The Holocaust saw the dispossession, deportation, and systematic murder of more than half of the Hungarian Jews, primarily after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.

[1] At the time of the German invasion, Hungary had a Jewish population of 825,000,[2] the largest remaining in Europe,[3] further swollen by Jews escaping from elsewhere to the relative safety of that country.

[4] Fearing Hungary was trying to pursue peace with the Allies (which the diplomat László Veress secretly did in the September of 1943[5]), Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion.

The invading troops included a Sonderkommando which was led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Budapest in order to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland.

[9] Diplomatic pressure and the Allied bombing of Budapest persuaded Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, to order a halt to the deportations on 6 July.

[14] Those who survived the selection were forced to provide construction and manufacturing labor as part of a last-ditch effort to increase the production of fighter aircraft.

[2] Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germany's Nuremberg Laws.

Their employment in government at any level was forbidden, they could not be editors at newspapers, their numbers were restricted to six per cent among theater and movie actors, physicians, lawyers and engineers.

[citation needed] SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, sent to Hungary to supervise the deportations, set up his staff in the Majestic Hotel in Budapest.

The Yellow Star and ghettoization laws, and the deportations, were accomplished in less than eight weeks, with the enthusiastic help of the Hungarian authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség).

[20] The mass transports, the first organized by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office or RSHA),[21] began leaving Hungary for Poland on 14 May 1944.

[24] According to Höss during his trial, the facilities at Auschwitz could not cope with the numbers, and he had to travel to Budapest to re-organize the transports, so that two or three trains would run on alternate days.

The report provided a detailed description of the gas chambers, and what was happening inside the camp; it had been dictated in April 1944 to the Slovakian Jewish Council by two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler.

[34] Information from the report about the murder of Czech Jews in Auschwitz was broadcast in Germany by the BBC World Service on its women's program at noon on 16 June 1944, with a warning that the Germans would be held responsible after the war.

He is credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War, marking the largest diplomatic rescue mission of the Holocaust.

Due to his actions, half of the Jewish population of Budapest survived and was not deported to Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.

Joel Brand, a leading member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, became known for his efforts to negotiate with Eichmann to stop the deportations.

In a meeting with Brand in Budapest on 25 April 1944, Eichmann offered to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks from the Allies, to be used exclusively on the Eastern Front.

[41] On 20 July The Times called the proposal by the Germans "one of the most loathsome" stories of the war and that Germany had reached a "new level of fantasy and self-deception.

[44] In 1954, he became the subject of a libel case brought by the Israeli government on his behalf against Malchiel Gruenwald, who alleged that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis.

[45] Gruenwald had alleged in a self-published pamphlet that Kastner had known Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz as early as April 1944, after being given a copy of the Vrba–Wetzler report, but he had done nothing to warn the wider Jewish community in Hungary.

[46] In June 1955, the judge, Benjamin Halevi, decided in Gruenwald's favor, ruling that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil".

[49] As a result of the verdict and its refusal to prosecute Kastner for collaboration, the Israeli government lost a vote of no confidence and collapsed.

[50] A dissenting opinion agreed with the original judgement that the ease with which the Nazis had murdered the Jews was "the direct result of the concealment of the horrifying truth from the victims".

At one point, Wallenberg appeared personally at the railway station in Budapest, insisting that Jews on the train be removed and presenting the Arrow Cross guards with Protective Passports (Schutzpass) for many of them.

[53] Horthy dismissed Prime Minister Sztójay on 29 August 1944, the same day the Slovak National Uprising against the Nazis began.

[54] After Prime Minister Ferenc Szálasi came to power in October, tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches.

Switzerland was allowed to issue 7,800 Schutzpasses (safe passage documents), Sweden 4,500, and the Vatican, Portugal and Spain 3,300 combined.

After seizure of the train by the Seventh United States Army, almost none of the valuables were returned to Hungary or their rightful owners or surviving family members.