The 1941 Galician Deportation and the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre: A Prologue to the Hungarian Holocaust

The German attack against the Soviet Union, beginning on June 22, 1941, presented an unparalleled opportunity for the Hungarian government to deport Jews from Hungary to Galicia during a six-week period in the summer of 1941. The deportations of 22,000 Jews culminated in an unprecedented bloodbath in Kamenets-Podolsk at the end of August, when most of the deportees were slaughtered. This massacre represented an important milestone in the course of destruction, both as the first mass killing of this scale, and as the opening of a new stage in the planned destruction of European Jewry.