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Thread: The 1942 massacre of Serbs by Hungarians

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    Default The 1942 massacre of Serbs by Hungarians


    Monument to the victims of the massacre in Novi Sad

    The 1942 Novi Sad county raid and massacre was a military operation carried out by the Honvédség, the armed forces of fascist-allied Hungary, during World War II, after occupation and annexation of former Yugoslav territories. It resulted in the deaths of 3,000–4,000 civilians in the southern Bačka (Bácska) region. The victims were 70-75% Serb civilians, the rest being Romani, Jews, Rusyns and even some Vojvodina Hungarians.

    The Hungarian occupational authorities began raiding towns and villages in southern Bačka as early as 4 January 1942, ostensibly as a means of suppressing Partisan resistance, though the historical record shows that the Hungarian Government was attempting to improve its geopolitical standing vis-ŕ-vis Germany. The first town to be raided was Čurug, followed by Gospođinci, Titel, Temerin, Đurđevo and Žabalj. The victims were seemingly detained at random while conducting everyday activities. On 20 January, the city of Novi Sad (Hungarian: Újvidék) was surrounded and placed on curfew; its telephone lines were cut. Over the next several days, the occupational authorities went about arresting "suspicious" individuals. More than 1,000 of the city's residents were killed by the time the raid ended. The victims in both Novi Sad and the wider region were mostly Serbs and Jews, though several Hungarians were killed as well. In Novi Sad, victims were forced to march across the frozen Danube, only to perish when the ice sheet was shattered by shelling from the shore. Some were pushed into holes in the ice sheet, causing them to drown or succumb to hypothermia, while others were shot in the street.

    The Hungarian Government and news media condemned the raid, calling for an immediate investigation. In 1943, the Hungarians conducted a mass trial of those suspected of organizing the raid, handing down four death sentences. The four escaped to Germany before their executions. After the war, several trials were held in Hungary and Yugoslavia, resulting in the conviction and execution of a number of key organizers. The final court proceedings relating to the raid took place in 2011, when Sándor Képíró was tried and acquitted of murdering over 30 civilians in Novi Sad.

    The raid has been fictionalized in literature and film in both Serbia and Hungary. The killings continue to strain relations between the two countries. In June 2013, Hungarian President President János Áder formally apologized for the war crimes that the Hungarian military had committed against Serbian civilians during the war.

    Timeline

    Killings commence

    More than 8,000 soldiers, gendarmes and border guards participated in the raid. It began in the town of Čurug on 6 January, with suspected Partisans, including women and children, being removed to barns, storage buildings, and municipal buildings. Although some suspects were released, between 500 and 1,000 people were killed and their bodies stripped of all valuables. The raid moved onto other local settlements such as Gospođinci and Titel the same day and continued the day after. Over the next three days, additional killings took place in the towns of Temerin and Žabalj. Civilians were rounded up at random and taken from their homes and businesses during their workday and while they were engaged in regular activities, even weddings.

    Novi Sad massacre

    On 20 January, Novi Sad was completely surrounded and placed on curfew. Its telephone and telegraph lines were cut. The city was divided into multiple areas of responsibility, with a different officer tasked with organizing the round-ups in each. Placards sprang up on buildings, warning citizens against going outdoors, except to buy food. Feketehalmy-Czeydner summoned the local authorities and announced that the Royal Hungary Army would "take charge and clean things up" over the next three days. The raid began the following day. Between 6,000 and 7,000 people that were considered "suspicious" were arrested and taken to have their papers examined. Others were detained on account that they had no papers. Most were released, but at least 40 were taken to the banks of the Danube and shot.

    "The massacre was conducted systematically," the historian Leni Yahil writes, "street by street." Many of the soldiers were visibly intoxicated. Survivor accounts, delivered after the war, attest to the brutality of the killings. A woman recalled how, on 23 April, a soldier entered her apartment, demanding to know her family's religious affiliation. The woman told him that she and her family were Orthodox Christians. Infuriated, the soldier called her a "stinking Serb" and killed her five sons. Thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned and interrogated at the Sokolski Dom, one of the city's main cultural centres. Many died during their interrogation.

    Temperatures reached −29 °C (−20 °F). Victims were brought to an area known as the Štrand, along the Danube, and shot with machine guns. Their killers then broke up the frozen river's ice sheets with artillery fire and tossed the bodies into the water. According to another account, the victims were forced to tread the ice sheets, which were then shattered by shelling from the shore, causing them to fall into the freezing water and drown. The killings only ceased after four days, when the city's Lord Lieutenant, László Deák, bypassed the curfew and alerted the authorities in Budapest. He returned with orders that the massacre was to come to an immediate halt. Feketehalmy-Czeydner ordered that all executions be stopped by 9:00 p.m. Deák's mother was among the victims. "The randomness and senselessness of the operation were evident especially by the fact that it hit not one single functionary of the Yugoslav Communist Party," the historian Krisztián Ungváry writes.

