The tragedy of Hungarian Jewry reached its climax between May 15 and July 7, 1944. During this period nearly half a million Jews were expelled from Hungary to the death camps. The removal of the Jews from Hungary—except for those of the capital, Budapest—was absolute, and was executed rapidly and efficiently. This dramatic event, unusual even against the background of the Holocaust, did not take place in a vacuum. Its roots grew out of a relationship that had persisted over generations between an expelled people and the population from which they were removed.

March 19, 1944—the day...

The anti-Jewish legislative process began in the spring of 1938 and lasted for some six years, up until the German invasion of Hungary in the spring of 1944. Earlier, Hungarian Jewry had enjoyed some equal rights for some seventy years, ever since the adoption of the Law of Emancipation in 1867, and as early as 1895 the status of the Jewish religion was rendered equal to that of the great Christian faiths. Equality before the law was absolute except for the limits imposed upon Jewish students under the “Numerus Clausus” Act of 1920. It was thus natural for the Jewish...

The German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944, aroused no opposition among the Hungarian populace. Jozsef Darvas describes the situation in the following manner:

The conquest of the country was carried out quietly and aroused no attention. On Sunday morning [March 19] SS units took control of the important government buildings and other key points. … Those Hungarians whose lives were not endangered by the conquest regarded events with complete indifference. As far as they were concerned, the word “conquest” was completely meaningless, for the Germans had been here before as friends and allies. As far as they were...