Impressions of Budapest in 1944: Diaries of German Occupation

The words of Scottish-born writer and journalist Margaret Mackenzie Scott read like a Modernist impression of the city. Written in January 1944, just two months before the occupation of Hungary by German troops, they also communicate a personal experience of the city’s atmosphere during the Second World War. 

Scott moved to Budapest during the war to work as a journalist, and her diaries, digitised in AM’s Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968 collection, record her impressions of daily life, health and politics during this turbulent period. Eighty years on from Hungary’s occupation, these records tell us a story about wartime life through a striking blend of emotion, detachment and personal reflection.

On 19 March 1944, German troops began their official occupation of Hungary, ousting Prime Minister Miklós Kállay and replacing him with the pro-German Dome Sztojay. Hungary’s support for the German army had been undercut by promises to the Allies that they would surrender to their troops, prompting Germany’s occupation.

Margaret’s entry for 19 March opens with news of the invasion: ‘About ten o’clock Kate walked in looking dazed. The doctor’s wife caught her on the stairs, and told her that the Germans had marched into the country, and the Governor is a prisoner’. This strange mixture of the everyday with the momentous reveals something about how we experience major events. It also describes a real lack of official news. By 21 March, there was ‘still no news in the papers’. Instead, rumours, or what Margaret dubs 'terror news', take over the city.

As a journalist, Margaret gathers and records her own impressions of the occupation, and of her encounters with the German soldiers. She describes watching German troops from her window as though viewing a play: ‘With the help of opera-glasses I could see the heads ranged in rows in the big beige cars’. She berates herself for not running out into the cold for a better look, ashamed of her failure to do so as a journalist. She later goes to gather news and comes face to face with German soldiers in a cake shop, describing how ‘[t]hey had the same mixture of bravado, shyness, awkwardness, and enjoyment of adventure in “foreign parts”, which made me smile over the English Tommies in the cafes of Cologne’. As individuals, the soldiers are transformed into young boys, excited to see a new city and try its cake.

The diaries go on to detail life under occupation, with Allied bombing starting in earnest. The question of whether Margaret will be interred as a British citizen remains unresolved for weeks, and she has to provide proof that she is not Jewish in order to avoid it. She describes the new restrictions against Jewish citizens, who were forced to wear the Star of David and were banned from public office, as well as being sent to internment camps. What she did not know is that many of these were in fact extermination camps. Over 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed.

The jarring coexistence of everyday calm and casual horror persists through Margaret’s accounts as she describes atrocities witnessed during the air raids. She does not fear dying in the raids however. In her own words, ‘[i]t is a quick respectable death, and hundreds of thousands are dying it!’

Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968 is out now. The ‘Diary of Margaret Mackenzie Scott, Book XV, XVI, XVII, Arrival of the Germans, 20 Nov 1943 - 8 Oct 1944’ quoted in this blog is open-access for 30 days.

For more information on this resource, including free trial access and price enquiries, please email us at info@amdigital.co.uk.