back “their” women (the women who were the prerogative of “Christian” men) as well. One case in which these various anti-Semitic laws for a “changing of the guard” worked together was that of a 53-year-old, rather well-off Budapest lawyer, who was convicted and given the maximum penalty of three years in prison by the court of first instance. The aggravating circumstances of the ruling have a particularly loaded language, even for this kind of court:

(…) the fact that the accused is married, that it happened repeatedly, that he committed the deed as a lawyer, and that partly in order to satisfy his lust, party for his own protection he contaminated spiritually a whole family and D.E., who is nearly still a child whose moral value depreciated to such an extent that she claimed that she was a prostitute without thinking, almost as if she were boasting.61

The lawyer was then acquitted by the appeals court, as they regarded the woman as dishonorable, and he was allowed to return home. However, as becomes clear on the basis of his petition for compensation, he lost his job as a lawyer because, subsequent to the first ruling, his name was automatically deleted from the list of chamber-approved lawyers. As a previous anti-Semitic Law had introduced a quota for the admittance of new Jewish lawyers to the Chamber, he did not stand a chance of being readmitted. Thus, in a case of sexual conduct in which he was finally acquitted, he still lost his profession and an accusation of race defilement de facto helped further the economic changing of guard. As for the disappointed Christian lover, race defilement cases provide some similar stories. One was that of a sailor, who traveled a great deal and whose wife had a Jewish lover. As the rulings states, “the married couple had constant fights because of the accused.”62 It was the husband who reported the affair in 1942 to the police in person, saying “I was informed that he has been having an affair with my wife since 1940. My wife has repeatedly said this winter that she would not leave him, she would rather break up with me and moreover, she wanted to convert to Judaism.”63 At the court hearing he said he was on bad terms with the Jewish man because he “nosed himself up (feltolakodott)” to his wife, but that he was nevertheless able to give an unbiased statement as a witness.64 The sentence was then reduced with each appeal, the initial ruling of 18 months first became one year and finally the Supreme Court reduced it to six months, indicating that it was not the Jewish man who initiated the liaison but the woman. He himself claimed that after 1941 he had “begged the woman to go back to her husband,” that is, in this case race defilement provided an opportunity for the disappointed husband to “reclaim” his lost wife from a Jewish man who, clearly under the pressure of the law, was willing to give up the affair.65 We can observe many of the same themes when looking at the ways in which some people reported Jews to the police. One such case was that of M.E., a house-painter, who was reported by another handyman, probably a rival, for living together with a Christian woman:

The foreign national M.E. defiles the Hungarian race and laughs merrily when there is talk about want of material, as his bottles are full of paint and varnish. If someone goes to him, he is ready to take any job, painting, coating, for less money, because he wants to oust the Christian workers by providing services without paying taxes.66

This letter indicates quite clearly that the man in question was much less concerned with sexual-biological purity than he was with getting rid of economic competition. In terms of national honor, I have cited these three examples as illustrations of the connection between the post-1938 anti-Semitic regulations in Hungary and the ways in which they contributed to a system that enabled a “changing of the guard.” National honor at the time was to be preserved by replacing the Jewish intelligentsia with non-Jews in all possible spheres of society. This happened with various degrees of success in different walks of life, and there are no numbers to prove that Christian men were able to “get” the women they loved or the women who had had sexual contact with Jews. However, this was certainly part of the game: Hungarian national honor after 1941 implied not only the silencing of Jews in the public arena and the pressuring and expulsion of Jews from their professions and businesses. It also meant that they were to lose contact with the women they loved if these women were regarded as belonging rightfully to the nation.

Conclusion

What do the racist sexual politics of the Horthy-era teach us about the uses of concepts of sexual purity and honor? Firstly, they exemplify the legal codification of what Ute Frevert framed in terms of the gendered nature of emotions. As the race defilement cases exhibit, female honor was irrevocably tied to sexuality, and it was defined by a patriarchal middle class. The suspicion of dishonor arose if women had more than one sexual partner, if they were believed to have engaged in sex in exchange for material gain or if they were ready to have sex with men they did not know without showing “proper female shame.” Female honor was decided upon by male authorities. In the race defilement cases courts composed of men were entrusted with the authority to determine whether a woman was honorable or not. These decision-makers were ready to grant female honor if the women in question fit a certain profile that made them look vulnerable and in need of protection. This has been demonstrated by some police reports and court rulings and their reliance on certain stereotypes which found confirmation, as it were, in contemporary sex education texts. A stereotype that reappeared consistently was that of the naïve, uneducated and inexperienced poor village girl, who encountered an older, Jewish seducer and was helpless against his tricks. I used the terms love and despair above to capture other common ideas that could be used to persuade officials that a woman was honorable. Despair was often linked to the village girl stereotype, and it referred mostly to the coercion that supposedly resulted from her dire economic situation. Love, on the other hand, gave a spiritual meaning to an otherwise materialistically motivated sexual encounter, so if a woman made a plausible demonstration of affection, her honor could be saved. I have not discussed Jewish female sexuality in this paper as, in contrast to German race defilement, the Hungarian law did not penalize sexual contact with Jewish women and therefore the archival sources I have consulted did not address Jewish female sexuality. The sex education materials focused more on Jewish male seducers but occasionally the sexuality of Jewish women was mentioned too. A study of how the personal life of female “Jews” changed in the early 1940s is, however, a challenge that will have to be taken up in the future.

Secondly, I tried to see what codes of honor were applied to the Jewish men who were the primary targets of this legal provision. Even though their honor was not as specifically spelled out in the law as that of their female partners, circumstances did matter. If, according to the agents of power, they showed signs of love and were deeply attached to their partner, it was possible for them to receive a relatively mild sentence. There was much more understanding on behalf of the courts for couples who had been living together for years and possibly even had children than for those men who could be made to resemble the stereotype of the “Jewish seducer.” I offered an example of one such “seducer,” who, to use Foucault’s concept of the psychological-ethical double, was already living in sin, coming from an urban-bohemian milieu and supposedly having caused his counterpart, the “village girl,” to begin to slide down a moral slope of no return. This “character,” so it was believed, was about to commit sexual violations as predetermined by his lifestyle. Jewish honor also included being humble and not standing in the way of a woman’s honor and her fulfilment of her alleged role, which implied eventually marrying a Christian man. If a Jewish man were to keep a woman “out of circulation” for too long by being her lover or by threatening her partnership with a Christian man, he would fall into a less honorable category. Naturally, the honor of Jews was not under scrutiny in this manner if they kept away from Christian women.

Thirdly, I linked the race defilement provision with other anti-Semitic legislation in Hungary and argued that the notion that Christian men had the property-rights over the nation was part of an abstract notion of “national honor.” National honor implied that they alone should have access to good jobs, to the ownership of capital, to public spaces, and the friendship and love of honorable women. As part of the changing of the guard, their rivals were to be restrained and remain humbled.

If other regulations served to deprive Jewish men of their economic rights, the anti-Semitic sexual provision stripped them of full sexual citizenship. The requirements connected to female honor put a wall around the sexual choices of certain groups in the emotional regime(s) of the Horthy era. One’s emotional liberty was seriously limited by the race defilement regulation, which forbade hundreds of thousands of Jewish men from approaching or continuing relationships with non-Jewish women, and in turn all non-Jewish women were closely monitored in order to ensure that they would not to engage in such illicit liaisons.

As with other anti-Semitic laws, what mattered was not just the number of the convicted and acquitted or the severity of their penalties. Stripping them of their honor as men (as part of the social construct of manhood), limiting their range of options, and policing and controlling female honor (i.e. sexuality) were all part and parcel of this regulation. Honorable Hungarian non-Jewish men wanted all honorable women to be their own virgin brides and loyal wives, whereas the love of a Hungarian woman for a “Jew” or any kind of rebellion against the legally buttressed order of things was to be punished with the full force of the law.

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Frevert, Ute. Emotions in History: Lost and Found. Budapest: CEU, 2011.

Gárdonyi, Máté. “Az antiszemitizmus funkciója Prohászka Ottokár és Bangha Béla társadalomképében” [The Function of Anti-Semitism in the Image of Society of Ottokár Prohászka and Béla Bangha]. In A holokauszt Magyarországon európai perspektívában [The Holocaust in Hungary from a European Perspective], edited by Judit Molnár. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2005.

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Lugosi, András. “‘Sztalin főhercege’. Kohn báró vacsorái a Falk Miksa utcában a fajgyalázási törvény idején” [“Archduke of Stalin.” The Dinners of Baron Kohn in Falk Miksa Street at the Time of the Miscegenation Law]. FONS 17, no. 4 (2010): 527–76.

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Olasz, Péter. A mai férfi életútja [The Path of Life of the Man of Today]. Satu-Mare: Corvin Nyomda, 1926.

Passerini, Luisa, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert, eds. New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

Prohászka, Ottokár. “A zsidó recepció a morális szempontjából” [The Reception of the Jews from a Moral Perspective]. In Prohászka Ottokár összegyűjtött munkái [The Collected Works of Ottokár Prohászka], edited by Antal Schütz. Vol. 22. Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1929.

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Tóth, Tihamér. A tiszta férfiúság [Pure Manliness]. Budapest: Stephaneum, 1920.

Zimmermann, Susan. “Nemiség, tisztesség és szegénység. A nőkkel és a prostitúcióval kapcsolatos vita és politika Bécsben és Budapesten a századfordulón” [Gender, Honor, and Poverty. The Debate and Politics on Women and Prostitution in Vienna and Budapest at the Turn of the Century]. In Rubicon 6, no. 8 (1998). Accessed October 5, 2015. http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/nemiseg_tisztesseg_es_szegenyseg_a_nokkel_es_a_prostitucioval_kapcsolatos_vita_es_politika_becsben_e/.

Regina Fritz

Inside the Ghetto: Everyday Life in Hungarian Ghettos1

 

The first ghetto was established in Hungary on April 16, 1944, about one month after the German invasion of the country. Within eight weeks, the Hungarian gendarmerie and police, together with the German Sondereinsatzkommando, had detained more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in over 170 ghettos. There were significant differences between the individual ghettos in Hungary with regard to housing, provisions, the ability to make contact with the “outside world,” the extent of violence, etc. The living conditions depended to a great extent on how the local administrations implemented the measures for ghettoization and how the non-Jewish population reacted to the creation of the ghettos. In addition, ghettoization in the annexed territories differed in many perspectives from ghettoization in the core of Hungary. It was not only more brutal, but also much less structured. The paper investigates the formal differences between the individual Hungarian ghettos and describes the widely differing situations experienced in them. On the basis of personal documents and the preserved estates of ghetto administrations, I offer a portrayal of daily life inside the ghettos in the capital and in cities and smaller towns in rural parts of Hungary.

 

Keywords: Hungary, Jews, persecution, ghetto, daily life, oral history, diary, DEGOB, 1944–45, Holocaust.

Introduction

On April 18, 1944, Olga and Ilona Iczkovitcs told their brother Elemér about their forced relocation to a ghetto.

 

According to official regulations, along with other Jews, we have to leave our homes maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after—we just don’t know yet. The tentative destination is Beregszász. We are allowed to bring one package weighing 50 kilos. All three of us are setting out on our way with strong spirits, hopeful and healthy. Should fate have it that we won’t meet again, we hope you may be truly happy.2

Two days earlier, on April 16, 1944, about a month following the German occupation of Hungary and twelve days before the official government ruling on “ghettoization,” the first ghetto was established in the annexed region of Carpathian Ruthenia. By early June 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were concentrated in over 170 ghettos,3 so that, with the exception of Budapest, the ghettoization of Jews in Hungary was practically completed within a matter of weeks. From mid-June 1944 onwards, the Jews of Budapest were required to move into specific “yellow houses” in the vicinity of factories, rail stations, and other possible targets of allied air strikes. Only in November 1944, months after the majority of Hungarian Jews had been deported and murdered, were two closed-in ghettos established in Budapest, the “Large” Ghetto and the “International” Ghetto.4

Most ghettos outside the capital existed only briefly, as the ghetto residents were transported to special collection camps in the county capitals within a matter of weeks. After two weeks at most, the vast majority of them had been sent to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. In exceptional cases, Hungarian Jews were deported to the Austrian camp Strasshof/Nordbahn.5

Concentration and deportation was organized by deportation zones, which corresponded mainly to the gendarmerie districts. With some exceptions, the Jews living in the territories Hungary annexed between 1938 and 1941 were deported first. The Jews living in the core parts of the country (post-Trianon Hungary) followed. The deportations were supposed to be concluded with the Jews of Budapest, however, Regent Miklós Horthy put a stop to the deportations before the Jews of Budapest would have fallen victim to them. He did so in reaction to growing international pressure and also due to his realization that the war had been lost following the landing of Allied troops at Normandy and the continuing advances of the Red Army.6 After Romania switched sides politically and militarily, Horthy installed a new government under Géza Lakatos, which secretly accepted an armistice agreement with the Soviet Union. Following the broadcast of this agreement on Hungarian radio, the German government forced Horthy and the Lakatos government to resign on October 15, 1944. Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Hungarian Arrow Cross party, took over the government and restarted the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. Between November 6 and December 1, 1944, over 76,000 Hungarian Jews were handed over to the German Empire. This number included forced laborers from Hungarian factories, labor servicemen from the Hungarian army, and Budapest Jews who had survived the first wave of deportations in the first half of 1944.7

Due to the fact that the rural ghettos of Hungary existed only for a matter of weeks, internal ghetto institutions and cultural life could not develop as distinctive aspects of ghetto life, as they had in other ghettos across Europe, especially in Poland.8 Although there was first evidence of administrative structures, religious life, organization of health and preventive care in the Hungarian case too, only the “Large” Ghetto of Budapest had a somewhat more developed administration.9 For historians wishing to analyze life and life worlds (Lebenswelt)10 in the Hungarian ghettos, the limited number of sources about the daily life inside them poses a serious challenge. Military operations also led to the destruction or loss of files. Because of this, everyday life in the Hungarian ghettos has rarely been made the subject of scholarly inquiry.11

However, as stressed by historian Saul Friedländer, Jewish perceptions, actions, and reactions to persecution are an integral part of the history of National Socialism.12 Accordingly, the study of everyday life in the Hungarian ghettos also constitutes a relevant scholarly subject. The following study aligns with the recent series of publications, which have increasingly explored Nazi ghettos from the perspectives of everyday life.13 The aim of these studies was to supplement historical research, which for a long time had focused on the perpetrator’s perspective, with the victim’s point of view. The “perceptions, agency, and reactions [...], in addition to the interactions [of the persecuted, note R.F.] with the rest of the population” thus became the central part of the analysis.14 These researches emphasize efforts made to regain a sense of normality in the chaos of everyday life in the ghetto. Endeavors to maintain friendships and family relationships, celebrate holidays, organize cultural, religious, and social institutions are also at the heart of these inquiries, as are internal conflicts in the ghetto or interactions with the outside world. The intention is not, as was in the past, to analyze ghetto history backwards, proceeding in our attempts to understand it from its outcome, i.e. by focusing on the subsequent annihilation of prisoners in the concentration and death camps, even if the context of persecution cannot be ignored. Instead, the studies consciously address the lives and activities of the persecuted and characterize the communities in the ghettos as heterogeneous societies.15 As noted by historians Imke Hansen, Katrin Steffen, and Jochen Tauber, “ghettos should not be seen only as places of persecution and murder, but also as places of life, albeit restricted, and moreover, as a coming together of different worlds.”16

The few surviving diaries and pieces of correspondences from the Hungarian ghettos are uniquely valuable sources that help document events and daily life during the period of persecution in the involuntarily ghettoized community.17 In addition to the documents produced by the organs of local administration, the daily reports from the various ghettos that were published by Hungarian historians Judit Molnár and Kinga Frojimovics18 and the reports from the “Large” Ghetto in Budapest also provide insights into everyday life in Hungarian ghettos. The small amount of source material from the time period can be supplemented with recollections recorded after 1945. The perspectives of those inside the Hungarian ghettos have been articulated not only in interviews recorded decades after the events,19 but also immediately after the war. One of the most valuable early postwar collections is that of the National Relief Committee for Deportees (DEGOB). Recorded between March 1945 and June 1946, the files in this collection document the personal stories of about 5,000 survivors.20 Although the project’s focus was documentation from the post-deportation period and the experiences in the National Socialist camp system, in almost every protocol survivors also spoke about the ghettoization process and everyday life in the Hungarian ghettos.21

Drawing on these sources, in this essay I investigate the diversity of the ghettos and analyze the differences in ghetto experiences. To what extent could the Jewish inhabitants of the ghettos influence and give structure to their daily life? Was it possible to adhere to religious commandments or arrange forms and patterns of cultural life? What influence did internal or “imported” conflicts have on the life of the ghetto inhabitants? How was violence exercised and experienced in the different ghettos, particularly by the Hungarian gendarmerie? How did the living conditions change over the course of the weeks? And, last but not least, how did the ability or the inability to make contact with the “outside world” influence ghetto life?

“It’s impossible to get used to this life.” On the Diversity of the Ghettos

Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler’s personal plenipotentiary in Hungary, sent a telegram to the German Foreign Office on April 23, 1944:

 

The ghettoization work began on April 16 in the Carpathian region. 150,000 Jews have been seized. It’s expected that this action will be completed by the end of next week. An estimated 300,000 Jews. Subsequently, similar operations in Transylvania and further border provinces near Romania are being planned. Still a further 250,000 to 300,000 Jews to capture. Then, those counties adjacent to Serbia and Croatia, and, finally, the inland ghettoization, finishing up in Budapest.22

Over the course of the following weeks, Veesenmayer regularly reported to the Foreign Office on the gradual ghettoization and the deportations, that followed. In a bureaucratic style, he relayed the number of captured persons and noted “incidents,” such as escape attempts or suicides. Because they don’t contain any information about daily life or living conditions, these reports shed no light on the many disparities among ghettos established in Hungary during the spring and summer of 1944. However, the ghettoization in the annexed territories differed from that in the core of the country because it was carried out in a more ferocious and less organized manner. This becomes apparent when the documents from regional administrations are considered, alongside egodocuments.

In many villages of the annexed territories, the authorities skipped a “multiphase ghettoization” altogether. Instead, the Jewish inhabitants were quickly gathered in collection camps in which, because of their provisional nature, conditions were especially dreadful. On the other hand, in the country’s core, where the ghettoization happened at a later time after the authorities had become more familiar with the procedure, the Jews living in the larger cities were moved to designated areas, which were usually isolated from the rest of the city. Jews from the villages and small towns were temporarily housed in synagogues and other Jewish community institutions in their hometowns. Later, the Hungarian and German authorities moved them to ghettos of nearby larger cities. One or two weeks before deportation, the Jews were finally concentrated in collection camps.

