The Budapest Ghetto

The Budapest ghetto was established on November 29, 1944, by the Hungarian authorities under the orders of the occupying German forces, confining more than 70,000 Hungarian Jews to an overcrowded area of the old Jewish quarter surrounded by walls. The conditions were catastrophic: starvation, epidemics, and the terror of the Arrow Cross party militias claimed the lives of several thousand people within the ghetto walls. The Arrow Cross militias regularly took groups to the banks of the Danube, where thousands were executed by being shot into the river. The ghetto was liberated in January 1945 by the Soviet troops.