Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Budapest in the Inter-War Period (1919-1945)
On 15th March 1942, the Historic Memorial Committee organized Budapest’s largest anti-fascist demonstration at the statue of Petőfi. On 19th March 1944, the German Nazi army occupied Hungary and Budapest. As a result, the country became an immediate base for the Nazi army command. Almost immediately, the Gestapo and the Hungarian authorities installed by the Germans arrested not only the left-wing opposition politicians, headed by Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, but anti- German politicians supporting the earlier Government as well, and threw them into concentration camps. The political parties were disbanded, the opposition newspapers suppressed. In April the Jews were compelled to wear a yellow star, and later were herded into ghettos. Another consequence of the German occupation was that the Allied Powers began to bomb Hungary, including Budapest. The first great destructive bombing attack against the city occurred on 3rd April 1944. After this, the air-raids became of daily occurrence. Whole blocks of housing and public buildings were destroyed with the military targets, and the number of victims—the dead and injured—grew steadily. On 15th October 1944 the Regent, Miklós Horthy made an unorganized, unsuccessful attempt to take Hungary out of the war. He and his family were deported to Germany, and Hitler appointed Ferenc Szálasi, the head of the Arrow-Cross Party, as “leader of the people”. Szálasi brought a reign of unbridled terror to Budapest and Hungary and a regime of general anarchy that paralysed life in the city. The former administrators were replaced by men of the Arrow-Cross; the military prison in Margit körút, as it was then called (to-day called Mártírok útja—road of the Martyrs) was filled with men of the left; the Jews were concentrated in ghettos, and their deportation to Nazi concentration camps in Germany, following the deportations from the provinces, also began in Budapest; Jews and leftists were shot daily by the hundreds on the Danube embankments. The resistance movement was nevertheless not broken. In May the Hungarian Front was secretly established, Communist and left-wing patriots clashed more and more frequently, often with arms, with the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators. It was in one such clash that Endre Ságvári, one of the outstanding personalities of the Communist Party, fell. In October, the symbol of the extreme right, the statue of the former Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, was blown up: in December bombs were thrown at the Arrow-Cross supporters’ meeting in the Municipal Theatre. The different groups of armed men were united under the Hungarian National Liberation Committee. Four of its leaders, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, János Kiss, Jenő Nagy, and Vilmos Tartsay were executed by the Nazis. Responding to the call of the resistance movement, the people refused to carry out the order issued to leave the city, and in many places successfully prevented the retreating Germans from dismantling or blowing up factories—the Water and Gas Works, the Kelenföld Power Station, the Goldberger Textile Mill, the Hungarian Waggon and Machine Factory, the United Incandescent Lamp Factory, and the Csepel Weiss Manfréd Works. By Christmas 1944 the democratic Provisional National Government had already been set up in Debrecen in the liberated part of the country, when the Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest and the siege began. To spare the city, the Soviet Command sent truce-bearers to negotiate with the German Command, but the advancing flag bearers, Captains Steinmetz and Ostapenko, were shot down with the brutal violation of international law at the entrance to the city. 57