In the case of Hungary, the location of ghettoization and the conditions in each ghetto depended mostly on decisions made by regional administrators.23 Prior to the establishment of the ghettos, there were administrative consultations regarding questions of location, supply, and equipment. The few surviving minutes taken at such meetings document the broad scope of action the local decision-makers had on questions concerning ghettoization. Thus, a note written by the Debrecen Council demonstrates vividly the radicalizing or deradicalizing affect that the local authorities could have on the centrally regulated ghettoization measures.24 On May 8, 1944, a confrontation between Mayor Sándor Kölcsey and prefect Lajos Bessenyei erupted over the implementation of the individual steps of ghettoization in Debrecen. The former took a more moderate position. Kölcsey was firmly against barricading the ghettos and also insisted that the Jews should be allowed to bring along all necessary items. What’s significant here is that Kölcsey substantiated his viewpoint with aesthetic and pragmatic argumentation, and not with any kind of philanthropic reasoning: “We have more practical solutions here and can close off the streets. He [Kölcsey, note R.F.] is averse to using wooden planks, first of all, because they are ugly [...]. Secondly, the planks might be useful for national defense.” Finally, the Jewish population in Debrecen ended up being housed in a ghetto located in the city center instead of the barracks built specifically for them outside the city (as first proposed); the lack of building materials was cited as the reason.

While ghettoization in Debrecen was carried out in accordance with the decision of the city authorities, due to protests by the local non-Jewish population, similar plans made for other cities often failed. On the one hand, some protesters laid claims to the homes of Jews, which were often located on projected ghetto premises. On the other, some gentiles complained that they would have to vacate their houses or apartments, which were in the area designated for the ghetto.25 These grievances often led to implementing more radical ghettoization plans than originally intended. Therefore, the area initially planned for many ghettos was further reduced, or the ghetto was set up on the fringe of residential areas, in warehouse-like conditions located in either abandoned factories or commercial buildings.26 However, in some places, such as Hódmezővásárhely, the Jews were actually allowed to stay in their own homes until deportation. In Budapest, the authorities at first decided that the Jewish population would be housed in houses marked with a yellow star throughout the entire urban area. The authorities rejected building a closed-in ghetto up until November 1944, as they had come to believe rumors, which had also been spread by the Budapest Jewish Council,27 that only non-Jewish neighborhoods would be bombed.

Overall, Hungarian historian László Csősz has distinguished five types of ghetto:

1. Complete resettlement. Accommodation outside residential areas in warehouse-like conditions in factories or farm buildings;

2. Separate residential neighborhoods, usually in former Jewish quarters;

3. Accommodation in individual buildings, not necessarily joined, marked with a yellow star;

4. Rejection of the establishment of a closed-in ghetto.28

Csősz characterizes Model 5, for instance the ghettos in Kassa, Ungvár, and Munkács as a combination of the first and second models. In these cities, local Jews were housed in a closed-off district within the city, while Jewish people from the surrounding region had to move to a collection camp, usually located on the outskirts of the city. However, there were also several other cases in which the Jewish population was divided into various groups. For example, in the Beregszász ghetto, Jews over 60 years of age were housed separately.29 In Bonyhád, there were separate ghettos for Orthodox Jews and Neolog Jews.30 Furthermore, in some ghettos the Jews who had converted to Christianity were housed separately, which occasionally also meant that they had somewhat better living conditions.31

The filth, lack of toilets and washing facilities, problems with supplies, loss of private space, confinement, harassment by the police, and uncertainty about the future were all deeply imprinted on the memories of most survivors. These factors affected people differently in the different ghettos. In particular, the type of housing seems to have had a key impact on experiences of the ghettos. Survivors from Kassa who were housed in the local brick factory recalled their experiences thus:

 

The wind was blowing terribly, it was cold, and the brick factory didn’t even have walls. The first days were miserable. There was no toilet. There was no water. There was not even space to unload our baggage or take a moment’s pause, so we just got to work. We built walls, but we slept on the ground. Whoever could manage to get hold of some straw did so.32

Those forced to move into houses designated for Jews within city perimeters lived under relatively better conditions. Although an average of 6 to 7 people had to share a single room, the survivors from Kassa accentuated the differences: “Life was better here, because they were able to live in apartments and move about more freely. Once in a while, a person might even have a minute alone to himself; he didn’t always have to think, eat, drink, or sleep collectively.”33 The dense concentration of people in a paltry space was a common characteristic of ghettos in the annexed territories. The lack of space was the most extreme in these ghettos, with an average of 1m2 per person. In a large portion of the heartland (meaning Trianon Hungary) the proposed standard was 4m² per person, although in many ghettos people in the end only had half that space.34 On May 19, 1944, a Jewish woman wrote a letter to her sister, describing the situation in the Miskolc ghetto:

 

As I mentioned, we sleep seven people to a small room. The seven beds take up so much of the space in the room that we are hardly able to move about. You can imagine how much daily life is compromised for my dear Irén, for whom her beloved home was everything. It’s impossible to get used to this life. It feels like prison.35

The internments were led by the Hungarian police and gendarmerie, representatives of the Sondereinsatzkommando functioned under the leadership of Adolf Eichmann as a “consulting institution.”36 The Jews of the individual counties usually had 3–12 days to relocate to the designated areas. In some places, however, they were only given a mere matter of hours for this purpose. For instance, in Munkács the officials decided on a strict limit of 10 hours. The procedures began in Munkács at 4:30 AM. The gendarmerie chased the local Jews from their beds and beat them up on the way to the ghetto.37

Most ghettos had a prescribed limitation on how much luggage could be brought along. In practice there were differences between the individual ghettos, as was true with regards to whether a ghetto was open or completely isolated. In some ghettos, especially those in the annexed territories, the ghetto residents possessed only the garments they wore on their bodies. In other ghettos, the Jews were allowed to bring along as many belongings as they were able to carry into the ghetto. This was the case in Debrecen,38 for example, where the county prefect at first rejected such a proposal from the mayor, maintaining that it would amount to “sanatorium accommodation.”39 In some villages Jews were even allowed to bring furniture into the ghetto.40 In general, however, only 50 kg worth of luggage was permitted.

As a consequence of the hasty creation of the ghettos, many areas of daily life were only provisionally organized. The living conditions were especially atrocious in the ghettos and collection camps in the annexed territories, where the percentage of destitute Jews was higher than in the core parts of the country and the transitional character of the ghettos and camps was the most blatantly obvious. In some cases, the Jews in these ghettos had to live out in the open, and the severe lack of water made the situation arduous. In a letter to Bishop László Ravasz dated May 5, 1944, the notary public in Marosvásárhely bemoaned the conditions in which the Jewish residents were housed next to an abandoned brick factory:

 

There were only three or four rooms available, full of shattered windows, and there was little more than a few open sheds. This means the huge group [of Jews, note R.F.] is forced to camp outside, exposed to the elements. They are not even provided with basic sanitary facilities. There is a lack of toilets and drinkable water, and the food supply does not work yet. Infants, small children, and the aged are left out in the windy, cold nights with no roof over their heads (completely unprotected).41

 

In the Munkács ghetto there were no bathing facilities either, and the inhabitants had to wash themselves in a nearby swamp.42 Moreover, many ghettos had an inadequate supply of food and medication. Although most ghettos had a communal kitchen, there was very little in the way of food or ingredients on hand. Many people were reliant on the food rations they had brought along. One survivor of the Huszt ghetto concluded that “[t]here was, indeed, a communal kitchen in the ghetto, but whoever relied on that could just go ahead and starve.”43 The Orthodox Jews in the Carpathian-Ukraine and in northeastern Hungary were hit especially hard by the supply problem. The Hungarian authorities began rounding up Jews in this region on April 16, 1944, the final day of Pesach. Because the religious Jews were minding the Jewish laws of not storing any leavened foods at this time, the Orthodox Jews, as a result, had no bread rations to take with them to the ghetto. This had massive consequences for the food situation in these ghettos.

Most ghettos were fenced in and put under outside surveillance by policemen or the gendarmerie.44 Ghetto life was organized by a local Jewish Council.45 In addition, numerous ghettos had a ghetto police. Ghetto residents relied not only on the institutional structures provided.46 They also organized aspects of communal and daily life on their own. In her journal, Éva Heyman described the Nagyvárad ghetto thus:

 

We chose Marica’s mother, Aunt Klári Kecskeméti, to be in charge of the inhabitants of our room. Everybody has to obey her. In the dark she gave a speech, and even though I was almost asleep, I understood that we all have to take care that everything is kept clean, because that is very important, and that we all have to think of one another, since all the people in the room are relatives and friends.47

House Commanders, in charge of orderliness, cleanliness, and discipline, were elected in many other ghettos too.48 Understandably, the internal administrative structure was most developed in the “Large” Ghetto in Budapest, which existed for seven weeks (the longest time among Hungarian ghettos). The ghetto was divided into ten districts, each of which was headed by a district leader who in turn was supported by a deputy. They were appointed by the Jewish Council and they were responsible for providing ghetto residents with food, organizing the fire response unit, leading a registration system, holding judicial powers, and being responsible for children who were living without their parents in the ghetto. Additionally, there was a Postal Service, which, because of organizational challenges, was able to process very few letters. Within each district, every building had a “building commander.” Apartments had an “apartment commander.” Order in the “Large” Ghetto was upheld by a ghetto police, the most important task of which was to prevent the theft of food and heating material.49

In general, the Hungarian ghetto inhabitants were mostly children, adolescents, older people, sick people, and women, because most Jewish men had been called to serve in the Hungarian labor service before and during the process of ghettoization.50 According to a report from Kisvárda, “55 percent of the people currently in the ghetto are women over 40 years old. The rest are children and elderly people; young men are not to be found at home, or only to a very minor extent.”51

In the cramped quarters of the ghetto, social and religious tensions flared up between rich and poor, young and old, and religious and secular Jews. Despite numerous difficulties, efforts were still made to follow religious commandments and maintain religious customs. Religious issues were crucial, especially in the ghettos in the annexed territories, where the number of strictly traditional, Orthodox Jews was relatively high. However, even in the core parts of the country conflicts erupted between Orthodox Jews and Neolog Jews, as well as between those who had converted to Christianity but were regarded by the authorities as Jews according to the anti-Jewish laws. A survivor of the Szolnok ghetto recalled an example of such a conflict on his first Shabbat in the ghetto, where attempts were made to organize the event in a former outdoor kitchen, but the required separation of men and women was not feasible. The conservative community argued that people should try to make the best out of the situation and pray together, but the ultra-Orthodox men left the room on the grounds that Jewish commandments were absolute and must be obeyed regardless of the circumstances.52

Even cooking together could lead to disagreements. A Debrecen ghetto survivor recalled how the ultra-Orthodox families would not cook in the communal kitchens because they were not kosher.53 Consequently, some ghettos arranged their own kosher kitchens.54 The differences were often exacerbated in the ghettos when high-profile Jews (members of the Jewish Council, doctors, or pharmacists) received better accommodations or were housed in a separate ghetto.

 

“The ghetto became the police’s favorite activity.” Suffering Violence in the Ghetto

Not only were the general conditions in the ghettos and collection camps in the first ghettoization zones often more disastrous than in parts of post-Trianon Hungary, in many instances, the police also treated the ghettoized population more callously. After the war, a survivor from the Mátészalka ghetto remembered: “They punched one fellow, because his yellow star wasn’t sewn on properly, and they beat another, because he had his hands in his pockets. They found mistakes all the time.”55 Often, the men and, eventually, women too were given meaningless work simply to keep them busy. In one instance, they had to dig pits and later fill them back in.

Beatings were a daily routine in the Munkács ghetto, too:

 

The ghetto became the police’s favorite activity. They entered whenever they felt like it and roughed us up. Sometimes, they would take us to the river and force us to get in, to make a header. Obviously, it was no big deal for the young lads, but they made the old and sick people do the same thing.56

 

Orthodox Jews, who notably stood out in the crowd because of their appearance, seem to have suffered an especially high number of acts of violence. For instance, there were countless attacks on strictly religious Jews in the Munkács ghetto. One survivor reported that Orthodox men were repeatedly abused on their way home after evening prayer.57 Many survivors remembered what was called “Black Saturday” in the Munkács ghetto. As the ghetto’s Orthodox men made their way to the synagogue early in the morning, they were intercepted by Germans, who took 200 of them off to work. The men were forced to remove doors from houses, carry out all of the objects that were in the synagogue, and then wash the floor of the synagogue with the tallit. The Germans severely abused them the whole time.58 A female eyewitness remembered: “On this day, they gathered all the Jewish men and boys, took them to the synagogue, and had them disassemble all the seating and furniture with their bare hands—without any tools. And they were forced to chant Jewish prayers at the same time.”59 The degree of the cruelty of the gendarmes and the police often depended on whether they had had any social relationships with Jews before ghettoization. The local policeman and gendarmes who knew some of the Jews tended to help out or behave more neutrally. Commando units from other localities carried out their tasks with more merciless severity.60

Many survivors vividly recalled the vicious interrogations conducted by the gendarmes and the acts of torture that were used in order to gain information about hidden valuables. Jews who were considered wealthy were interrogated with exceptional violence, as noted in a Salgótarján ghetto report received by the Jewish Council in June 1944:

 

It has been reported that during the night of May 31 in the Salgótarján community, several affluent Jews were investigated in the main school building. Their inspection began with the most abominable savageries. 50 gendarmes from other communities questioned men and women. They broke their bones, forced them to take off their shoes, punched them on their barefoot soles, and pierced them with needles, all to extort confessions whether they’d concealed any assets with certain Christians.61

 

Women were subjected to humiliating strip searches in the course of which midwives probed all bodily cavities in search of cached goods. The procedure was traumatizing for many women: “Personally, I have never felt such panic as I did in those artillery barracks. I was always afraid there before hand and knew it was my turn to be brought into the torture chamber.”62 Several people actually died as a result of the brutal interrogations.63 The surge in brutal treatment made daily life in the ghettos significantly more burdensome.

There were also raids in the course of which the few possessions of the ghetto residents were looted by gendarmes, police officers, or other non-Jews. In a unique way, the diary of 13-year-old Éva Heyman illustrates the increasing decline of living conditions in the ghetto. The quiet optimism expressed in her first journal entry64 was soon replaced with fear and despair concerning the situation:

 

I have no idea how things are going to be now. Every time I think: This is the end, things couldn’t possibly be worse, and then I find out that it’s always possible for everything to get worse, and even much much worse. Until now we had food, and now there won’t be anything to eat. At least we were able to walk around inside the Ghetto, and now we won’t be able to leave our house. Every child could wash up in warm water in the bathtub, and now they’ve taken the wood from the basement, and we won’t be able to heat water to wash in any more. (…) Until now Mariska [the family’s gentile housekeeper, note R.F.], was even able to come to us and we always had food, and now I really don’t know what we’re going to eat.65

As portrayed in this diary, many factors contributed to the worsening of the general situation in the ghetto. In many places, the already difficult living conditions in the ghetto deteriorated further, particularly as a consequence of the ongoing raids by the gendarmes. In the Kassa ghetto, for example, according to a survivor’s report she was to bring with her two pieces of clothing, a pair of shoes, two weeks’ worth of groceries, two blankets, and two pillows.66 Most of these items, however, were taken by gendarmes in the course of “house searches,” after which only a few articles of clothing were left for the ghetto inhabitants.67 Even in the Kaposvár ghetto, where the Jews were permitted to bring an unlimited amount of their property with them, there was a rampage that began on June 5, 1944. Over the course of several days, a group of about 25 men captured furniture, carpets, clothing, and other assets.68

The rising number of people being sent into the ghetto aggravated the situation further, leading to overcrowding. In some towns, the ghetto area was even reduced after the authorities or individuals laid claim to buildings located in the ghetto areas.69 Furthermore, permission to leave the ghettos was increasingly restricted in many cases. Reports sent from the Gyöngyös ghetto are, therefore, typical of many ghettos:

 

After the first two weeks, the situation in the ghetto has deteriorated drastically. Unless the errand is absolutely justified, exiting the ghetto has been banned completely. They have taken away all money over 50 Pengő from everyone’s money supply. They have taken away all extra clothes and underwear. There is undeniably a shortage of food.70

 

The approximately 70,000 residents of the “Large” Ghetto in Budapest, established in November 1944, were not spared violent assaults either. Reports sent to the Budapest Jewish Council describe single acts of repeated violence being carried out. For example, the Council received reports on December 16 from several House Commanders:

Several apartments in the building at 10 Rumbach Street were robbed on the night of November 13, and three armed men stole cash (3,500 Pengő), etc. and have taken wedding rings. The same robbers struck again the night of November 15 and stole money and other valuables from other apartments. [...] The night of the 15th, the apartment at 11 Kazinczy Street, first floor, door one, was robbed of money and clothes by two thugs. [...] On the 16th, several members of the Arrow Cross showed up in uniform at 30 Klauzal Street and seized money, medicine, and clothing.71

 

In addition to the numerous raids, there were incidents of sexual assault, abductions, and arbitrary shootings of Jews in Budapest. Thousands were shot while outside the ghetto72 or massacred in attacks on Jewish hospitals located on the ghetto’s periphery by members of the Arrow Cross,73 many of whom were no more than 15 years of age.74

Jews who considered themselves successfully assimilated into Hungarian society experienced the harsh treatment in the ghettos as a profound identity crisis. Many well-assimilated Hungarian Jews lived in post-Trianon Hungary, and they had been confident for a long time that the conservative-aristocratic leadership of Hungary would protect them from expulsion or mistreatment.75 They were proven wrong by the willing collaboration of the Hungarian authorities, the brutality of the gendarmerie, and the widespread apathy of the population concerning the subsequent deportations: “The local Christian population looked on with laughter at our disparagement, and even today, I cannot forget that,” summed up one survivor after the war.76

Thus, persecution signified a rupture of national identity for many. Especially affected were members of the middle class, often converts who possessed little to no Jewish identity and believed themselves to have successfully integrated into Hungarian society. Again and again, survivors recalled comrades who assumed that they had somehow been imprisoned by mistake and refused to accept the fact that in the eyes of the state they were Jewish. Ibolya G., who had been raised in the Christian faith, consulted a priest in a desperate letter from May 1944: “Frankly, I could never have imagined that something like this could happen. I still can’t comprehend it, but if that’s just the way it is, why does it concern me, even though I’ve never had anything to do with Jews?”77

A “Closed Society”? Relations with the “Outside World”

Although the living conditions declined in many ghettos, there were also ghettos in which the situation improved with progressive strides for a certain time. This was the case primarily in ghettos in which the initial situation was especially appalling. In some such cases, the ghetto administration was able to devise institutions which regulated supplies. But other factors could also lead to improvements in some ghettos, especially if there were possibilities to be in contact with the outside world. Although most ghettos were fenced in, not all of them were hermetically sealed. In many ghettos, residents were permitted to leave at certain times. In some ghettos younger men and women were even assigned work, such as in the Tab ghetto:

 

Everyone 50 years of age or younger had to work. We were assigned to agricultural or construction work. We even built the Levente Home.78 [...] We were put up at jobs in the various pastures nearby. We worked from Monday morning until Saturday evening, and on Saturday we returned home by car in the evening. The work was hard, but we were not so badly off. The supplies were generally very good in the farm yards.79

The same sentiment was echoed by the notary in the Tab ghetto, Endre Kovács, who made the following observations after the city’s liberation by the Soviet army:

After the ghetto’s establishment, I asked permission from the county notary Nádasdy if they [the Jewish ghetto inhabitants, note R.F.] might be used in the fieldwork. I received the directive that yes, under observation, this would be okay, because there was a shortage of workers, and manpower was necessary. In response, I assigned the Tab landowner Zénó Welscherscheimb, landowner Gusztáv Götzen, and other landowning Jews, including myself, to agricultural work […].80

As demonstrated by this statement, ghetto inhabitants were exploited for labor due to the general scarcity of workers during the war. Many mayors and officials, therefore, believed that closing the ghettos completely was problematic, because the war economy would thereby lose a valuable workforce. Most people in the ghettos were apparently sent to do agricultural work. Some of them worked for the military81 or were kept busy in mines. The working conditions in the individual workplaces varied greatly. In some places, workers were treated well and taken care of, while in other places, workers were regularly mistreated and beaten. Getting an opportunity to work outside the ghetto thus had its dangers and advantages. For example, it was a means of smuggling food into the ghetto and thereby improving one’s own circumstances.82 Occasionally, survivors could even recall that workers were paid in cash, such as in the Pécs ghetto, where workers were assigned to forestry tasks. They received 4.60 Pengő per day, while the women who worked in the garden nursery got 3.60 Pengő.83 Money on the other hand could be used to purchase groceries at a public market.

