In October 1944, with the Red Army approaching Hungary’s borders, the German military launched a decisive operation to prevent Hungary from leaving the Axis alliance. The plan involved the kidnapping of the son of Hungarian Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy, who was bound in a carpet and flown to Germany as a hostage. Faced with the threat of his son’s execution, Horthy withdrew his armistice announcement and abdicated.
The Germans then installed a new government under the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, the head of the fascist Arrow Cross Party. Szálasi’s regime quickly resumed the persecution of Hungarian Jews with extreme brutality. In under three months, between November 1944 and January 1945, Arrow Cross death squads murdered approximately 38,000 Hungarian Jews, with as many as 20,000 shot along the banks of the Danube.
Ferenc Szálasi was born on January 6, 1897, in Kassa, then part of Austria-Hungary. He followed his father into the army and served as an officer during World War I, earning the Order of the Iron Crown, one of the highest honors in the Austrian Empire. After the war, Hungary suffered severe losses under the Treaty of Trianon, which reduced its territory by 72 percent and left millions of ethnic Hungarians outside its borders.
Szálasi became increasingly fascinated with politics and developed a radical nationalist ideology. He advocated for the restoration of Greater Hungary and borrowed ideas from Italian fascism and German Nazism. His ideology included a specific form of anti-Semitism called “Hungarism,” which argued that Jewish existence was incompatible with European society.
In 1939, Szálasi became the leader of the National Socialist Arrow Cross Party, which won 15 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections that year. Hungary regained some territories with German and Italian help before and during World War II, and in November 1940, Hungary joined the Axis Alliance. Hungarian troops participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
By 1941, Hungary had a Jewish population of about 825,000. Hungarian racial laws modeled on Germany’s Nuremberg Laws restricted Jewish participation in professions and civil service. In the summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities deported some 20,000 Jews to German-occupied Ukraine, where they were shot by Nazi mobile death squads. In January 1942, Hungarian military units murdered 3,000 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad.
Despite German pressure, Prime Minister Miklós Kállai refused to deport Hungarian Jewish citizens. This led to the German military occupation of Hungary in March 1944. The Germans installed a pro-German prime minister, and deportations began in April 1944. Over eight weeks, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were killed in gas chambers.
By late July 1944, only the Jewish community of Budapest remained. Horthy ordered a halt to the deportations in July and dismissed the government in August. He began negotiations with the Soviet Union, but the Germans intervened, leading to Szálasi’s rise to power on October 16, 1944.
Under Szálasi’s rule, Arrow Cross gangs terrorized the Jews of Budapest. Hundreds were murdered, and many died from brutal forced labor conditions. In November 1944, the regime ordered the remaining Jews into a ghetto that held nearly 70,000 people in an area of just 0.1 square miles. Thousands were marched on foot to the Austrian border, with many shot along the way.
Between December 1944 and the end of January 1945, the Arrow Cross took as many as 20,000 Jews from the Budapest ghetto, shot them along the Danube, and threw their bodies into the river. Their methods were especially cruel, often tying three people together and shooting only the middle person, causing the others to drown. Holocaust survivor Susanna Osvath recalled seeing the river turn red with blood.
The Arrow Cross also attacked hospitals and nursing homes. In one incident on January 14, 1945, they shot patients and staff in a hospital courtyard, killing 130 people in two hours. Days later, they executed 70 elderly residents of a Jewish nursing home, shooting them in the snow and throwing hand grenades among the wounded.
Szálasi did not object to the killings but became concerned about the impression on neutral diplomats. He ordered that the murders be carried out with more discretion. During this time, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and others organized false papers and safe houses, saving tens of thousands of Jews. In total, between 65,000 and 70,000 Budapest Jews perished during the Arrow Cross’s short rule.
Szálasi’s government also sent Hungarian assets to Germany and conscripted civilians into hopeless battles against the Red Army. His rule lasted only 163 days. As Soviet forces encircled Budapest, Szálasi fled the capital on December 9, 1944. By March 1945, he was in Vienna, and on April 29, 1945, he married his fiancée of nearly two decades.
On May 6, 1945, Szálasi was captured by American troops in Austria. He was returned to Hungary and tried by the People’s Tribunal in Budapest. On March 1, 1946, he was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and high treason, and sentenced to death.
Szálasi was hanged on March 12, 1946, in Budapest’s Markó Prison, along with three other former officials. The execution was public, drawing a large crowd of onlookers. The method used was the Austrian pole method, which likely caused a slow death by strangulation. There were no tears shed for Ferenc Szálasi, whose death squads murdered tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.