After World War I, Hungary plunged into political chaos. When the former commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy, Miklós Horthy, crushed a short-lived communist regime in 1920, his troops targeted not only political opponents but also the Jewish population of Budapest. In the years that followed, however, anti-Semitism was never as violent as in Germany. In 1939, Hungary, eager to regain territory lost after 1918, joined a formal alliance with Germany and participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Nevertheless, most of Hungary's Jews escaped the mass murder that took place in the surrounding countries until 1944. In March of that year, the Germans occupied the country and immediately began deporting Hungarian Jews. In just eight weeks, over 400,000 Jews were deported, most of whom were murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We spoke with Adam Kerpel-Fronius who works at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin about this final phase of the Holocaust.

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