On this day in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Budapest Ghetto. The ghetto was established the year prior, on November 29, 1944, by the Arrow Cross Party, Hungary’s far-right political party. The Party came to power on October 15, 1944, following Operation Margarethe, when Hitler’s Nazi Party began its occupation of Hungary in March of the same year. Before the outset of WWII, Budapest was home to roughly 200,000 Jews. The Jews of Budapest were safeguarded against the widespread antisemitism that had afflicted the rest of the country until the Nazis began to occupy the city in March 1944. Heavy deportations of Jews carried out by both German and Hungarian authorities took place between April and July of 1944. By July, Budapest’s Jews were, for the most part, the only Jews still living in Hungary. That June, instead of being sent to ghettos, the Jews were placed into over 2,000 buildings throughout Budapest. Each building was marked with a Star of David to signify to the rest of Budapest where they were located. Some 25,0000 Jews living in the suburbs of Budapest were eventually sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many such Jews were assisted by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who, along with other such diplomats, developed false identification papers and housing accommodations that ended up saving thousands of Jews from certain deaths. On November 8, 1944, the Budapest Death March began, with more than 70,000 Jews forced to march to Austrian camps. Thousands died during this March either from bullets, starvation, or the bitter weather conditions that plagued their journey. The surviving Jewish prisoners managed to reach Austria in December where they were escorted by Germans to concentration camps such as Dachau, located in southern Germany, Mauthausen in northern Austria, as well as to Vienna, in eastern Austria, where they were forced to do construction on various sites throughout the city. The Jews that remained in Budapest were quarantined by the Arrow Cross into a sectioned-off ghetto. Those who failed to present identification papers that were issued by a neutral country were to permanently report to the ghetto by December 1944. Over the next two months, the Arrow Cross removed some 20,000 Jews and shot them by the Danube River, where their bodies would be interned.The Soviets began liberating the ghetto on January 17, 1945. Roughly 50,000 Jews were liberated from the Budapest Ghetto.