M. Kir. Belügyminiszter. 577.600/1944. II. B. M. szám. Mentesitö okiratok megerösitése, illetöleg új mentesitések engedélyezése (Royal Hungarian Ministry of Interior. 577.600/1944. Number II. B. M. Confirmation of the Documents of Exemption, and Granting New Exemptions) [SIGNED BY VAJNA GABOR, WITH ORIGINAL SEAL OF THE ROYAL HUNGARIAN MINISTRY OF INTERIOR]

Budapest: Royal Hungarian Ministry of Interior, 1944. First edition. Paperback. g+. Quarto. 14, [2]pp. On October 15, 1944, the Fascist and anti-Semite Nyilas (Arrow Cross) took power in Hungary, with the 'Nation Leader' Ferenc Szálasi as Prime Minister, and Gábor Vajna as Interior Minister. One of their first acts was to reconsider the list of the Jewish people who were exempted by the previous governments from the enacted laws against the Jews (Jews married to non-Jews, or on whom higher military distinctions were conferred in the World War). This signed printed document is thus a new revised (and dramatically downsized) list of less than 600 Jews exempted from the Hungarian anti-Jewish laws. Its last page bears the original signature in ink of Interior Minister Gábor Vajna*, and the stamped seal of his ministry.

Until the spring of 1944 the position of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews can be described as relatively safe - this despite the fact that the Jewish Laws made their lives difficult. Jewish men were forced to serve as laborers in the armed forces and work camps. Thousands of these men died on the Russian front. More than 18,000 Jews, qualified as aliens were deported to Kamenets-Podolsky in the Ukraine, in the summer of 1941, where they were massacred by the German SS, Hungarian soldiers, and Ukrainian militia. From 1939 to 1944, approximately 15-20,000 Jews from abroad found refuge in Hungary. During 1942 and 1943, a number of Polish and Slovak refugees later attested to the nearly undisturbed life of the Jews in Hungary. In March 1944, Hungary had the largest surviving Jewish community, around 800,000 people including converts. This was then the largest grouping of Jews anywhere in German-controlled Europe. In March 19, 1944, the German army occupied Hungary and Horthy was forced to appoint a pro-German government. There was no resistance. Soon Adolf Eichmann appeared with his small team to organize the deportation of all Hungarian Jews to death camps. The Hungarian genocide began in the spring of 1944. Within less than two months - May 15 and July 10, 1944, 437,402 persons (almost the entire Jewish population of the countryside), were locked up in ghettoes and deported mainly to the Auschwitz extermination camp with the collaboration of part of the Hungarian state apparatus, the gendarmerie and the police. Horthy and the people looked on passively. The Pope addressed a personal plea to Horthy on June 25, 1944, which was followed by the warnings of President Roosevelt on June 26, and that of King Gustav of Sweden on June 30. Horthy prohibited further deportations. On October 15, the fate of the Budapest Jews took a dramatic turn for the worse. After Horthy´s unsuccessful attempt to extricate Hungary from the war, the Germans activated the Arrow-Cross Party of Ferenc Szálasi, which immediately initiated an unprecedented reign of anti-Jewish terror. Eichmann, who had been obliged to leave Hungary on August 24 (after succeeding in deporting the inmates of the Kistarcsa and Sárvár camps, against Horthy´s orders), returned to Budapest on October 17 to proceed to the deportation of the capital´s Jews. As a preliminary step in the deportations, a few days after the Arrow Cross putsch, the Jewish male population aged 16 to 60 was ordered to work on fortifications around the capital. At the end of October and the first half of November, some 50,000 Jews, men and women, were driven toward the Austrian border to work on fortifications. A high percentage of persons on this ˝death march˝ perished on the way due to hardship and brutal treatment. Members of the neutral diplomatic corps in Hungary tried to put pressure on the Szálasi-government. The luckier Jews, in possession of genuine or forged safe-conduct passes, were placed into the so-called international ghetto, while the others were forced into the proper ghetto. From the Arrow-Cross seizure of power until the liberation of the Pest ghetto, about 98,000 of the capital´s Jews lost their lives in further marches and in train transports, as well as through Arrow-Cross extermination squads, starvation, disease, and cases of suicide. Some of the victims were shot and thrown into the Danube. Tens of thousands of the persecuted were helped by the capital´s citizens and the Christian Churches. Soviet troops liberated the big Budapest ghetto on January 18, 1945. On the Buda side of the town, the encircled Nyilas continued their murders until the Soviets took Buda on February 13.

Moderate and sporadic creasing along edges of pages. Upper corner of pages creased. Folding marks at center. Text in Hungarian. Document in overall good+ condition. *Gábor Vajna (1891 - 1946) was a Hungarian politician, who served as Interior Minister between 1944 and 1945. Vajna was a confidant of Prime Minister Ferenc Szálasi, the Hungarian fascist party leader and founder of the extreme right "Party of National Will", which later became the Arrow Cross Party. After the fall of Budapest, he was arrested and tried by the People's Tribunal in Budapest in open sessions and sentenced to death for war crimes and high treason. Vajna was hanged in 1946 in Budapest (on the same day as Ferenc Szálasi).