The Social Spaces of the University Student Battalion's Odyssey in Germany (1944–1945)

Abstract

In December 1944, Ferenc Rajniss, Minister of Religion and Public Education, relocated senior medical, pharmaceutical, veterinary, and engineering students from Hungarian universities to Germany. Male students received SAS military draft orders, while female students were assigned to military labor service, also with the University Battalion. Those who did not obey the draft orders were considered deserters, which automatically brought them before a military court-martial. In my study, I analyzed the diversity of the social spaces of this journey, from the social spaces of travel (by train and on foot) through different types of locations (university towns, military camps, small villages), to different types of accommodation and classrooms (monastery buildings, hospitals, university buildings, artillery barracks, castles, pubs, brick factories, and private houses). At the same time, I analyzed the cooperation between the different military commands (German, American) and the local population (mutual assistance, hostile attitudes, terror) at the various locations. The groups of the University Battalion, numbering more than 2,500 people, experienced this 9-10 month deportation in different ways. Some groups were luckier than others, surviving the deportation with minimal losses, albeit at the cost of terrible sufferings, while others were less fortunate, such as the technical university students who were present during the carpet bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945, and suffered terrible losses. The analysis of the social spaces of this enormous Odyssey is very useful, as it happened that university groups living in neighboring villages evaluated the social space in which they lived and worked in different ways.