Tag #136653 - Interview #78463 (Bela Muller)

After the second Vienna Dictate, the Jews who worked after 1940 in commerce or industry felt the effects of the anti-Jewish laws, more and more to an extent that in 1940 the Baross Association was created by the Hungarian traders, specifically to economically repress the Jews. [The Baross Association was an association of Christian and Hungarian traders, industrialists and crop growers. They got their motto from Kossuth: ‘The nation is living a colonial life, with our economic life in the hands of strangers.’ Their aim was to tend and develop the Hungarian commerce, industry and crop growers. The exclusion was evident.] In 1943 the Jewish traders weren’t receiving any products, and the Jewish industrialists were left without raw materials. Therefore the Jewish industrialists and merchants had to associate with Hungarian traders and industrialists and had to run their business under the name of their associates. This type of partnership was called the figurehead system.