Work could also give some moral support and help people win back a sense of dignity. Many people felt that the hours of idle waiting were especially excruciating because they tended to make a person feel completely useless. A survivor from the Budapest ghetto recounted: “I didn’t want just to vegetate there [in the ghetto, remark R.F.] and stare at all the indignity, so I volunteered for kitchen work, because they said young people can join in, as there were already enough older folks. I signed myself up right away, and I was so glad to be able to work from morning until afternoon […].”84 Some people hoped that by working, they would draw attention to their own economic usefulness, and some believed they might, in this way, escape deportation.

It is noteworthy that in some places Jews were allowed to continue practicing their original professions, indicating the urgent need for their expertise. This was most evident in the medical profession. Specifically, city governments consented to allowing many Jewish doctors and pharmacists to continue practicing, as British historian Tim Cole illustrated with an example in the Körmend ghetto.85 The Jewish doctor there was allowed to leave the ghetto each day to visit his patients, despite the fact that Jews had been officially prohibited from treating non-Jewish patients. Nonetheless, due to the insufficient number of non-Jewish professionals, the latter regulation was often disregarded. After all, Jewish doctors made up the majority of the medical profession in Hungary.

There were other examples of professional continuities too. In Körmend, for instance, a plumber and an electrician were allowed to keep pursuing their professions.86 In the city of Békéscsaba, even the bank manager left the ghetto on a daily basis to keep doing his work.87 A letter from the Miskolc ghetto refers to a parallel situation: “I have approval to go to the studio every day as long as I am able to carry out my trade. For my lunch, I send someone to the ghetto, and I only go back home to the ghetto in the evening.”88

Leaving the ghetto was a privilege also granted to members of the Jewish Council. Furthermore, in many ghettos people were named who exited the ghetto daily at officially regulated times to purchase food at the public market. Therefore, the conclusion drawn by Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert applied in the case of Hungary. According to Dieckmann and Quinkert, “a hermeneutical sealing off and sweeping surveillance […] [of the ghetto, note R.F.] were not the rule.”89 The “openness” of many ghettos resulted in numerous encounters between Jews and non-Jews which continued to take place even following the establishment of the ghettos. Accordingly, the Jewish involuntary community in the Hungarian ghettos cannot be considered an entirely closed society.

Jews and non-Jews continued to come into contact after the ghettoization of the former also because in some ghettos the local non-Jewish population was permitted to continue living in homes within ghetto boundaries. Furthermore, in many ghettos residents were allowed to receive letters and packages, and non-Jewish workers continued to have access to and come into the ghetto. Such workers included debt collectors, chimney sweeps, plumbers, construction workers, and those responsible for reading gas, water, and electricity meters.90

In a few cases, non-Jewish acquaintances were allowed to enter the ghetto, such as in Jászberény and Sepsiszentgyörgy.91 Thus, many Hungarian ghettos were unusually permeable and offered time and time again possibilities for interactions between Jews and non-Jews, as well as the chance to smuggle food into the ghettos. In many ghettos, non-Jewish sellers offered their wares to ghetto dwellers in front of the ghetto gate up until May and June of 1944, when regulations were tightened to restrict such exchange.92

Though there was a chance in many ghettos to maintain contact with the non-Jewish population, it was not always possible to take advantage of these opportunities. Ultimately, the non-Jewish population was not always friendly to the involuntary community of ghettoized Jews, nor were they always willing to help.

In fact, a segment of the Hungarian population benefited from ghettoization, as demonstrated by historians Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági.93 The economic marginalization and subsequent deportation of 5 to 6 percent of the population facilitated the division of 20-25 percent of the entire population’s assets.94 The Hungarian government was keen to take advantage (i.e. possession) of “Jewish wealth” to stabilize the Hungarian economy.95 Meanwhile, by means of break-ins, the occupation of apartments, or other methods, substantial parts of the population grabbed assets. The failure of carefully planned government organization structures led to a chaotic rush by people in local administrations, members of the organs of German occupation, and private individuals to fill their own pockets.96 As illustrated above, exploitation continued in the ghettos as well. Some individuals even tried using official channels to obtain Jewish assets. On May 30, 1944, the newspaper Dunántúli Hétfő reported:

 

What an unbelievable commotion at the housing office, and how much they’ve disturbed the housing department officials in their work with all these personal appointments and telephone queries! Everyone wanted to get their apartment at the same time. They had their eyes on a certain apartment and a few days’ delay was already a ‘scandal’ in one applicant’s opinion.97

Generally, the “Jewish properties” were first handed over to people whose homes were located within the ghetto boundaries. To appease the complaints regarding evictions, the authorities promised these people bigger and better apartments. Countless apartments were also given to military personnel, police, and administrative officials. Thus, ghettoization and deportation provided material benefits to a segment of the Hungarian gentile population.98 A survivor commented:

The non-Jewish people responded with glee to every decree passed, because they were getting closer to their goal: appropriating Jewish assets. One example was the master baker named J.B. I had not even walked through the door frame when he showed up immediately and moved into my house right before my very eyes.99

 

Humiliation, theft, and active collaboration were everyday practice. Nevertheless, indifference seems to have been the most widespread reaction to ghettoization. Survivors of the Munkács ghetto reported: “We didn’t notice that the Christians behaved especially hostilely towards us. You could even say they were indifferent and couldn’t be bothered to notice us.”100

Individual gentiles sometimes reacted empathetically and offered their help (especially to friends and acquaintances). There were constant reports in the press at the time according to which non-Jewish people were smuggling food into the ghettos. Correspondingly, survivors also testified, for instance in the Ungvár ghetto, about how non-Jews brought bread and milk into the ghetto.101 Occasionally, there were also efforts to hide Jews, but these attempts were mostly to save friends or relatives, and when discovered by the authorities, such acts were severely punished.

Although the possibility to profit from the deportations increased the general acceptance of the radical anti-Jewish policies, as soon as the predicted economic upswing failed to materialize, there was quick social disappointment. In fact, conditions deteriorated in some sectors, such as in the case of healthcare or the procurement of general supplies, because so many doctors, pharmacists, producers, and consumers had been deported. The ever heavier allied bombing also made it more and more obvious to people that the war had been lost. Thus, many gentiles witnessed the radicalization of persecution with unease.102 Edmund Veesenmayer reported to the Foreign Office already before ghettoisation:

 

Although the Hungarian authorities are diligently trying to be convincing, the people do not completely agree with how the Jews are treated by the Germans, it must be noted on the part of the Einsatzkommando that the action taken against the affluent Jews repeatedly triggers many remarks of approval from the Hungarians. There is, however, no understanding from the population for the sporadically occurring public mistreatment of Jews or the unauthorized clearing out of Jewish shops by members of German military organizations. In these instances, they [the general public] exhibit immediate compassion for the poor Jews [italics in original, note R.F.]103

The Arrow Cross’s public acts of violence in the Hungarian capital in October 1944, including the shooting of Jews along the banks of the Danube River, eventually led more people to contribute to relief actions.104

Escape, Religious Conversion, Suicide

To avoid deportation, some Jewish men and women decided to flee, convert, or commit suicide. The overall number of people who escaped was quite low, even though every opportunity to leave the ghetto amounted to a chance to escape. Many people mentioned contemplating escape in their recollections, but they eventually decided against it, often out of consideration for their families. There are numerous claims in the DEGOB protocols resembling the following excerpt: “Several people had fled the ghetto, and I, too, wanted to escape, but out of consideration for my parents, I distanced myself from that plan.”105

Those living along the Romanian–Hungarian border were most likely to attempt to escape, taking advantage of the chance to flee into Romania, but many such attempts failed partially due to lack of support from the non-Jewish population. Many Jews who tried to escape or hide were denounced by gentiles and arrested: “Many tried to hide out in the bunkers in the mountains, and if they were not driven out again by hunger, then they were exposed immediately by the Christians.”106

When faced with ghettoization, M.L., a 19-year-old mechanic living in Uglya, tried to hide in a nearby forest:

 

I managed to conceal myself for a considerable length of time, but ultimately, the Swabian farmer K.J. discovered and then betrayed me. The police soon came to fetch me and take me to the Nyíregyháza collection camp, where I stayed for 2 1/2 weeks. Afterwards, they loaded me into a train and sent me to Auschwitz.107

 

Some Jews also tried hiding somewhere in the ghetto to avoid deportation. In the ghettos of Nagyvárad, Kassa, and Munkács, authorities discovered people who were still in hiding in the ghetto two weeks after the deportations,108 as mentioned in a related telegram from Edmund Veesenmayer:

 

According to a report from the Cluj/Klausenburg KDS, 28 Polish Jews hiding in burrows in the woods of Tiszabogdany were arrested by the Hungarian gendarmerie. 2 of the Jews had guns with them. Furthermore, 15 Jews were discovered in a basement in the former ghetto of Grosswardein, where they had immured themselves. In the Munkács ghetto, 11 Jews who’d cached securities and gold items totaling a value of 150,000 Pengő were also arrested. Recently, in Kaschau, 30 to 40 Jews who had also tried to hide were arrested and will join the next transport.109

Several Jews tried to save their families and themselves by using false papers and making bribes. Many considered traveling to Budapest and going undercover in the big city, but these efforts were complicated by regulations denying Jews an official license to travel.110

Convinced it would spare them from being deported, many Jews chose to convert. Hopelessness and disillusionment drove many people to take their own lives. For instance, the Székesfehérvár ghetto announced that there had been several suicides, mostly among people who had converted from Judaism decades earlier.111 Likewise, the landowner S.G., who had joined the Reformed Church in 1920, shot herself on the day she was ordered into the Tab ghetto.112

Inhabitants in some ghettos tried to find a way to delay their deportation or even stop it altogether.113 People who had survived the Aknaszlatina ghetto reported: “We wanted to trigger a typhus epidemic so they wouldn’t be able to take us away. We did this by drinking black coffee with salt, which made us feverish. This is how we managed to defer our deportation for two weeks.”114 The Aknaszlatina ghetto inhabitants were only able to delay their deportation, but in the end could not prevent it. On May 20 and 23, 1944, they were sent to the Birkenau camp.115

The Dissolution of the Ghettos

On May 30, 1944 Éva Heyman noted in her diary:

 

The people of Block One were taken away yesterday. All of them had to be in their houses in the afternoon. We’ve been locked up in here a long time, but now even those with special passes aren’t allowed to go out any more. We even know already that we can take along one knapsack for every two persons. It is forbidden to put in it more than one change of underwear; no bedding. Rumor has it that food is allowed, but who has any food left? The gendarmes took everybody’s food away when they took ours. It is so quiet you can hear a fly buzz. Nobody cries […] Dear diary, everybody says we’re going to stay in Hungary; the Jews from all over the country are being brought to the Lake Balaton area and we are going to work there. But I don’t believe it. That train-wagon is probably awful, and now nobody says that we’re being taken away, but that they are deporting us.116

Éva Heyman’s diary ends with this entry. On June 3, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was murdered on October 17.

The collections camp, where the Jewish population from the ghettos outside the capital was resettled, was the last stop before deportation from Hungary:

 

We had been in the ghetto for four weeks. One morning at 7 o’clock, the police rammed in the doors with the butts of their rifles, stormed in the homes, and chased everyone outside. After forcing the people out and literally tearing adults and children from their beds, they beat them like horses. This was the most horrible part of the whole deportation. The Germans struck the same way, going house to house, and together with the gendarmerie, they drove us all to the marketplace, where we stood in rows of five. Then, we made our way to the brickyard.117

 

The mass deportations in Hungary began on May 14, 1944.118 By early July 1944, 437,400 people had been deported. The Budapest Rescue Committee bought the freedom of approximately 1,700 prisoners who were subsequently transported to Switzerland. 18,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the Vienna region to do forced labor. However, the majority of the deportees (about 320,000) were killed in gas chambers shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, for instance Olga and Ilona Iczkovics, whom I cited at the beginning of this essay. Before their departure from the Beregszász ghetto, they had hidden their handwritten letter to their brother Elemér with a request for whoever discovered it to forward it to Elemér. As a gesture of gratitude, they had enclosed an earring and a ring. “Dear Stranger,” they wrote in an accompanying note, “I beg you, please do not tear up this letter for my brother Elemér Ickovics (he is now on the Eastern front, and his camp number is K673). Instead, please make sure this letter together with the two notes get to him once he’s come back home. Otherwise, please return the letter to its hiding place, keeping the earring and ring for yourself.”119 Elemér probably never received the letter from his sisters. He never returned from the labor service, and a central database of Shoah victims categorizes him as disappeared. 28-year-old Olga and 26-year-old Ilona, together with their 49-year-old mother, Etel, never returned from deportation either. They are considered missing since their arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau on June 1, 1944. They were most likely selected immediately for murder in one of the gas chambers upon their arrival or died within a few days or months from malnutrition or disease.

After the deportations in the spring and summer of 1944, the only ghetto remaining on Hungarian territory was in Budapest, where the Jewish population lived in yellow houses and later in the “Large” or “International” Ghetto. The “Large” Ghetto was liberated by Soviet troops on January 17 and 18, 1945. The conditions in the ghetto had already deteriorated drastically a few days earlier as a result of Soviet troops having surrounded the city. The journal of Erzsébet Fóti offers a moving description of this. On January 14, 1945, she was transferred from a protected house into the ghetto. Two days later she wrote:

 

Today I got a slice of bread and a little jam. We had a horrible night because of the heavy bombing, such as we’ve never experienced before. The windows in every room were broken, and we were all lying on the ground. My hair is lice-infested. There’s no water. We each receive a milk bottle full of water each day, and that is supposed to be enough, and for washing, too!

The next day, she continued: “Today a fight broke out in the street nearby. There are fights again on Wesselényi Street. Many people have been shot. There is nothing to eat. I am going crazy with hunger. Hungry. Hungry. I’m cold. I can’t write anymore, nor can I even feel my fingers.”120

Conclusion

As Tim Cole remarked in one of his essays, “Although the ghettoization of Hungarian Jews in 1944 can be seen as the implementation of policies of ‘concentration,’ there are significant differences in experiences of ghettoization between Hungary and other nations in East Central Europe as well as within Hungary and within individual cities in Hungary.”121 With particular clarity, the survivors’ recollections and contemporary reports portray the divergent situations in the Hungarian ghettos. The situation in each ghetto depended on a variety of factors, such as the type and place of accommodation, the amount of food rations brought along and the behavior of the police. The living conditions not only varied from ghetto to ghetto, but also in one and the same ghetto the situation could deteriorate or improve by and by.

The Hungarian administration not only had a significant impact on the living conditions, but could even prevent ghettoization in some places, such as in Hódmezővásárhely. But instead of trying to deescalate the situation, many mayors and prefects endorsed more extreme policies. Officials, gendarmes and police who acted more mildly were repeatedly denounced and often suspended.122 For instance, prefect Lajos Bessenyei demanded that the more moderate mayor of Debrecen, Sándor Kölcsey, resign after the May 8, 1944 meeting concerning the ghettoization of the local Jewish population. In a confidential letter to Kölcsey, the prefect told him that his resignation would be initiated “for fundamental reasons which must not be ignored,” but Kölcsey would be allowed to resign voluntarily. A few days later, the local press reported on Kölcsey’s decision to retire.123

Overall, in most cases the living conditions in the ghettos in the annexed territories were strikingly worse than the condition in the ghettos in the heartland. In these parts of the country, which were less developed than the territories in Trianon Hungary, the administration and the gendarmerie both carried out policies in a much more extreme manner. Because these ghettos were the first to be established, they were more significantly affected by the chaos and lack of structure.

The opportunity to interact with the “outside world” could significantly improve living conditions. It is worth noting that the establishment of the ghettos did not mean an interruption in economic and social relations between Jews and non-Jews. Interaction with the “outside world” remained very much possible. It is thus necessary to revise the notion of the ghetto as an area of complete isolation. Ghettos did not amount to parallel societies. Moreover, in some cases, professional continuities were apparent even post-ghettoization. Thus, the Hungarian government’s intention to exclude Jews from the Hungarian economy was not fully realized until the deportations. Although the Holocaust in Hungary was motivated not only ideologically but also economically, the concept of “work” provides a perfect example of the clash between anti-Semitic ideology and economic pragmatism. It is precisely this contradiction that may have influenced a substantial number of Hungarian Jews to doubt the threat of deportation. There were rumors in many ghettos that ghetto residents would be sent to do agricultural labor. Names of different towns circulated as possible destinations which without exception were within Hungary.

