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Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find

Article about: Some 6,300 documents have been found behind a wall in a Budapest apartment. The files, a large part of the Nazi census undertaken during 1944, are fortunately in fine condition due to a lack

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    Default Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find

    Some 6,300 documents have been found behind a wall in a Budapest apartment. The files, a large part of the Nazi census undertaken during 1944, are fortunately in fine condition due to a lack of air in the cavity where they survived. In August this year, a builder informed the owners of the find whilst he was working on renovation of the flat. The direct connection to the mass transports and ultimate extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews will patently be drawn, as the census served as the precursor to the horrors that followed. Links below from various news agencies:

    Thousands of Holocaust papers found in Budapest apartment | The Times of Israel

    Nazi holocaust documents found: 6,300 files discovered behind wall of Budapest apartment - Telegraph

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/worl...icle-1.2442505

    Carl

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    Very interesting....
    The best Militaria forum in France is here : http://deutsch-militaria.forumactif.us/

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    Puzzle pieces keep coming together ..thanks for posting this Carl
    It is not the size of a Collection in History that matters......Its the size of your Passion for it!! - Larry C

    One never knows what tree roots push to the surface of what laid buried before the tree was planted - Larry C

    “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston Churchill

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    Very interesting.

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    Amazing to find these documents in that condition .
    REGARDS AL

    We are the Pilgrims , master, we shall go
    Always a little further : it may be
    Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
    Across that angry or that glimmering sea...

  6. #6
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    Quote by Alan M View Post
    Amazing to find these documents in that condition .
    It certainly is Alan. Fortunately, the lack of exposure to air in their hidden location has helped preserve them.

    Carl

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    An amazing find Carl, good to read that the majority of Budapest's Jews survived the Reich's occupation unlike those of many countless European cities, towns and villages. Leon.

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    Quote by FALLSCHIRMJAGER View Post
    An amazing find Carl, good to read that the majority of Budapest's Jews survived the Reich's occupation unlike those of many countless European cities, towns and villages. Leon.
    Sadly, that is not true Leon. Although the extermination phase for the Hungarian Jews did not begin until later, cca 1944, due to annexations of Romanian, Slovakian and Yugoslavian regions, by March 1944 there were approximately 800,000 Jews in Hungary. Yad Vashem estimates that 565,000 of them were murdered. From May 1944, when the mass deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau (site of the largest extermination facilities) began, over 420,000 Jews arrived at the killing centre in just eight weeks. A rough estimation of the mass murder of European Jewry reads as follows: of the nine million Jews in Europe before the mass killings began, six million would ultimately not survive - two of every three Jews fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Around 70% of the Jews in Hungary were killed - above the average figure.

    Carl
    Click to enlarge the picture Click to enlarge the picture Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find  

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    Thx Carl, this is grim... a very strange phase of the war, even though they were retreating from Russia across [what had been] a 1000 mile front, they still had the time and will to do this. 420000 people in eight weeks works out to 7000 a day!!! My wife and I are both shaking our heads in grim disbelief... This last gasp of the SS/Reichsbahn carrying out the "Final Solution" is a testament of the relentless efficiency of the Nazi killing machine, a dose of German "Kultur" the world will never forget. I hope will never forget...
    Last edited by CARL; 12-03-2015 at 06:29 PM. Reason: statistical error

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    I've remade the Daily Telegraph article here, also included is a link found at the bottom of the original article, disturbing, but not surprising...

    Nazi holocaust documents found: 6,300 files discovered behind wall of Budapest apartment

    Couple renovating their flat in Hungary find huge trove of documents from a 1944 Nazi census hidden behind a wall

    Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find

    A vast trove of well-preserved Holocaust-era documents, long thought destroyed during the war were found hidden in a wall cavity by a couple renovating their Budapest apartment Photo: Attila KISBENEDEK

    By Agency

    12:10PM GMT 21 Nov 2015

    A vast and historically valuable trove of Holocaust-era documents, long thought destroyed during World War II, has been found hidden in a wall cavity by a couple renovating their Budapest apartment.

    The haul of 6,300 documents are from a 1944 census that was a precursor to the intended liquidation of the Hungarian capital's 200,000 Jews in Nazi death camps.

    Brigitte Berdefy, co-owner of the apartment overlooking Hungary's parliament, said that in August a worker detected paper after jamming a screwdriver through a crack in the wall.

    Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find

    "We thought we'd ruined the neighbour's wallpaper," Berdefy told AFP.

    But then her husband Gabor peered through the crack and saw what looked like handwriting.

    One of 6,300 census forms of Budapest's then Jewish population in Budapest

    Carefully removing each brick, the couple eased out some 61 kilogrammes (135 pounds) of dusty papers, many with bits of plaster caked on, but all more or less intact.

    With the ink still readable - thanks to a lack of air in the cavity and nicotine from the heavy-smoking former owner - the yellowed papers were given to the Budapest City Archives.

    Istvan Kenyeres, head of the archives, was amazed.

    "Most wartime papers are more faded or rotten than medieval documents, on bad quality paper due to the rationing," he said.

    "The content and scale of the finding is unprecedented," he said. "It helps to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest."

    Since September, restorers at the archives have been literally ironing the papers to study them, pausing occasionally when they spot someone famous among the scrawled names.

    The May 1944 Budapest census was to identify houses to serve as holding locations for Jews before moving them to a planned walled ghetto in the city's seventh district.

    Two months earlier Nazi Germany had occupied Hungary and deportations in the countryside to the gas chambers of Auschwitz began almost immediately.

    Budapest Apartment Reveals Huge Document Find

    Klara Tobi, restorer of the Budapest City Archives, prepares a document dating from 1944

    The forms found in the Budapest apartment contain names of each building's inhabitants, and whether they are Jewish or not, with total numbers of Christians and Jews marked in the corners.

    "Jewish people filled in the forms honestly, they refused to believe where this might end up," said Kenyeres.

    Shortly after the census, around 200,000 Jews were moved into some 2,000 selected buildings, "Yellow Star Houses" with the Star-of-David Jewish symbol painted on the doors.

    "Thanks to the Berdefys, we know that if a lot of Jews lived in a building then it likely became a Yellow Star House," Kenyeres said.

    In late 1944, they were crammed into the ghetto, where some died of starvation or were shot next to the river - a poignant memorial of abandoned iron shoes today marks the spot.

    The arrival of the Russian army in January 1945 saved the rest though, and unlike the Jews from outside the city, most of Budapest's Jewish population survived.

    An estimated total of 600,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust, most in Auschwitz.

    Kenyeres said that an estimated 23,000 more documents may still be out there which would give further valuable insight into what happened in 1944 and would also be digitalised and made available to the public if they turned up.

    "People should look behind their walls, you never know in Budapest what could be there."

    Inside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future - Telegraph

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