Less than three months after the Budapest Ghetto was established, the Soviet Army liberated it on 17 January 1945. The ghetto had been created on 29 November 1944 by a decree of the Royal Hungarian Government. It was surrounded by a high fence and stone wall that was guarded so contraband could not be sneaked in, and people could not get out. The area consisted of several blocks of the old Jewish quarter that included the two main synagogues of the city, the Neolog Dohány Street Synagogue and the Orthodox Kazinczy Street Synagogue. The last remaining section of the ghetto wall – in the backyard of a building at 15 Király Street – was demolished in 2006 during construction work.
As with ghettos that had been set up in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, the area was completely cut off from the outside world: no food was allowed in, rubbish and waste were not collected, the dead lay on the streets and piled up in the bombed-out store fronts. The buildings were overcrowded, leading to the spread of diseases such as typhoid. From the start of the German occupation to liberation, the Jewish population of Budapest was reduced from 200,000 to 70,000 in the ghetto, and about 20,000 housed in specially marked houses outside the ghetto having been granted diplomatic protection by neutral politicians, including Raoul Wallenberg, who issued protective passports on behalf of the Swedish legation, and Carl Lutz, who did the same via the Swiss government.
One of the much debated individuals of the German occupation is Wehrmacht commanding officer General Gerhard Schmidhuber (pictured right), who stopped fascists from liquidating the 60-70,000 inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto. The exact motives of the German army’s local supreme commander are unknown to this day. In the second week of January 1945, Wallenberg found out that leading Nazi Adolph Eichmann planned a massacre of the ghetto. The only one who could stop it was the man given the responsibility to carry out the massacre, General Schmidhuber. Wallenberg sent Schmidhuber a note promising that he, Wallenberg, would make sure the general was held personally responsible for the massacre and hanged as a war criminal when the war was over. The general knew that the Germans were near defeat. The massacre was stopped at the last minute thanks to the courage and daring action of Wallenberg, but many believe – and some survival reports support the idea – that Schmidhuber did not do so to save himself but as an act of humanity.
-
Display
