James Comey, the director of the FBI, in a speech that was reprinted in The Washington Post, said that those who lived in Eastern Europe during World War II share responsibility for the mass murder of Jews.
He said: “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.”
Mr. Comey is right. The first large scale massacre of Jews from Hungary in 1941 could not have happened without the full support of the Hungarian Government and the approval of pro-fascist ruler Admiral Horthy. Today Holocaust revisionists frequently claim that Jews in Hungary were not in danger until the spring of 1944 when the Germans took over the country. Wrong!
The Kamenets-Podolsky massacre. The mass killing could not have taken place without the collaboration of Hungarian authorities and the complicity of the Horthy regime in the murder.
Between 1939 and 1941, the Hungarian authorities locked up thousands of Jews claiming that they are not Hungarians, and they were marched to certain death at Kamenets-Podolsky. The actual killing was done by the Germans in the summer of 1941, but the massacre would have never taken place without the active participation of the Hungarian authorities. In fact, at that time prominent non-Jewish Hungarian politicians (Mr. Károly Rassay and Sister Margit Slachta) accused the Horthy-regime of complicity in the massacre.
Hungarian MP Sister Margit Slachta protested the Horthy-regime’s complicity in the Kamenetsk-Podolsky massacre.
In August 1941, for three days, thousands of Jews were marched to killing pits by policemen, and were murdered by members of Einsatzgruppe. (The Einsatzgruppen were so-called ‘task forces’ that effectively operated as mobile killing squads in Eastern Europe.) From the 18,000 Hungarian deportees, about 16,000 were buried in the mass graves of Kamenets-Podolsky, Stanislawow, Chortkow, or were thrown into the gas chamber of the Belzec extermination camp.
Anne Applebaum writes in The Washington Post:
“The wartime government of Adm. Miklós Horthy did pass anti-Semitic legislation and did align itself with the Nazis. But the mass murder and deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began only in March 1944, when that government dissolved and was replaced with a straightforward German occupation. Once the Hungarian state had been dissolved, in other words, Hungary also became a lawless, violent zone where anything was possible.”
Ms. Applebaum is utterly wrong. The mass murder and deportation of Hungarian Jews, and non-Hungarian Jews who had initially sought refuge in Hungary, started three years earlier at Kamenets-Podolsky, under the watchful eyes of Admiral Horthy.
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György Lázár
