Béla Bodó

Senior Fellow (10/2025 – 03/2026)

Edmund Veesenmayer in Budapest: The Final Phase of the Jewish Genocide

This project researches the private life and political career of Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler’s personal representative and Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary between March and December 1944. As Nazi Germany’s chief diplomat, Veesenmayer prevented Hungary from leaving the Axis in the war’s final phase. He deposed the conservative Kállay government, appointed ministers, orchestrated arrests of political opponents, and hastened Hungary’s economic transformation to serve German needs.

Veesenmayer played a major role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Third Reich and Nazi-occupied Europe in spring–early summer 1944, when over two thirds of 450,000 deportees perished in labour and death camps. The project sheds light on Veesenmayer’s performance as an economist, academic, diplomat, and one of the architects of the Holocaust. It also examines his testimony at the Endre-Baky-Jaross trial in 1946, his behaviour at his own Nuremberg trial in 1948/49, and his later life as a successful businessman in Germany after his 1951 release.

Béla Bodó received his PhD from York University in Canada in 1998. He is a professor of history at the University of Bonn in Germany. His latest book, entitled Black Humor and the White Terror was published by Routledge in 2023.

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