U.S. historian Randolph L. Braham wrote that on March 19, 1944, without any resistance, Germany occupied Hungary primarily based on military-strategic considerations. Braham wrote that, from May 15 through July 9, 1944, approximately 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, with more than 420,000 Jews sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He claimed that most of the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered upon arrival. British historian David Cesarani wrote that, in the unremittingly grim record of the Holocaust, no single chapter is quite so awful as the fate which befell Hungary’s Jewish population. This article documents that, contrary to the statements of most historians, the Hungarian Jews were not subject to a program of mass extermination at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
