A collection of papers read at the International Conference held in New York in April 2011 under the sponsorship of the Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. The studies deal with the domestic and international ramifications of the Holocaust in Hungary, with several of them focusing on the successes and failures of the rescue decisions made under the impact the so-called Auschwitz Reports.

The Holocaust in Hungary provides a comprehensive documentary account of one of the most brutal and effective killing campaigns in history. After Nazi Germany took control of Hungary late in World War II, Jews were rounded up with unprecedented speed and sent directly to Auschwitz. They would form the largest group of victims who perished in that camp. The complex interplay between German and Hungarian actors brought about the annihilation of a once-thriving Jewish community and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. The authors present extensive reports, testimonies, and other primary sources of these events accompanied by in-depth commentary that spans the years from the late 1930s to the fractured political landscape of postwar Hungary.

The clock was ticking on the Nazi plan to annihilate the last group of the Hungarian Jewry. But after nearly suffocating in an underground bunker, Auschwitz prisoners Ceslav Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin escaped and told Jewish leaders what they had seen. Their testimony in early June, 1944, corroborated earlier hard-to-believe reports of mass killing in Auschwitz by lethal gas and provided eyewitness accounts of record daily arrivals of Hungarian Jews meeting the same fate. It was the spark needed to stir a call for action to pressure Hungary’s premier to defy Hitler—just hours before more than 200,000 Budapest Jews were to be deported.

The Nazis' Last Victims articulates and historically scrutinizes both the uniqueness and the universality of the Holocaust in Hungary, a topic often minimized in general works on the Holocaust. The result of the 1994 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, this anthology examines the effects on Hungary as the last country to be invaded by the Germans. The Nazis' Last Victims questions what Hungarians knew of their impending fate and examines the heightened sense of tension and haunting drama in Hungary, where the largest single killing process of the Holocaust period occurred in the shortest amount of time. Through the combination of two vital components of history writing—the analytical and the recollective—The Nazis' Last Victims probes the destruction of the last remnant of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the ?Final Solution? of the ?Jewish question? in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship. In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization. This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance. The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war. ÿ

In this book historians examine one of the greatest tragedies of World War II, the deportation and murder of 435,000 Hungarian Jews during the last months of the war.

In 1944 a Slovakian Jew named Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz and wrote a document about the death camp activities. His words never reached the half million Hungarian Jews who were herded there. The story of that suppression is told here.

Chronicles the experiences of Jews in Hungary who lived through the Holocaust, and examines the historical, political, communal, and socioeconomic factors that led to the tragedy.

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 47. Chapters: Elie Wiesel, Rudolf Vrba, Adolf Eichmann, Joel Brand, Rudolf Kastner, Albert Wass, Stolperstein, Hungarian Gold Train, Miklos Kanitz, Count Gyula Cseszneky de Milvany et Csesznek, Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kastner train, Dezs Kanizsai, Labour service, Theodor Dannecker, Wilhelm Hottl, Edmund Veesenmayer, Glass House, Kolozsvar Ghetto, Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre, The Last Days. Excerpt: Rudolf "Rudi" Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg (September 11, 1924 - March 27, 2006) was a Slovak-Canadian professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia, who came to public attention during the Second World War when, in April 1944, he escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland with the first information about the camp that the Allies regarded as credible. The 32 pages of information Vrba and his fellow escapee, Alfred Wetzler, dictated to horrified Jewish officials in ilina, Slovakia-in which they offered extensive detail about the mass murder taking place inside Auschwitz, including a description of the layout of the camp and the use of gas chambers-became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. Three weeks before Vrba escaped, German forces had invaded Hungary-an ally of Nazi Germany-and SS officer Adolf Eichmann had arrived in Budapest to oversee the deportation to Auschwitz of the country's Jewish population. Mass transports began on May 15, 1944, at a rate of 12,000 people a day; they were led to believe they were being resettled, but most were sent straight to the gas chambers. Details from the Vrba-Wetzler report alerting the world to what was happening inside the camp were broadcast in Czech and Slovak on June 15, 1944, by the BBC World Service and reported several days later by The New York Times, prompting world leaders to appeal to Hungarian...

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Frank Baron emigrated to the United States in 1947. After studies at universities in Illinois, Indiana, Marburg and Göttingen, he received his doctorate from the University of California in Berkeley. He began teaching German language and literature at the University of Kansas in 1970. Together with the Hungarian journalist Sándor Szenes, he published a study about the Auschwitz Report of Vrba and Wetzler. His work as director of the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies resulted in a digital library for Alexander von Humboldt and a book on Abraham Lincoln and the German immigrants. He has published books and articles on the history of Renaissance humanism, origins and evolution of the Faust legend, and the works of Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Herman Hesse.