On March 19, 1944, Magda Spira awoke to see large columns of German soldiers marching through the streets of Kassa. From her house she could see the city’s railway station to which they were arriving as they began their occupation of Hungary. “From then on,” she recalled, “it was a hurricane in the city and everybody was talking” about what the Germans would do with the Jews. Isaac Kurtz was caught in the middle of this hurricane. The son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, he was arrested the same day the Germans occupied the city, along with about one hundred other notable Jews. The Germans demanded Kassa’s Jewish community come up with one million pengő to secure their release, in an act that was a precursor of the all-out plundering of the Jewish community that would take place in the months to come.

While Kassa’s Jewish population looked on with dread, the city’s administrators and police force immediately adopted the role of collaborators. In a report to the Interior Ministry, Kassa’s police chief described the occupation as a seamless transition in which the German soldiers treated Hungarians as “brothers in arms and allies.” The German army had requested that local authorities help with border enforcement, cordoning off sections of the city, and “security measures against Jews.” The police chief explained that he had “fully complied with German wishes … and done so immediately, accurately, and to the best of my ability.” This compliance would soon prove essential to efficiently and ruthlessly deporting the Jews of not only the city of Kassa but the entirety of Hungary, including all the territories it had annexed since 1938.

Due to its geographic location on the border, Kassa became the most strategically important city for carrying out the Final Solution in Hungary. It was the final stop in Hungary for trains headed to Auschwitz and the location at which Hungarian gendarmes handed over control to the German SS. The majority of the 430,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1944 passed through the city. In preparation for its role as a transfer station, Kassa was among the first cities in Hungary to establish a ghetto and deport its Jewish population.