The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCIII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2003) 616-618 Randolph Braham. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Pp. 328. Wayne State University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have done students of the Holocaust and of modern East-Central Europe a great service by releasing a condensed edition of Randolph Braham 's classic study, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. While the original magnum opus, published in 1981 and re-issued in a second edition in 1994, stretched over two volumes and, in the second edition, to some 1,486 pages, this latest version comes as a much handier paperback . Despite the brevity, however, the most valuable results of Braham's lifelong study of the Holocaust in Hungary remain. Basing his conclusions on an exhaustive study of Hungarian sources, both archival and published, as well as captured German documents available in the U.S. National Archives, Braham chronicles the origins and subsequent implementation of the policy to segregate Hungary's Jews in transit ghettos , and then to deport them to Auschwitz in the late spring and summer of 1944, where most of the deportees were murdered upon arrival. Braham begins this condensed edition with a survey of anti-Jewish policy between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941, when Hungary became a military ally of Germany, and the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. This initial section includes a section on the Hungarian labor service system, the program by which Hungarian Jewish men of draft age were impressed into dangerous and often deadly forced labor squads, as well as an account of the several roundups and massacres carried out by Hungarian officials in the years before the German occupation. Absent from the shortened version, however, is Braham's long study of the history of Hungarian antisemitism; the inter-war period is treated here only in a tenpage overview. Instead, Braham devotes the bulk of the book to an analysis of the initial negotiations between German and Hungarian officials during and after the March 1944 occupation to coordinate anti-Jewish policy and to a careful recounting of the deportations themselves. Braham also analyzes the much different fate of the Jews of Budapest, who were spared mass deportation in July 1944 on the orders of Hungary's Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, only to be subjected to a brutal and murderous regime of anarchic terror after the German-led coup against Hungary's government in October 1944 and the establishment of a puppet regime led by Ferenc Szálasi and his fascist Arrow Cross party. Finally, Braham treats the response of Jewish Hungarians (and especially of the Central Jewish Council, or Judenrat, of Budapest), Christian Hungarians, and the international community to the campaign of persecution, deportation, and murder unfolding in 1944 in Hun- BRAHAM, THE POLITICS OF GENOCIDE—HANEBRINK6 1 7 gary. The book concludes with a survey of post-war efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. The heart of Politics of Genocide remains the same in the condensed edition as it was in the original unabridged version: a meticulous account of the process by which some 440,000 Jewish Hungarians from all of Hungary outside the city of Budapest were rounded up, placed in ghettos, and then deported to Auschwitz, all within the space of some ten weeks in 1944. At times, Braham's account reads more like a chronicle than a historical narrative, especially when the author discusses all that is now known about each of the short-lived transit ghettos established throughout provincial Hungary immediately prior to the deportations from each region. The record of fact that Braham establishes clearly demonstrates the complicity of the Hungarian regime at all levels in the deportation of its Jewish subjects . Hungarian government officials, and especially Minister of Interior Andor Jaross and under-secretaries of state László Endre and László Baky— all of them politicians with a long history of antisemitic views—worked closely with Adolf Eichmann and the SS Special Commando stationed in Hungary to devise a country-wide timetable for the round-up and deportation of Hungary...