After the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the first wave of nationwide anti-Jewish violence was Kristallnacht in November 1938. During the riots, synagogues and Jewish shops were burned and dozens of people were murdered. The police did not intervene, thus legitimising the violence. And on 1 September 1939, World War II officially began, with the "cleansing" of Europe of groups declared inferior to the rest of the world as a priority.
From respected citizen to public enemy
In Hungary before the 18th century, Jews were subject to all kinds of restrictions, living mainly from trade, loan business, working as bankers or craftsmen. In 1781, by decree of Joseph II, they were allowed to move into the free royal towns and buy land, the first major step in assimilation. first important stage of assimilation.
Gradually, emancipation made it possible for Jews to pursue careers as doctors, lawyers, lawyers, newspaper writers, publishers, photographers: the wealthier were even allowed to rent land. In the 1848-49 war of independence, they tried to distinguish themselves by their involvement, but in the spring of 1848 there were still anti-Jewish riots in many places... On the verge of collapse, the emancipation law of 1849 of the Semere government came too late, but it could not come into force because Emperor Franz Joseph revoked it as a punishment. In 1867, however, the Jews gained full equality by voting in favour of the bill proposed by Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy.
By the 19th century, the majority of Jews living in the country had declared themselves Hungarian. They considered Hungary their homeland and played a major role in the modernisation of the country. However, an early example of racially motivated anti-Semitism was the Tiszaeszlár blood accusation of 1883, in which 15 Jews were accused of the kidnapping and ritual murder of a maid, Eszter Solymosi. The case, which ended in acquittal, sparked a flare-up of anti-Semitic and it is interesting to note that some of those on the side of the prosecution did not accept the acquittal in their memoirs published between the two world wars.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Hungarian Jews made up about 5% of the population, and most of the political elite continued to support their assimilation efforts. However, the defeat in the First World War, Trianon and the revolutions of 1918-1919 changed the public mood. The leaders of the Soviet Republic included many people of Jewish origin (who considered themselves Bolsheviks), so that the Jews, although the vast majority of them were anti-communists, were often identified with the subversive elements. By the 1920s and 1930s they had become more and more a public enemy, a minority that could be held responsible for the problems.
The Hungarian Jews were caught unawares by the resurgence of hatred: most of them were thrown from their peaceful civilian life into the deepest depths of hell, their centuries-old refuge turned almost overnight into a hostile land, and in the end into a place of destruction.
Hunku Gyula levele Endre László főszolgabírónak, 1924 nyara – részlet (Endre a magyar holokauszt egyik kulcsfigurája, lelkes fajvédő, Szálasi híve, a Sztójay-kormány alatt belügyminiszteri államtitkár. 1946-ban kivégezték.):
In Cinkota, a Polish Jew named Schwalb Henrik took over the sparkling water factory and Dreher's beer factory of a respectable Christian family: the widowed Mrs. Béláné Szakács. She is the widow of a List B official, a Lutheran, the mother of 2 children, and her stepbrother, Sándor Lauth, a disabled soldier, a List B official, a widower, a Roman Catholic, the father of 3 children. They have the best quality Dreher's Bak beer and the best quality sparkling water of their own production in stock at the most reasonable prices, and because of them the other sparkling water producer here, Bernat Goldmann, has now lowered his prices. Their only crime is that they are Christians, and therefore the owners of the mostly Jewish-owned liquor stores do not buy from them, because the Jewish race sticks together and supports each other.
Letter from Artúr Bory, notary of the village of Dány to Chief Bailiff László, summer 1935:
I managed to catch Philip Stern, the drink-maker, selling what I believe was rum in a pancake for 80,000 crowns a litre, at a time when even the finest rum can be bought for 60,000 to 70,000 crowns a litre. crowns. Philip Stern is one of the strongest Jews we will have a lot of trouble with. Please be gracious to settle this matter in the usual way, so that we may be one step nearer to the ideal state when a Jew-free, happy Greater Hungary will be established. I ask your heartfelt forgiveness for my inconvenience, but I could not restrain my joy when the fish was finally hooked.
The persecution of gays in the Third Reich
In Germany, homosexuals (mainly men) have been a persecuted group since the early Middle Ages. Although Section 175 of the German Constitution of 1871 prohibited sexual relations between men, homosexuality was long accepted - at least tacitly. But when, on 30 June 1934, on the night of the long knives, Hitler ruthlessly executed the SA (the Nazi stormtroopers' unit that played a key role in the rise to power of the NSDAP), citing the need to eradicate the homosexual 'infection' in the unit (the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, was known to be gay), everyone knew that a new era was coming.
In 1936, Himmler set up the Reich Office for the Prevention of Homosexuality and Abortion, and the authorities in Germany began to register the homosexuals. The files were destroyed in the last year of the war, but it is estimated that they may have held records on hundreds of thousands of people. Many Catholic priests were also discredited or arrested for alleged homosexual behaviour. Many were attempted to be re-educated, tortured, castrated and then sent to prisons and concentration camps. In the camps, gay men were made to wear pink triangles and women who were attracted to their own sex were made to wear black triangles (as a sign of anti-sociality). Many thousands died at the hands of the National Socialists.
After the war, Germany did not acknowledge that gays were victims of Nazism: the German government did not officially apologise to them until 2002.
