The Hungarians in Stanisławów

On 2 July 1941 Hungarian troops entered Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk), the pre-war capital of the Stanisławów Voivodeship. The Red Army had already left the city, which had been incorporated into the USSR since the autumn of 1939, and before it went the NKVD had murdered hundreds of prisoners in the local gaol. In the same days Hungarian units occupied Kołomyja (Kolomyia) and other towns of Pokuttya, now in Ukraine. The Hungarians, who a few days earlier had entered the war against the Soviet Union, ruled Stanisławów for less than a month. On 26 July the Germans arrived in the city. That day the Gestapo ordered a Judenrat, a Jewish council, to be set up, headed by Izrael Seibald. For the roughly 25,000 Jews of Stanisławów it marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

The sources themselves give different dates for the Hungarian entry. The encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and studies by the Yad Vashem institute give 2 July, while some accounts and some Polish publications give 3 July. According to Polish studies, Kołomyja came into the Hungarian zone on 3 July. War chronologies usually say that the Hungarians “took over Stanisławów and other towns”. That is indeed what happened, although they did not capture them in battle: by then the Red Army was retreating along the whole front, and the Hungarians entered towns that its units had already abandoned.

The Carpathian Group sets off

Hungary declared a state of war with the USSR on 27 June, the day after the air raid on Kassa (Košice). The troops that were to go into action were not ready. On 30 June the general staff of General Henrik Werth formed them into the Carpathian Group (Kárpát-csoport). Command went to General Ferenc Szombathelyi, commander of VIII Corps from Kassa. The group consisted of his corps – a mountain brigade and a border rifle brigade – and of General Béla Miklós’s Rapid Corps, the most modern part of the Hungarian army: two motorised brigades and a cavalry brigade with Toldi light tanks, tankettes and armoured cars. According to various calculations it numbered between 40,000 and 60,000 men.

The German command did not count on the Hungarians as a striking force. On 1 July it placed the Carpathian Group under General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel’s 17th Army, part of Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. The Hungarians were to cross the Carpathians, clear Soviet troops from the northern foothills, seize crossings over the Dniester and cover the German army’s right flank against a possible counter-attack by the Soviet 12th Army. On the morning of 1 July they set off from Carpathian Ruthenia, which Hungary had occupied in March 1939. The main road led through the Yablunytsia Pass, the former Polish–Czechoslovak border, and then down the Prut valley through Worochta (Vorokhta) and Delatyn (Deliatyn) towards Stanisławów and Kołomyja.

The Soviet 12th Army did not defend the foothills. The first week of the war had brought catastrophe to the Red Army: in Belarus the Germans were just closing the Białystok–Minsk pocket, and in Ukraine the Soviet mechanised corps had lost the tank battle of Dubno and Brody. After the loss of Lwów on 30 June the command of the South-Western Front was withdrawing its armies towards the old Polish–Soviet border of before 1939 to avoid encirclement. The Hungarians encountered mainly rearguards, demolished bridges and mined roads. The columns of the Rapid Corps advanced more quickly. On 7 July its units reached the Dniester, and two days later the corps was detached from the Carpathian Group and placed directly under the Germans. It went on east with them, as far as the Battle of Uman. Szombathelyi’s command turned to occupation duties in the rear.

A city between two occupations

In 1941 Stanisławów was one of the largest cities of former Eastern Galicia. The 1931 census recorded some 60,000 inhabitants: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. Until 1939 it was the garrison of the 11th Carpathian Infantry Division and the Podolian Cavalry Brigade. For Ukrainians the city had a special significance: in the first half of 1919 it had been the seat of the government of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. After the Soviet invasion of Poland the Soviets made Stanisławów the centre of an oblast, nationalised businesses and, in successive waves of deportations, the last in May and June 1941, sent thousands of inhabitants east, above all Poles.

Soon after 22 June, as the front approached from the west, the NKVD began to clear its prisons, as it did throughout Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Some of the inmates of the Stanisławów gaol were evacuated east; the rest were shot in the cellars and in the prison courtyard. Their number is estimated, depending on the source, at 1,200 to 2,500. They included Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, arrested for pro-independence activity, membership of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, their social origin, or simply by chance. The bodies of some of the victims were found in the Demianiv Laz ravine on the outskirts of the city, where for decades no one was allowed to speak of them. Exhumations were carried out only at the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was falling apart. Some prisoners managed to escape in the last days before the Soviets left. Similar crimes were committed in Kołomyja, Czortków (Chortkiv), Stryj (Stryi) and dozens of other places.

When the Soviets had gone and the Hungarians had not yet arrived, power in Stanisławów and Kołomyja was taken by Ukrainian activists linked to the Bandera faction of the OUN. They formed a militia and municipal administrations, invoking the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, proclaimed in Lwów on 30 June by Yaroslav Stetsko. In many towns of the region the discovery of bodies in the abandoned NKVD prisons served as a pretext for pogroms. Their victims were Jews, held collectively responsible for Soviet crimes in line with the propaganda slogan of “Judaeo-communism”, which both the nationalists and the Germans fanned. In Kołomyja, according to Polish studies, the Ukrainian militia organised a pogrom on 4 July, when the town was already under Hungarian occupation: Jews were beaten and humiliated and forced to pull down monuments to Lenin and Stalin. A planned execution was prevented on that occasion by the town’s Ukrainian deputy mayor.

Under Hungarian administration

The Hungarians did not come to Galicia as conquerors who intended to stay. Their zone, covering Pokuttya and part of Podolia between the Carpathians and the Dniester, was for Budapest a transitional area. It was administered by garrison commanders and military authorities who interfered little in local affairs. The Ukrainians kept their municipal administrations and a freedom of action greater than under the Germans. In Stanisławów a Ukrainian press began to appear, and demonstrations and church services were held.

