One in ten Holocaust victims came from Hungary within its borders at the time. 500,000-600,000 Jews, Roma and Romani people were murdered by the National Socialists and their Hungarian allies. The names of most of these persecuted people are still unknown today. 80 years after the Holocaust in Hungary, a transnational research and remembrance project aimed to investigate the fate of the deported women, men and children, and preventing it from being forgotten.
The project “Digital Commemoration and Research Infrastructure - The Holocaust in Hungary 80 Years Later” (HUNGMEM) was carried out in cooperation with the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archive in Budapest, the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities and the Jewish Community in Komárno in Slovakia. The project was supported by the EU Commission as part of the CERV - Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values funding program. The aim of the international cooperation was to jointly examine the sources scattered in various archives by researchers from four countries and with different areas of expertise and thus to be able to compile information on transportation routes and individual biographies.
Quantitative and qualitative research on the deportations from Hungary to northern Germany was carried out at the IGdJ. The initial aim was to record as many names and stories as possible of those who were deported to the SS concentration camps in northern Germany. In a second step, data and empirical case histories were analysed in the context of research on forced labour and the war economy as well as the publicity of the persecution and knowledge of the Shoah among the German population. The case studies and visualizations compiled from the researched data with a regional focus on northern Germany are made available on the bilingual website “The Holocaust in Hungary and the Deportations to Northern Germany” (https://holocaust-ungarn-norddeutschland.de).
The research was carried out in close cooperation with the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial by the two project team members Lara Meinert M.A. and Louis Wörner M.A.
A database structure was developed at the Jewish Museum and Archive in Budapest, into which the data researched by the various project partners was integrated. People can be searched for on the corresponding website. The aim is to give researchers and interested parties the opportunity to search for names of those deported from Hungary. In particular, families who are still unclear about the fate of deported relatives should be provided with information and research opportunities via the website (https://holokauszt80.milev.hu/) developed at the Jewish Museum and Archive in Budapest.
As part of the research project, Dr. Kim Wünschmann (project management) and Dr. Anna Menny (coordination) have already held several conferences and events. For example, the panel discussion “Everything known? Knowledge about the Holocaust”, Dr. Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, and Rabbi Dr. Gábor Lengyel discussed the importance of history and remembrance for one's own family and social past. You can watch the recording of the event here.
In the Holocaust Memorial Lecture 2025, organized on the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day together with the Vienna Holocaust Library London and the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the journalist and writer Judit Kárpáti talked to Louis Wörner and Professor Tim Cole (Bristol) about the search for traces of the fate of her missing grandfather and how the research project helped. Watch the recording here.
In the Shabat Shalom episode at the end of March, Gabriela Fenyes, member of the board of trustees of the IGdJ, and Dr. Anna Menny spoke about the research and remembrance project on the Holocaust in Hungary HUNGMEM and the deportations to northern Germany as well as the history in our present.
You can listen to the recording of the program from March 28, 2025 here.