A working group, including officials from the prime minister's office, other ministries and several historical archives, has been formed to clarify what documents are still in the Hungarian archives and what has become of the missing files.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest are also part of the working group, said Lajos Gecsényi, director of Hungary's National Archives and the professional leader of the group.
Hungary has long assisted in documenting the Holocaust, however many of the relevant documents were destroyed at the end of the war.
Gecsényi noted that neither the Hungarian archives nor any political powers has been an obstacle to revealing the documents. The fact that many more Holocaust documents have been found in Poland, Germany and Romania than in Hungary can have many reasons, such as the size of the country and the scale of destruction during the war, he said. It is also possible that Russian troops took the documents, he added.
Jad Vasem, an Israeli government organisation set up to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, commissioned a team of experts, including Hungarian historian Lászlo Karsai, to research Holocaust-related documents in the mid-1990s. In 2001, the Hungarian government signed an agreement with the organisation on sending microfilm of documents which had been copied. In 2003, the government signed a similar agreement with a U.S.-based organisation researching and documenting the Holocaust.
Despite these efforts, Washington has repeatedly noted that important documents are still missing on forced labour, the military police and Jewish property seized.
Several members of the U.S. Senate and Congress, including Hillary Clinton have contacted the Hungarian Prime Minister in writing, asking for his help to promote the issue.
In line with a decision by the head of the Prime Minister?s Office, György Szilvásy, the first meeting of the U.S.-Hungarian working group was held on November 21. Its members include undersecretary in charge of international relations at the Prime Minister's Office Ferenc Gémesi, as well as representatives from the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Historic Archives of the State Security Service and the Budapest City Archives, Gecsényi said. The session was also attended by the international project director and archive director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and a representative of the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, he added.
