The Germans occupy Hungary

On the night of 18–19 March 1944, at around four in the morning, German columns crossed the Hungarian border from Austria, Croatia, Serbia and occupied Poland. Paratroopers appeared over the airfields near Budapest, and motorised units drove straight for the capital. At that moment the regent, Miklós Horthy, was sitting in a special train bringing him back from talks with Adolf Hitler near Salzburg. No one in Budapest gave the order to resist. Operation Margarethe – the German occupation of the only ally that had until then retained full internal sovereignty – was in practice over in a few hours. Its consequence was not only Hungary’s subjugation to the Reich but also a death sentence for the largest Jewish community still within Germany’s reach in 1944.

An ally looking for a way out

Hungary entered the war against the USSR in June 1941, a few days after the German invasion. Earlier, thanks to German backing, it had recovered part of the lands lost at Trianon: southern Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia, northern Transylvania and Bačka. The price was participation in the war in the east. In January 1943 the Hungarian Second Army was shattered on the Don during the Soviet offensive that ended with the recapture of Voronezh. Its losses – killed, wounded, missing and prisoners – are usually estimated at more than a hundred thousand men. After this defeat few in Budapest still believed in a German victory.

From 1943 Prime Minister Miklós Kállay, with Horthy’s knowledge, pursued a policy the Hungarians called the “see-saw”. Officially the country remained loyal to the Axis; unofficially its diplomats sought contact with the British and Americans – in Istanbul, Stockholm, Bern and the Vatican. In September 1943, after the Armistice of Cassibile, the Hungarian envoy László Veress conveyed to the British ambassador in Istanbul his government’s acceptance of preliminary terms: Hungary was to surrender to the Western Allies as soon as their troops reached the Hungarian border. This was not an armistice in the full sense, more a declaration for the future, but the Germans learnt of the talks. They had known about such contacts before, too. As early as April 1943, during the talks at Klessheim, Hitler had reproached Horthy over Kállay’s contacts and demanded his dismissal. The regent refused.

The second source of German irritation was the Jewish question. From 1938 onwards Hungary passed several anti-Jewish laws and sent Jews to forced labour battalions attached to the army, and in the summer of 1941 it expelled well over ten thousand Jews without Hungarian citizenship to occupied Ukraine, where at the end of August they were murdered near Kamianets-Podilskyi. The government nevertheless refused to deport Hungarian Jews to German camps, as Berlin had been demanding since 1942. On top of this, in December 1943 the officers responsible for the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942 were put on trial in Budapest. Convicted in January 1944, they fled to Germany and were given refuge there.

The Margarethe plan

After Italy left the war, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht High Command to prepare a similar strike in case further allies committed “treason”. The plan to occupy Hungary was code-named Margarethe I, the plan to occupy Romania Margarethe II. The scheme was ready by the end of September 1943, just as the plans for Operation Achse in Italy had been ready in advance. The Romanian variant was soon shelved: troops were lacking, and Marshal Ion Antonescu gave no grounds for intervention.

The Hungarian question gathered pace at the beginning of 1944. The Red Army’s offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine was bringing the front closer to the Carpathians – that is, to Hungary’s borders. Through Hungary ran the railways that carried Romanian oil to the Reich, and through it led the route to the Balkans. Berlin feared that the Hungarians would open the passes to the Russians or break the alliance at a moment when the Germans lacked the strength to prevent it. In February Horthy asked for the Hungarian occupation divisions to be withdrawn from Ukraine, which Hitler read as a sign of an impending defection. Edmund Veesenmayer, an envoy of Joachim von Ribbentrop who had several times examined the situation in Budapest in 1943, wrote in his reports that the Kállay government had to be replaced by an obedient one, that Horthy should be left in office to give an appearance of legality, and that the Hungarian Jews, supposedly the source of “defeatism”, should be regarded as the main problem. At the turn of February and March Hitler decided to carry out the operation in the first half of March.