Overall, the living conditions people endured in the weeks immediately prior to their deportation sometimes made the difference between life and death when they arrived at the railway platforms of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

 

Translated from the German by Catherine Novak-Rainer

 

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Attila Gidó

The Hungarian Bureaucracy and the Administrative Costs of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania

 

In the course of May and June 1944, forty-five trains crammed with Jews from Northern Transylvania were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, making the region “Judenfrei” in accordance with the Nazi vision of the “Final Solution.” This article explores how the extermination process and its consequences, including the costs incurred, were approached and handled by the central and local authorities of Northern Transylvania as bureaucratic tasks. As I show, in addition to participating directly in the processes of genocide, local authorities also aimed to assure “the reparation of material and financial damages” caused by ghettoization, while the expropriated assets of the deported and their unresolved financial transactions were subject to further administrative action. Drawing on scattered documents held in various provincial branches of the Romanian National Archives and materials from the Cluj-based People’s Courts from 1946, in this article I discuss the high-level of continuity among Hungarian administrative personnel in 1944 and demonstrate that practically the entire Hungarian state apparatus participated in the implementation of the Final Solution. I argue that the economic costs incurred by “Christian Hungarians” may have been negligible compared to the overall theft of “Jewish property,” but the administrative tasks related to ghettoization and deportation were substantial.

 

Keywords: World War II, Holocaust, Northern Transylvania, ghettoization, deportation, bureaucracy

 

The so-called Second Vienna Award, which was issued on August 30, 1940 and which essentially made northern Transylvania part of Hungary while leaving the rest of the province (including most of Bánát and swathes of Partium) in Romania, temporarily brought an end to the territorial dispute between Hungary and Romania. With this legal change (accompanied by the occupation of the region in question by the Hungarian army), according to the results of the 1941 census 151,312 people of the Jewish faith again found themselves under Hungarian rule. The Jewish laws that were brought into effect, however, were based on racial categories, so they applied not only to practicing Jews, but also to Christians who, according to the provisions of the law, were legally regarded as Jewish. Thus the anti-Semitic measures that were taken by the Hungarian government affected 164,052 people living in northern Transylvania, or 6.4 percent of the population. From this point on, the circumstances of the Jewry of northern Transylvania in many ways resembled the circumstances of the Jewry of Trianon Hungary (by which I mean the territory of Hungary following the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which is almost entirely contiguous with the territory of Hungary today), though as I will demonstrate, there were some significant regional differences.1

The occupation of Hungary by the German army, which began on March 19, 1944, accelerated the pace of events and proved fatal to the Jewry of the country.2 By the end of March, German troops had arrived in northern Transylvania. There were several phases to the implementation of the Final Solution in Hungary and northern Transylvania.3 The occupation of the country did not make ghettoization and deportation inevitable.

In the course of the ghettoization and deportation of the Jewry, the territory was divided into two “deportation zones.” The first was the region known as Máramaros (Maramureş in Romanian), which included an area that today lies north of the Romanian border in Ukraine (historically Máramaros is essentially a valley of the Tisza River surrounded by mountains and thick forests). The second zone consisted of Szatmár county (roughly equivalent with what today is Sătmar county in Romania), Bihar county (roughly equivalent with what today is Bihor county in Romania), Inner Transylvania, and the so-called Székely Land, a region in eastern Transylvania which to this day has a large Hungarian-speaking majority.

The plans for the assembly and deportation of the Jewry belonging to the first zone were drawn up during a meeting that was held in the city of Munkács (today Mukacheve in Ukraine) on April 12, 1944. The plans for the deportation of the Jewry of the second zone were completed in the course of meetings that took place on April 26 in Szatmárnémeti (today Satu Mare in Romania) and on April 28 in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureş in Romania). After having returned from the meetings, the leading local civil servants, police, gendarmes, and sub-prefects again conferred on the measures that would be adopted in various settlements to implement ghettoization, including for instance the sites of the ghettoes themselves.4

Just before the process of ghettoization was implemented and over the course of the month of May, Undersecretary of State for Internal Affairs László Endre traveled throughout northern Transylvania.5 He was present for the meeting in Marosvásárhely on April 28, at which some 200 people from the Székely Land took part, including the lord lieutenants, sub-prefects, mayors, chief administrative officers of the districts, and chiefs of police and the gendarmerie.6 Endre gave precise instructions concerning the process of ghettoization at the meeting, as well as the ways in which to ensure the effective assembly of the Jews, the organization and operation of the ghettos, and the management of “Jewish property,” including real estate and moveable assets.7 He then held a meeting in Kolozsvár (today Cluj in Romania) on the process of ghettoization, and by April 30 he had already reached the city of Nagyvárad (today Oradea in Romania) on the western fringes of Transylvania (actually in the region known as Partium), where he gave oral instructions to the mayor, László Gyapay, regarding ghettoization and the various administrative costs it would involve. Gyapay, referring to these instructions as authorization to act, implemented a series of measures affecting the agricultural properties and moveable belongings of Jews.8

The deportations in northern Transylvania began on May 16 in Máramarossziget (today Sighetu Marmaţiei in Romania) and ended on June 7 in Kolozsvár. 131,639 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania to Auschwitz-Birkenau.9 Lieutenant colonel of the gendarmerie László Ferenczy, who served as a communications officer between the Hungarian gendarmerie and the German security forces, sent regular reports on and accounts of the state of affairs with regards to the gathering together and deportation of the Jews to Minister of the Interior Andor Jaross.10 Of the 164,052 people who were defined as Jews under the law, between 35,000 and 40,000 survived the Holocaust. Most of the survivors, some 25,000 to 30,000 people, were among those deported. The others were liberated from forced labor units or managed to survive the upheavals in some other way, for instance simply by going into hiding or fleeing to Romania.11

There is, alongside the reading of the history of the virtual annihilation of the Hungarian Jewry as a tale of immeasurable suffering, a cold, dispassionate bureaucratic side to the story as well. The creation and maintenance of the ghettos, the organization of the transportation of the deportees, the assessment of the material demands of the non-Jewish population, and the provision of compensation for costs that arose represented an unusual challenge for the county and municipal authorities. By dealing with these and similar administrative issues, civil servants and officials took important preliminary steps in bringing about the suffering and deaths of masses.

The Hungarian and international historiography has already dealt in detail with the role of state bureaucracies in the Holocaust. In his classic study on the connections between modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman writes that the German bureaucracy was able to organize and implement ghettoization and deportation with such dispassion because it deprived the objects of its measures of their humanity, reducing them to mere numbers.12 In the Hungarian secondary literature, Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági have provided perhaps the most recent overview of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Carpathian Basin, the history of modern anti-Semitism, and the path that led to the Holocaust.13 Kádár and Vági came to the conclusion that the annihilation of the Hungarian Jewry “was caused by a tragic meeting” of Nazi Germany’s program of extermination and an attitude of exclusion that had been present in Hungarian society for centuries.14 According to them, this attitude of exclusion, the “official routine” of anti-Semitism, and the opportunities that arose to make personal profit together were sufficient to prompt the majority of civil servants working in the organs of state administration to perform the tasks that were assigned to them in the course of the slaughter of the Jews of Hungary in an orderly and reliable fashion.15 In his study of the events that took place in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county, László Csősz also came to the conclusion that most of the civil servants did not actually espouse the principles of National Socialism, nor were they committed supporters of the physical annihilation of the Jewry, but rather agreed “only” that the role of Jews in economic and social life should be restricted. Nonetheless, in 1944 most of them, influenced by varying motivations, participated, whether reluctantly or with enthusiasm, in the implementation of the Final Solution.16 Drawing on the findings and insights of these authors, in this essay I closely examine the administrative issues and costs that came up in the course of the deportation and extermination of the Jewry of Hungary in order to arrive at a more detailed and precise picture of the ways in which civil servants working in state administration took part in the Final Solution and the extent of this form of collaboration.

In Hungary, as was the case in Germany and every country or territory that was affected by the Holocaust, the implementation of the Final Solution depended not simply on the acts of the political elites, but also on the cooperation and collaboration of everyday people, including civil servants who worked in state administration. Following the occupation of Hungary by the German army in March 1944, many of the high ranking civil servants and government officials were replaced or given positions in different offices. However, most of the people in lower levels of state administration, including the police and the gendarmerie, remained in their positions.17 Very few of the sub-prefects and mayors, who played important roles in county administration, were removed from their posts, in all likelihood because in the first few weeks it already became apparent that most of the influential figures in local administration were loyal to the new political leadership and would implement the anti-Semitic measures as ordered.18 Some of the people in low ranking offices were replaced or moved to different positions, but this was the exception rather than the rule.19 The ghettoization of the Jewish population was executed by two organs of power, but the necessary infrastructure was provided by the sub-prefects, lord lieutenants, chief constables, mayors, and deputy mayors, along with other state administrators with local or regional authority. With very few exceptions, they collaborated in the expropriation, ghettoization, and deportation of the Jews.

The situation in northern Transylvania essentially resembled the situation in Hungary. In late April, i.e. before the process of ghettoization had begun, a decision was reached regarding the removal of seven of the ten county lord lieutenants.20 Also in April 1944, Béla Bethlen, lord lieutenant of Szolnok-Doboka and Beszterce-Naszód counties, asked to be removed from his posts. In the end, he was relieved of his position as lord lieutenant of Beszterce-Naszód county, but he continued to perform the tasks of lord lieutenant in Szolnok-Doboka county. Ödön Inczédy Joksman served as lord lieutenant of Kolozs county and the city of Kolozsvár. At his request, he was relieved of the post of lord lieutenant of Kolozsvár (he was replaced by Lajos Vargha, who earlier had served as deputy prosecutor of the city), but he continued to hold the post of lord lieutenant for the county.21 Thus only with significant qualifications could these individuals be included among the civil servants who voluntarily resigned from their positions.22

The sub-prefects, who played one of the most important roles in the process of ghettoization, almost without exception remained at their posts.23 However, in Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely, Nagyvárad and Szatmárnémeti, which in May and June served as the largest centers for railway transportation, new mayors were appointed.24 (Tibor Keledy, who had served as mayor of Kolozsvár, was made lord mayor of Budapest on April 8, 1944. He was replaced by László Vásárhelyi, who had served as deputy mayor of Kolozsvár.) Over the course of April and at the beginning of May, many of the chief constables were also replaced, for instance in Székelyhíd (today Săcueni in Romania), Szatmárnémeti, Zilah (today Zalău in Romania), and Felsővisó (today Vişeu de Sus in Romania), or simply given different positions, moved for instance from the district of Nagyszalonta (today Salonta in Romania) to Titel (today in Serbia), from Nagysomkút (today şomcuta Mare in Romania) to Halmi (today Halmeu in Romania), or from Szilágycseh (today Cehu Silvaniei in Romania) to Nagykálló.25 The essential purpose of these changes was to ensure that the chief constables, who played a key role in the implementation and enforcement of the various anti-Semitic measures in the rural districts and on the county level, be distant from their familiar environments and social worlds so that in new, unfamiliar contexts, surrounded essentially by strangers, they would carry out the disenfranchisement and expropriation of the Jews and ensure that they were gathered together into the collection centers to expedite the process of deportation.26

Many civil servants moved up on the professional ladder in this period, so for them, these changes meant opportunities to build their careers.27 The May and June issues of Budapesti Közlöny (Budapest Gazette) indicate that in general low level civil servants were advanced in greater proportions in northern Transylvania than in the other areas of provincial Hungary. While in other regions emphasis was placed on transferring civil servants to different settlements, civil servants in northern Transylvania often remained in the communities where they had been employed and were simply promoted. This may have been due in part to the fact that, when the territory had become part of Hungary again in 1940, many civil servants from Trianon Hungary or functionaries who had fled from Transylvania to Hungary in the wake of World War I had been given positions in the newly acquired territory. In 1944, most of these people were still serving in northern Transylvania. Thus in all likelihood, they were not as familiar with the local society or as closely connected to it as their Transylvanian colleagues and were therefore considered more reliable.28

Historians have taken note of several high ranking civil servants in northern Transylvania who resigned from their offices for ethical reasons, thereby refusing to take part in the persecution of the Jews. Baron János Jósika, who served as lord lieutenant of Szilágy county, and János Schilling, who was sub-prefect of Szolnok-Doboka county, were among them. Jósika resigned when sub-prefect Endre Gazda informed him of what had taken place at the meeting in Szatmárnémeti on April 26 (Gazda had been present for the meeting).29 Schilling took part in the implementation of the measures that laid the groundwork for the ghettoization of the Jews of the county, but on May 2, 1944, one day before ghettoization began, he went to the hospital and had his (perfectly healthy) appendix removed and resigned from his post.30 However, these people were exceptions, and most of the leaders and staff of the state administration in northern Transylvania reliably performed the tasks that were assigned to them in the dispossession, ghettoization, and deportation of the Jews.

Jewish inhabitants of rural settlements were gathered together for deportation by the gendarmerie, which was under the authority of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense. The Hungarian gendarmerie was broken up into ten different districts, each of which was under the command of a gendarmerie colonel. Following the occupation of Hungary by the German army, no changes were made to the leadership of the gendarmerie, so when the ghettoization and deportation of the Jews was taking place, the same people were in command as had been before. In contrast, changes were made to the leading cadres of the police forces, and many commanding officers were removed from their posts. There were even a few who resigned, for instance Antal Örményi, police captain of Gyergyószentmiklós (today Gheorgheni in Romania).31 Of the ten gendarmerie districts, two (the ninth and the tenth) had their seats in northern Transylvania, one in the city of Kolozsvár and the other in Marosvásárhely. The gendarmerie of the Kolozsvár district was under the command of Tibor Paksi-Kiss and the Marosvásárhely district was under the command of János Papp. Both Paksi-Kiss and Papp had begun serving in their posts before 1944. Officially, it was Paksi-Kiss who supervised the ghettoization and deportation of the Jewry of all of Transylvania, including the areas under the command of Papp.32

The search for and rounding up of Jews was done by the gendarmes of the districts. In the collection centers and the ghettos, however, the theft of Jewish belongings, the loading of Jews onto train cars, and the final deportation of the Jews was done by gendarmes who belonged to subunits that had been created within the individual districts. These gendarmes in general did not come from the given settlements, but rather had been brought to the area from distant regions. This measure was taken in order to prevent Jews from bribing people they might have known personally, as well as to ensure that no mercy would be shown by the people charged with carrying out these measures. This is why gendarmes were sent from Miskolc, Szászrégen (today Reghin in Romania), and Szeged to Máramarossziget, for instance, or from Zilah to Dés (today Dej in Romania).33

While these processes were underway, the bureaucracy also dealt with the belongings and real estate that had been taken from the Jews, as well as the costs that arose in the course of their ghettoization and deportation, the assessment of damages, and the provision of compensation. Later, dealing with the economic and social problems that arose as a consequence of the ghettoization among the members of the population who were not defined by the laws as “Jewish” (i.e. the so-called Christian population) became the first priority. The creation of a “judenrein” provincial Hungary (and therefore a “judenrein” Transylvania), the division of stolen properties, and the provision of compensation for claims of damage were done by a stratum of officials and an administrative system the original responsibility of which had been the completion of bureaucratic tasks that were important to the preservation of social cohesion and stability. In the changed domestic political circumstances and as a consequence of the anti-Semitic public sentiment that prevailed at the time, this bureaucracy was capable, without having undergone any major structural changes, of providing the infrastructure, the “administrative foundation,” for the annihilation of the Hungarian Jewry.34

While several of the administrative and political models in Transylvania were borrowed from Hungary, there were regional peculiarities. The conservative, right-wing Hungarian political elite of Transylvania was quite convinced, as indeed was a significant part of Transylvanian Hungarian society, that in the period between 1918 and 1940, when the entire territory, northern and southern Transylvania, had been part of the Romanian Kingdom, the Jewry had betrayed Hungary and had represented the interests of the Romanian elites in power. This accusation found expression not merely in the period following the outbreak of war, but rather had been a discernible motif of public life in Transylvanian Hungarian communities since 1920.35 The platform of Erdélyi Párt (Transylvanian Party), which was created in 1940–41, was seen as providing political legitimacy for the measures that were taken against Jews. Between 1941 and 1944, this political party represented the political interests of the Hungarian communities of Transylvania in the Hungarian parliament, and it enjoyed widespread social support and influence in the region. According to the eighth point of its platform, the party approved of measures “against the Jewry, which voluntarily broke from the body of the Transylvanian Hungarians when under Romanian rule,” and indeed it strongly urged the implementation of measures that would remove Jews from public life and every sphere of economic life “until the question had been settled on a European scale.”36 The right-wing in Transylvania, which grew increasingly influential after 1940, also emphasized its view according to which the path of Transylvanian Hungarians and Transylvanian Jews had forever split, since the Jews were the enemy of Germany, the state which had made territorial revision in 1940 possible.37 While the process of ghettoization was underway, the Transylvanian Party justified the expropriation of Jews with the claim that the belongings and real estate that had been acquired had to be used to improve the social circumstances of the Hungarian population.38 Thus the collaboration of the so-called Christian population, including administrators of various ranks and positions, was influenced by a number of factors, but one of them was the branding of the Jews of Transylvania as outsiders and members of a group that had deliberately parted ways with the Hungarians.

