Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 19. From the Successes of Revision to German and Russian Occupation (1938-1945). István Ihász

operation known as the "malenky robot" ended up being dragged off to the Soviet Union to carry out compensatory hard labour, many of them dying among inhuman conditions in the Gulag camps. 900,000 Hungarian soldiers from the enlarged country of 1938 became prisoners of war, 700,000 of these on the Eastern front. Of these, 250,000 died. Up until the peace treaty around 250,000 were able to return from the west and the same number from the Soviet Union, and from the east another 180,000 between 1947-1949. Hungary's total human loss was more than one million, among them between four and five hundred thousand Jews, 160,000-180,000 soldiers on the front and the rest civilians dying as a result of wartime activities and being taken away by force. In November 1945 the Allied Control Commission (which at the outset had at its head Soviet Marshall Voroshiiov, the all-powerful dictator of Hungarian domestic political life), decreed that in accordance with the Potsdam Conference resolution all Hungarian Germans should be relocated to Germany. The implementation of the principle of collective guilt had particularly tragic repercussions in the parts of the country now divided up among its neighbours: between twenty to forty thousand Hungarian men from Ruthenia, now part of the Soviet Union, were sent off to do forced labour in Siberia. The same number of Hungarian citizens were killed in Újvidék, which was controlled by the Yugoslavian partisans. The Czechoslovakian government programme of April 5, 1945 at Kosice collectively deprived the Hungarian population on Slovakian territory of its citizenship and rights. On February 27, 1946 the Hungarian government signed an agreement of population exchange with Czechoslovakia, which was later only partially implemented. In the interest of further "solving" the Hungarian question a forced re-Slovakianisation began on April 17, 1946. On November 15, 1946 compulsory relocation commenced of Hungarians from Csallóköz to the Czech Sudetenland, which had been emptied of German speakers. It is characteristic of the damage to our economy that of its branches suffering the worst, 54% of industry, 59% of communication, all livestock for breeding, 21.5% of agricultural produce, 18% of dwellings and a total of 40% of the national wealth - the services, commercial, insurance and credit banks, schools and hospitals - were ruined.