The Holocaust of Hungary's Psychoanalysts

With the chancellorship of Hitler in 1933 and especially with the outbreak of World War II, there were increasing restrictions placed on Hungary's Jewish psychoanalysts, whose very lives were at stake in the final phase of the war. The Hungarian society of psychoanalysts was among those suffering the greatest losses. The article is an account of the society during the war years and the fate of its members.

The history of the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis, like that of the international depth-psychology movement, was abruptly interrupted in 1933. Up to that time Hungarian psychoanalysis was an organic part of the international movement; running parallel, they mutually influenced one another. Analysts in Budapest kept especially in close touch with their colleagues in Vienna and Berlin.

From May 1933 onwards, when Freud's works were burned in Germany, the world of psychoanalysis shifted westward to the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the United States. In the growing shadow of the Reich, and with Hungary itself becoming increasingly fascist, Hungarian psychoanalysis too was made to lose ground. The losses were only compounded by the early death of Sándor Ferenczi, the founder of the Budapest school of psychoanalysis and its most outstanding representative to this day. He died in May 1933, five months after Hitler became Chancellor and two weeks after the Berlin book burning. Of course, if not for the growth of fascism in Central Europe, which also meant violent opposition to psychoanalysis, Ferenczi's team could have maintained the continuity of the Budapest school.

Beginning in 1938 a succession of anti-Jewish laws were enacted in Hungary, each more severe than the previous one. Hungarian psychoanalysts began to leave Hungary or other countries of the continent to which they had emigrated earlier. Among the famous scientists who had left their homes or Europe itself were Franz Alexander, the founder of psychosomatics, Robert C. Bak, Alice