Gendarmes, Bureaucrats, and Jews

An illuminating chronicle of the concentration, ghettoization, and deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944-1945, Gendarmes, Bureaucrats, and Jews presents, for the first time in English, the key primary sources from the period, documenting how this genocidal program was facilitated by both the Nazi regime and the Hungarian state.

Judit Fejes Schulmann holds a PhD in twentieth-century Hungarian and European history from the Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary. After working as a research historian at the History Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, she subsequently investigated war crimes committed during World War II as a researcher in the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. justice department, a position she held for twenty-four years until she retired.

David Alan Rich holds a PhD in Russian and East European history from Georgetown University. He worked for twenty-three years as an investigative research historian on Nazi-era crimes for the Office of Special Investigations in Washington DC. Specializing in the Aktion ‘Reinhardt’ and Ukrainian auxiliary police cases, he has published research on the evolving legal framework that supported Soviet postwar trials of these perpetrators and collaborators.

Judit Molnár is associate professor of history at the University of Szeged and, since 1994, the deputy director of the Hungarian research group of the Yad Vashem Archives. She organized the first Hungarian permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest (2004-2006). Her primary research interest is the role of Hungarian Jewish leaders and the gendarmerie during World War II and the Holocaust.

Judit Fejes Schulmann holds a PhD in twentieth-century Hungarian and European history from the Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary. After working as a research historian at the History Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, she subsequently investigated war crimes committed during World War II as a researcher in the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. justice department, a position she held for twenty-four years until she retired.

“This documentary reader makes accessible to non-Hungarian readers […] a well chosen set of documents that captures the events of the so-called ‘last chapter’ of the Holocaust: the rapid ghettoization and deportation of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz Birkenau in the spring and summer of 1944.” • Tim Cole, University of Bristol