    Aftermath

    In Stari Bečej, the occupational authorities staged another "rebellion" and followed it up with further mass arrests. Around 200 people were detained and taken to the banks of the Tisza, where they were shot and their bodies thrown into the river. When the ice thawed, the corpses of those killed in the raid floated down the Danube and the Tisza. The Hungarian news media denounced the raid as unparalleled in the country's military history. The Hungarian government also condemned the killings, vowing that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

    Casualties

    The historian Zvonimir Golubović places the total number of civilians killed in the raid at 3,809. Of these, 2,578 were Serbs. The number of Jews killed, which he places at 1,068, were mostly killed in the Novi Sad city itself (809). In the other massacres across the Novi Sad county, the ethnic composition of the victims was completely or overwhelmingly Serb.

    In Mošorin 170 killed Serbs, 0 Jews
    In Vilovo 64 killed Serbs, 0 Jews
    In Gardinovci 37 killed Serbs, 0 Jews
    In Lok 46 killed Serbs, 0 Jews
    In Titel 49 killed Serbs, 1 Jew
    In Čurug 842 killed Serbs, 44 Jews
    In Žabalj 614 killed Serbs, 28 Jews
    In Đurđevo 173 killed Serbs, 22 Jews
    In Gospođinci 73 killed Serbs, 10 Jews

    These statistics make it clear that anti-Serbianism (Hungarian Catholic hatred for Orthodox Serbs), and not anti-Semitism, was the primary reason for the massacres.


    * * *



    THE 1966 HUNGARIAN FILM "HIDEG NAPOK" (COLD DAYS) THAT BROUGHT AWARENESS OF THE EVENTS TO HUNGARY

    In January 1942, the Novi Sad massacre involved the murder of 3,000-4,000 civilians in the Backa region of a hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia. The victims, mostly Serbs, were forced to march across the river Danube and murdered as shelling from the Hungarian officers on shore broke the ice. After this massacre, a full investigation and trials of those involved intended to serve justice. However, a culture of silence around the event prevailed until the 1960s, when cultural production in eastern Europe began to reflect with the traumatic past of World War II. Literature, art and film that touched on this history included Tibor Cseres' book Cold Days and Andras Kovács film (1966) based on the book. The film Cold Days especially had an enormous impact on Hungarian society and national identity.

    Cold Days is known for its focus on the the perpetrators of the massacre and its explorations of the justifications behind their actions. This raises the question of how a film that seeks to understand and humanize the perpetrators of the massacres as Cold Days does could help Hungarian society see the Serbs as victims of a genocide? An analysis of this film reveals that by bringing his viewer into the jail cell of convicted Hungarian officers, Kovács is able to show the psychology and rationalizations of the men, all of whom yearn for a clear conscience after their participation in the Novi Sad massacre. Furthermore, as one of the officers realizes his wife and child were killed in the very massacre he perpetrated, the director puts this character in the position of both victim and perpetrator. This story line showed the audience that anyone could be a victim of genocide, no matter what “side” they were on. As a result, Cold Days was uniquely able to present the Novi Sad raid as a genocide with victims and perpetrators, rather than a war with two sides.


    Andras Kovács

    Throughout the movie, as each of the Hungarian soldiers tries to shift blame for the massacre onto another, Kovács uses this unique perspective of inside their private jail cell to expose the men’s psychological justifications for their actions. Most importantly, though, the director portrays these rationalizations as ridiculous justifications rather than legitimate excuses. In one scene, for instance, the commanding officer who orchestrated the massacre shouts “how did I end up among these murderers” and argues that his hands are unstained, that he was simply giving orders. But Kovács makes it quite clear that “each one of [the men] is an essential link in the chain of a massacre”, making this shifting of blame seem almost pathetic. When the viewer watches these four murderers scramble for justifications to clear their conscience, they begin to understand a more human side of the men. This effect is prominent in one particular scene, when an officer new to the jail asks the other men if they murdered during the massacre. One of the men replies immediately: “You: murder, Me: strict orders” after which the commanding officer shouts “Not everyone is a murderer! Stop it! Change the subject.” From this exchange it becomes clear to the audience that for these men, remembering the massacre and their roles in the murder of thousands of people is worse than the massacre was itself. This scene also highlights how some men cited following orders as an excuse for their participation in the killings while others suffered from denial of the murders all together. Very few films about genocide took the perspective of the perpetrators. Further analysis of these men’s memories of the massacre shows the viewer how the humanization of the Hungarian soldiers may have acted as an agent in shifting the national memory of Novi Sad from an event in a war to a genocide.

