The Third Reich—Hitler’s Nazi regime—governed Germany from 1933 into the mid-1940s. Following World War I, strong interconnections developed between the authoritarian governments of Germany and Hungary. Intent on improving Hungary’s stressed economy and reversing the country’s significant territorial and population losses resulting from the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, Hungarian leaders reached out to the Third Reich. Germany responded with a trade agreement favorable to Hungary, providing raw materials and purchasing Hungarian goods. Thus, Hitler was able to use a combination of approaches—economic pressure, military threats, and political indebtedness—to insure Hungarian support for Nazi Germany’s military ventures.

    World War II began in early September, 1939, when Hitler and the Nazis launched their plan for territorial expansion by invading Poland, and Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany. Within a year, the Third Reich controlled much of Europe. In 1940, Hungary, pressured by and beholden to Hitler, agreed to an alliance with the main World War II Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan. Hungary eventually sent troops to assist the Nazis in their invasion of Yugoslavia and Soviet Russia. In 1941, the Soviet Union and the United States entered World War II, joining Great Britain, France, Poland, and other Allied countries in their effort to stop Hitler and the Nazis.

    When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they moved many Jewish Poles into forced labor camps and began a system of ghettoization for the remaining Jews. Turning the sacred Star of David, a symbol of Judaism, into an object of prejudice and bigotry, they required Jews to wear badges and then forced them into severely overcrowded ghettos. These ghettos served as collection areas where the Nazis could easily control Jews, isolating and separating them from their employment and support systems. Most ghettos lacked food, medical care, and sanitation supplies. Although succumbing to the Nazis’ proclamations placed the imprisoned Jews at risk, disobeying the Nazi orders could result in immediate death.

    The Nazi leadership, remaining focused on their goal of ridding Europe of all Jews, authorized members of the Gestapo (the state secret police) and the Schutzstaffel (SS), an elite branch of the Nazi military, to round up Jews and other targeted groups and send them to concentration camps. After realizing it would be impossible to geographically remove all Jews, the Nazis moved forward with the Final Solution, their plan of complete extermination, beginning in Germany and Poland, and quickly extending their efforts to other Nazi-occupied regions.

    Vague information about events in Germany and other Nazi-occupied counties began reaching Hungarian Jews, a group with strong Jewish cultural and religious traditions but also a deep sense of national pride. Before World War II, Hungarian Jews had a thriving community and were socially, economically, and culturally assimilated into Hungarian society. About 5 percent of the total Hungarian population was Jewish, but the percentage was much larger in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, which was home to a vibrant and successful Jewish community and the Dohány Street Synagogue, a preeminent synagogue in Europe and one of the largest in the world. The perception that Hungary was a safe haven prompted Jews in Nazi-occupied countries to flee and seek safety within the Hungarian borders.

    Despite their country’s history of anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ looming presence in neighboring countries, Hungarian Jews’ assimilation into Hungarian society led them to feel secure in their homeland. Even when they began hearing rumors of the treatment of Jews in Germany and Poland, the Hungarian Jewish population had no idea that the Nazis posed a serious threat to their existence, believing that their government would protect them. This false sense of security was bolstered by a belief that the Allies were getting close to defeating the Nazis and winning the war. So it was a complete surprise to most Hungarian Jews when the Hungarian government not only failed to protect them, but actively participated in their ghettoization and deportation.

    Despite Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany, Hungary’s leader, Miklós Horthy, consistently refused to allow the Nazis to occupy Hungary and deport Hungarian Jews. Tired of Horthy’s lack of cooperation, Hitler ordered Nazi troops to invade Hungary in March, 1944. Almost immediately, SS Officer Adolf Eichmann implemented his plan to efficiently round up all Hungarian Jews, contain them in ghettos, and deport them to death camps. Members of the Hungarian Nazi and Arrow Cross parties as well as local police enthusiastically participated in Eichmann’s plan. As had occurred in other parts of Europe, many non-Jewish citizens were either indifferent to or voluntarily supported and participated in the ghettoization, deportation, and killing of Jews.

    Once the majority of the Hungarian Jewish population was detained in ghettos or ordered into forced labor, the Hungarian Arrow Cross soldiers and local police assisted SS troops in the daily deportation of approximately 12,000 Jews from ghettos throughout Hungary to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp. Starting with Jews in the smaller cities and villages, prisoners were forced from the ghettos and into crowded cattle cars. The Jews being deported were controlled with lies and with vague reassurances that they were being transported to a better place. In June, 1944, Noémi and most of her family were part of these deportations. The vast majority of Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz, with the exception of about 20,000 who were sent to a labor camp near Strasshof, Austria, a destination with a much higher survival rate. Approximately 75 percent of those deported to Auschwitz were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The transports also included the 28,000 Hungarian Romani people who died at Auschwitz.

