Budapest Ghetto

As with other 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 were piled up in bombed-out store fronts, and the buildings were overcrowded, leading to the spread of diseases such as typhoid.

From the occupation to liberation the Jewish population of Budapest was reduced from 200,000 to 70,000 in the ghetto, and about 20,000 others were 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.

Of those that were deported (most of them to a concentration camp on the Austrian border), the vast majority were liberated by the advancing Red Army.

He agreed to meet Szabó's influential friend, Pál Szalai, a high-ranking member of the police force.

In the second week of January 1945, Raoul Wallenberg found out that Adolf Eichmann planned a massacre of the largest Jewish ghetto in Budapest.

The only one who could stop it was the man given the responsibility to carry out the massacre, the commander of the German troops in Hungary, General Gerhard Schmidhuber.

Shocked and incredulous, he asked for a direct hearing with the Hungarian interior minister Gábor Vajna, in the basement of the Budapest City Hall where he had his headquarters, and threatened fictitious legal and economic measures against the "3000 Hungarian citizens" (in fact, a much smaller number) declared by Perlasca as residents of Spain, and the same treatment by two Latin American governments, to force the minister to withdraw the project.