    One particular officers’ story of his wife being executed on the Danube unfolds throughout the film. It is not completely clear if the officer was witness to his wife’s death on the river, however, his attempts to evacuate her and their child, and her subsequent accidental detainment, suggest this to be so. Their deaths are implied in one of the first scenes in the film, when a lieutenant enters the cell and the soldier asks if there is any news of his wife (who the soldier has summoned as one of his witnesses in his trial in an attempt to locate her). The following exchange unfolds between the men:

    LIEUTENANT: “I asked Nuremburg. No trace”
    SOLDIER: “There wouldn’t be any. The Germans hold back their witnesses”
    LIEUTENANT: “Not in this case”

    The lieutenant suggests that in this particular instance, the Germans were not being as secretive about or withholding their witnesses, implying that if the soldier’s wife was alive, she would have been located. Following the indication of his wife’s death, an unmistakable look of doom covers the soldier’s face as both he, and the audience, realize his wife was in fact massacred. Now, the soldier must live with “the nightmare-ish knowledge of having taken the wrong action, of being guilty without being prepared to acknowledge his own, albeit indirect, part in his wife and son’s own deaths”. In this specific storyline, this character has become both a perpetrator and a victim of the massacre. Before this film, Jews were almost exclusively given the label of “victim” in Holocaust films. However, this particular plot line breaks that mold, bringing a Hungarian perpetrator of a horrific massacre into the “victim” category. He has both lost his own loved ones and taken away the lives of many during the same event. Before this film, Hungarian society viewed the Novi Sad events as a war between Fascists and Communists, with a clear winner and loser. With this horrific twist of fate, the viewer can no longer deny that World War II was a genocide with victims and perpetrators and that anybody, even a perpetrator, could be a victim of his own crime.




    By bringing the viewer inside the jail cell of convicted Hungarian Officers, Kovács reveals the tortured psychology of the men as they scrape for justifications or excuses for their participation in the Novi Sad massacre. The director humanizes them further via the storyline of one Hungarian soldier who lost his wife and son in the very massacre he perpetrated. As a result, Cold Days was able to convey the events in Novi Sad as a genocide, rather than simply a battle between Fascists and Communists, and was uniquely equipped to break the silence around the massacre. This films’ release contributed to a memory boom in Yugoslavia, Novi Sad in particular. In his article, "1956 and the Collapse of Stalinist Politics of History: Forgetting and Remembering the 1942 Újvidék/Novi Sad Massacre,” Árpád Von Klimó informs his reader that “Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, as a result of the debates initiated by the book and film Cold Days the city of Novi Sad began to publicly commemorate the 1942 massacre” (Klimó 760). Taking the perspective of the perpetrator in film and literature was rare and quite possibly offensive in when Cold Days was made. However, when András Kovács takes this perspective, the director is able to expose the complexities of the actors in the massacre, as well as the genocide itself, to his viewers. As a result, this film disallowed its audience from viewing past events as anything but a genocide.

    The whole movie "Cold Days" (Hideg Napok) in two parts (in Hungarian):

    Cold Days part 1 (video) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x59fytp
    Cold Days part 2 (video) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x59fywu
    Last edited by Castor; 09-18-2020 at 03:40 PM.

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    Veteran Member Blondie's Avatar
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    And later serbs massacred 20000 hungarian people (10x more):
    https://dailynewshungary.com/hungari...odina-village/

    So be happy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Castor View Post
    Those are very slim and tall people.

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    Member Brânză-Viezure's Avatar
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    That happened in pretty much every territory the Horthysts "occupied" during World War II. Rest in peace.

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    Maybe there was less Jew casualties because:
    1. There were less Jews in these cities than Serbs
    2. Probably many of them probably were sent to death camps

    It doesn't have to proof anti Serbianism, there were such monsters on each side and no the fact that someone made such massacres doesn't have to mean to attack another innocent civilians on the second side for this.

    Rest in peace to victims

    Unfortunatelly such massacres(in larger or smaller numbers) took place in many places from many sides

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    Quote Originally Posted by Blondie View Post
    And later serbs massacred 20000 hungarian people (10x more):
    https://dailynewshungary.com/hungari...odina-village/

    So be happy.
    As soon as i read "Yugoslav Partisans" everything was immediately clear to me. Girl, if you already wanted to talk about that situation, you should have informed yourself about who were Partisans first. I'am Anti-Communist.

    If you really want to talk about that, read a little about the crimes of the Communists Partisans against the Serbian civillians.

    You should have informed yourself about how they executed Serbs. How they took and privatized lands from Serbian peasants, and how the families of executed Serbs were forbidden to visit their graves and fire the candle. Many Serbs were killed by the Communist regime, and this is well known in our country. And next time, don't try to declare Yugoslav Communist crimes as Serbian, because you're going to piss me off a lot. Communists didn't this not only to the Serbs, but also to other who opposed the regime. They are devils.

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