Administrative Issues before Ghettoization

On April 20, 1944, Antal Kunder, Minister of Trade and Transportation, issued decree number 50.500/1944 KKM on the seizure of the goods, furnishings, and equipment belonging to Jewish businesses.39 The decree went into effect on April 21, and in accordance with it, the Jewish businesses in the various settlements were stamped as such on that very day, lists of them were made, and these lists were sent within the space of a few days to the Chamber of Trade and Industry to which the given settlement belonged.40 The surviving sources suggest that at the time the members of the non-Jewish population were most concerned with the fate of possessions of theirs that had been left for repair or for some other reason in the workshops and business now under sequestration. They besieged the authorities with questions and requests, and the rumor spread that they would not be given back the belongings that had been left with the Jewish merchants and tradesmen.41 On May 5, 1944, the Minister of Trade and Transportation issued decree number 56.912/1944 KKM, with which he sought to address these questions and lay these rumors to rest. According to the decree, between May 8 and May 20, Jewish merchants and tradesmen would have to hand over or return to its (so-called) Christian owner any article that had been ordered before April 21 or left in their places of business for repairs, alterations, or exchange. This was to take place with the shutters to the establishments only half open. The daily press in northern Transylvania published this news on May 7 and 8.42 With regards to the implementation of the decree, the sub-prefects of the region gave instructions to the district chief constables and the mayors of the cities one or two days after the news had appeared in the papers, i.e. on May 8 and 9.43

People who sought to retrieve items they had left with Jewish tradesmen or take possession of articles they had ordered and already paid for could only do so if they first submitted a request to the authorities responsible for commerce or the office of finance. The ghettoization of the Jews of the region for the most part had been completed by this time. Thus the former owners of the businesses were no longer able to tend to the requests. Instead, “Christian” custodians who were not regarded as Jews (in the case of workshops and smaller factories) performed this task, or in some cases they were done by the municipal authorities. In the case of businesses that were being closed and put out of operation, the return or bestowal of such articles was overseen by committees consisting of three people. These committees were formed under the oversight of the office of the mayor or the office of the chief constable, and one member had to be a civil servant, while the other two had to be merchants.44 In many cases, this all took place well after the May 20 deadline. On May 19, the mayor of Székelyudvarhely (today Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romania) announced that people who sought to retrieve items from the Jewish-owned businesses that had been closed had 48 hours to present themselves at the city hall.45 In Nagybánya (today Baia Mare in Romania) the return of such articles to their owners probably took place much later, at the beginning of July, as indicated by notification number 1465/1944, which was issued by the leader of the city’s excise office on July 2. In this notification, he informed the mayor that the financial directorship of the city of Szatmárnémeti had given permission for the distribution of articles of property belonging to (so-called) Christians that were being held in Jewish dwellings, factories, and workshops. An announcement to this effect was to be made public on July 3, and on the subsequent days the news was spread far and wide.46 Sometimes, it took months for these issues to be settled, and sometimes they were never resolved. Before ghettoization had begun, Tibor Gortvay Tihamér, an architect from Budapest, paid 8,000 pengő to Bernát Schöffler, a merchant from Palotailva (today Luncu Bradului in Romania). He never received the building materials he had ordered, however, since Schöffler in the meantime had been taken to the ghetto in Szászrégen. The last source regarding the case of the Budapest architect is dated August 31, 1944. On that day, a government committee bearing the name “Committee for the Solution of Issues pertaining to Jewish Pecuniary and Property Rights” sent a transcript to the Royal Hungarian Financial Directorship in the city of Marosvásárhely urging them to resolve the case promptly.47

On May 3, the transportation of the Jews to the ghetto began. The fate of the businesses that were owned by merchants and tradesmen who had been taken to the ghetto remained uncertain for days. In most of the settlements, there was great uncertainty regarding the future of the workshops, that had been left without owners. According to decree number 50.500/1944 KKM, enterprises that were important to the national economy could continue to be in operation and so-called Christian entrepreneurial leaders were needed to oversee them. In many cases, however, a great deal of time passed before these “custodians” were named to their positions.48 In many cases, the staff took over the management of the workshops and factories, which meant, for instance, that they took new orders and they used the raw materials that were on hand to continue production. The Craftsmen’s Association of Kolozsvár submitted protests against this practice to the trade authorities of the first instance, contending that sloppy, amateurish work was being done and raw materials that were essential to the national economy were being used in a manner that betrayed a dire lack of expertise.49

The distribution of the businesses that had been closed took place in accordance with decree number 2.120/1944. ME, which was passed on June 10 and announced on June 14. Across the country (and thus in northern Transylvania as well), the first people to be given places of business that had been stolen from their Jewish owners were merchants and tradesmen whose businesses, workshops, or factories had been damaged or destroyed by bombs or whose enterprises happened to be located in areas that had become part of the ghetto.50 Of the (so-called) Christian merchants and tradesmen whose businesses had been damaged in the bombing of Kolozsvár on June 2, 1944, 96 took part in this legalized form of theft.51

In the meantime, people who had been employed by Jews worried about the wages they had not been paid. The general practice was for the municipal trade authorities or the cities themselves to pay lost wages, and these institutions returned articles to their owners as well.52 In many cases unpaid wages were covered using monies that had been taken from Jews and put in the city treasury. This was the solution adopted by the mayor of Székelyudvarhely, who on June 12, 1944, referring to the second point of the sixth paragraph of decree number 1600/1944 ME, ordered the payment of more than 3,100 pengő to 14 people.53 This sum covered work that had been done in the period beginning in early April and ending in late May.54

The question of the retrieval of various articles and possessions was a matter of concern not only for the civilian population, but also for various institutions. In some case, library books were among the articles that had remained in the dwellings of Jews. For instance, a request that was made by a craftsmen’s association in the city of Csíkszereda (today Miercurea Ciuc in Romania) to the office of the mayor indicates that members who were defined as Jewish by the law had regularly borrowed books from the organization. In one abandoned lodging, for instance, there was a copy of a book entitled Mit ér az ember, ha magyar (What a man is worth if he is Magyar?) by the well-known populist writer of the era, Péter Veres.55 It is a sad and perverse irony of fate that the pages of this book, in which the author expresses his concern for the fate of the Hungarian peasantry, were being turned by a reader who was defined as an outsider (a non-Hungarian) and condemned to deportation.

The Costs of Ghettoization, Unpaid Assistance, and Food Ration Cards

With regards to the costs that arose in the course of ghettoization and the fulfillment of the individual requests that were made for reimbursement or reparation, these questions were addressed in the confidential deportation decree of April 7, 1944 (Minister of the Interior’s Confidential Decree number 6163/1944) and a notice that was issued on April 19, which was a supplement to the decree.56 Neither document contained concrete instructions, but the document of April 19 specified that costs were to be covered using assets that had been seized from Jewish homes and places of business.57 An internal decree issued on May 13, 1944 by foreign Minister Andor Jaross provided additional directions. The costs of the transportation of Jews to the ghettos were to be covered with the assets that had been taken from them. People who were not defined under law as Jewish but who nonetheless were compelled to vacate their dwellings because of the ghettoization were only entitled to compensation under extraordinary circumstances and with extraordinary justification. According to the decree, settlements in which ghettos were established had to cover the costs that arose as a consequence of this using money from their own coffers. They were given the promise that in time the state treasury would repay them for these costs. In some cases, the Ministry of Interior provided some settlements with an advance to ensure the completion of the operations. However, in every case the local authorities were expected to be frugal and keep costs to a bare minimum.58 In principle, the costs of ghettoization were to be covered using funds from the central “Jewish account” (number 157.880), which was created by the state in June 1944 and was under the administration of the Ministry of Finance. Monies from this account were also to be used to cover the taxes and dues, unpaid public works bills, and private debts of individuals who had been deported.59 Indeed articles had been published in the press on the issue of unpaid public and private debts at the beginning of the process of ghettoization.60 The mayors dealt with bills that had been sent to people who had already been deported (electricity bills, for instance). As early as May 12, the mayor of Nagyvárad had given instructions regarding the settlement of debts to the public works.61

As I will discuss, private individuals who participated in the ghettoization and deportation of the Jews of northern Transylvania were given payment or compensation in response to their demands only with great difficulty or not at all. One of the reasons for this was that in September and October of 1944, Soviet and Romanian troops began to take control of the territory. From then on, it became almost impossible to receive any compensation from the state authorities for costs incurred in the processes of ghettoization and deportation.

The various jobs and tasks that arose as the ghettos were created, during the process of transporting the Jews to the ghettos, during the period in which the ghettos were in use, and then as they were liquidated either were done by the people of the settlements and the subordinate institutions at their own expense or were performed by private individuals who had been hired to provide their services. These private individuals or the offices that represented their interests turned to the mayors of the settlements for payment of wages for services rendered. The settlements then asked for compensation for these costs from the state treasury. From the perspective of the local authorities, one of the most cost-efficient tools in the creation of the ghettos was the use of forced Jewish labor. In other cases, the Jews who had been moved into the ghettos had to create the conditions necessary for (temporary) survival. In the early days, the authorities, “moved to act by their good faith,” gathered the Jews together in the collection centers so rapidly that problems arose concerning the acquisition of the necessary materials.62 Only with the passing of several days could the ghettos be made more or less habitable. In Dés, the suggestion was made to move the Jews who had been gathered together, more than 5,000 people, to the ghetto of Szamosújvár (today Gherla in Romania), since the camp which had been established in the Bungur forest lacked any trace of infrastructure. However, count Béla Bethlen, lord lieutenant of Szolnok-Doboka County, quickly intervened, and on May 5 and 6 he had building materials sent for the construction of a camp in Dés. In the end, no one was moved.63 The construction of a plank fence around the ghetto of Nagyvárad was done by local carpenters and joiners. Twenty inmates from forced labor camps, who represented a free source of labor, were sent to assist them.64 In Beszterce, on the days leading up to ghettoization, 50 to 80 local Jewish men were forced to help built barracks on the territory of the ghetto.65 Forced labor units were dispatched to work at sites in the territories of Trianon Hungary as well. In the city of Pécs, for instance, construction on the wattle fence that surrounded the ghetto had been begun by people who had been sent to the ghetto and then was completed by forced labor units.66

In general, the representative bodies of municipal government authorized the mayor to pay the various costs that arose. In many cases, this authorization was retroactive, meaning it applied to payments that had already been made. The bureaucratic jargon in the following excerpt from the records of a meeting of the body of representatives of Szilágysomlyó (today Şimleu Silvaniei in Romania) offers a clear impression of how the measures that were taken against members of the local population who were defined as Jewish were reduced to a mere question of administrative procedure:

 

The body of representatives of the Hungarian city of Szilágysomlyó approves the declaration of the mayor of the city according to which, with regards to the costs that have arisen in connection with the gathering together of the Jews of Szilágy county and their transport to a camp and the costs of the maintenance of the camp itself, the visit and negotiation of the lord lieutenant of the county that took place on April 29, 1944 in the communities of Szilágysomlyó and Somlyócsehi [today Cehei in Romania] made provisions to the effect that for the moment these costs would be covered with an advance from the coffers of the Hungarian city of Szilágysomlyó and the Ministry of Interior of the Hungarian Kingdom will provide reimbursement and has instructed the mayor of the city to issue the money order.67

Some requests for reimbursement and compensation were made in the first days following ghettoization, though most of these requests were made around the time of or after the deportations. The offices of the mayor in the various settlements answered only with considerable delay, and in many cases they rejected the requests. In general, requests made by private individuals involved reimbursement for the costs of transportation or payment for work done by craftsmen (for instance joiner’s work and carpentry). In many cases, owners of cars and wagons had been compelled personally to assist with the transportation of Jews to the ghettos or had had to allow the authorities to use their vehicles. On May 13 and 14, 1944, the ghetto command had made use of the car owned by cab-driver Márton Dankó of Kolozsvár. On June 14, the city paid him 384 pengő in compensation.68

In the ghettos, for a daily wage midwives were hired to perform body searches, which included searches of body cavities. On May 29 and 30 and June 3, Mrs. György Dumitrán, a midwife under the authority of Borpataktelep performed body searches in the small ghetto of Nagybánya, for which she was paid 16 pengő. There were cases in Hungary in which the midwives were paid even more for these searches. In Szeged midwives were paid 20 pengő per day for their services, and doctors were paid 200 pengő per day.69 The midwife in Nagybánya was only one of the many “costs” covered by the city. According to statements of account issued on August 8 and September 4, 1944, there were 56 “services” for which payments totaling 38,734 had been made. This of course only represents the sum of the costs for which claims had been made before July 5 and which had been covered between July 5 and 31 from the city coffers.70 It is worth noting that the city covered the costs of transportation for mayor Károly Tamássy to the meeting on the details of deportation process that took place in Munkács on May 12 using monies that had been stolen from Jews.71 The costs of the burial of the corpses of three deportees that were removed from a train passing through Nagybánya on June 7 were also covered using these monies. The train had probably arrived from Marosvásárhely (it passed through the city of Kassa, today Košice in Slovakia, on June 8). It was carrying elderly people and the sick from various settlements. According to the health officer of the first district in Nagybánya, the station agents in Zilah and Zsibó (today Jibou in Romania) had already refused to allow the train to unload the three cadavers. In Nagybánya they were given a simple burial.72

The rejection of a request for the payment of costs was sometimes justified with the claim that the monies that had been expropriated from the Jews had already been transferred in their entirety to the central account. On September 6, 1944, the mayor of Nagybánya used this explanation when rejecting a request that had been submitted significantly earlier, on July 7. In this petition, a city alderman named István Ágoston had requested the daily wages for four contract workers for the services they had performed transporting foodstuffs from the homes of Jews to the ghetto, providing assistance loading Jews onto train cars, and taking care of storerooms. The mayor advised the alderman to turn with his petition to the financial directorship of Szatmárnémeti.73

In the process of creating the ghettos, it was not possible to avoid compelling some Christian families to move. In some cases, for instance the ghettos of Szatmárnémeti and Nagyvárad, this meant changes of dwelling on a massive scale. In other places, it affected only a few families. In Kolozsvár, working-class families who were forced to leave their domiciles in the brick factory, which was used as the site of the ghetto, were given new lodgings in homes that had been taken from Jewish families. According to the newspaper Keleti Újság (Eastern News), the municipal authorities even took into consideration the size of the family in question. Families with two children were given dwellings with at least two separate rooms and a kitchen. Larger families were given homes with three rooms and a kitchen. By May 5, more than thirty Hungarian working-class families had been moved to new lodgings in Kolozsvár.74 The other properties that had been forcibly vacated by the Jewish families were made available to people whose homes had been damaged in the bombing of the city that had taken place on June 2. According to the financial directorship in Kolozsvár, by the second half of June some 1,300 dwellings that had been expropriated from Jewish families had been allotted to them.75 These forced changes of dwelling often gave rise to sentiments of dissatisfaction among the people who were moved into the homes that had been vacated. There were two main reasons for this. Some of them did not find the new homes suitable and therefore felt that they had been unfairly treated. Others, having returned to their original homes following the deportations, complained that their domiciles had been seriously damaged and requested compensation.76 Some were dissatisfied because, following the deportation of the Jews, they were compelled to return to their original homes, which were not as comfortable as the dwellings in which they had been temporarily housed. The people who had been assigned lodging in homes that had been stolen from Jewish families had to leave their temporary domiciles by a given deadline that varied from settlement to settlement. They had to return the keys to the local financial directorship. They were given compensation out of the city coffers for damages that had been done to their original homes, and the costs of the moves were also covered. On July 9, 1944 (i.e. some six weeks after the deportations), the mayor of Máramarossziget ordered the people who had been moved into temporary lodgings to return to their homes, and he gave them sixteen days to do so (the deadline was July 25). Families were only allowed to remain in the lodgings to which they had been temporarily assigned if their original homes were in potentially life-threatening or uninhabitable condition or they had in the meantime had another child and therefore required a larger home.77

From the perspective of the authorities, the complete deprivation of the rights of members of the citizenry who were defined under law as Jews was accompanied by a “fortunate” drop in expenses. Jews who had been isolated in the ghettos were no longer seen as worthy by the civil servants of receiving various subsidies and benefits. Bureaucratic habit inclined Sándor Gyulafalvi Rednik, the mayor of Máramarossziget, to submit a request to the sub-prefect on April 29, 1944 for an adjustment to the war relief payments to be made in the month of May. The sub-prefect’s response, which was dated May 12, made it clear that, in accordance with the oral instructions that had been given during a talk with Pál Tomcsányi Vilmos, the military operations commissioner of Ungvár (today Uzhhorod in Ukraine), on May 6, Jews who earlier had received war relief payments but who in the meantime had been removed to the ghetto had lost any and all legal claim to such payments.78

There was also no need to provide sugar rations for Jews. On May 31, 1944, the mayor of Szatmárnémeti informed the Ministry of Public Nutrition that the 17,650 “Jewish sugar ration cards” that the county usually received had not yet arrived.79 However, it would have been quite impossible to have distributed these sugar ration cards, since the deportations were already underway. Food ration cards could not be distributed among the Jews of Kolozsvár for the same reason. According to news that was reported on May 23, 1944, new food ration cards were to be distributed among the Jews of the city, who had been compelled to wear the yellow star to identify them, on May 25, precisely the day on which the first train destined for Auschwitz departed from Kolozsvár. The reports in the press were not really intended for those whom they would, in principle, have affected, but rather served merely as a means of distracting and placating the Christian population.80

Liquidation and Assessment of Damages

As soon as the last transports had departed from the ghettos, the territories began to be emptied. In general, considerable emphasis was placed on disinfection and proper cleaning. In many settlements, the locals complained that the scraps of food, the trash, and the latrines that had been left behind gave off a terrible smell and posed a threat of contamination or contagion.81 Yet following the deportations, the ghettos were first plundered and only then disinfected. In Nagyvárad the ghetto was left unguarded for a few days. The articles of everyday use that had been left in the buildings became spoils for the taking. Then the forced labor unit of the anti-aircraft defense squadron that was stationed in the city was assigned the task of gathering together and sorting the furniture, clothing, and other items of value that had been left behind and transporting them to the Orthodox synagogue, which had been turned into a repository.82 If there were forced labor units in or near a settlement, it was general practice, following the deportations, to make use of them in the transportation of valuables and belongings that had been left in the ghettos. Trucks and wagons were used to transport these items in Nagyvárad and the other settlements as well.

