About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

34 Holocaust & Genocide Stud. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/hologen34 and id is 1 raw text is: The Holocaust in Hungary: A Critical Analysis Randolph L. Braham City University of New York Introduction by Paul Hanebrink Rutgers University New Brunswick Randolph L. Braham, the authority on the Holocaust in Hungary, spoke out forcefully against the historical revisionism of the Fidesz government in Hungary. Historians and publicists close to that leadership equate the occupation of Hungary by its World War II German ally with its occupation by the Red Army and subsequent decades of Soviet domination. Implying that the Hungarian people suffered at the hands of the Germans just as did the Jews, these writers set forth a nationalist narrative that casts Hungary as a victimized Christian nation. Braham submitted this synthetic article shortly before he died in 2018. An introduction by Paul Hanebrink sets Braham's work in its biographical, political, and historical contexts. Introduction In January 2014 Randolph L. Braham returned the Medium Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary that the country's president had awarded him three years earlier in recognition of a lifetime of historical scholarship. For more than five decades, Braham had studied the Holocaust in Hungary, which he declared one of the most perplexing chapters in the history of the Holocaust.I As of March 1944, some 750,000 Jews still lived in Hungary. By July, 440,000 had been deported to Auschwitz. At war's end, the number of Jewish Hungarian dead approached 570,000. How had so large a community been destroyed so quickly and so close to the end of the war, when German defeat was already clear, when so much was known about the Nazi genocide, and when the Allies, neutrals, the Vatican, and the International Red Cross were all making plans for the postwar world? Hungary's award honored the work that Braham had done to answer these difficult questions. But the gesture soon seemed to ring hollow: in the scathing open letter that Braham wrote when returning his award, he declared that Hungary's subsequent history-cleansing campaign had left him stunned. As a survivor whose parents and many family members were among the hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews, he could not remain silent.2 Randolph Braham had never been silent. He began his path-breaking work to document the genocide of Hungary's Jews at a time when Hungary's Communist government suppressed nearly all mention of it.3 Braham continued this work after the Communist regime vanished in 1989. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as political power in Hungary oscillated between Left and Right, he organized symposia on both sides of the Atlantic to present the latest historical findings of younger scholars.4 And he followed the politics of historical memory in Hungary with a keen and skeptical eye, writing frequent and trenchant critiques of the versions of history that Hungary's post-Communist nationalists promoted during ceremonial commemorations of newly rehabilitated historical figures, at museums like the House of Terror (opened in 2002), and in school textbooks designed to teach the next generation of Hungarians about their past.5 doi:10.1093/hgs/dcaa002 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 34, no. 1 (2020): 1-17 1

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most