Budapest 1944

Abstract

Ghettoization has generally been taken as an unproblematic given in the historiography of the Hungarian Holocaust. This paper argues that it should not be. The accepted assumption is that the establishing of ghettos — as part-and-the Nazi destruction process — was more or less ‘inevitable’ after the Nazi occupation of Hungary. For Braham — whose work dominates the field — the ‘master plan worked out by the German and Hungarian dejewification experts’,¹ called for ghettoiza-tion, followed by deportation.² Cohen adopts a similar approach, in pointing to the post-occupation implementation of ghettoization and ‘mass evictions’ as elements of ‘the process … characteristic of the German policy during the period of the Holocaust’.³ A picture is painted therefore, of the rapid implementation in Hungary of the ‘characteristic’ elements of a Nazi ‘master plan’. It is the rapidity of implementation which is seen to be significant, with Braham writing that ‘in no other country was the Final Solution program — the establishment of the Judenrate, the isolation, expropriation, ghettoization, concentration, and deportation of the Jews — carried out with as much barbarity and speed as in Hungary.’⁴