The original plan envisaged a sham transit of troops through Hungary and the participation of Slovak, Croatian and Romanian units. In the end the involvement of the neighbours, who had claims against Hungary, was dropped. The threat of partitioning the country among them, however, became an instrument of pressure on the regent in Hitler’s hands. The whole operation was directed by the commander of the German forces in the Balkans, Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs. Several corps were earmarked for it: from Serbia and Slavonia, from Croatia, from the Vienna area and from the Kraków region.

The talks at Klessheim

On the evening of 15 March 1944 – a Hungarian national holiday – Horthy was at the opera when the German minister, Dietrich von Jagow, asked for an urgent meeting. He handed over a letter from Hitler inviting the regent to talks at Klessheim Palace near Salzburg. Kállay advised against the journey and suspected a trap. Horthy went nonetheless, believing that a personal conversation could dissuade Hitler from drastic steps. He was accompanied by the Minister of Defence, Lajos Csatay, the Foreign Minister, Jenő Ghyczy, and the Chief of the General Staff, General Ferenc Szombathelyi. The train left on 17 March, and on the morning of 18 March the delegation was at Klessheim.

According to the accounts of the Hungarian participants, Hitler at once accused the regent of treachery. He declared that he knew of the secret talks with the Allies and would not allow Hungary to repeat what Italy had done. He demanded consent to the entry of German troops and to a change of government. Horthy refused and at one point left the room. He threatened to resign. He was then told that if he did not give way, Hungary would be occupied by force, with the participation of Romanian, Slovak and Croatian troops. Szombathelyi argued to the regent that resistance was pointless. After a further private conversation Horthy gave in. He did not sign the protocol put before him, but he agreed to remain in office and to appoint a government Hitler could trust. Hitler promised that German troops would be withdrawn once such a government was in place. He never kept that promise.

19 March

On the evening of 18 March Horthy boarded the train home. The Germans stopped it several times on various pretexts, so that the regent would not get back to the country before the army did. Meanwhile the Wehrmacht columns crossed the border. Szombathelyi, still on the train, passed an instruction to the army not to resist and to welcome the Germans as allies. The order did not arrive everywhere in time. According to German and Hungarian tallies, there were clashes on the Danube bridge at Novi Sad, where a Hungarian border guard battalion fought, as well as around Sopron, Győr and Székesfehérvár and at Ferihegy airfield near Budapest, among other places. In all, according to these figures, a few dozen German soldiers and between ten and twenty Hungarians were killed. The Germans disarmed some Hungarian units before learning that they were to treat them as allies. On the whole, however, the entry passed off quietly, and Weichs was able to report that all was calm in Budapest.

When Horthy’s train pulled into Kelenföld station in Budapest at around eleven, the regent was greeted by a German guard of honour. Waiting on the platform were Jagow, Weichs and Veesenmayer, who was introduced as the new Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary. From then on it was he, not the minister, who was the most important German in the country. Command of the German forces in Hungary was taken over by General Hans von Greiffenberg, until then the military attaché in Budapest, and Otto Winkelmann became Higher SS and Police Leader.

The Security Police came in with the army. The wave of arrests was directed personally by the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The Gestapo had its lists ready: liberal politicians, Social Democrats, legitimists, Smallholders’ Party activists, industrialists of Jewish origin, journalists, officers regarded as Anglophiles. On the first day several dozen prominent people were detained, among them members of parliament; within a few days, according to German figures, the number arrested had reached about three thousand. The Interior Minister Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, who for years had protected the left and refugees from persecution, was taken into German custody and later sent to a concentration camp. The Smallholders’ deputy Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky fired his pistol at the Gestapo men who broke down the door of his flat; he was wounded and arrested. The former prime minister István Bethlen went into hiding in the provinces. Kállay took refuge in the Turkish legation, where he stayed until the autumn.

