Hromadné deportácie civilného obyvateľstva z Maďarska v rokoch 1944-1945
Abduction of Civilian Population from Hungary in the years 1944-1945

Author(s): Béni L. Balogh
Subject(s): WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989)
Published by: Fórum Kisebbségkutató Intézet
Keywords: history of Hungary;málenkij robot;forced labour;Soviet Union;
Summary/Abstract: In the late 1944 and the beginning of 1945, a mass abduction of innocent civilian population was committed by the Soviet troops entering Hungary. These unsuspecting people were transported to the Soviet Union as prisoners of war or internees. Although we do not have exact data on their number, historians' estimates put the number of abducted civilians between 100-110 thousand and 170-180 thousand. In the background of abductions there was mainly the extreme labour shortage in the Soviet Union, but there were another three reasons, or rather justifications: supplementation of the number of prisoners of war, intention of ethnic cleansing (on territories outside the Trianon borders, so first of all in Transcarpathia), and the German minority. Until the second half of the 1980s, it was even prohibited to implicitly refer to atrocities committed by the Red Army. After the regime change, a systemic exploration of sources had begun in the Hungarian archives, and ever since more and more local history books, monographs and documents collections are published on the issue.

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