Arrow Cross Party

The country has fought alongside Nazi Germany for much of the conflict.

In March 1944 German forces occupied Hungary and later that year the fascist Arrow Cross movement seized power.

Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported and murdered.

Budapest became a battlefield.

He describes himself as Stalin's best Hungarian disciple and this is not false modesty.

The political police, eventually known as the AVH, the State Protection Authority, operates through surveillance, intimidation and arbitrary arrest and torture.

Its headquarters at 60 Andrasi Avenue in Budapest had previously been used by the Arrow Cross.

Under communist rule, the building continues to be associated with interrogation, imprisonment and fear.

They never withdrew all their forces.

They maintained a few divisions of, uh, around Buda- They withdrew from Budapest, so you couldn't see a Russian soldier just around the corner after, uh, they liberated Hungary, I think it was in March when the final li- liberation was, uh, the Arrow Cross and the Nazis who were left there, uh, unconditionally surrendered because they knew that they were, they were gonna be dead if they don't.

So that's what happened.

Hungary was liberated in the spring of 1945.

So Sabo is born in 1938 in Budapest and he comes from a family of doctors who of Jewish doctors who had converted to Catholicism.

And then during the war, their conversion to Catholicism doesn't really help them in the eyes of the Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross Party.

And Szabo spends the latter period of the war in hiding.

And his father dies of diphtheria shortly after the war ends.

Look it up.

Arrow Party.

I think it's the Arrow Party.

Oh, cool.

And then, um, and then, yeah, this museum's depressing.

Like, independent state Croatia was really the only instance of that.

I know some people watching this are going to say, like, well, what about the Arrow Cross in Hungary? Okay, that was...

the war was...

I mean, this was the final months of the war.

But that was the phase one of the Hungarian Holocaust.

Then the phase two started when Hitler decided to change the government of Hungary and put in a puppet government that was called the Arrow Cross government.

Literally, that was their symbol, too.

Very close to, uh...

I have a slide that, one slide that says the, uh, swastika on one side and the Arrow Cross, and they look very much the similar color red.

And it just symbolically told you that this was, the Arrow Cross was a virulently anti-Semitic party, and now they were charged to finish the job of the Budapest Jews.

And that's when the major event happened in my early life because all was left was all the Jews in Budapest, and the first thing they did was that on October, and it's exactly the date was October 10, when one night...

Oh, w- uh, before that, bombing of Budapest started by the Allies in June.

By the time of this operation, Hungary had suffered devastating losses during the war.

Almost 200,000 people were killed during altercations with the Red Army over the years, and during the siege of Budapest, a further 38,000 civilians died, mostly as a result of starvation and mass executions of Jewish citizens by the far-right nationalists of the Arrow Cross Party.

Budapest's eventual surrender on February 13, 1945, was considered a huge win for the Allies.

The last major offensive by the Germans during the war was Operation Spring Awakening, which began on March 6th and aimed to protect and secure several important oil reserves, as well as to stop the Red Army from moving on Vienna.