Skip to content
History–Tours
1944March 1944–January 1945 · Budapest

Holocaust in Hungary and the Budapest ghetto

Iron shoes on the Danube embankment in Budapest, a memorial to Jews shot there in 1944–45
Photo: Marek Mróz. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hungary's Jews, the largest community still left in Europe, were spared deportation until Germany occupied the country in March 1944. Within eight weeks Hungarian gendarmes helped deport some 437,000 people, most to Auschwitz. In Budapest the Arrow Cross regime walled Jews into a ghetto and shot thousands into the Danube, while diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz issued protective papers.

Sites

  1. Site 1: Shoes on the Danube BankSixty pairs of iron shoes on the embankment where Jews were shot.Map ↗
  2. Site 2: Dohány Street SynagogueGreat synagogue inside the former ghetto, with a memorial garden.Map ↗
  3. Site 3: Holocaust Memorial Center, Páva StreetMuseum built around a restored synagogue.Map ↗
  4. Site 4: Glass House, Vadász StreetFormer glass shop run by Carl Lutz's Swiss legation as a refuge.Map ↗

Guides who take you there

History-only · order never for sale
We haven't found an independent history guide for this yet. Guide here? Tell us about your tours.

Also in Budapest

More from the Second World War

Read more: reference. Summary written by History-Tours.com.