Terror of the Arrow Cross Party
Terror escalated sharply from late November 1944, in the final weeks of the Arrow Cross Party’s rule. The first victims were executed within hours of the Arrow Cross coup on 15 October 1944. Hungarian Jews – tortured in party houses, robbed, and seized from protected buildings or the streets – were driven to the banks of the Danube.
There, they were stripped, abused, and shot, their bodies carried away by the current. For the militias, the river served as a convenient mass grave for the estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Jews who were murdered. As the Szálasi regime realized that neutral states would not recognize its authority, even diplomatic protections eroded.
Just before Christmas, the Arrow Cross government fled Budapest, which later came under Soviet-Romanian siege. In their absence, the fate of tens of thousands of Jews was left to local Arrow Cross leaders and militia commanders until the Siege of Budapest ended in February 1945.
“Then the Danube was not the blue Danube, not the brown Danube: it was the red Danube, red with the blood of the Jews.”
Survivor of the days of Arrow Cross terror
Further Reading / Sources
Budapest 1945
Tamási Miklós–Ungváry Krisztián (1945). Budapest: Corvina
A Horthy-rendszer és antiszemitizmusának mérlege. Diszkrimináció és társadalompolitika Magyarországon, 1919–1944
Ungváry Krisztián (2016), Budapest: Jelenkor
Csillaggal nem jó járni most. Kis Pál budapesti fényképész naplója (1944. október-december)
Kis Pál (2016). Budapest: Magvető