The Hungarian Bureaucracy and the Administrative Costs of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania

In the course of May and June 1944, forty-five trains crammed with Jews from Northern Transylvania were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, making the region “Judenfrei” in accordance with the Nazi vision of the “Final Solution.” This article explores how the extermination process and its consequences, including the costs incurred, were approached and handled by the central and local authorities of Northern Transylvania as bureaucratic tasks. As I show, in addition to participating directly in the processes of genocide, local authorities also aimed to assure “the reparation of material and financial damages” caused by ghettoization, while the expropriated assets of the deported and their unresolved financial transactions were subject to further administrative action. Drawing on scattered documents held in various provincial branches of the Romanian National Archives and materials from the Cluj-based People’s Courts from 1946, in this article I discuss the high-level of continuity among Hungarian administrative personnel in 1944 and demonstrate that practically the entire Hungarian state apparatus participated in the implementation of the Final Solution. I argue that the economic costs incurred by “Christian Hungarians” may have been negligible compared to the overall theft of “Jewish property,” but the administrative tasks related to ghettoization and deportation were substantial

Două decenii. Evreii din Cluj în perioada interbelică

The main topic of this book is the history of the Jewish community in Cluj in the inter-war period. It is a tentative for a monograph, with interdisciplinary approaches using the classical research methods of history, but also elements from sociology and anthropology. The author sets itself an aim to present this topic from the point of view of identity and social integration. The history of the Transylvanian Jewry, and of Cluj as well, went through a metamorphosis after the WWI. Their social stratification, cultural life, the institutional system, political attitude, economic role have changed. Thus, the process of integration and assimilation to the Hungarian community had slowed down or in some cases even stopped, due to the geopolitical changes and internal political and social events