In many cases, the procurement of means of transportation presented a considerable problem for local administrators. In Kolozsvár, the belongings that had been left behind in the ghetto or in the forcibly vacated homes were transported using vehicles belonging to the municipal sanitation unit, which so dramatically hindered the transportation of waste that it threatened the public health of the city. For this reason, on August 16 the mayor decided in the future to use only privately owned vehicles for the transportation of items that had once belonged to Jews.83

Most of the ghettos were in horrible condition for months following the deportations and even following liberation. Anything of value was looted, but heaps of debris and items of everyday use were left behind. When Ernő (Ernest) Marton, who earlier had been a Zionist leader, came to northern Transylvania in November 1944, he made the following observation: “The sight of these ghettos is heart-rending even today. Broken furniture, household items that are now useless, layers of feathers from torn pillows, the remains of prayer books, and inch-thick grime all indicate that months ago thousands of innocent people suffered in these houses and awaited their doom.”84

Damages were done to the buildings in the ghettos and the brick factories that were used as sites for ghettos. The assessment of these damages and the arrangement of compensation constituted new administrative burdens for the authorities and the municipal leadership. The dossier on the assessment of damages done to the Municipal Brick Factory, which was used as the ghetto in Kolozsvár, has survived, and it offers a detailed overview of the process of how these kinds of damages were assessed.85 According to the ascertainment of the engineers’ office, the replacement of items that were missing and the repairs that would be necessary would cost 3,900 pengő in total, which (in line with customary practice) the city would pay for using the assets that had been stolen from the Jews.86 This sum, however, was significantly less than the estimate that had been given by the Municipal Brick Industry Corporation on May 27. According to the managers of the factory, the damages would cost some 70,880 pengő, and they predicted that this sum would grow.87 Following the deportations, the factory requested compensation several times for the damages that had been incurred, but no complete settlement was ever made. These questions were decisively influenced by the fact that by the autumn of 1944, the Soviet and Romanian armies had reached the borders of the city. On September 16, the decree to evacuate the city was issued, and on that very day the Hungarian authorities, who were fleeing, closed the city’s coffers.88

Conclusion

As the cases I have discussed in this essay demonstrate, the implementation of the Final Solution in northern Transylvania, in other words, the expropriation and annihilation of the Jewry of the territory, involved a complex state apparatus consisting of civil servants, units responsible for the maintenance of order and defense, and even intellectuals and technical experts (engineers, physicians, teachers, and economists). The anti-Semitic measures, which were adopted in a period of only a few weeks, created serious administrative challenges for this apparatus and, furthermore, had negative material consequences for some segments of the so-called Christian population. Problems involving production and provisions arose in several branches of the economy, and the lack of trained experts and specialists, which had already been a problem, became worse.89 Others, however, profited from the situation. They submitted claims for compensation, denounced people to the authorities, plundered, and moved up on the professional ladders. The relocation of some lower ranking and mid-level leaders (some of whom had left Transylvania in the 1920s and were returning to communities from which they had become distant) from Trianon Hungary to the newly acquired territory also increased the “efficiency” with which the Final Solution was implemented. For bureaucrats who often barely knew the people of the communities to which they had been assigned, loyalty to the regime proved stronger than any solidarity with the local Jews.

It would be difficult to produce a balance sheet for the implementation of the Final Solution in northern Transylvania, much as the costs incurred by Hungary and the material losses of the Jewry also rest on rough estimates. For this reason, I have attempted first and foremost to analyze a few kinds of costs.90 As far as the question of the actual value of the real estate and belongings that were stolen by the Hungarian authorities, the Germans, the locals, and the soldiers who passed through region in the autumn of 1944 is concerned, we cannot know this with any precision, just as we cannot know precisely the value of the things that were destroyed in the course of the war and the pillaging. The 1946 assessment (which survives only in fragments) of the situation in Transylvania by the World Jewish Congress contains precise information on the material losses of a few hundred Holocaust survivors. According to it, the value of the properties stolen from 316 survivors from Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad, and Nagykároly (today Carei in Romania) came to 219,064,631 pengő and 367,902,000 lei.91 A memorandum sent to the government commission for Jewish property by the deputy mayor of Nagyvárad in June, 1944 offers a rough idea of the scale of the properties stolen from the Jews of the city. According to the memorandum, 4,700 dwellings were left empty following the ghettoization of the Jews, with some 13,000 rooms and 4,000 kitchens and larders. Furthermore, 600 businesses and 500 workshops and factories were taken from residents who had been defined under the law as Jews.92

As is clear, the value of the property, both real estate and belongings, that was taken from the 164,000 former citizens of northern Transylvania must have come to billions of pengő before the Holocaust. A significant share of this property came into the hands of the Hungarian state and the civil servants, gendarmes, and police who took part in the ghettoization and deportation, as well as the civilians who submitted claims for reimbursement or simply looted. In comparison, the costs that arose in connection with the expropriation, ghettoization, and deportation of the Hungarian Jewry of the provinces were slight. Historians have not yet arrived at any precise estimate of how much the ghettoization and deportation of the Jewry of northern Transylvania cost (even disregarding the damages caused to the national economy). In 1945, the National Audit Office estimated that costs of the ghettoization and deportation of the Hungarian Jewry of the provinces came to 60 million pengő.93 There are also estimates regarding the costs of the transport of the Jewish populations of some individual Hungarian settlements. In the case of the Jews of the city of Mohács and the surrounding area, these costs were estimated at 70,000 pengő. In the case of the ghetto of Szeged, we know the costs of the creation of the camp, the transportation of Jews, and the provision of food, which in total came to more than 32,300 pengő.94 The creation of the ghetto of Túrkeve, which “housed” some 160 individuals, cost almost 50,000 pengő. This sum includes a plank fence (18,000 pengő) and the sanitation equipment, daily wages, transportation charges, etc.95 The construction of the three-meter-high plank fence surrounding the ghetto of Zalaegerszeg is estimated to have cost 40,000 pengő. The forcible relocation of the Jews of Sátoraljaújhely to a single part of the city and the resulting relocation of some so-called Christian families cost 90,000 pengő. Transportation (to the ghettos and then deportation to the extermination camps) cost several million pengő.96

In the case of northern Transylvania, we only have partial amounts. We cannot assess the total costs, and it is not entirely clear that we would arrive at a useful figure if we were to attempt to determine the “share” of the 60 million pengő (the estimated cost of the ghettoization and deportation of the Hungarian Jewry of the provinces according to the National Audit Office) that was “spent” on the 131,639 people deported from northern Transylvania (it would be roughly 18 million pengő). We have the greatest amount of detailed data on the small and large ghettos of Nagybánya. The cost of the creation and maintenance of the larger ghetto, which “housed” 3,660 people, came to 38,734 pengő, including the daily wages of the “Christians” who “provided services.” Following the liquidation of the smaller ghetto, where some 2,000 people were held, the cost of the damages that had been done was estimated at 30,000 pengő. If these sums are applied to all of the 131,639 people who were deported from northern Transylvania, the costs incurred in the process of ghettoization and deportation would come to 1.4 million pengő and the damages would come to roughly 2 million pengő, for a total of 3.4 million pengő. Naturally, this sum is not reliable, since the process by which it has been reached contains numerous possibilities for error. In individual settlements and areas the costs and the damages depended in part on whether or not in the given ghetto or collection camp existing edifices and infrastructure were used, how many people they were intended to “house,” the extent to which the local authorities had been frugal, and the length of time during which the ghetto was in use. The transportation costs of deportation must also be added, and they may have come to several million pengő in northern Transylvania as well.

However, it is quite clear that, following the liberation of the region, only a small fraction of the wealth that had been stolen was returned to the few survivors. In November 1944, Ernő Marton informed the Romanian government and the international Jewish organizations of the difficulties regarding the recovery of stolen properties. In the course of the trip he took through northern Transylvania, Marton observed that the military and civilian authorities of the region, which had only been liberated a few weeks earlier, were hindering the reacquisition of stolen wealth. He ascertained with considerable concern and consternation that the returning survivors had to confront the people who had persecuted them: “the Hungarian civil servants who did not flee with the retreating Hungarian and German troops continue to serve in their positions, even though many of them displayed fascist conduct and took part in the implementation of the brutal measures of the Hungarian government. Some segments of the civil guard, which was created to replace the gendarmerie and the police, also consist of such fascist elements, which contributes to a great extent to the aggravation of uncertainty and doubt.”97

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Kádár, Gábor, and Zoltán Vági. Hullarablás. A magyar zsidók gazdasági megsemmisítése [Robbing Corpses. The Economic Annihilation of Hungarian Jews]. Budapest: Hannah Arendt Egyesület–Jaffa Kiadó, 2005.

Kádár, Gábor, and Zoltán Vági. Self-Financing Genocide. The Gold Train, The Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2004.

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Molnár, Judit. Csendőrtiszt a Markóban. Ferenczy László csendőr alezredes a népbíróság előtt [Gendarme-officer in Markó Street. Gendarmerie Lieutenant Colonel László Ferenczy before the People’s Court]. Budapest: Scolar, Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, 2014.

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Singer, Zoltán. Volt egyszer egy Dés. Bethlen, Magyarlápos, Retteg, Nagyilonda és környéke [Once upon a Time there was Dés (Dej). Bethlen, Magyarlápos (Târgu Lăpuş), Retteg (Reteag), Nagyilonda (Ileanda), and the Surroundings]. Tel Aviv: Dés és Vidékéről Elszármazottak Landsmannschaftja, 1970.

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Anders E. B. Blomqvist

Local Motives for Deporting Jews

Economic Nationalizing in Szatmárnémeti in 1944

 

The article provides a case study of Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare, today in Romania) during World War II by using the concept of economic nationalizing. I investigate the motifs behind the de-Jewification and re-Hungarianization of the city and show that by 1944 the Hungarian leaders were convinced not only that the seizure of Jewish property would significantly improve their own situation, but also that the gradual implementation of this policy was the key reason for its previous failure. The article also discusses the ways in which the Hungarian elite aroused expectations among the Hungarian public that Jewish property would be redistributed as a “national gift” and the eagerness of members of practically all sectors of Hungarian society to acquire property that had been left behind by the deported Jews. I thereby argue that the relatively strong local support behind the deportation of Jews was driven, above all, by the economic interests of the local Hungarian community. The entire economy of the city was de-Jewified and re-Hungarianized when the Jews were deported in the summer of 1944. However, I also show that, ambitious plans for social redistribution notwithstanding, major redistribution of assets took place primarily within the housing sector. In general, the gains of the beneficiaries were sharply exceeded by the human and material losses for the city as a whole.

 

Keywords: The Holocaust in Hungary, economic history, economic nationalism, ethnic borderlands

 

This article addresses the question of responsibility and collaboration in the ethnic borderlands of Hungary in World War II by using the concept of economic nationalizing. The concept is applied to a case study of the city of Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare, today in Romania, near the Hungarian–Romanian border) by using formerly unexplored sources. I will thus investigate how the “de-Jewification” and “re-Hungarianization” of Szatmárnémeti was implemented in 1944. This means examining why Hungarian leaders, authorities and civilians supported the deportation of Jews. In other words, the account will not provide a comprehensive explanation of the reasons for the murder of the Jews by Nazi Germans (with the active collaboration of Hungarians). Instead, I will concentrate primarily on the economic motives for Hungarian support of the deportation and also on the closely interrelated question of its actual economic impact.

I define economic nationalizing as an institution of a social practice of economic and political principles and processes that influence and are influenced by nationalism and national identities. My approach to the study of economic nationalizing is inspired by Paul Brass. It emphasizes the importance of how ethnic and national identities are instrumentalized, constructed and used by the elite to gain political power and economic advantages. Ethnic identity and nationalism arise out of specific interactions between the leaderships of the nationalizing states and minority elites. Thus, ethnic and national identities are social and political constructs, which are created by elites who draw upon and distort cultural attributes for political and economic reasons.1 Economic nationalizing is a dynamic process, in which national and economic factors interact. To stress the dynamic aspect and the social force behind this process I use the term “nationalizing” (as well as Romanianizing, Hungarianizing) instead of “nationalization.”

The social practice of economic nationalizing is discernible in formal and explicit ways, as in regulations or laws, or implicitly in the form of social rules. One fundamental principle of nationalism is to improve the political and economic positions of the core members of the nation relative to and at the expense of members of other nations and minorities. This definition of economic nationalizing is inspired by Rogers Brubaker’s concept of “a nationalizing state,” which he defines as a nation-state of and for a particular ethno-cultural nation—the core nation—whose state promotes and protects their language, culture, demographic position, economic welfare and political hegemony.2

Economic nationalism has been a driving force in the region of East-Central Europe since the nineteenth century, as consecutive regimes have striven to create ethno-national economies, including dualist Hungary and interwar Romania. The ruling nation usually used its political power to establish an ethnocracy to maximize economic advantages for itself at the expense of minorities. During the dualist period, the Jews of Hungary were included in the ethnic category of Hungarian speakers (Magyars) with the aim of Magyarizing the economy at the expense of the so-called nationalities. So the economy of Szatmárnémeti city was completely Magyarized during the dualist period. 3

In 1920, the city was ceded to Romania and renamed Satu Mare, despite the fact that it had a large Hungarian-speaking majority, and a process of Romanianizing began. Romanianizing was radicalized at the beginning of the 1930s, and the public sector was almost completely Romanianized at the expense of minorities and especially Jews. In the mid-1930s, efforts to Romanianize were focused on the core parts of Romania, while the Jewish share of the economy in the ethnic borderlands, such as Satu Mare, grew. In 1940, Romania underwent a major revision of its borders. It lost Northern Transylvania (including Satu Mare), Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. In the remaining parts of Romania the Antonescu regime continued with Romanianization, with the intention of completely Romanianizing real estate, businesses and jobs, though in the end these efforts largely failed.4

When northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary in 1940, a process of re-Hungarianization of the economy was immediately launched. Re-Hungarianization included redistributing economic assets and resources owned by Jews among so-called Christians, a practice that was referred to as de-Jewification. However, in the Hungarian–Romanian borderland this process was intended also to strengthen the position of Hungarians at the expense of Romanians. Szatmárnémeti had around 13,000 Jews out of a total population of 52,000. The majority of the Jews were Orthodox, and the Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, the first Grand Rebbe of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, had turned the city into an important Orthodox center. The generation of Jews that had lived in the city during the Dualist period remained deeply attached to the Hungarian language and Hungarian culture, despite 20 years of Romanian rule. Nonetheless, during World War II the category “Hungarian” excluded Jews on “racial” grounds and other nationalities, mainly Romanians, on linguistic grounds. Hungary imposed anti-Jewish legislation, but the implementation of this legislation proceeded slowly.

The Hungarian elite in the city of Szatmárnémeti aimed to remove Jews from the economy, while at the same time a political economy of exploitation developed in which the Hungarian elite made large profits at the expense of Jews. Officially and legally so-called “straw man” arrangements were banned, but in reality leading Hungarians were profiting from this type of arrangement. The straw man (stróman from the German Strohmann) or Aladár was typically a Hungarian Christian who, in an effort to circumvent the anti-Jewish legislation, formally took over Jewish businesses in exchange for a share of their profits.5

As a result of the pro-Magyar attitudes of leading Jews in the Dualist period and during the interwar period, some of them were defined as Hungarians and exempted from the anti-Jewish laws. One important example was the Princz family, who were one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the city and owners of the Princz factory. They were exempted because they “had behaved patriotically with regards to the Hungarian cause” during the interwar Romanian period, i.e. they had supported Hungarian irredentism and ethnic Hungarian politics and the ethnic Hungarian economy and culture. Armin Princz, the head of the family, had been a leader of the ethnic Hungarian party in the interwar period. This means that some leading Jews and Hungarians were collaborating on the re-Hungarianization of the economy, which clearly adds to the complexity of the situation.6 According to the law, these Jews fell under the anti-Jewish legislation, but they were exempted because of their national merits.

On March 19, 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. The occupation was motivated in part by the fact that the Hungarian government had tried to negotiate an armistice with the Allies. A second reason was that the “Jewish question” in Hungary remained “unresolved” according to the Nazi German criteria. The situation of Jews in Hungary had been deteriorating up to 1944, but the large majority of Jews was still alive despite the fact that tens of thousands had been killed in instances of mass murder. Additionally, Jews possessed a significant share of the Hungarian economy, as they did, for instance, in Szatmárnémeti, despite ever more severe discrimination. The re-Hungarianization process hit primarily the lower and middle class stratum of Jews, while more wealthy Jews were able to maintain their positions.

Nazi Germany’s plan for eliminating the Jews in occupied Hungary was to expropriate and deport them with the assistance of Hungarian leaders and authorities. Nazi German leaders’ targeting of Hungarian Jews was part of their larger Final Solution, which aimed at a complete de-Jewification and the killing of Jews in territories under Nazi control. Still, leading Nazi Germans took personal advantage of the situation and were occasionally willing to spare the lives of individual Jews in exchange for large bribes.

The German occupation and takeover of Hungary went quickly and smoothly. The Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy remained in power and appointed a pro-German Prime Minister, Döme Sztójay. A group of 600 Germans under the leadership of Adolf Eichmann arrived to implement the Final Solution.7 The area east of the river Tisza, including Szatmárnémeti, was declared a war zone under German command.8 The declaration of war zone was a way of legitimizing the deportation of the “internal enemies,” i.e. one of its functions was to help strengthen the image of the Jews as enemies who supported communism. The plan was first to deport Jews from this eastern territory because the front and the Red Army were advancing westward.

Hungarian and German interests overlapped in their desire to remove the Jews. In a perverse misuse of a term that in principle refers to religious belief, the Hungarian authorities used the word “Christian” to exclude Jews on a racial basis. The inclusion of the Romanians in the privileged category of “Christians” reduced the Hungarian–Romanian tensions, as the Romanians were not discriminated against de jure. Still, the Hungarian leaders regarded Hungarian ethno-national interests as paramount. I will therefore use the term “Hungarian” when referring to a person who was defined by the law as non-Jewish, although the Hungarian authorities admittedly employed the term “Christian.”

