Funding: Jürg Breuninger Doctoral Scholarship
The deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944 is often regarded as the »last chapter« of the Holocaust. Amid the approaching end of the war, and despite growing awareness of Nazi extermination policy, more than 400,000 Jews were deported within a few months, predominantly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were killed immediately upon arrival. The compressed timeframe and the relatively clear contours of the »Ungarn-Aktion« made it appear, in the 1960s, as a suitable subject for a broader complex of legal proceedings. At times, the possibility of a joint prosecution of the officials involved was considered.
The actual outcome fell far short of these expectations. While the two members of the »Sonderkommando Eichmann«, Hermann Krumey and Otto Hunsche, were only convicted after protracted trials, other key figures such as Kurt Becher, Himmlerʼs special representative in Hungary, and Otto Winkelmann, Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer in Hungary, remained unpunished and were able to reestablish themselves in the Federal Republic. Public attention was by no means absent: even in the 1980s, Becher’s Nazi past and his business activities in Bremen continued to provoke protests. Nevertheless, repeated investigations failed to result in any criminal consequences.
In contrast to the extensive research on the Holocaust in Hungary itself, its judicial aftermath in the Federal Republic remains only partially explored. A central concern of the project is to examine which forms of participation and responsibility in connection with the »Ungarn-Aktion« became visible within West German judiciary and which, by contrast, were marginalized. The project addresses not only the legal and institutional limits of criminal prosecution, but also their relationship to the knowledge about the »Ungarn-Aktion« that circulated in parallel: testimonies of survivors, journalistic investigations from both East and West, and the public debates surrounding the accused that unfolded over decades.
