In March 1944, the tide of the Second World War had turned decisively against Nazi Germany. Hungary's regent, Miklós Horthy, faced growing pressure both at home and from Berlin to decide where his country truly stood.
Behind the scenes, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Kállay had become convinced that Germany's defeat was inevitable. He discreetly reached out to the Western Allies, hoping to secure a separate peace and avoid Soviet occupation.
Those secret efforts did not go unnoticed by the Germans. On March 19, 1944, under the code name Operation Margarethe, German troops entered Hungary and swiftly occupied the country without firing a shot.
In the days that followed, Horthy faced a stark ultimatum from Hitler. He could appoint a pro-German prime minister who would fully cooperate with the Nazi leadership, or accept total occupation, which would strip Hungary of its remaining sovereignty.
Fearing the fate that had already befallen countries like Poland and France, Horthy reluctantly agreed to replace Kállay. The Germans strongly recommended Béla Imrédy, a former prime minister known for his fanatical pro-German stance and anti-Semitic policies.
Horthy, deeply uneasy about Imrédy's extremism, instead proposed a seemingly more moderate figure. He chose a man who would help the Germans kill hundreds of thousands of Hungarian citizens. His name was Döme Sztójay.
Sztójay was born as Dimitri Stojaković on January 5, 1883, in the city of Versec, then part of Austria-Hungary. He came from a Serbian family and pursued a military career, studying at the cadet school in Pécs and later at the military academy in Vienna.
During the First World War, which began on July 28, 1914, Stojaković served in the Austro-Hungarian army and led the Balkan group of the military intelligence service.
Hungary was on the losing side of World War I, which ended on November 11, 1918. On June 4, 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, which reduced the country's territory by 72 percent.
Hungary also lost its sea access, half of its ten biggest cities, and all of its precious metal mines. Post-1920 Hungary had a population of 7.6 million, compared with the pre-war kingdom's 20.9 million, and 3,425,000 ethnic Hungarians found themselves separated from their motherland.
In June 1919, Admiral Miklós Horthy, a former Austro-Hungarian Navy officer, came to power as head of a conservative nationalist coalition. Horthy presided for the next 24 years over an authoritarian, almost feudal system of aristocratic rule that nevertheless had a functioning parliament and permitted political opposition.
After Horthy became regent, Stojaković was promoted to general and served as a military attaché in Berlin from 1927 to 1933. He magyarized his name to Sztójay in 1927, and from 1933 to 1935 he served in the Ministry of Defense.
In 1935 he became Hungary's ambassador to Nazi Germany, a position he held for the next nine years. As ambassador, Sztójay formed strong ties with the Third Reich and often voiced support for German policies to his superiors in Hungary.
In the late 1930s, as Germany began redrawing national boundaries across Europe, Hungary, with support from Germany and Italy, was able to reclaim lost territory. Before the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, this included southern Slovakia, annexed from Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Subcarpathian Rus, acquired from the dismembered Czechoslovak state in 1939.
After the war started, regained territory included northern Transylvania from Romania in 1940 and the Bačka region from dismembered Yugoslavia, which was attacked in April 1941.
In November 1940, Hungary joined the Axis Alliance, the military coalition that initiated World War II and fought against the Allies. In June 1941, Hungarian troops participated alongside German troops in the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Hungary fell increasingly under Germany's influence, and many Hungarian politicians called for more radical steps to solve the so-called Jewish question. According to a 1941 census, Hungary, including the recently annexed territories, had a Jewish population of 825,000, less than 6 percent of the total population.
The Hungarian racial laws were modeled on Germany's Nuremberg laws. They defined Jews in so-called racial terms, forbade intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, and excluded Jews from full participation in various professions. The laws also barred employment of Jews in the civil service and restricted their opportunities in economic life.
In the summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities deported some 20,000 Jews, most of whom lived in Subcarpathian Rus and none of whom had been able to obtain Hungarian citizenship. They were deported to the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi in German-occupied Ukraine, where they were shot by detachments of Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile death squads.
In January 1942, Hungarian military units murdered 3,000 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad, the major city in the part of Yugoslavia annexed by Hungary.
However, in 1942, when the German government began pressuring the Hungarians to deliver Jews who were Hungarian citizens into German custody, Horthy's prime minister, Miklós Kállay, refused to deport the Hungarian Jews despite significant pressure from the domestic radical right.