Polish and Jewish accounts agree in describing the Hungarians as a far milder occupier than the Germans. According to them, Hungarian units in Stanisławów curbed the violence of armed Ukrainian groups against the Jews. In Kołomyja, when on 16 July a German Security Police detachment that had come from Stanisławów arrested some 110 Jews from a list prepared by the local OUN leader and marched them off to be executed, the commandant of the Hungarian garrison stopped it. The memoirs of Jewish survivors from Stanisławów speak of Hungarian officers who employed Jews as interpreters and treated Jewish fellow professionals in a friendly way. The Poles, who had lost many of their most active people during two years of Soviet rule, used the short period of Hungarian presence to rebuild the underground network of the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ). During the first half of July the former Polish–Hungarian border in the Carpathians was guarded only by Hungarians, so some fugitives, Jews among them, slipped across into Hungary, where tens of thousands of Polish refugees had been living since 1939.

This leniency had its limits. That same July the authorities in Budapest began, under the pretext of removing “aliens”, to expel to Galicia Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship – refugees from Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, but also many people whose families had lived in Carpathian Ruthenia for generations. From mid-July trains from Jasina (Yasinia) carried them over the Carpathians, and from there lorries and columns on foot took them further east. Exhausted and hungry deportees also appeared at the station in Stanisławów. By some estimates more than ten thousand people were expelled in this way, most of them driven across the Dniester to Kamianets-Podilskyi.

The Germans take over the city

The Hungarian zone had arisen out of wartime necessity, and the Germans had no intention of leaving it to the Hungarians. Eastern Galicia was to be attached to Hans Frank’s General Government, and its lands beyond the Zbruch to the Reichskommissariat Ukraine then being formed. The German Security Police was already operating in the Hungarian zone in July, as the example of Kołomyja shows, and at the end of the month it took control of Stanisławów. The USHMM encyclopedia of ghettos states that the Germans arrived in the city on 26 July.

That same day the Gestapo ordered a Judenrat to be formed in Stanisławów. It was headed by Izrael Seibald, a pre-war activist of the Jewish community, with the lawyer Michał Lamm as his deputy. The council was to carry out German orders: register the population, supply workers for forced labour and collect levies. Its members, like those of hundreds of other Judenräte in occupied Europe, faced choices that in practice did not exist. Almost all of them were killed in the next two years.

On 1 August 1941, by a decree of Hitler, Eastern Galicia became the fifth district of the General Government – the District of Galicia, with its capital in Lwów. According to the Ukrainian historian Ivan Bondarev, on that day, at a rally outside the post office, a Hungarian colonel named Lerer symbolically handed over power in the city to the German district governor (Kreishauptmann) Hans Albrecht. The head of the Security Police outpost in Stanisławów was SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, who in early July, as a member of a team operating in Lwów, had taken part in preparing the murder of the Lwów professors. With him came Heinrich Schott, the official responsible for Jewish affairs.

Place in the war

In Stanisławów the German occupation began with the murder of the elites. At the beginning of August the Germans summoned the Jewish and Polish intelligentsia – doctors, lawyers, teachers, officials – for “registration”. According to the USHMM, more than 500 of them were taken to a forest near the village of Pawełcze and shot, while their families went on sending them parcels for a long time afterwards. During the night of 14–15 August between 250 and 300 Poles, arrested from lists drawn up with the help of the Ukrainian militia, were killed in the same Black Forest. On 12 October 1941, a day later called “Bloody Sunday” (Blutsonntag), the German Security Police and Order Police, supported by the Ukrainian auxiliary police, shot between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews in the Jewish cemetery. It was one of the largest massacres committed in the territory of the General Government up to that time. In December the Germans shut the remaining Jews in a ghetto, from which people were deported in 1942 to the Bełżec extermination camp, and which was liquidated in February 1943. Of the several tens of thousands of Jews of Stanisławów and its surroundings, including many refugees and deportees from Hungary, some 1,500 survived the war. Kołomyja shared the same fate. After the war Krüger made a career in the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1968 a court in Münster sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The Jews deported from Hungary in July were killed at the end of August in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre, one of the first atrocities in which the number of victims exceeded 20,000. Thus the Hungarian alliance with the Reich, which in Galicia at first meant protection against Ukrainian and German violence, also led Hungary into complicity in the Holocaust.

For Hungary itself the July march across the Carpathians was the first, easy stage of a war that would prove a catastrophe. Béla Miklós’s Rapid Corps went with the Germans as far as beyond the Dnieper and returned home in November, having lost most of its equipment. The Regent, Miklós Horthy, and his new chief of staff Szombathelyi, who replaced Werth in September 1941, wanted to keep Hungary’s part in the war to a minimum, but the Germans demanded more and more. In 1942 the whole Hungarian Second Army went east, and in January 1943 it was destroyed on the Don. Behind the front, Hungarian occupation divisions fought partisans in Ukraine and Belarus.

Stanisławów, which on 2 July 1941 was changing occupiers for the second time in less than two years, changed them for a third time in 1944: on 27 July 1944 the Red Army returned. After the war the city fell within the borders of the Ukrainian SSR, its Polish inhabitants were resettled to the west, mainly to Opole, and in 1962 Stanisławów was renamed Ivano-Frankivsk. The city of many nations, ruled for a few weeks in the summer of 1941 by the Hungarians, ceased to exist in the course of three years of occupation and the post-war population transfers.