Hitler met the Hungarian dictator, Admiral Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943 with the aim of demanding the deportation of the Jews in Hungary. The minutes of the meeting were taken by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, who was chief interpreter for the German government and had been since before the Nazi seizure of power.
The meeting took place at Schloss Klessheim, around 4km to the west of the centre of Salzburg in Austria, around 1km from the German border. This was a very convenient location for Hitler, being a short drive from his mountainside reside at Obersalzberg overlooking Berchtesgaden. He held a number of meetings at this location.
What is important about this meeting is that both Hitler and Rippentrop clearly state that Jews are being murdered.
There are at two photographs of the event that I am aware of, both were taken on 16 April 1943 and show the Nazi dictator greeting his Hungarian counterpart and another with the pair of them walking off somewhere, presumably to a meeting room.
Shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary had joined in. The country had already become bloated from recent territorial acquisitions at the cost of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, however by April 1943 the situation was looking much worse. The Hungarian Second Army, the best equipped part of the armed forces, had suffered a casualty rate of around 84 percent in the wake of the battle of Stalingrad which meant the loss of well over 100,000 men.
There were around 825,000 Jewish people living in Hungary at the time. Around twelve percent were of Christian religion but Jewish by the terms of the Nuremburg Laws. Around one quarter of a million lived in Budapest and one third of a million in the newly occupied territories.
One could argue that the writing was on the wall for the Axis. The front had stabilised in the USSR by April 1943 but it must have been clear that North Africa was about to be lost. With that in mind, the Nazis wanted tougher action against the Jewish population of Hungary and Joachim Rippentrop demanded as much on the first day of the meeting. Horthy asked what he was supposed to do with the Hungarian Jews, after all, he had taken just about all means of earning a living from them and surely couldn't kill them. Hitler reassured him: "There is no need for that." Hungary could accommodate the Jews in concentration camps just like Slovakia did.
The following day, Horthy, brought the subject up again, trying to get a clear answer of what was expected of him. Once more he asked if they seriously wanted him to kill the Jewish population. To a straight question, he got a straight answer. The Reich Foreign Minister replied that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.
Hitler added to this. He said that where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn't want to work, they were shot. If they couldn't work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.
Horthy did not hand over the Hungarian Jews to the Nazis. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944 and deported the bulk of the Jewish population mainly to Auschwitz where around one half of the Jewish population of that country was murdered in the late spring and early summer of 1944.
Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, who took the minutes confirmed them at the Nuremberg trial.
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18 апр 2020