The blow also fell on the Poles. Since 1939 Hungary had taken in tens of thousands of Polish refugees, soldiers and civilians; many of them had made their way on to France, but some had stayed, and Polish schools, welfare organisations and clandestine posts operated in Budapest. After 19 March the Germans began to shut them down. Among those arrested in the following months was Henryk Sławik, who together with the Hungarian official József Antall had organised help for Polish refugees, including papers for Polish Jews. He was killed in August 1944 in the Gusen camp.

The Sztójay government

For three days Horthy tried to retain at least some influence over the choice of prime minister. The Germans pushed for Béla Imrédy, a far-right former prime minister; the regent rejected him. Under threat – according to some accounts Veesenmayer even spoke of occupying the castle in Buda – he agreed on 22 March to a compromise candidate, the minister in Berlin until then, General Döme Sztójay. Imrédy’s men entered the government, and the Interior Ministry went to Andor Jaross. His state secretaries were László Baky and László Endre, avowed antisemites who soon took upon themselves the execution of the deportations. Hungary did not formally lose its statehood: it had a regent, a government, a parliament and an army. This façade distinguished it from the occupied countries, but the decisions were taken in Veesenmayer’s office.

A death sentence for Hungary’s Jews

The most tragic consequence of 19 March was the fate of the Hungarian Jews. Within the borders of enlarged Hungary there lived, according to the most frequently cited estimates, some 760,000–825,000 people regarded as Jews under the racial laws. Despite discrimination, forced labour and the crimes of 1941–1942, this was in 1944 the largest Jewish community still left within reach of the Reich’s power. In the very first days of the occupation a special SS unit under Adolf Eichmann, made up of experienced organisers of deportations from other countries, arrived in Budapest. In those first days the Germans also ordered the creation of a central Jewish council, which was to pass their orders on to the community. From 5 April Jews had to wear the yellow star.

Eichmann had few men. The actual work was done by the Hungarian administration and gendarmerie, directed by Baky and Endre. In April the confinement of Jews in ghettos began in Carpathian Ruthenia and the north-eastern counties, and from 15 May the trains set off for Auschwitz-Birkenau. By 9 July, according to Veesenmayer’s report, 437,402 people had been deported; the Hungarian gendarmerie gave a slightly lower figure. Most of the deportees were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival – estimates speak of some 320,000–330,000. At the beginning of July, under pressure from the Pope, the King of Sweden, President Roosevelt and the International Red Cross, and also for fear of a German coup, Horthy halted the deportations. Most of the Jews of Budapest were saved at that point.

Place in the war

Operation Margarethe gave the Germans what they wanted in the short term. The Hungarian army stayed in the field, and its First Army went to defend the Carpathian passes in the spring of 1944. The railways, oil and food remained at the Reich’s disposal. At the same time Hungary lost the last of its protection from the air war: from April Budapest and the Hungarian refineries were bombed by American aircraft from Italy. The question of leaving the Axis returned in the summer. After Romania went over to the Allies in August 1944, Horthy dismissed Sztójay, and on 15 October he announced an armistice with the USSR on the radio. The Germans responded with Operation Panzerfaust: they kidnapped the regent’s son, forced Horthy to abdicate and handed power to Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross. The rule of that party brought further murders of Budapest’s Jews and death marches towards the Austrian border. The country became a battlefield, and the siege of Budapest lasted until February 1945.

19 March 1944 showed that Hitler had no intention of letting any ally leave the war the way Italy had. It was also the last great act of a policy in which the war in the east and the Holocaust were intertwined. The front was approaching the Carpathians and the Reich was in retreat in every direction, and yet the first fruits of the occupation of Hungary were not a regrouping of forces but lists of people to be arrested and a deportation plan. After the war Sztójay, Imrédy, Szálasi, Jaross, Baky and Endre were sentenced to death and executed in Budapest. Veesenmayer was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in the Nuremberg Ministries Trial, and was released as early as 1951. Eichmann was captured in Argentina in 1960 and executed in Israel in 1962.