Economic and National Motives of the Holocaust

Research on the Holocaust in general has pointed to the importance of economic and national factors. Martin Dean has argued that the confiscation of Jewish property was linked to the physical process of destruction.9 Several historians have applied a functional approach to explaining the Holocaust in Hungary, stressing the importance of economic and class factors.10 Historians Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági have described the looting of Jewish property as a “self-financing genocide,” since the Hungarian state used the property to pay for the deportations and the mass killing of Jews.11 Krisztián Ungváry stresses in his latest major study on the Horthy period that “cold and rational economic calculations” lay behind the deportations.12 Ungváry claimed that Hungarian authorities framed the solution to the so-called Jewish question as a “major social transformation” through the full-scale Hungarianization of Jewish property.13 Other historians, such as Mária M. Kovács and Victor Karády, have concluded that economic anti-Semitism initially developed during the interwar period, alongside conflicting economic-occupational interests and social class competition between Jews and Christians over material resources.14

Michael Mann contended that without Nazi German power, the Jewish genocide would not have been attempted in Hungary, even though almost all local perpetrators were Hungarian. The Hungarian regime saw the ethnic cleansing of the country as desirable primarily for economic reasons, but was divided over the means. Mann argues that the core perpetrators were ideologically motivated by nationalism, defined in ethnic and racial terms, but when the cleansing took the form of violent deportation, this created massive opportunities for profit. Many Hungarians were thereby sucked in by materialistic motives that were legitimized by state agencies.15

Regarding the expropriation of Jewish assets during the Second World War, Kádár and Vági have argued that the Hungarian government was successful in looting but almost completely failed to organize the redistribution. Thus, the looting, of the Jews could not alleviate the economic problems faced by the Hungarian “nation,” even though this was one of the policy aims.16 Kádár and Vági believe, moreover, that this re-allocation scheme of Jewish jobs and property, which included about one-fifth of the national wealth, could have resulted in better living standards and an economic upturn for non-Jewish Hungarians; however, because of the chaotic wartime conditions, the scheme had the opposite effect, further eroding the Hungarian economy and society.17

Studies on the factors of economic anti-Semitism and nationalism have focused relatively little on the annexed territories, including Northern Transylvania in 1940–44, despite the fact that the physical destruction of Jews was more thorough there than in the core areas of Hungary.18 One notable exception is the work of historian Ferenc Sz. Horváth, in which he examined the role of social compensation, economic reparation and the politics of resettlement in Northern Transylvania. He claims that ethnic Hungarians aimed to regain the economic positions that Jews had taken during the period of Romanian rule, i.e. they sought to implement economic re-Hungarianization.19 Horváth’s study included examples from Nagyvárad (today Oradea in Romania) and Kolozsvár (today Cluj in Romania), but not Szatmárnémeti. Apart from Horvath’s article on the topic, there is no study using primary sources on the implementation of anti-Jewish legislation in Northern Transylvania for the period 1940–44.20

In order to grasp the mechanisms and motivations behind the deportation of Jews, a local case study is warranted that draws on a variety of sources, including official documentation, newspaper articles and oral testimonies. Kádár, Vági and Horváth have made important contributions in this direction, but their inquiries hardly represent detailed investigations of the local scene. Rather, they draw on bits and pieces of information from various places. This article therefore aims to address this lacuna by undertaking a local investigation in order to arrive at a more subtle understanding of the mechanisms of deportation by using the analytical concept of economic nationalizing.

The Final Solution

The German plans for a radical solution of the so-called Jewish question received support among Hungarian leaders and authorities. Hungarian leaders were interested in the possibility of deporting Jews, as this would enable them to fully implement their program of re-Hungarianization. In the context of a war economy plagued by shortages, Hungarian leaders aroused expectations among the Hungarian public that Jewish property would be redistributed as a “national gift.” Expectations were high that this would amount to the “salvation of the Hungarian economy.”

The majority of Hungarians in Szatmárnémeti were not aware of the plan to annihilate Jewry, but we can assume that the leading Hungarians, including Mayor László Csóka, had been informed and knew of the extermination camps. State secretary László Endre attended the meeting in Szatmárnémeti at the end of April, at which plans were made for the establishment of the ghetto and the deportation of Jews. We can assume that during this meeting Csóka asked Endre about the destination of the Jews. Lower-ranking officials most probably understood that the Jews would face harsh conditions, but we can assume that they were not given specific information about their final destination.21 They proved willing to support the deportations, as they expected to receive economic returns in the form of “Jewish property.”

Until March 1944, the various anti-Jewish measures that had been passed primarily affected poor Jews, as some of the more affluent Jews had succeeded in maintaining their economic positions and wealth. Still, around 1,000 Jews, mainly refugees from Poland, had been deported from Szatmárnémeti because they lacked documentation necessary in order to obtain Hungarian citizenship. Together with around 24,000 other Jews, they had been massacred near Kamianets-Podolskyi, a city that today lies in western Ukraine, in the fall of 1941.22

Wealthy Jews were still visible in society at the beginning of 1944, which increased the support for a more radical solution among Hungarian leaders, including the mayor. At the beginning of March, the number of Jewish tradesmen and craftsmen was 980, which represented 41 percent of all active permits. The city’s economy relied on Jewish managers and engineers. Furthermore, several larger Jewish industries that produced goods necessary for the war economy were still in operation. The local newspaper concluded on April 6 that in 1940–1943, “we succeeded in convincing the majority to favor the Christian Hungarians,” but that “the real reorganization begins now.”23

Elisabeth Heimfeld, a Jewish survivor, stated that in April 1944 she and members of her community felt that “something was coming for the Jews.”24 Polish Jewish refugees living in the city urged Jews to “run away, everyone will die!”25 Rivka Handler, a Jewish eyewitness, stated that Polish Jews were telling “unbelievable horror stories,” but “we still could not imagine mass killings.”26 Most Jews thought these reports were exaggerated. In any case, even if they were considering leaving the city, it was extremely difficult to find a place where they would be able to take refuge.27 Many Jews were convinced that “the Hungarians won’t let us down” and that atrocities “will not happen to us, because we are Hungarian Jews.”28

However, at the beginning of April, the Hungarian Ministry of Interior, together with the Nazi German special appointee Adolf Eichmann, worked out the details of relocating the Jews to ghettos.29 The official arguments for establishing so-called “designated areas” or ghettos were based on economic and security reasoning. The Hungarian Minister of Interior Andor Jaross argued that Jews lived in better lodgings than non-Jews because they were unjustly richer, and therefore should be moved to designated areas with poor housing. Furthermore, for supposed reasons of national security, Jaross required Jews to be transferred from villages and smaller towns to larger cities, where authorities could supervise them in designated areas.30 According to the plan, during each phase Jews would be subjected to special investigation in order to ensure that they would surrender their valuables.31

The security argument was specious and deluded, as Jews in general were not organizing any armed resistance. In Szatmárnémeti only two guns were found in the possession of Jews, though the city had around 13,000 Jewish inhabitants.32 Nonetheless, the city’s police kept the Jews under surveillance. In early 1944, they caught some Jews operating an illegal printing press used for printing falsified civil and military documents, including ration cards.33 Most of the Jews of the city were highly religious and did not engage in violence, even to defend themselves. Falsification of documents was the most defiant form of resistance among Jews.

One of the first measures in the plan was the April 11 announcement that all Jews would be dismissed from their jobs between April and September without compensation. This was meant to be part of a gradual process that would “not disturb production.”34 The announcement made no mention of the “designated areas.” However, the Hungarian authorities started to round up Jews in the neighboring district of Carpatho-Ruthenia as early as April 16.35

The mayor issued a decree on April 17 according to which all Jewish shops, with the exception of food stores, were to be closed.36 Although the decree was issued on April 17, the authorities started to close shops at six o’clock in the morning of April 16. Within a few days, the Hungarian authorities had taken the first step in the process of expropriation and relocation, by closing the 350 Jewish shops, which represented more than half of all shops in the city.37 As the second step, the Hungarian state formally seized these shops on April 21.38 The authorities reported that this was the end of the “straw man system,” i.e. the collusive system of circumventing anti-Jewish laws.39 Thus, this major operation to nationalize Jewish commercial property successfully de-Jewified the commercial sector. However, the process of re-Hungarianization had only started, as most of the shops remained closed and were only gradually reopened under new and exclusively Hungarian-Christian management.

A special conference was held in Szatmárnémeti on April 26 in order to discuss the organization of the ghetto. During this conference, László Endre, the state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, explained that he expected “full and honest collaboration from all civil servants and others participating in this action, which, possibly, may not be fully appreciated until history has proven us right.”40 Endre seemed convinced that de-Jewification would bring salvation to the Hungarians.

All top-ranking officials were present at the conference, including the mayor of Szatmárnémeti, who was responsible for executing orders in the city. While precious little is known about what actually happened during the conference, it is likely that future Jewish policy was discussed.41 After the conference, the majority of the Hungarian leaders decided to remain in their positions. This failure of Hungarian officials and leaders to resign from their posts is persuasive evidence that they supported a more radical “solution of the Jewish question.”

One exception was the prefect of Szatmár County, Ferenc Kölcsey, who resigned and was replaced by Barnabás Endrődi on April 25.42 According to Béla Földvári, a Jewish survivor, Kölcsey had received information about the plans for deportation and had told Földvári’s family about them. Kölcsey informed them: “first they [the Germans] will take you [the Jews] and then they will take us [the Hungarians].”43 The fact that Kölcsey resigned (and this made him an exception) indicates that he understood that something radical was going to be implemented, and that he was not willing to take responsibility for it.44

The commission for the apprehension of Jews in Szatmárnémeti and its surroundings held a special meeting after the conference. The mayor chaired the meeting and representatives from the police, the gendarmerie, the financial and tax departments of the city and primary and secondary school teachers attended it.45 They decided that the location of the Szatmárnémeti ghetto should be established in the Jewish neighborhood in the centre of the city.46 On April 27, the local newspaper reported that “an important decree is under negotiation by the government regarding Jewish houses and a designated area for Jews,” i.e. the ghetto.47 By this time, the deportation of Jews was already underway in the neighboring district of Carpatho-Ruthenia.

The newspaper explained that a governmental decree made it possible for the authorities to requisition Jewish houses. The justification for this was simply the contention that “Jews live in better houses than non-Jews.”48 The official reason was that the homes of Jewish families were needed by members of Hungarian society, emphasizing the material side of Hungarian “needs.” The purpose of the decree was to persuade segments of the Hungarian public that they would soon receive Jewish houses, and thus create public support for the expropriations. This justification was also part of an attempt to legitimize the concentration of Jews in the ghetto with the claim that they generally lived in better conditions than Hungarians.

Furthermore, ghettoization was also intended to prevent Jewish resistance. Security concerns (however deluded) motivated the announcement on April 28 that “Jews are not allowed to buy explosives and all their licenses to use weapons will be withdrawn.”49 This decree served the purpose of constructing Jews as an “inner enemy,” even though the local police were fully aware of the lack of violent organized resistance among Jews.

On April 17, 1944, the authorities ordered all Jews to declare their property, including property supervised by non-Jews.50 However, few Jews had reported their property by the end of April, and on April 28 the order was repeated.51 The finance office announced that it would be open even on Sundays from eight in the morning until six in the afternoon in order to receive the declarations.52

At this point, the intention of the declaration was to create the public impression that everything was in order. However, privately the authorities feared that Jews would leave with their capital or transfer money abroad. The mayor therefore decided to forbid Jews from leaving the city.53 Additionally, the mayor issued a decree the same day prohibiting Jews from using the telephone, sending telegrams, or transferring money at the post office. However, the director of the post office rejected the order and resigned.54 He was one of the few known cases of someone in a leading position who protested against the orders given by the mayor during the ghettoization.

On April 28, the “ghetto order” was made. The official name of the decree was “Concerning the regulation of certain questions relating to the determination of the Jews.” It stipulated the establishment of “a designated area” and was announced in the local newspaper on May 1.55 Furthermore, it stipulated that “Christians” living in the area had to move out.56 On May 3, all Jews wearing the yellow star were ordered to remain inside their homes. As of May 4, all Jews who were not living in the ghetto were only allowed to go outside between 9:00 o’clock and 11:00 o’clock in the morning.57

Jews were rounded up and brought to the ghetto between May 3 and 6; Jews from surrounding villages and cities were brought to the ghetto later.58 The ghettoization proceeded without any major disturbances. The reasons for this were that there was no resistance movement organized by the Jews and no major opposition by the Hungarian public or Hungarian officials.59

The rounding up of Jews was carried out by special units composed of civil servants, including local primary and secondary school teachers, gendarmes and policemen, who were under the authority of the mayor and operated under his jurisdiction. Thus a large share of the public sector was involved in this process. Jews were brought to the ghetto and were only allowed to bring a limited amount of personal belongings and food.

Another special unit came afterwards to make an inventory and ascertain whether the Jews had declared all of their property. The Jews received a copy of the declaration as a sign that the whole process was legal. This created the false impression that they would be given back their property once they returned from the ghetto.60

The local newspaper reported that “a new episode in the economic life of the city” had begun. Decrees had been announced on April 16 and the Jews had to “declare” their property upon it. After the establishment of the ghetto in the beginning of May, this property was “seized,” i.e. it became the national property of the Hungarian state.61 However, according to one newspaper article, the amount that was seized was “surprisingly little.” The same article stated that “economic experts believe that one of the reasons for this is that Jews are keeping money for themselves.”62 Jewish testimonies confirm that they were indeed hiding some of their valuables or had given them to Christians whom they trusted.63 Thus, Jews realized that the “declaration” was only a pretext for the theft of their property.

Another explanation for the perception that the property that had been seized from the Jews was “little” was that Hungarian officials took advantage of the opportunity to steal items for themselves. Sources confirm that Hungarian officials seized the opportunity and took things that were easy to carry.64 The newspaper also cited cases of illegal transactions. In one case two detectives had accepted a bribe from a Jew and were sentenced to prison. This reveals that officials used the opportunity for private economic gain.65 In some cases Jewish houses were looted before the authorities arrived to take inventory.66 However, according to a police report, already by the end of 1943 and beginning of 1944 some of the more affluent Jews had transferred some of their wealth abroad.67

According to eyewitness Livia Kellerman, some Hungarians suggested to their Jewish neighbors that they trust them with their valuables instead of handing them over to the authorities.68 Another Jewish survivor, Margerete Weinberger, claimed that “Gentiles were waiting to take over,” i.e. that as soon as the Jews had been rounded up, Hungarians used the opportunity to steal.69 This reinforced the economic incentives of Hungarians to de-Jewify the city.

Another explanation for the perception of the allegedly “low” quantity of the Jewish property that had been expropriated could simply be that the expectations concerning the amount of property owned by Jews were exaggerated. The anti-Jewish legislation had been in force for almost four years, and moreover the war had created economic difficulties for everyone, but especially for the Jews.70 This contributed to the false perception among the Hungarian authorities and public that the Jews were much richer than they actually were. This perception was also fed by the existence of a few wealthy Jews.

Around 200 of them, most of them wealthy, were interrogated. Some of them were tortured because they did not cooperate or voluntarily hand over their valuables, according to Jewish sources.71 Some Jews committed suicide because of the torture, including a noted Jewish grain merchant.72 According to the eye-witness Magda Moldovan, another wealthy Jew was shot on the spot by SS men.73 According to the Jewish memorial book of Szatmár, 30 people were killed in the ghetto and 9 people committed suicide, some of them after having been tortured, others because they could not bear the conditions in the ghetto.74 Thus, one of the main purposes of the ghetto was indeed to rob the Jews of their remaining property and valuables.

On May 12, the mayor announced that all Jewish property seized had become national property.75 This means that economic re-Hungarianization had been completed before the deportations began. However, the process of redistribution had not yet begun. The purpose seems to have been to raise the expectations among the Hungarian public in order to legitimize the rounding up of Jews. From a Jewish perspective, this was only the beginning of a series of horrors that only a few of them could have anticipated. Many of them still believed that, as Hungarian citizens, they would be exempted from deportations.

The fast reduction of the Jewish workforce created major disturbances in economic and industrial production. For example, efforts were made in several places to make exceptions for Jewish doctors because of the shortage of physicians. This shortage was made severe, since 45 percent of doctors fell under the anti-Jewish legislation. The result was a significant health care problem in Hungary.76

Still, the concentration of Jews in the ghetto made it possible to re-Hungarianize the economy. Hungarian leaders used both alleged security concerns and economic incentives to establish the ghetto, but they were primarily interested in seizing Jewish property. In this way, the Final Solution was promoted by the Hungarian elite and received support (or at least was not met with opposition) from the larger part of the Hungarian public. The expectation among the Hungarian public was that they would receive Jewish houses, properties and companies. The de-Jewification of the city was presented as the salvation of the Hungarians, but the process in fact involved the loss of significant human expertise and experience. The economy was practically brought to a standstill, as a substantial part of it was in the process of being re-Hungarianized. More than half of all shops were closed, and industrial companies lost more than 40 percent of their skilled managers and workers. This caused major disturbances in the production and supply of goods, which had negative consequences for society at large.77

Deportations

The Jews were rounded up at the beginning of May, and most Jews lived in the ghetto for roughly 3 weeks before being deported. There were two ghettos in Szatmár County, one in Szatmárnémeti and the other in Nagybánya. Jews were brought from the surrounding smaller cities, villages and districts into the two cities.78 At its peak at the end of May, the Szatmárnémeti ghetto had around 19,000 Jews.79

The Jews from the Szatmárnémeti ghetto were deported in six transports. The first train departed on May 19 and the last on June 1, with around 3,000 Jews in every transport. The expenses for the deportations had to be paid by the city, but were reimbursed by the state.80 This means that Hungary paid for the cost of deportations to Nazi Germany using seized Jewish property, an arrangement that has been referred to as “self-financing genocide.”81

Jewish survivors offer different assessments of how the Hungarian public reacted when the Jews were taken to the railway station. One Jewish eye-witness claimed that “people were crying,”82 while two others stated that people were “smiling” and “clapping their hands.” Yet another claimed that “the rest of the population did not say anything when we were deported.”83 Regarding responsibility for the deportations, one Jewish survivor claimed that “our neighbors, the Hungarians, were participating, not the Germans.”84 Another summarized the collaboration between the Hungarians and the Germans by saying that “the Hungarians were more interested in valuables and Germans in our lives.”85 Local Jewish testimonies therefore support the notion that the Holocaust in Hungary was the result of a combination of Hungarian material interests and the Nazi German desire to exterminate the Jews.

The final destination of the transports from Szatmárnémeti was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a majority of the Jews would either be immediately killed or perish because of the harsh conditions of camp life. The fast deportation of the Hungarian Jews to the extermination and concentration camps (4 trains every 24 hours) resulted in a high death rate among them. It is estimated that around 65–75 percent of the Jews who were deported from Northern Transylvania died.86 Thus around 12,000–14,000 Jews from the Szatmárnémeti ghetto died as a result of the harsh conditions in the ghetto and trains or else were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Although the Hungarian authorities seized property from the deported Jews, the local newspaper claimed that many valuables were still missing. “Christians” who had received property from Jews were “robbing the Hungarian state,” according to the newspaper. The editor, Albert Figus, urged everyone to report all Jewish property to the authorities.87 The Hungarian authorities suspected that neighbors had taken Jewish property and requested that everyone hand all such property over to the authorities.

While Jews were suffering or being killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the local newspaper claimed that “Hungarian history justified the solution of the Jewish question, because former periods had shown the danger of letting Jews take over.”88 This referred to the alleged overrepresentation of Jews in the economy from the Dualist period until April 1944.

