Hungarian Guards of a Concentration Camp: Interactions and Atrocities in Bergen-Belsen

Abstract

Bergen-Belsen is one of the biggest and most significant concentration camps in the history of the Holocaust. In this paper I reconstruct. 1. The Hungarian Camp between December 1944 and April 1945. 2. The evacuation and settlement of Hungarian military troops to the Bergen military training camp. (Truppenübungsplatz Bergen). This camp is also called as Bergen-Hohne Military Training Area. 3. The interactions between the Hungarian Jewish prisoners and the members of the Hungarian units between the two camps. 4. The controversial paths and memories of the atrocities against the Jews committed by Hungarian soldiers. The main focus of my study is a comparative analysis on the similarities and differences among the actors’ fragmented contemporary and postwar narratives: the perpetrators, the liberators and the victims on the activities of and killings by the Hungarian soldiers. I analyze ego-documents (interviews, testimonies and other correspondences) of the survivors and perpetrators of digital collections and primarily from the Archives of Gedensktätte Bergen-Belsen and from the Military Archives (Budapest). I also explore the most significant military files as well based on the Archives of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.

Keywords

• bergen-belsen
• concentration camp
• dp camp
• hungarian survivors
• liberation