First the Jews, then the Germans Were Deported

The first German settlers arrived to Budakeszi in the mid-17th century: the presence of this
German population defined the history and characteristics of the town for the next three
hundred years. Between the two world wars, Budakeszi was a blooming town, influenced by
tourism and the proximity of the capital. According to the 1941 census, the mother tongue of
two-thirds of its 7300 inhabitants was German. Besides, Budakeszi was also home to 82 Jews.
However, the war and the following years brought about fundamental changes in the ethnic
composition of the town.

Jewish life in Budakeszi before 1944

Life became ever harder for Hungarian Jews from the end of the 1930s, when the first anti-
Jewish laws were introduced: their participation in the so-called free professions was restricted,
at the same time they were disenfranchised. These laws marked the beginning of intensifying
persecution: the ancestry of Jews was controlled and those, whose parents were not Hungarian
citizens or they simply could not prove that, faced the risk of deportation or expulsion. This
was the fate of Mrs. Erik Hartung, an inhabitant of Budakeszi, who, according to an official
letter dated to 16 April 1940, was born in Budapest in 1902, “German citizen of the Israelite
faith”. She applied for residence permit, instead she was expelled by the district leader, together
with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Judit.
The local administration of Budakeszi frequently received the texts of anti-Jewish decrees
from ministries: Jewish merchants were forbidden to enter local markets, communal buildings
rented by Jews had to be emptied, the right of Jews to participate in the town council was
abolished. Providing Jews with trade permissions could be denied based on one sentence in a
decree: “even if legal conditions are verified, it can be denied if handing out the trade
permission is not desirable for common interest under such extraordinary economic
circumstances.” The exact same sentence can be found in the justification of the district leader,
when he denied to give a trade permission to János Schwartzinger, a tinsmith from Budakeszi.
Thus, the decrees not only gave the possibility to anti-Semitic civil servants to act against Jews
on a local level, but they even provided them with phrases to be copied and used in legal
decisions.

The “Final Solution” in Budakeszi

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, according to an official report, 40
Jews lived in Budakeszi – by this time most able-bodied Jewish men had been conscripted into
forced military labor service. Anti-Jewish measures were enacted almost on a daily basis. The
food rations of Jews were cut, Jews and “communist suspicious elements” were not allowed to
use their radios and phones. Jews were segregated from society: first by being marked with a
yellow star, then physically, by being separated in ghettos.
Jews were also systematically deprived of their possessions, which process started with the
obligation to declare all of their properties, then the authorities closed off their houses after the
ghettoization. Movables were re-distributed to non-Jews, who also had the possibility to claim
Jewish houses – thus they were also involved in the institutionalized robbery. Manó Braun had
a weekend house in Budakeszi, which was claimed by Frigyes Wallrabenstein, a teacher from
the town. Wallrabenstein wrote a letter to the district leader, who then confiscated and gave the
house to him. Manó Braun was obliged to hand over the house in appropriate conditions for
moving in. The justification section of the official decision mentions that Wallrabenstein could
not develop his special education institution, only in case he acquired the empty house next to
his own. “His request was all the more to be granted, as Manó Braun Jew has a house in
Budapest and he has no need to maintain empty houses in multiple places of the country,”
added the district leader.
Such was the fate of every Jewish property, except for the 50 kg bags that Jews were allowed
to take into the ghettos. The Jews of Budakeszi were collected and brought to the Budakalász
transit camp, from where they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Afterwards, a rush for
Jewish goods started. The terminology of official documents suggests that the administration
did its best to ease the conscience of non-Jewish claimants: “collecting and selling properties
abandoned by Jews or which had gotten out of the keeping of Jews,” “declaring houses
abandoned by the Jews”. In the documents Jews were often labeled as “absent” – as indeed
they were, having been deported.

