The Jews who dressed as Nazis to hunt them down

A freezing wind blew in from the icy Danube that last day of December 1944. The men in the uniforms of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi movement, waited patiently on Vadasz Street in the heart of downtown Budapest. The sight of their black jackets, trousers and red, white and black armband induced terror among Budapest’s surviving Jews. The Arrow Cross men were gathered outside a building known as the Glass House, a former factory.

It now housed thousands of Jews, desperately counting the days until the Russians arrived.

Budapest was surrounded, under siege and slowly dying as the Red Army advanced. The grand boulevards and tree-lined squares were a smoking hellscape, bombarded by artillery, pockmarked by machine-gun and mortar fire.

The fighting was savage as the Russians moved forward, street by street, building by building and room by room. Parts of the once glamorous, cosmopolitan capital now resembled Stalingrad. The war was all but over but still the Arrow Cross, consumed with a psychotic, sadistic hatred, continued their massacres. At least 100,000 Budapest Jews were still alive, corralled into two ghettos, freezing and starving, and others were hiding elsewhere in the city under false papers.

Jews being rounded up in BudapestBundesarchiv

Neutral diplomats including the Swede Raoul Wallenberg; the Swiss Carl Lutz; the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as the Spanish consul-general; and the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta all ran courageous rescue operations, saving tens of thousands. Lutz had placed the Glass House under Swiss protection.

But the power of the neutral powers was fading. Night after night the Arrow Cross marched groups of Jews to the Danube, stripped them of their coats and shoes – which they later sold in the market – and tied them up in groups of three, shooting one in the head. All three then toppled into the freezing waters to drown, although some managed to escape.

The Glass House was an affront to the Arrow Cross. They had raided it several times, but their aim was clear: empty it out for good and shoot all the Jews into the river. The small group of men in Arrow Cross uniforms waited until the main raiding party, ten strong, arrived. Two of the waiting men, called Tamas Vallo and Ernest Stein, stepped forward and saluted the new arrivals. The rest of their group stepped out of the shadows. Vallo and Stein quickly went into action. Stein grabbed one of the new arrivals by his throat and began to choke him. He passed out.

Stein kept squeezing until he was dead. Vallo too killed the Arrow Cross man nearest him. Their comrades attacked every one of the new arrivals. Within a few minutes all of the Arrow Cross raiding party were dead. They were killed by men they thought were fellow Hungarian Nazis. In fact they were Jews – Jews dressed in stolen Arrow Cross uniforms. Stein, Vallo and the others threw their bodies into waiting vehicles and they were driven away.

Hungarian Jews arriving in Auschwitz[Missing Credit]

Writing my wartime history, The Last Days of Budapest, I found many untold or barely known stories about the city. Who knew, for example, that Britain had a Legation in Budapest until April 1941 – even though Hungary joined the Axis with Germany, Japan and Italy in November 1940 – and that Owen O’Malley, the British minister, had worked with Princess Caja Odescalchi, a glamorous Hungarian aristocrat, to help organise the escape of tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and refugees, including many Jews? Or that Hungary had agreed to change sides in September 1943, finalising the terms on the British ambassador’s yacht moored off Istanbul? Tragically, Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s wartime leader, delayed the decision to desert the Nazis.

The courage of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943 has been rightly and thoroughly documented. But there was no spectacular uprising in Budapest. Instead hundreds of young Zionist resistance activists worked underground for months in conditions of extreme danger. Even now their achievements are still not widely or properly recognised.

Ernest Stein, who was 21 in 1944, lived near the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street. A student, he refused to wear a Yellow Star. After the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, at great risk, he surreptitiously took photographs of Jewish men being arrested. He met with the Jewish Council, the wartime Jewish leaders, and gave them the photographs.

They refused to circulate the images for fear of causing a panic. The role of the Hungarian Jewish Council, and its ready cooperation with the Nazi authorities, remains traumatic and deeply controversial. The Hungarian Holocaust was one of the fastest and most efficient. By the time the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944 the machinery of death was finely honed and engineered. Between mid-May and early July 1944, the Germans, working with the ready assistance of the Hungarian authorities, deported 440,000 Jews from outside Budapest to Auschwitz. Most were murdered on arrival. Tragically, the Jewish leaders repeatedly ordered their co-religionists to observe every new Nazi rule and restriction and to obediently follow orders. Most did.

Stein, however, refused to do as he was told. Rebels had a much higher chance of survival. Stein joined the Jewish resistance and lived illegally, moving between safe-houses and abandoned buildings. In his unpublished memoir, he wondered why so few followed his example.

During the war, before the Nazi invasion, Jewish men were drafted for army labour service, often on the eastern front. Many died in terrible conditions or were killed by their own officers. It would have been easy, he wrote, for the labour servicemen to overpower their guards.

“Some of the labour camps had thousands of these men and only a handful of guards… And yet none of the prisoners seized the guns of the guards to try to attack them and escape. Why were we not successful at doing that? How was it all possible?”

In the capital though, the Zionist movements did resist effectively. They operated on two levels. The Vaada, the Aid and Rescue Committee, dealt with officialdom, negotiating with the Nazis and the Hungarian authorities. The Vaada also ran smuggling and courier lines out of Hungary through the Balkans into Turkey and Palestine. Its leaders were Ottó Komoly, Joel and Hansi Brand, Rezső Kasztner and others. Working with the Red Cross and the youth movements, the Vaada helped save thousands of Jews in the terrible winter of 1944, by providing food, shelter and setting up a network of children’s homes. At the same time, the young members of the Zionist movements ran networks of safe houses, forged documents and also smuggled thousands of Jews out of Hungary.

