Yet until 1944, Jews were not murdered in their masses,
and for tens of thousands of Jewish refugees,
from Poland and Slovakia, Hungary was a true harbour.
This changed dramatically, on March 19, 1944,
with the German occupation of Hungary,
following Horthy's hesitation to continue supporting Hitler
in light of allied victories.
In less than a month, by April 14, 1944,
the experienced SS Officer, Adolf Eichmann,
started organising the deportation of Hungarian Jewry,
and roundups, arrests, and concentration of the Jews,
throughout the country, started.
Having limited manpower, Eichmann
relied on the full cooperation of the Hungarian bureaucracy.
Between May 15, and July 8, 1944,
about 430,000 of Hungarian Jews, mainly
from countryside and the annexed territories,
were deported from hundreds of transit camps and ghettos
to Auschwitz.
And even this most modern and efficient death factory,
couldn't keep up with the intensive pace of deportations
pouring in from Hungary.
In October, 1944, Horthy was deposed by Nazi Germany,
for intending to leave the axis powers and join the Allies,
and Ferenc Szalasi, the Nationalist and gracious leader
of the vicious anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party,
became Hungary's ruler.
In the next few weeks, about 100,000 Budapest Jews
were constrained in the ghetto.
Tens of thousands sent to concentration and labour camps.
And thousands of Jewish men, women, and children
were murdered in the streets of Budapest,
or thrown and drowned in the Danube.
Well over half a million Hungarian Jews
were murdered by the end of 1944 by Nazi Germany,
with extensive collaboration and assistance
of the Hungarian regime, and its forces.
And actually, in other spheres of Nazi German influence,
the advancing allied forces only caused the Nazi murderer effort
to be more intensified.
In July 1944, Kovna and Shavli remnant ghettos were destroyed.
In July and August, the remaining 70,000 Lodz ghetto
Jews were sent to Chelmno and or Auschwitz.
And on August 16, 1944, about 2,000 Jews
were brought to Auschwitz from the Greek Islands.
The boat, which assembled the Jews, of Rhodes and Kos,
stopped on the way at the tiny island of Leros,
and picked up Daniel Rahamim, the only Jew who lived there.
With the decline of the Third Reich,
Nazi Germany's desire to murder all European Jews only
intensified, and became, for many, the most important front,
which could still be marked as was victory.
At the same time, Nazi Germany did
much to destroy evidence of its crimes.
Since the end of 1943, and especially
after the Jewish uprising in Treblinka and Sobibor
extermination camps, Sonderaktion, Special Action
1005 established for this purpose,
was enacted and formed in Reinhard operation camps,
as well as in numerous killing sites all over Eastern Europe.
Jewish prisoners were forced to open mass graves,
burn what was left of buried bodies,
and to crush the remaining bones in order
to leave no signs of the atrocities.
This was an expression of Nazi Germany's tension
between the pride of murdering the Jewish people,
and thus solving the Jewish question,
and the desire to hide it, since even Germans understood
that mass murder of millions of innocents
could not serve as a source of pride.
An example for this two-faced position,
can be taken from Himmler's famous speech
before senior SS officers in Poznan on October
the 4th, 1943.
"I also want to speak to you here,
in complete frankness, of a really grave chapter.
Amongst ourselves, for once, it shall be said quite openly,
but all the same we will never speak about it in public.
I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews,
the extermination of the Jewish people.
This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page
of glory in our history."
Yet as the secret reports on German popular opinion,
analysed in the first part of our course,
reveal this despicable page of glory was very much known
in Germany.
Moreover, David Bankier has shown that the prevailing
knowledge was actually a clear policy, and interest,
of the Nazi regime.
As the war was turning on Germany,
its leaders made it clear that all bridges to humanity
were burned by Germany's genocidal acts.
And that none of the Germans will be spared by the Allies,
especially by the powerful and merciless Red Army.
This too contributed to the murderous acts
of the final stage of the war, as well as the deadly results
of the Death Marches, Todesmarsche,
Nazi Germany's effort to evacuate concentration camp
prisoners into the shrinking greater Reich.
This deadly evacuation effort, which was ill-planned,
had apparently two main motivations:
the removal of human evidence of atrocities carried out
in the camps, and keeping the forced labour,
which some devoted Nazis still thought,
against all odds and against all German generals' evaluations,
could serve the not yet defeated Nazi Germany.
As Daniel Blatman showed in his detailed research, The Death
Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide,
this became one of the signs of the end
of the war and its chaos.
About 300,000 of the 700,000 prisoners
held in Nazi camps in January 1945, the height of the winter,
died while being marched by foot or transferred
in open and closed cattle cars hundreds of kilometres.
Some froze to death and some were
shot by the retreating guards.
Many starved to death in their new destinations,
which were not equipped at all to receive them.
Others were murdered by local German and Austrian populations
whose villages became routes for the evacuated inmates.
Not all prisoners in the Death Marches were Jews.
Yet, as in other occasions, Jews were preferred victims.
Above their preliminary dire physical and psychological
condition, many times they were more easily beaten to death,
shot, or drowned.
And allowing their liberation was just not
grasped as possible for their guards
or for the population within they were marched.
Nazi Germany's drive to murder all the Jews had no limits,
and continued even when the liberating armies
were within reach.
Four weeks prior to the liberation
of France, 300 Jewish children and their staff
were sent to Auschwitz.
The last deportation from the Netherlands left to the East
on September the 3rd, 1944, with more than 1,000 Jews.
And some of the most deadly death marches
were still on the move in May 1945,
days before the Second World War in Europe ended.