Many others died from the brutal conditions of forced labor to which the Arrow Cross subjected them. Hundreds of Jews, both men and women, were violently murdered. They arrested Horthy and installed a new Hungarian government under Ferenc Szalasi, the leader of the fascist and radically antisemitic Arrow Cross party.ĭuring the Szalasi regime, Arrow Cross gangs perpetrated a reign of arbitrary terror against the Jews of Budapest. Horthy had begun final negotiations with Soviet army commanders by mid-October, 1944, when the Germans sponsored a coup d'etat. In August, he dismissed the Sztojay government and resumed efforts to reach an armistice, this time with the Soviet Union whose army was on Hungary's borders. In light of the worsening military situation and facing threats (from Allied leaders) of war crimes trials, Horthy ordered a halt to the deportations on July 7, 1944. By the end of July 1944, the only Jewish community left in Hungary was that of Budapest, the capital. Thousands were also sent to the border with Austria to be used for digging fortification trenches. In less than two months, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. The Hungarian police carried out the roundups and forced the Jews onto the deportation trains. SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann was chief of the team of "deportation experts" that worked with the Hungarian authorities. In mid-May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the German Security Police, began to systematically deport the Hungarian Jews. None of these ghettos existed for more than a few weeks and many were liquidated within days. Individual gendarmes often tortured Jews and extorted personal valuables from them. Police guarded the perimeters of the enclosures. Hungarian authorities forbade the Jews from leaving the ghettos. Food and water supplies were dangerously inadequate. In some Hungarian cities, Jews were compelled to live outdoors, without shelter or sanitary facilities. In other cases the ghetto was merely a single building, such as a factory. Sometimes the ghettos encompassed the area of a former Jewish neighborhood. The urban areas in which the Jews were forced to concentrate were enclosed and referred to as ghettos. Hungarian gendarmes were sent into the rural regions to round up the Jews and dispatch them to the cities. In April 1944, Hungarian authorities ordered Hungarian Jews living outside Budapest (roughly 500,000) to concentrate in certain cities, usually regional government seats.