Holocaust historian returning award to Hungary
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Holocaust survivor and historian Randolph L Braham said Sunday he is returning a high state award to Hungary to protest what he says are government efforts to rewrite history and exonerate the country from its role in the Holocaust.
Braham also asked the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest to remove his name from the BrahamTheque Information Centre, which collects his research results and publications.
His two-volume The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, from 1981, is considered one of the most important books about the subject. He received the Medium Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2011.
Braham, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, said in an open letter addressed to executives of the memorial centre that the “straw that broke the camel’s back” leading to his decision was the government plan to erect a memorial commemorating the March 1944 invasion of Hungary by the Nazis.
Braham said the memorial was “a cowardly attempt to detract attention from the Horthy regime’s involvement in the destruction of the Jews and to homogenise the Holocaust with the ‘suffering’ of the Hungarians — a German occupation, as the record clearly shows, was not only unopposed but generally applauded.”
Miklos Horthy was Hungary’s autocratic leader from the 1920s through most of World War II.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has also been criticised by Jewish groups for tolerating statues of Horthy being set up by far-right groups in several places.
The government said the memorial of the invasion wasn’t part of the year-long series of events marking the 70th anniversary of the deportation of over 430,000 Hungarian Jews to Nazi death camps shortly after the German incursion.
Sculptor Peter Parkanyi Raab’s memorial will be around 7.5 metres (24.6 feet) tall and includes Germany’s imperial eagle swooping down on the archangel Gabriel, who symbolises Hungary. It is expected to be unveiled March 19 on Freedom Square, an area in Budapest that also includes a Soviet war memorial, the USEmbassy and a statue of Ronald Reagan.
Responding to the Jewish community leaders, Orban said the statue was “dedicated to the victims of the German occupation”.
“I am sure that a show of respect for the memory of the victims requires no further explanation,” Orban said in a statement Wednesday.
But Braham said he was “stunned” by the “history-cleansing campaign of the past few years calculated to whitewash the historical record of the Horthy era”.