After the »Anschluss« in 1938, Hungary closed her borders against any Austrian Jewish immigrants. Nevertheless, around 4400 Jews from Austria took refuge here. A quarter of those were Jews who held Hungarian citizenship and whose bases of subsistence had for a long time been in Austria.

In April 1938, several hundred Burgenland Jews were violently driven across the Hungarian border by the Gestapo. A few of them managed to find shelter with relatives. Most of them, however, were caught and driven back over the Austrian border. At the beginning of the deportations in the fall of 1941, a new – larger – wave of refugees from Vienna to Hungary commenced. Many refugees managed to go into hiding and live as »U-Boote.« Those refugees who were arrested, were collected in four small internment camps in Budapest and later detained in one of the five larger provincial camps.

In the summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities sent 25,000 stateless Jews as well as almost all refugees from the camps to southern Galicia, which had been conquered by Hungarian troops and then occupied by the German Reich. The massacre of Kamenec-Podol'skij (Kamenetz-Podolsk), in which the greater part of these deportees was murdered by SS units, shocked even the Hungarian government, and the deportations came to a standstill. When in March 1944 Hungary was occupied by the Germans while at the same time maintaining a sem-blance of Hungarian sovereignty, Adolf Eichmann who had traveled to Budapest proceeded immediately with the »Final Solution.« From the beginning of May until the beginning of July, deportation trains with about 437,000 people on board rolled from the Hungarian provinces and the suburbs of Budapest to Auschwitz. After the government had been taken over by the extreme right-wing »Arrow Cross« movement under their leader Szálasi in October 1944, Jews who still lived in Budapest suffered brutal terrorisation, and a great number of refugees from Austria as well were among the victims of these excesses. In late fall of 1944, tens of thousands of Budapest Jews were marched towards the western border.

Of 4400 Jews who once had lived in Austria and had fled to Hungary, only about 740 survived the Shoah.