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The World at War - Hungary and After

© William Waller

Now, at the end of 1943, the Allies could see the way to the end of the war. Although there does not seem to be any written evidence, Hitler must also have seen the same ending, but he was determined to ensure it would be a long time in coming. His primary task was the killing of all Jews and as many Slavs as were of no use to him. The killing machine was geared up even higher as more and more Jews were rounded up and transported mainly to Auschwitz, but other infamous death camps were still working such as Majdanek and Treblinka. For much of the war, Hungary had been an uneasy partner of Hitler’s, mainly as a result of their greed at the outset when Hitler offered them territory on their borders which they had long coveted. They also contributed fighting divisions to Barbarossa but, by the end of 1943, were trying to extricate themselves from their involvement. Hitler knew of their attempts to bargain with the Allies and, in February 1944, sent in two mechanized divisions to ‘occupy’ the country. There is quite a lot of evidence of Hitler’s direct involvement in this whole operation, with absolute identification of his aim, namely the killing of all the Hungarian Jews, who had mainly escaped so far. This is yet another example of Hitler’s utter insanity. At a time when he was being forced back on the eastern front, when the Allies were advancing through Italy and when the Germans knew that an Allied invasion across the Channel would not long be delayed, here is a man obsessed with rounding up people of no military significance and using up railway space to transport them to Auschwitz. In this, the last major massacre of the war, some 500,000 people were murdered.

Of all this the Allies were only slowly becoming aware. They were fighting a war to defeat the Nazis and were finding it none too easy, especially in Italy where Kesselring, taking advantage of the Allied blunder of landing too far south, had established a line south of Rome where he had little trouble in holding their forces. But they were marshalling for the opening of a second front in France. Politics was also very quickly coming to the fore of the minds of the Western leaders, forced on them by Russia’s attitude. Stalin had already made it clear that, once the fighting stopped, Rusia would control what they had won. In addition they would have nothing to do with the Polish government-in-exile. Roosevelt and Churchill both misread Stalin’s real intentions, although Churchill never learned to trust him; they were more concerned with ending the fighting but Stalin was looking to extending his own domination.

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