Árpád von Klimó. Remembering Cold Days

On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Yugoslavia. As recompense for its participation in the Nazi invasion, the Budapest government annexed the Vojvodina region, which had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. The annexation and the ethnic cleansing that followed pushed local partisan units to attack Hungarian government offices and gendarme and military patrols that summer. On January 12, 1942, Chief of Staff Ferenc Szombathelyi ordered Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner, commanding general of the Fifth Army Corps in Szeged, to carry out a punitive raid against the partisans (23). The anti-insurgency operation quickly degenerated into a pogrom and campaign of revenge, which cost the lives of about one thousand people, the majority of whom were Jews, in the town of Novi Sad alone. The Novi Sad massacre, carried out between January 21 and January 23, 1942, created an uproar in Hungary. Under pressure by the parliament and the press, Prime Minister László Bárdossy set up an investigative committee to look into the murders. At the end of 1943, the Hungarian courts sentenced four high-ranking officers to death for their role in the atrocity. Before the sentencing, the main culprits escaped into Nazi Germany, which granted them asylum. They returned to Hungary with the German troops in March 1944 to play an important role in the final stages of the war and the Jewish genocide. After the liberation of the country by Soviet troops, the main culprits were sentenced to death once again. They were extradited to Yugoslavia and executed in 1946. The lesser defendants received heavy prison sentences and spent years in prisons and labor camps.

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