eightieth Day of Remembrance for the Expulsion of the Hungarian Germans | EUROtoday

As of: January 19, 2026 6:24 p.m

Federal President Steinmeier and Hungarian President Sulyok collectively commemorated the kidnapping of tens of hundreds of Hungarian-Germans 80 years in the past. Many of them needed to do compelled labor within the Soviet Union.

In the autumn and winter of 1944/45, when the armies of Hitler and his allies within the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Red Army superior on a number of axes in direction of Eastern and Central Europe. The Battle of Budapest was significantly fierce. The Hungarian capital was surrounded for six weeks.

One of the final modern witnesses from that point, Michael Kretz, tells in a number of interviews how he skilled Budapest’s give up in February 1945: “They took us to Ercsi, a small town a few kilometers south of Budapest. There were around 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners who were led to a farm.”

Brutal actions by Soviet troopers

Michael Kretz is Hungarian-German, a so-called Danube Swabian. He was born close to Budapest and was drafted into the Hungarian military on the age of 21 as a driver. He tells how brutally the troopers of the Soviet Union handled the Hungarian and German prisoners of battle after the conquest of Budapest.

“A soldier ordered: Jews here, workers there, sick people here. I had a swollen foot and thought I’d go to the sick. There were Russian doctors there who thoroughly examined all the sick people.” Whenever they found somebody who wasn’t sick, two Russians got here and beat them to loss of life with rods, Kretz says.

They would have overwhelmed her till there was no motion left. “I thought at the time: That’s it. When I was the last person standing in front of the doctor with my swollen foot, he said, fortunately: sick.”

Many died whereas attempting to flee

Michael Kretz says that he was held captive in a cellar with different prisoners. But after six days, he managed to sneak away at a second when the guards had been inattentive. It was a really delicate operation as a result of he noticed corpses in every single place within the streets, of people that had been shot whereas attempting to flee.

But Kretz managed to disguise himself as a sick civilian and reunite together with his household. They had been expelled and fled to Germany, the place they constructed a brand new life for themselves.

They had additionally managed to cover when Red Army troopers arrested younger men and women to ship them to labor camps within the Soviet Union. This was an order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, Joseph Stalin. He referred to as it “reparative work.”

According to Soviet sources, round 30,000 Hungarian Germans had been deported to the Soviet Union as compelled laborers. According to Hungarian sources there might have been as much as 60,000.

Some of the survivors emigrated to southern Germany

The Hungarian historian from the University of Pecs, Beata Markus, has researched this subject and can speak in regards to the atrocities that folks skilled after the Second World War in a lecture. “They were driven in closed cattle trucks to the Soviet Union, to the coal basins of the Donetsk region, to the Caucasus and to the Ural region.”

On the journey, which lasted a number of weeks, many individuals died as a result of it was too chilly within the wagons and so they had too few provides. It is estimated that round a 3rd of the folks within the labor camps died, together with from sickness and malnutrition. “They had to do hard work, in coal mines and in construction,” says Markus.

Those who survived had been normally launched after three to 5 years. Most Hungarian Germans emigrated to Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Austria.