After the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Horthy and Kállay recognized that Germany would likely lose the war. With Horthy's tacit approval, Kállay tried to negotiate a separate armistice for Hungary with the Western Allies.
To prevent these efforts, Adolf Hitler ordered Operation Margarethe, the German occupation of Hungary. On March 19, 1944, German troops entered the country without resistance. By this time, about 63,000 Jews living in Hungary had died or been killed.
During the German occupation, Horthy was permitted to remain as regent, but Kállay was dismissed. In his place, the Germans installed Döme Sztójay as prime minister, and he immediately aligned Hungarian policy with Nazi interests.
Sztójay quickly legalized Ferenc Szálasi's Arrow Cross Party, a radically anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired fascist movement that had previously been banned under Horthy. He committed Hungary fully to the Nazi war effort, increasing Hungarian troop deployments on the Eastern Front and cracking down on political opposition.
Labor unions were dissolved, left-wing politicians were jailed, and civil liberties were severely restricted. Most notably, Sztójay oversaw a dramatic escalation in the persecution of Hungarian Jews.
On March 31, 1944, a decree required all Jews over the age of six to wear a yellow six-pointed star on their clothing starting on April 5. In April 1944, Hungarian authorities ordered Hungarian Jews living outside Budapest, roughly 500,000 people, to concentrate in certain cities, usually regional government seats.
When Horthy learned about the deportations, he called them inhuman, stupid, and unworthy of the Hungarian character, saying the present Hungarian government had sullied the Hungarian name in the eyes of the world.
Horthy wrote to his prime minister: "Dear Sztójay, I was aware that the government in the given forced situation has to take many steps that I do not consider correct and for which I cannot take responsibility. Among these matters is the handling of the Jewish question in a manner that does not correspond to the Hungarian mentality, Hungarian conditions, and for that matter Hungarian interests."
He continued: "It is clear to everyone that what among these were done by Germans or by the insistence of the Germans was not in my power to prevent. So in these matters, I was forced into passivity. As such, I was not informed in advance or I am not fully informed now. However, I have heard recently that in many cases in inhumaneness and brutality, we exceeded the Germans."
Sztójay ignored this, and he even ramped up the pace of forced deportations of Hungarian Jews.
Just before the deportations began, two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and passed details of what was happening inside the camp to officials in Slovakia. This document, known as the Vrba-Wetzler report, was quickly translated into German and passed among Jewish groups and then to Allied officials.
In late June 1944, world leaders including Pope Pius XII and American President Roosevelt pleaded with Horthy to use his influence to stop the deportations. Roosevelt specifically threatened military retaliation if the transports were not ceased.
On July 2, 1944, Horthy issued the order halting deportations. On July 7, deportations to Auschwitz from cities around Budapest nevertheless continued for two more days.
During eight weeks, from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials, whose members were closely linked to the anti-Semitic Arrow Cross, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported nearly 440,000 Jews from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
About 100,000 Jews from Hungary were selected for forced labor, and the remainder, approximately 330,000 Jews, about 75 percent, were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival. This was the deadliest period at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz camp complex, begged the Hungarian authorities not to send more than one transport per day, as the camp crematoria did not have the capacity to cope with the number of bodies arriving from the gas chambers.
To solve this problem, Otto Moll, director of all crematoria at Auschwitz, ordered fire pits to be dug there. The excess people, Hungarian men, women, and children, were shot in the back of the head and dropped into fire.
It sometimes happened that some prisoners put up a fight or children cried. As punishment, Nazi personnel threw them into the burning pits alive.
By the end of July 1944, the only Jewish community left in Hungary was that of Budapest, the capital. Horthy became appalled by Sztójay's actions and demanded his removal as prime minister. Hitler sternly refused.
Eventually, in August 1944, the Germans yielded and allowed Sztójay to be replaced by General Géza Lakatos. When Horthy himself was overthrown by the Nazis in October, Sztójay was not reinstated because of poor health.
He fled Hungary as the Red Army advanced but was later captured by American forces, extradited, and sentenced to death for war crimes by a Hungarian people's tribunal.
Döme Sztójay was 63 years old when, on August 22, 1946, he was executed by firing squad in Budapest. There were no tears shed for Sztójay.