A „málenkij robot” budapesti áldozatai 1944–1945. Egy forráscsoport elemzésének tanulságai
The Victims of Russian Forced Labour (“malenkij robot”) from Budapest 1944–1945. The Lessons of the Analysis of a Group of Sources

Summary/Abstract: The primary source material of the present study is the collection of the Department of Prisoners of War in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The bulk of this immense collection is constituted by those questionaries which were filled and sent to the Ministry by the relatives in the hope of advancing the return of the family member who had been taken to the Soviet Union. The gathering of civilians had begun already during the siege at Budapest. Alongside taking away people from shelters and flats, the obligatory registration of all those liable to work was ordered as well. The majority of civilians collected under the pretext of trenching and public work also ended up as prisoners of war. Deportations did not cease together with fighting; quite to the contrary, they gained new momentum. The ad hoc raids which characterised the period of the siege gave way to premeditated, systematic deportations. After the ending of fight the main scene of deportation became the street. The research sheets attest that the mass taking of civilians only ceased at the end of April in 1945. Within the research into the history of deportations the greatest challenge is to establish the exact number of civilian prisoners. The reports of the Soviet Information Office issued in February 1945 maintain that altogether some 123 000 „soldiers” were made prisoners of war during the fight at Budapest. The announcements about the huge numbers of prisoners symbolised the greatness of the victory, but at the same time denounced the activities of the Soviet deportation-troops, for the overall number of German and Hungarian armed forces under siege was much smaller. The accuracy of the figure which is given by the victory report can be doubted, however. What can be said with any certainty is that several tens of thousand civilians were taken away from the Hungarian capital and its immediate environs. The Soviet general who directed the siege of Budapest justified the delay in taking the city with the great number of the defenders, but surely without reason. Yet it was this exaggerated number to which the number of prisoners of war had to be suited, an aim that could not be attained without the capturing of civilians. The gathering of an important part of the civilian population may have been motivated by considerations of security as well. As elsewhere, Soviet military leadership counted with the possibility of partisan warfare beyond the front. These were not, however, the main reasons of the deportations. Prisoners, whether soldiers or civilians, were in fact needed for the reconstruction of the Soviet Union. Soviet leadership had aimed from the start of the war at creating a huge army of forced labourers from captivated soldiers and the civilian population of the territories conquered. It was to this campaign of taking prisoners that the civilians at Budapest fell victim.

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