Exiled gays in Hungary
Until the 20th century, homosexuality was considered a crime in Hungary, and consensual sexual relations between men were made punishable in 1878. Article 241 made the category of "lewdness against nature" punishable by up to one year in prison: most of the so-called Csemegi Code, which contained this, was in force until 1961. At the same time, a particularly vibrant homosexual subculture similar to that in Germany developed in Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century, which was only ended by the German invasion in 1944.
No original police documents have survived, so we can only rely on indirect information. For example, in his 1933 book Catastrophes in Love Life, the sex pathologist Zoltán Nemes Nagy refers to the semi-official register of the capital's gay community, which, like in other European cities, was created for control purposes and was finalised in 1908. Its existence was never openly acknowledged. It was usually discovered when a person had a run-in with the police, for example if they were caught in the act. The registry kept quite detailed records of people, mainly noting down their physical features and personal history (such as whether they had a female name, moustache or beard). However, the authorities were generally lenient with gays; on the one hand, they had fewer problems than being seriously harassed, and on the other, they did not want homosexuality to 'spread' by becoming more public. So, under the taboo of collective silence, gays did quite well in the capital, especially if they concealed their sexual orientation.
During the Horthy era, various criminal law measures were introduced to maintain public morality, including stricter regulation of non-traditional sexuality (such as prostitution). Surprisingly, men who were attracted to their own sex were still - for the most part - left alone; the authorities never openly attacked them, and if they did occasionally take someone in, they were often released.
Budapest is the first city in the world to have a semi-official "register" of homosexuals. The better known, let's say notorious homosexuals - mainly the "blackmailers" - are listed and registered by the police. This is particularly important from a law enforcement point of view, because male homosexuals are followed and threatened by blackmailers as a shadow.
(Zoltán Nemes Nagy: Catastrophes in Love Life. A study in sexual pathology. Aesculap, Budapest, 1933, 69.)
The persecution of the Roma in the Third Reich
As mentioned above, the Germans did not plan to kill the entire Roma population, and considered the so-called stray gypsies to be the lowest ranking. In 1938, Himmler declared that the issue needed to be resolved on racial grounds. The Nazis made a distinction between 'pure-blood' and 'mixed-blood' Gypsies, extended the law prohibiting mixing between groups of people to them, herded them into ghettos and deported many of them sporadically. However, there was no uniform Nazi policy on Gypsies until 1943, when mass deportations of Gypsies finally began; large numbers of men, women and children were deported to Auschwitz and the camps of the Nazis. Birkenau not only from Germany but also from Belgium, France, Hungary and Romania, among others.
The last group, about 4,000 men, was killed on 2 August 1944. The last inhabitants of the Birkenau Gypsy camp lived in more acceptable conditions than the Jews, but were eventually exterminated by epidemics and overcrowding. The Roma, unlike the Jews, tried to resist, but to no avail: the Nazis used guns and dogs to break up resistance, and the camp's inhabitants were dragged into gas chambers.
According to the literature on Porajmos, the gypsy question was probably intended to be "solved" after the total extermination of the Jews, after the war. The exact number of dead is still unknown, but various estimates put the number of Roma victims of National Socialism at between 10 and 30 per cent. The Gypsies were not given a separate charge in the Nuremberg trials, and it was only in 1963 that the Federal Supreme Court in the FRG ruled that the Germans had also racially racially persecuted.
The Hungarian Gypsies before the World War
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Hungarian administration used the term "Gypsy question" to refer to stray gypsies, as in German. It did not include people who were engaged in the caravan trade - turtle diggers, basket weavers, potters, travelling merchants - who had the appropriate permits and did not come into conflict with the authorities.
In the period between the First and Second World Wars, unemployment, illiteracy and, as a consequence, poverty continued to rise as traditional Gypsy lifestyles disintegrated. Traditional Gypsy craftsmen were increasingly unable to keep pace with industrial production. In the Lowlands, Romungros and the recently resettled Oláh Gypsies became casual agricultural labourers. However, it was precisely in these decades that the dwarf minority of Gypsies - musicians from the capital and a few former factory workers from Transdanubia - 'clung' to the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie.
The "gypsy problem" was still represented by the groups of mainly Olá Gypsies, known as "stray gypsies": according to a 1928 Interior Ministry decree, raids were carried out against them twice a year, at first mainly "on paper", and from the late 1930s onwards in practice. In most cases, they were ignored, but when there was conflict in the local community, they were blamed for theft or murder, and the gendarmerie took immediate action against them. However, if a group was confirmed not to be a stray, the authorities did not further sanction the their movements.
Zsuzsa Horváth's recollection of 1939 (Zsuzsa was deported at the end of 1944, a few days before her 14th birthday. She was sent to the Ravensbrück camp, survived the Holocaust)
We had to go to church every Sunday, and we went because we loved it, the boys and us. I was a surrogate mother in Dozmat, and the innkeeper in Dozmat was our godmother and our surrogate godmother. They loved my father so much, he used to work there. (...) So there were no hatreds, the teachers were also very good, better than maybe now. (...)
all chapters
Remembering the HolocaustHungary
Return and emigrationHungary
LMBTQHungary
History of the HolocaustHungary
Fascist ideologyHungary
The HolocaustHungary
The HolocaustSlovakia
Slovak StateSlovakia
IdeologySlovakia
PersecutionSlovakia
AntisemitismSlovakia
AryanisationSlovakia
PorajmosSlovakia
PorajmosHungary
LGBT minoritySlovakia
First transportSlovakia
DeportationsSlovakia
Life in the campSlovakia
Slovak National UprisingSlovakia
HomecomingSlovakia
EmigrationSlovakia
