The whole operation in Hungary lasted less than two months and came to a sudden stop at the beginning of July. Thanks chiefly to the Zionists, it had been better publicized than any other phase of the Jewish catastrophe, and Horthy had been deluged with protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. The Papal Nuncio, though, deemed it appropriate to explain that the Vatican's protest did not spring “from a false sense of compassion”—a phrase that is likely to be a lasting monument to what the continued dealings with, and the desire to compromise with, the men who preached the gospel of “ruthless toughness” had done to the mentality of the highest dignitaries of the Church. Sweden once more led the way with regard to practical measures, by distributing entry permits, and Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal followed her example, so that finally about thirty-three thousand Jews were living in special houses in Budapest under the protection of neutral countries. The Allies had received and made public a list of seventy men whom they knew to be the chief culprits, and Roosevelt had sent an ultimatum threatening that “Hungary's fate will not be like any other civilized nation… unless the deportations are stopped.” The point was driven home by an unusually heavy air raid on Budapest on July 2. Thus pressed from all sides, Horthy gave the order to stop the deportations, and one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Eichmann was the rather obvious fact that he had not obeyed “the old fool's” order but, in mid-July, deported another fifteen hundred Jews who were at hand in a concentration camp near Budapest. To prevent the Jewish officials from informing Horthy, he assembled the members of the two representative bodies in his office, where Dr. Hunsche detained them, on various pretexts, until he learned that the train had left Hungarian territory. Eichmann remembered nothing of this episode, in Jerusalem, and although the judges were “convinced that the accused remembers his victory over Horthy very well,” this is doubtful, since to Eichmann Horthy was not such a great personage.
This seems to have been the last train that left Hungary for Auschwitz. In August, 1944, the Red Army was in Rumania, and Eichmann was sent there on his wild-goose chase. When he came back, the Horthy regime had gathered sufficient courage to demand the withdrawal of the Eichmann commando, and Eichmann himself asked Berlin to let him and his men return, since they “had become superfluous.” But Berlin did nothing of the sort, and was proved right, for in mid-October the situation once more changed abruptly. With the Russians no more than a hundred miles from Budapest, the Nazis succeeded in overthrowing the Horthy government and in appointing the leader of the Arrow Cross men, Ferenc Szalasi, head of state. No more transports could be sent to Auschwitz, since the extermination facilities were about to be dismantled, while at the same time the German shortage of labor had grown even more desperate. Now it was Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, who negotiated with the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior for permission to ship fifty thousand Jews—men between sixteen and sixty, and women under forty—to the Reich; he added in his report that Eichmann hoped to send fifty thousand more. Since railroad facilities no longer existed, this led to the foot marches of November, 1944, which were stopped only by an order from Himmler. The Jews who were sent on the marches had been arrested at random by the Hungarian police, regardless of exemptions, to which by now many were entitled, regardless also of the age limits specified in the original directives. The marchers were escorted by Arrow Cross men, who robbed them and treated them with the utmost brutality. And that was the end. Of an original Jewish population of eight hundred thousand, some hundred and sixty thousand must still have remained in the Budapest ghetto—the countryside was judenrein—and of these tens of thousands became victims of spontaneous pogroms. On February 13, 1945, the country surrendered to the Red Army.
The chief Hungarian culprits in the massacre were all put on trial, condemned to death, and executed. None of the German initiators, except Eichmann, paid with more than a few years in prison.
SLOVAKIA, like Croatia, was an invention of the German Foreign Office. The Slovaks had come to Berlin to negotiate their “independence” even before the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, in March, 1939, and at that time they had promised Goring that they would follow Germany faithfully in their handling of the Jewish question. But this had been in the winter of 1938–39, when no one had yet heard of such a thing as the Final Solution. The tiny country, with a poor peasant population of about two and a half million and with ninety thousand Jews, was primitive, backward, and deeply Catholic. It was ruled at the time by a Catholic priest, Father Josef Tiso. Even its Fascist movement, the Hlinka Guard, was Catholic in outlook, and the vehement anti-Semitism of these clerical Fascists or Fascist clerics differed in both style and content from the ultramodern racism of their German masters. There was only one modern anti-Semite in the Slovak government, and that was Eichmann's good friend Sano Mach, Minister of the Interior. All the others were Christians, or thought they were, whereas the Nazis were in principle, of course, as anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish. The Slovaks' being Christians meant not only that they felt obliged to emphasize what the Nazis considered an “obsolete” distinction between baptized and nonbaptized Jews, but also that they thought of the whole issue in medieval terms. For them a “solution” consisted in expelling the Jews and inheriting their property but not in systematic “exterminating,” although they did not mind occasional killing. The greatest “sin” of the Jews was not that they belonged to an alien “race” but that they were rich. The Jews in Slovakia were not very rich by Western standards, but when fifty-two thousand of them had to declare their possessions because they owned more than two hundred dollars' worth, and it turned out that their total property amounted to a hundred million dollars, every single one of them must have looked to the Slovaks like an incarnation of Croesus.
During their first year and a half of “independence,” the Slo-aks were busy trying to solve the Jewish question according to their own lights. They transferred the larger Jewish enterprises to non-Jews, enacted some anti-Jewish legislation, which, according to the Germans, had the “basic defect” of exempting baptized Jews who had been converted prior to 1918, planned to set up ghettos “following the example of the General Government,” and mobilized Jews for forced labor. Very early, in September, 1940, they had been given a Jewish adviser; Haupt-sturmfiihrer Dieter Wisliceny, once Eichmann's greatly admired superior and friend in the Security Service (his eldest son was named Dieter) and now his equal in rank, was attached to the German legation in Bratislava. Wisliceny did not marry and, therefore, could not be promoted further, so a year later he was outranked by Eichmann and became his subordinate. Eichmann thought that this must have rankled with him, and that it helped explain why he had given such damning evidence against him as witness in the Nuremberg Trials, and had even offered to find out his hiding place. But this is doubtful. Wisliceny probably was interested only in saving his own skin, he was utterly unlike Eichmann. He belonged to the educated stratum of the S.S., lived among books and records, had himself addressed as “Baron” by the Jews in Hungary, and, generally, was much more concerned with money than worried about his career; consequently, he was one of the very first in the S.S. to develop “moderate” tendencies.