Collective punishment: the “re-location” of Germans

After the war, the Provisional National Government introduced a decree concerning the re-
location of Germans from Hungary. According to the decree, everyone was to be evacuated,
who declared to be German or had German mother tongue at the 1941 census, and who had
been members of the Volksbund or the SS. The procedure was conducted by the Interior
Minister, but the lists of Germans to be re-located were compiled by the municipalities. In
Budakeszi, the list contained 3489 persons – however, among them many had never been
members of the above-mentioned organizations, and some were forcibly recruited into the SS.
In preparation for the re-location, restrictive measures were introduced: all properties of the
Germans were declared “national wealth” and were impounded. Germans were not allowed to
sell anything from December 1945, which they tried to bypass by giving their properties for
safekeeping to friends or family members. However, such actions were also sanctioned, when
a curfew and prohibition on assembly were ordered. Moreover, visitors were not allowed to
take away anything from the town. In the beginning of 1946, the associations of Germans were
dissolved, they were not allowed to Magyarize their surnames – only if the applicant’s
“political reliability” was proven. Germans were forbidden to participate in the election
committees, as “from their side we cannot assume the objectivity, which […] those taking part
must have.”

Deportations in 1946
József de Ponte and his family were of German origins, living in Budakeszi. According to a
protocol written in May 1945, de Ponte’s wife admitted to have enrolled their fourteen-year-
old son, Imre in the Volksbund school in 1942, as “at that time there was no Hungarian school
[…] however, I explicitly deny to have been a regular or sponsoring member of the
Volksbund.” In June, József de Ponte wrote a letter to the local council, in which he pleaded
for the deferral of his eviction and the conduction of investigations in his case. “The house and
its accessories are the possessions of my 70-year-old father, who has never been neither a
fascist, an Arrow Cross member, nor a Volksbundist, just like me and my wife,” he wrote.
József de Ponte was a prominent inhabitant of Budakeszi: his propagation of Hungarian
culture was famous on a national level. He organized passion-plays and stage-plays for which
he painted the sceneries with Hungarian motifs: “These works, above all, prove my burning
Hungarian patriotism, my being a socialist and my decade-long altruistic work for Hungarian
culture,” he wrote in his letter. Attached to it, is the confirmation of the local group of the social
democratic party, proving that de Ponte’s “political behavior has always been Hungarian and
democratic.”
A month later, the party wrote a petition to the főispán, the administrative leader of the
county, asking him to review the cases of certain inhabitants of Budakeszi – among them de
Ponte’s. The főispán wrote to the notary of the district, asking for a report on the case, who, in
turn, forwarded the request to the municipality leadership. The answer cannot be found among
the archival documents, only the note of the local notary: “said people had been re-located to
Germany, 18 April 1946.”
By the summer of 1946, almost 3500 Germans had been deported from Budakeszi. In their
places, Hungarian families from Transylvania and the Subcarpathian were settled. In the case
of the re-location, official documents used similar euphemisms as in the case of the deportation
of the Jews: real estates were referred to as “abandoned,” in many cases the forced re-location
was labelled as voluntary, the deportation as “settling elsewhere.” Furthermore, to the
indignation of Holocaust survivors, the leftover properties of both Jews and Germans were
handled by the same institution: the Government Commission for Abandoned Property. The
attempts of Germans to return to Hungary were prohibited by a decree, which stated that re-
located people lost their citizenship and they were to be treated as foreigners.

Conclusion
Budakeszi lost a big chunk of its population during and after the war – many locals and the
new settlers profited both from the Holocaust and the re-location of the German population, as
real estates, lands and movables were re-distributed among them in both cases. What happened
on a micro-level, also happened on a national level: altogether 440 thousand Jews and 200
thousand Germans were deported from Hungary. Even though on the short term this brought
about economic benefits, on the long-term Hungary lost almost its entire middle class.
Confiscations, deprivation of rights and deportations were the means of collective punishment,
however, the motives and the outcome were different for the two groups: Jews were persecuted
merely for being Jewish, the German population as retribution for war crimes. And while 80
per cent of the deported Hungarian Jews died during the Holocaust, the re-located Germans re-
started their lives in German territory.

Sources
Bank, Barbara – Sándor Őze: A “német ügy” 1945-1953 [The “German case” 1945-1953],
2005.
Marchut, Réka: Töréspontok. A Budapest környéki németség második világháborút követő
felelősségre vonása és annak előzményei [Breakpoints. The impeachment of Germans around
Budapest after the 2nd World War and its antecedents], 2014.
Pest County Archives, V.1016 Cb-Db Budakeszi municipality documents.
Swanson, John C.: Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century
Hungary, 2017.