    With the Nazis on the verge of defeat and the war in Europe appearing close to an end, on July 7, 1945, Miklós Horthy summoned the strength to end the deportations. Arrow Cross soldiers in Budapest, angry at Horthy’s decision, responded by using guns and bayonets to kill thousands of Jews, throwing their bodies into the Danube River. Soon after, Horthy attempted to change sides and cooperate with the Allies, following in the footsteps of Romania, which had abruptly ended their alliance with the Nazis. Horthy was negotiating surrender to the Soviet Red Army when Hitler, learning of this betrayal, ordered Nazi commandos to kidnap Horthy’s son and imprison him in a concentration camp in Austria. Although concern for his son prompted Horthy to revoke the armistice he had signed with the Soviets, Hitler ordered the Nazis to also take Horthy into custody and replace him with a leader sympathetic to the Nazis.

    In their determination to efficiently murder Europe’s entire Jewish population—eleven million people—as well as members of other targeted groups, the Nazis built extermination camps in addition to their many concentration camps. During the Holocaust, Noémi was imprisoned in two of these camps: first in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp in Poland and then in a forced-labor sub-camp of the Buchenwald complex in Germany.

    Prisoners arriving at the camps went through a selection process as they arrived; older teenagers and younger adults considered fit to work were admitted into the camp, whereas mothers and their children, the elderly, and incapacitated adults were immediately gassed. Those who were spared as a possible source of labor lived under inhumane conditions—surrounded by armed guards and electrified barbed wire fences and crowded into barracks with no sanitation and limited food and water. These captives were supervised by kapos, powerful prisoners selected for their willingness to violently enforce the rules in return for better living conditions.

    The SS working at Auschwitz lived with their families in comfortable quarters with access to a library, swimming pool, and theater. The original Auschwitz complex was focused on subjecting prisoners to hard labor, but Auschwitz later became the Nazi’s most lethal extermination camp when Auschwitz II-Birkenau opened in 1942 with almost constant use of its multiple gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to Birkenau, approximately 1.1 million died; some perished from starvation or disease, but most were killed immediately in the gas chambers, poisoned with Zyklon B, a form of hydrogen cyanide, and then moved to the nearby crematoria that burned day and night. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered within a ten-week period in 1944. When Noémi and her family arrived on July 1, 1944, the gas chambers had been working at full capacity for months.

    Word of these mass killings did not spread because the Nazis periodically killed the prisoners who were forced to assist with the murders and burning of bodies. Additionally, the SS participants in the mass killings were sworn to secrecy. A small number of prisoners escaped from extermination camps, but their stories of atrocities were so inconceivable that they were not believed.

    In mid-August, 1944, Noémi was among a group of one thousand Hungarian women who were transported from Auschwitz II-Birkenau to the Buchenwald camp complex near Weimar, Germany. Buchenwald, the largest of the concentration camps in Germany, was not an extermination camp, but it was a place of death from starvation, disease, exhaustion, medical experimentation, and direct killing by the SS guards. Noémi and her fellow prisoners were housed at Münchmühle, a Buchenwald satellite camp near Allendorf, Germany, where Noémi and some of the other woman spent long hours of forced labor working with explosives at a large German munition factory.

    Beginning in early 1945, anticipating possible defeat by the Allies, the SS began to destroy records, demolish buildings, and take other actions to hide evidence of their atrocities. Each time the Nazis realized Allied forces were getting close to a concentration camp, the SS guards forced their prisoners to participate in so-called death marches—a forced march to alternative camps considered safe from the Allies. Although the Nazis hoped to keep their prisoners alive to be used as forced laborers or hostages, many of the emaciated prisoners succumbed to exhaustion as they walked. The SS ordered Noémi and her fellow prisoners at Münchmühle into such a march in mid-April, 1945, when US troops approached their camp. Soon afterward, the Nazis fighting in Germany surrendered to the Allies. Around the same time, the Soviet army overcame the Hungarian and German forces within Hungary. By the time of the Nazis’ final surrender, they had killed over five million Jews and millions of others including people of Polish, Romani or Slavic descent; homosexuals; people with mental or physical disabilities; and political prisoners.

    After the war, liberated prisoners were provided shelter in displaced persons camps scattered throughout the areas previously occupied by the Nazis. Many Nazi leaders were taken to court as war criminals during the Nuremberg trials held in Germany in the late 1940s. Throughout the Holocaust, many courageous Europeans took actions that saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews by helping them hide or pose as non-Jews. These courageous individuals, referred to as Righteous Among the Nations, have been honored by Israel, the long-envisioned Jewish homeland founded on May 14, 1948, a country that became home to many survivors of the Holocaust.