Hungarians had a significant incentive to seize Jewish property, which they defined as Hungarian property, while Nazi Germany was mainly interested in exterminating the Jews. The result was that the deportations of Jews from Szatmár was among the fastest and most destructive chapters of the Holocaust in Europe, as never had so many Jews been deported and so much property seized in such a short time.89 The rapid deportations were implemented chiefly by Hungarian authorities in cooperation with Nazi German experts in genocide. Still, a few members of the Jewish elite managed to escape the horror by paying large bribes.

“National Gift”

The seizure of Jewish property, according to the plans of the state, was the first step in a major social welfare program to the benefit of the Hungarian public. Jewish property was stored and protected by the municipal administration. On May 21, the seized property of Jews in the surrounding cities was transferred to Szatmárnémeti.90 The most valuable things were taken to Budapest by train.91 All former Jewish houses not intended for immediate public use were sealed.92

On May 9, the new prefect announced in the local newspaper that the seized Jewish property would be redistributed as a form of social welfare. He promised to give textiles, clothes, and shoes to poor workers and their families. There was also the possibility that Jewish homes would be reallocated, but before doing this he would have to wait for further instructions. The prefect claimed that this new system was something that people in general had been expecting for a long time.93 Thus, he aimed to arouse high expectations among the Hungarian public.

On May 12, clothing that had been stolen from Jews was sold at low (symbolic) prices to poor workers with children in order to facilitate a “rapid solution to the social problem,” said the mayor.94 According to the local paper, Jewish property that had been seized created an opportunity to provide support for the city’s “largest family,” beneficiaries of the public welfare office, which included 3,599 families with 11,612 individuals. Thus, about 25–30 percent of all inhabitants of the city were entitled to social welfare, which indeed gave the Hungarian public a material interest in seizing “Jewish property.”

The ghettoization of Jews enabled the Hungarian authorities to provide more support for non-Jewish families. According to reports, 200 cows and fifty horses were seized and redistributed. Horses were given to families of soldiers. Wagons and tools were distributed to Hungarians in the same way.95 Agricultural machines seized from Jews were distributed among farmers.96

The conclusion is that Jewish property was used as “national gift,” i.e. as part of a program for social welfare. In the end, it was not entirely a “gift,” as poor Hungarians had to pay a symbolic price in order to obtain clothing that had been stolen from Jews. This justified the robbing and deportation of Jews and gave the Final Solution a political legitimacy among the Hungarian public under the pretext that national property was actually being restored.

Requesting “National Property”

On May 16, 1944, the Hungarian authorities ordered that all valuables be collected, stored and listed in protocols.97 As a group, civil servants had some of the highest expectations and demanded material compensation for their work. On May 16, twenty civil servants submitted a signed request to the prefect in which they claimed that, “we have read in the newspaper Szamos that Jewish property will be redistributed to poor people and workers.”98 However, the civil servants who signed the petition regarded this as an offence, as the “work conducted by the civil servants had not been fully compensated.”99

At this point, they had not yet received houses or flats, so the civil servants requested that they be given the clothes that Jews had left behind “in the name of the middle class, which is facing more expensive times.” The civil servants argued that “the fine clothes owned by the Jews were not suitable for physical work.” They meant to imply that the clothing should be given to them, white-collar workers, not to blue-collar workers. Furthermore, they stressed that they did “not ask for luxurious things.”100 On May 24, a second group of civil servants requested that they should receive clothes, household utensils and furniture left by the Jews because of the “difficult economic situation and the low salaries.”101

However, strict orders were given on May 25 according to which no “redistribution was allowed except for social welfare.”102 All belongings were to be kept until a full inventory had been conducted, and only then would redistribution begin. Still, the pressure from the general population and the widespread expectation that people would receive properties that had been stolen from the Jews were high, and many private individuals and institutions continued to send requests for their “share” of the “national property.”103 Pressure from the civil servants increased, as on May 26 they were joined by other professionals to make their case stronger. In another letter, 33 civil servants, teachers and policemen (groups that had participated in the rounding up of Jews and the establishment and administration of the ghetto) requested “Jewish clothes,” as they regarded themselves as “low paid workers who could not afford these kinds of clothes.” The tone of the letter was more demanding than that of the previous request. The petitioners claimed that “the issue is urgent and important,” because for two weeks they had “worked from 5:00 o’clock in the morning until 7:00-8:00 o’clock in the evening, performing not only administrative work but also hard physical labor.” According to their request, if they were not given new clothes, “they [would] not have proper clothes to work in.”104

Thus, civil servants expected to receive economic compensation for their help in deporting the Jews. However, the prefect denied their request for clothing and textiles.105 The formal reason for the denial was that all property had to be inventoried and listed and that the government had to issue an order before the redistribution could begin.106 In order to indicate his appreciation for the role played by the civil servants, the mayor announced at the end of May that “all civil servants are serving on the inner front,” i.e. they were serving as soldiers in the local war against the internal enemies.107

Other groups that made requests for the confiscated Jewish property included pensioners, disabled veterans, refugees from southern Transylvania, priests, 130 railway workers, and journalists.108 All of these groups claimed that they had undertaken important tasks related to de-Jewifying and re-Hungarianizing the city. Public institutions such as the civil defense association, military hospital, workers’ office, and the local branch of the Red Cross all asked to receive equipment and material from Jewish institutions or private persons.109

Some of the textiles had been sold to poor families through the social welfare office, but in June it was reported that the remaining textiles needed to be cleaned and thus no further distribution was authorized.110 It was clear at this point that “the general principle is that Jewish property should not be given for social purposes.”111 This was a total change in policy in comparison with the actions and promises made in May. The reason was that “all property that remained belonged to the Jewish owners until a new law regarding this would be passed.”112 The issue of Jewish property had not been solved at the legal level, and so the whole process of redistribution was delayed, causing disappointment among those who expected economic compensation for their work and support.

To conclude, Hungarians working for the Hungarian authorities and at other national institutions expected to be compensated for their support and the work they had performed in connection with the deportation of the Jews. They claimed to be the rightful beneficiaries of Jewish property. This shows how a mechanism of exploitation operated in which the enrichment of Christian Hungarians at the expense of Jews was justified by alleged national merits.

Houses and Flats

Jews owned a significant share of the houses in the city. On May 10, the local newspaper reported that “the solution of the Jewish question solved the problem of housing in a radical way.”113 On May 9, people in the city had already begun to submit requests to receive Jewish houses and flats. It was decided that public institutions should be given priority in this redistribution. The second priority was “civil servants who did not have any place of their own”, because there were several cases in which the families of civil servants rented their dwellings.114 The third category was civil servants who had flats that were deemed too small.

This announcement clearly shows how civil servants were promised compensation in the form of Jewish homes for their assistance in the process of rounding Jews up. It is likely that many civil servants expected to receive benefits for their work and that this was their primary motivation in helping in (instead of protesting against) the ghettoization and deportation of the city’s Jews.

In the course of the following days, the prefect changed the priority regarding the redistribution of houses and emphasized social welfare, meaning that poor families with many children or without houses would be first to receive lodgings that had been stolen from Jews.115 Social welfare institutions such as kindergartens and retirement homes were also given priority.116

The estimated number of Jewish houses in mid-May was around 1,200 out of 6,000 dwellings. Still, this was only an estimate, as Jews from other places owned houses in the city and the final report had not yet been completed. The final outcome of the redistribution was of “great public interest” according to the local newspaper, since Jews had possessed a large share of what was referred to as “national property.”117

The expectations rose among Hungarians that they would benefit materially from the redistribution of Jewish homes. The newspaper reported that “everyone wants to move to Szatmár[németi],” and by the end of May as many as 2,099 requests to move to the city had indeed arrived. It was announced in the newspaper that “Christian [Hungarian] working families with many children” would be the first to be given homes. People who requested houses because they wanted more comfortable and larger accommodations would be denied.118

The inventory of the houses was undertaken by a special finance committee consisting of twelve members. They made a list of all items of furniture and appointed a caretaker, who either rented the house to a Hungarian renter or sealed it. The rent was paid to a public account. According to the report, because of the shortage of policemen, some Jewish houses had been entered before the special commission came.119 However, in my view it is not unlikely that officials also abused their mandate in the interest of their own economic gain. This was the case in other places in Northern Transylvania.120

The redistribution of houses started in mid-June when the first families with several children moved in, and another fifty families were about to follow.121 According to the newspaper, Jews had occupied the best houses in the city, while several thousand Hungarians had been living in poor conditions. By this time, 3,100 requests had been received. “A new happy Hungarian life has started,” reported the newspaper on June 23.122 Rose Markovits claimed that “a Hungarian peasant family took over our house and they loved it,” because “for the first time they had a decent home and they had gotten something that they had never had before.”123

By the beginning of July, 360 Hungarian workers had received one-room and two-room houses and flats, while another 4,000 requests were pending.124 The constant increase in requests reveals how large a share of the public had an interest in obtaining Jewish property. By the end of July, all “Jewish” real estate and flats had a caretaker appointed and were seized as Hungarian state property.125

The newspaper reported that “the building of the new Szatmár[németi] will go smoothly when real estate is in the hands of the state.”126 Flats and houses were rented out and the newspaper announced that “everyone will have a place to live.” This work was undertaken by 40 teachers, who compiled a registry of all of the houses.127 Schools were waiting to take over the buildings that had been used by Jewish schools and, according to the newspaper, the “whole nation is waiting to get its property back.”128

In mid-August, it was announced that 3,260 families would receive houses or flats and that 1,800 had already moved in. These dwellings were given first to poor people and civil servants and then were distributed to the rest of the public.129 In the end, civil servants were compensated for the assistance they had provided in rounding up Jews and seizing their property. Also a large segment of society benefitted materially from the transfer, as around 40 percent of all houses and flats in the city were redistributed.

In conclusion, the deportation of Jews enabled a major redistribution of houses and flats to a large share of the Christian Hungarian public in general and the Hungarian elite in particular, as they received credit and compensation for this major transformation. Houses and flats were distributed as a form of social welfare, but were also given as compensation to civil servants who had participated in the deportation of Jews. The position of civil servants allowed them opportunities to gain economic advantages, both legally and illegally. This shows how a mechanism of ethno-racial exploitation functioned. The large redistribution of Jewish property to the Hungarian public was a way of legitimizing the deportations and currying popular support.

Redistribution Delayed

In June, the principles for the redistribution and re-Hungarianizing of Jewish property were circulated, with the general criterion being to give priority to public projects.130 According to the local newspaper, former Jewish property became “national property and a national gift,” as the property was being restored to its “rightful owners.”131 However, the process of redistribution was delayed and all Jewish valuables were stored in Hotel Pannonia (formerly Hotel Dacia) and in warehouses. According to the local newspaper, the Hungarian authorities accumulated one wagonload of gold in total as well as “luxury products of the finest quality.”132

The Hungarian Government was delayed in the redistribution of Jewish property, and it was only in June, two months after the expropriations had begun, that a Commissioner for Jewish property was appointed.133 Decrees regarding Jewish property had been contradictory; at first, the Hungarian government had decreed that clothing would be sold as part of a social welfare program, but later this and other decrees were suspended.

On August 10, the criterion for redistribution was finally announced. Jewish property was to be used for the “public and national good.” This included redistribution to, first and foremost, military organizations (such as the Levente Associations, which were paramilitary youth organizations), social and religious institutions, cultural houses, churches and educational institutions, all of which, of course, were regarded (and legally defined) as Christian Hungarian.134 With regards to the redistribution of property to private individuals, the following priorities were established:

 

1. Surviving members of soldiers’ families;

2. World War I veterans;

3. Poor families with several children;

4. Disabled or impoverished people without property;

5. Partisan fighters (fighting for Hungary in non-regular units);

6. Workers earning less than 200 pengő per month;

7. Families who had lost property because of bombing;

8. Pregnant women;

9. Civil servants with eight or more children.135

 

This list of priorities clearly reflects considerations of social welfare. It also recognized and privileged groups that were fighting for the “nation,” i.e. soldiers and their families, as well as civil servants.

Even though the criteria for redistribution had been decided, the newspaper announced on August 12 that the huge task of completing the inventory had not been finished.136 The city was bombed on August 16 and 17 and again on September 19 and 20, and many people left for the countryside. Shops and warehouses were not guarded and there was some looting, according to a police report.137 Ultimately, only a fraction of the property was redistributed. Following the chaos created by the advancing front and the bombing of the city, confiscated Jewish property remained in warehouses or was stolen.138

In conclusion, a significant amount of the property that had been expropriated from Jews was never redistributed because the process was delayed, and during this time a great deal of property was stolen or lost. The redistribution was intended to provide social welfare and to reward “national merits.” The delay of redistribution meant that the Hungarian people’s expectation that they would be given some part of this “national gift” was frustrated.

Conclusions

The main method of re-Hungarianizing the economy in the city of Szatmárnémeti was the ghettoization and deportation of Jews. This created an opportunity to seize, confiscate, rob, steal and redistribute Jewish assets. However, in the process of property seizure and collective thieving, a significant share of the values that were in principle to be stolen by the state was simply appropriated by individuals and never nationalized. Hungarian politicians, policemen, gendarmes, civil servants and others took part in this collective and private looting, which became a vast operation and occupied major segments of the population for several months during the summer of 1944.

Jewish property was re-Hungarianized in a process consisting of several stages. First, Jews had to declare their property. Second, the Hungarian government and individual Hungarian citizens seized property when the Jews were rounded up. The last and somewhat delayed part of the process was when the Hungarian government redistributed lodgings and real estate by appointing Hungarian caretakers, renting out dwellings, or simply giving property away. The political aim of de-Jewifying the city, which was to ensure popular support, was accomplished; however, while the properties and belongings had been re-Hungarianized on a formal level through seizure, this did not mean that all “Jewish” jobs, including positions in workshops and manufactories, were taken by Hungarians. The deportation of Jews and the redistribution of Jewish property caused significant disruptions in the economy.

Some of the properties that were seized were used as a form of social welfare. This social welfare functioned as a way of pacifying the Hungarian public and generating political support for the regime. Moreover, it helped legitimize the deportations. The seizure of Jewish property created an expectation among Hungarians that their economic situation would improve, because it was generally believed that Jews were wealthy. However, in the end, some of the property was never redistributed within the frameworks of the social welfare programs because of administrative and legal issues, and also because Hungarian rule in northern Transylvania came to an end when the Romanian army entered the city in late October 1944. One important exception was the redistribution of houses and flats, which were given to Hungarians. This did indeed constitute a huge economic transformation.

Certain sectors of economic life were severely disrupted by the loss of human capital and know-how, which created a general standstill of the economy. The Holocaust not only destroyed the Jewish community of the city, murdering its members, it also destroyed a significant part of the city’s economy. Before the German occupation, the Hungarian authorities had been cautious and implemented a gradual re-Hungarianization, but radical forces among the Hungarian elite and the new pro-German regime abandoned this approach. They seemed convinced that the operation would be economically beneficial to the Hungarian community. In reality, they paid a high price for having cleansed the city of Jews.

Hungarian leaders were convinced that a complete seizure of minority property would improve their own situation and that the gradual implementation of this policy (instead of a rapid implementation) had been the reason for the policy’s previous failure. In 1944, they therefore supported a radical policy of enacting a large-scale operation as quickly as possible that was meant to prove them right. Eventually, this turned out to be an illusion, as it created major economic disturbances and a political economy of exploitation. The fact that a similar process in Romania, which never involved deportation on the same scale that took place in Hungary, has similar negative economic consequences suggests that indeed the relationship between the two (ethno-racial nationalizing and economic stagnation) was causal.139 These two cases of Hungarianization and Romanianization clearly exemplify the economic problems (beyond the obvious human ones) involved in ethnic and racial discrimination and exploitation.

In the interwar period, the Romanian elite in Szatmárnémeti believed that it was possible to Romanianize all sectors of the economy, even though the Romanians were themselves a minority in the city. The Hungarian elite believed in much the same way that they could re-Hungarianize all sectors of society when the city again fell under Hungarian rule in 1940. In both cases, however, the minorities succeeded in maintaining their presence in or control over important parts of the economy. Ironically, this was partly the result of the successful nationalizing in the public sector, which increased economic space for minorities in the private sphere one. Another reason was that minorities found ways to circumvent the legal efforts to nationalize the economy, which they were able to undermine through bribes and political pressure.

The Hungarian elite in particular promoted the elimination of Jews as part of the “Final Solution” with the support of Hungarian society in order to achieve a complete re-Hungarianization of the economy. In my view, support for this policy can be partly explained by the stepwise process by which it was implemented. When one measure did not produce the desired effect, this only heightened expectations and increased pressure to devise more radical measures with which to improve the economic situation in the context of the war. In the case of Szatmárnémeti, wealthy Jews remained in their positions, and some were exempt from legal measures, despite the anti-Jewish legislation. This delay in implementing the most vicious measures reinforced the public demand and support for a more radical solution. This argument and mechanism echoes the ideas put forward by Raul Hilberg, who claims that the decision to annihilate the Jews required “the implementation of systematic administrative measures in successive steps.”140 Hilberg claims that first Jews were racially defined; second, expropriation operations were initiated; third, Jews were concentrated in ghettos; and finally, the decision was made to annihilate them.

The discrimination against Jews and the promotion of Hungarians in the economic sphere led to short-term economic gains for Hungarians, but created several detrimental social mechanisms that reinforced a vicious circle. The most important was the mechanism of exploitation, meaning that Hungarians could live off the work of others by looting and robbing their property. The Hungarian state used formal and direct discrimination and seized all Jewish property in the name of an anti-Semitically defined nation. The state redistributed property based on ethno-racial identity, which created a belief among Hungarians that they would be rewarded in economic terms merely because of their alleged ethno-national merits.

The relatively strong local support for and lack of resistance against the deportation of Jews was driven, above all, by the economic ambitions of the local Hungarian community. Local Hungarians had economic incentives, namely the prospect of being given property that the Jews had had to leave behind. Jews in the city trusted their leaders and stayed, despite warnings and rumors about mass murders. The economy was totally re-Hungarianized when the Jews were deported in the summer of 1944. However, the consequence was that the Hungarian economy and society was paralyzed. Hungarian leaders believed that the deportation of Jews and the redistribution of “Jewish property” would amount to “the salvation of the Hungarian economy,” but instead the Holocaust became a dead-end of human and material losses for everyone. The Holocaust in Hungary should therefore primarily be explained with local Hungarian economic motives, which overlapped with the Nazi German Final Solution.

 

Archival Sources

Direcţia Judeţeană Satu Mare a Arhivelor Naţionale (DJSM), Prefectura Judeţului Satu Mare (PSJM)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MNL OL)

University of Southern California (USC), Shoah Foundation Institute (SHI)

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