All of the main Zionist youth movements were represented, from Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror on the left to Betar on the right and the religious Bnei Akiva. The often passionate debates about the future Jewish state were put aside. The priority now was much simpler: survival.

David Gur too sometimes wore an Arrow Cross uniform. Gur, born Endre Grósz, came from Okány in eastern Hungary. He arrived in Budapest in 1943 at the age of 17, joined Hashomer Hatzair and took a job as a trainee draughtsman. His penmanship and draughtman’s skills would soon help to save many lives. By autumn 1944 Gur was running the Zionists’ mobile document forgery workshop. It was extremely dangerous work. He and his comrades were frequently on the move, relocating across the city to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and their Hungarian accomplices. That November the Zionist youth movements decided to produce 120,000 fake safe Swiss passes – one for every Jew left alive in Budapest. It was a massive undertaking – and one opposed by the Jewish leadership who feared it would endanger those Jews with genuine Swiss passes.

The Zionists not only forged neutral safe-passes. They produced fake Arrow Cross documents, including “execution orders”. They then dressed up in Arrow Cross uniforms. They wore the uniforms when delivering food supplies and documents to Jewish families and children’s homes. Sometimes they went out on patrol looking for Arrow Cross gangs who were rounding up Jews. Posing as an Arrow Cross execution squad themselves, they then demanded that the Jews be handed over. That demanded enormous confidence and acting ability. The real Arrow Cross killers were often drawn from the poorest, criminal parts of society.

A street in Sopron, Hungary, with images of Jewish victims of HolocaustAlamy Stock Photo

The young Jews had to learn to speak their rough street dialect. When they rescued their fellow Jews – who had no idea the new arrivals were also Jewish and they were being saved – they had to abuse them and scream at them as they took them away.

Only when they were safely at a distance could they reveal to their captors that they too were Jews – and now they should run for their lives. On one such mission one of the Jewish young men in Arrow Cross uniform was recognised by someone from his home town who starting yelling that he was a Jew. A hostile crowd soon gathered, demanding that he be taken to a police station.

At that moment two more Arrow Cross militiamen appeared, jabbed the two fake Arrow Cross men in the back and marched them off down a side street. Once out of sight of the mob, all four embraced. The new Arrow Cross men were actually members of Habonim Dror.

Eventually, Gur’s luck ran out. On December 21, 1944, he and his comrades Miki Langer and Andrej Fabry were all arrested by the Arrow Cross. All three were taken to the Arrow Cross headquarters, together with their suitcases containing their documents and forgery equipment.

They managed to shred and eat their identity documents. The young men were then stripped to their underpants and savagely beaten with fists, clubs and chairs for hours. The following morning Langer died from the beating. Gur and Fabry, who was no longer able to stand as he was so severely concussed, were taken to Budapest’s military prison.

Gur was interrogated by one of the most notorious torturers, Lieutenant Balassa, who was also well informed about the Zionist youth movements. He asked Gur which one he belonged to. Hashomer Hatzair, replied Gur. Balassa smiled, and said he already had people from Dror and Maccabi Hatzair, so he was happy to welcome someone from Hashomer Hatzair.

Then a new nightmare began. Gur was forced into a chair. Electric clips were attached to his skin and the switch was thrown.

The pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced, a bolt of pure agony. His entire body shook.

He lost control of himself. Balassa was enjoying himself. Sometimes he switched the current on and off quickly. At other times he let it linger. Neither of them knew that outside the prison Gur’s comrades were planning a rescue operation, one of the most daring of the war. On December 27, Gur and the other Jewish prisoners were told to assemble in the courtyard and step out as their names were called. Gur then heard a name he knew very well: Tibor Rapos Farkas – his underground name. He stepped forward. Gur and 16 others were allowed to leave and made their way to a Swiss-protected building near the Glass House. The following day members of Dror and several communists were released. In total 117 prisoners were freed in a brave, audacious – and well-funded – operation.

The Budapest Zionists’ document workshop was one of the most successful rescue operations of the Holocaust. For months in the heart of a Nazi-occupied city, one later ruled by murderous street gangs, Gur and his fellow forgers produced documents that helped save thousands of lives. Gur and Fabry survived the war but numerous comrades lost their lives. When Fabry, born Endre Feigenbaum, arrived in Budapest in 1942 from Slovakia, he asked Samu Stern, the leader of Budapest Jewry, to help absorb the Jewish refugees from Slovakia and Poland.

Stern refused, saying he would do nothing to help endanger Hungarian Jewry. Stern later became the president of the wartime Jewish Council. Had he and his fellow Council members shown similar courage and steadfastness in the spring and summer of 1944 as the young Zionists, the history of the Hungarian Holocaust might have been very different.

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The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance 1940-1945 by Adam LeBor is published by Head of Zeus.

Adam LeBor will be discussing his book with Toby Lichtig at Jewish Book Week on March 9 at 8pm. The website machteret1944.org has extensive accounts and documentation of the wartime Budapest Zionist resistance