One in ten Holocaust victims came from Hungary within its borders at the time. 500,000-600,000 Jews and Roma were murdered by the National Socialists and their Hungarian allies. The names of most victims are still unknown today. 80 years after the Holocaust in Hungary, a transnational research and remembrance project has set itself the goal of researching the fate of the deported women, men and children thus preventing their memory from being forgotten.
The research project “Digital Commemoration and Research Infrastructure – The Holocaust in Hungary 80 Years Later” (HUNGMEM) is carried out in cooperation with the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archive in Budapest, the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities and the Jewish Community in Komárno in Slovakia. The project is supported by the EU Commission as part of the CERV – Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values funding program. The international cooperation offers the unique opportunity to provide new impulses for research on the Holocaust. Researchers of different national backgrounds and scholarly expertise join forces to evaluate sources scattered in various archives. They will construct a database to compile information on transportation routes and individual biographies.
Quantitative and qualitative research on the deportations from Hungary to northern Germany is carried out at the IGdJ. On the one hand, this involves researching the archives to compile as many names and individual fates as possible of those who were deported to the SS concentration camps in northern Germany. In a second step, data and empirical case histories will be analyzed in the context of research on forced labour and the German war economy, as well as public awareness of the persecution and knowledge of the Shoah among the German population.
Research is conducted in close cooperation with the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial by the two project team members Lara Meinert M.A. and Louis Wörner M.A. In cooperation with the partners of the EU project, a database structure will be developed and made available to researchers and the general public. In particular, families who are still unclear about the fate of their relatives who were deported are to be provided with information and research opportunities by means of the digital memorial and research infrastructure. The IGdJ provides a contextualization and visualization of the findings with a regional focus via the IGdJ website “The Holocaust in Hungary and the Deportations to Northern Germany”→ https://holocaust-ungarn-norddeutschland.de.
As part of the research project, Dr. Kim Wünschmann (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Anna Menny (Coordinator) organized several conferences and events. In the panel discussion “Everything known? Knowledge about the Holocaust, Dr. Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, and Rabbi Dr. Gábor Lengyel discussed the importance of history and remembrance for one's own family and social past.
In the Holocaust Memorial Lecture 2025, jointly organized with the Wiener Holocaust Library London and the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the journalist and writer Judit Kárpáti talks to Louis Wörner and Professor Tim Cole (Bristol) about the search for her missing grandfather and how the research project helped her in tracing his fate.