region for the previous 50–100 years, but their legal identification was problematic because of the numerous change of status quo. Also, the laws and regulations did not help them confirm their former Hungarian citizenship. Later, most of the deportees were handed over to German Einsatzgruppen units at Kaminets Podolsk and machine-gunned over a three-day period in August 1941. Hungarian authorities conscripted Jewish men of working age into slave labor gangs in which a high proportion perished. In March 1944, Operation Margarethe had German forces overthrow the Hungarian government and install Döme Sztójay as prime minister. In April 1944, 17 main ghettos were set up in cities in Ruthenia. 144,000 Jews were rounded up and held there. Starting on May 15, 1944 Jews were taken out of these sites to Auschwitz every day until the last deportation on June 7, 1944. By June 1944, nearly all the Jews from ghettos of Carpathian Ruthenia had been exterminated, together with other Hungarian Jews. Of more than 100,000 Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia, around 90,000 were murdered. Transcarpathian Ukraine In October 1944, the German and Hungarian forces occupying Carpathian Ruthenia were expelled by the Soviets. With the assistance of the Soviet military administration, the territory was temporarily organised as an independent transitional state, namely , and it remained as such until the territorial dispute between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union was settled in 1946. Territorial dispute A Czechoslovak delegation under František Němec was dispatched to the area which was to mobilize the liberated local population to form a Czechoslovak army and to prepare for elections in cooperation with recently established national committees. However, loyalty to a Czechoslovak state was tenuous in Carpathian Ruthenia. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile led by President Edvard Beneš issued a proclamation in April 1944 excluding from political participation former collaborationist Hungarians, Germans, and the Russophile Ruthenian followers of Andrej Brody and the Fencik Party (who had collaborated with the Hungarians). This amounted to approximately one-third of the population. Another one-third was communist, leaving one-third of the population presumably sympathetic to the Czechoslovak Republic. Upon arrival in the territory, the Czechoslovak delegation set up headquarters in Khust and on 30 October issued a mobilization proclamation. Soviet military forces prevented both the printing and the posting of the Czechoslovak proclamation and proceeded instead to organize the local population. Protests from Beneš's government-in-exile went unheeded. Soviet activities led much of the local population to believe