The Nazis' Last Victims

This work articulates and historically scrutinizes both the uniqueness and the universality of the Holocaust in Hungary, a topic often minimalized in general works on the Holocaust. The result of the 1994 conference at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the 50th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, this anthology examines the effects on Hungary as the last country to be invaded by the Germans. The Jewish community in Hungary remained relatively intact throughout most of the Holocaust period until just months before the end of World War II. "The Nazi's Last Victims" questions what Hungarians knew of their impending fate and examines the heightened sense of tension and haunting drama in Hungary, where the largest single killing process of the Holocaust period occurred in the shortest amount of time. The book covers the experience of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, rescuers, resisters and bystanders, as well as memorializers and historiographers of the Holocaust.
While providing a basic historical overview of the Holocaust, this collection applies to Hungary the general themes of Holocaust historiography, analyzing tradition, local collaboration, Jewish responses, ghettoization, deportations, the killing process and Allied responses. Reflecting scholarship from a number of different disciplines in Hungary, Israel and the United States, the contributors present a variety of - and often conflicting - analyses and insights, demonstrating an open and animated exchange of ideas. The contributors utilized archives from Hungary, Israel and Germany, and some, as survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary, have included their own personal testimony. Through the combination of two vital components of history writing - the analytical and the recollective - "The Nazi's Last Victims" probes the destruction of the last remnant of European Jewry in the Holocaust.