fbpx
Wikipedia

Miklós Horthy

May 04, 2023

"Horthy" redirects here. For the surname, see Horthy (surname).

The native form of this personal name is nagybányai Horthy Miklós. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya (Hungarian: Vitéz[1] nagybányai Horthy Miklós; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈviteːz ˈnɒɟbaːɲɒi ˈhorti ˈmikloːʃ]; English: Nicholas Horthy;[2] German: Nikolaus Horthy Ritter von Nagybánya; 18 June 1868 – 9 February 1957), was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who served as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary between the two World Wars and throughout most of World War II – from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944.

His Serene Highness Vitéz
Miklós Horthy
Official portrait
Regent of Hungary
In office
1 March 1920 – 15 October 1944
MonarchVacant
Prime Minister
See list
DeputyIstván Horthy (1942)
Preceded byKároly Huszár (acting)
Succeeded byFerenc Szálasia
Personal details
Born
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya

(1868-06-18)18 June 1868
Kenderes, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
Died9 February 1957(1957-02-09) (aged 88)
Estoril, Lisbon, Portugal
Spouse
​
(m. 1901)​
Children4, including István and Miklós
Parent(s)István Horthy
Paula Halassy
Signature
Military service
Allegiance Austria-Hungary
Branch/service Austro-Hungarian Navy
Years of service1896–1918
RankVice Admiral
CommandsFlottenkommandant
Battles/warsWorld War I
a. As Leader of the Nation.

Horthy started his career as a sub-lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Navy in 1896, and attained the rank of rear admiral in 1918. He saw action in the Battle of the Strait of Otranto and became commander-in-chief of the Navy in the last year of World War I; he was promoted to vice admiral and commander of the Fleet when Emperor-King Charles dismissed the previous admiral from his post following mutinies. During the revolutions and interventions in Hungary from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, Horthy returned to Budapest with the National Army; the parliament subsequently invited him to become regent of the kingdom. Through the interwar period Horthy led an administration which was national conservative and antisemitic[3].[4] Hungary under Horthy banned the Hungarian Communist Party as well as the Arrow Cross Party, and pursued an irredentist foreign policy in the face of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. Emperor Charles I of Austria-Hungary, the former king, attempted twice to return to Hungary before the Hungarian government caved in to Allied threats to renew hostilities in 1921. Charles was then escorted out of Hungary into exile.

Ideologically a national conservative, Horthy has sometimes been labeled as fascist.[5][6][7] In the late 1930s, Horthy's foreign policy led him into an alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. With the support of Adolf Hitler, Hungary succeeded in redeeming certain areas ceded to neighbouring countries by the Treaty of Trianon. Under Horthy's leadership, Hungary gave support to Polish refugees in 1939 and participated in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some historians view Horthy as unenthusiastic in contributing to the German war effort and the Holocaust in Hungary (out of fear that it may sabotage peace deals with Allied forces), in addition coupled with several attempts to strike a secret deal with the Allies of World War II after it had become obvious that the Axis would lose the war, therefore eventually leading the Germans to invade and take control of the country in March 1944 in Operation Margarethe. However, prior to the Nazi occupation within the area of Hungary 63,000 Jews were killed. In late 1944, 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were gassed on arrival.[8] Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubović has claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres, but had approved of them such as those in the Novi Sad Raid.[9]

In October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary had declared an armistice with the Allies and withdrawn from the Axis. He was forced to resign, placed under arrest by the Germans and taken to Bavaria. At the end of the war, he came under the custody of American troops.[10] After providing evidence for the Ministries Trial of war crimes in 1948, Horthy settled and lived out his remaining years in exile in Portugal. His memoirs, Ein Leben für Ungarn (A Life for Hungary),[11] were first published in 1953. He has a reputation as a controversial historical figure in contemporary Hungary.[12][13][14][15]

Early life and naval career

 
Admiral Miklós Horthy during World War I
 
Miklós Horthy's parents: Paula Halassy and István Horthy
 
Magdolna Purgly, wife of Admiral Miklós Horthy

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was born at Kenderes to an untitled lower nobility, descended from István Horti, ennobled by King Ferdinand II in 1635.[16] His father, István Horthy de Nagybánya, was a member of the House of Magnates, the upper chamber of the Diet of Hungary, and lord of a 610-hectare (1,500-acre) estate.[17] He married Hungarian noblewoman Paula Halassy de Dévaványa in 1857.[17][18] Miklós was the fourth of their eight children raised as Protestants.[19][20]

Horthy entered the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Naval Academy (k.u.k. Marine-Akademie) at Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) at age 14.[21] Because the official language of the naval academy was German, Horthy spoke Hungarian with a slight, but noticeable, Austro-German accent for the rest of his life. He also spoke Italian, Croatian, English, and French.[18]

As a young man, Horthy traveled around the world and served as a diplomat for Austria-Hungary in the Ottoman Empire and other countries. Horthy married Magdolna Purgly de Jószáshely in Arad in 1901. They had 4 children: Magdolna (1902), Paula (1903), István (1904) and Miklós (1907). From 1911 until 1914, he was a naval aide-de-camp to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, for whom he had a great respect.[22]

At the beginning of World War I, Horthy was commander of the pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Habsburg. In 1915, he earned a reputation for boldness while commanding the new light cruiser SMS Novara. He planned the 1917 attack on the Otranto Barrage, which resulted in the Battle of the Strait of Otranto, the largest naval engagement of the war in the Adriatic Sea. A consolidated British, French and Italian fleet met the Austro-Hungarian force. Despite the numerical superiority of the Allied fleet, the Austrian force emerged from the battle victorious. The Austrian fleet remained relatively unscathed, however, Horthy was wounded. After the Cattaro mutiny of February 1918, Emperor Charles I of Austria selected Horthy over many more senior commanders as the new Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Fleet in March 1918. In June, Horthy planned another attack on Otranto, and in a departure from the cautious strategy of his predecessors, he committed the empire's battleships to the mission. While sailing through the night, the dreadnought SMS Szent István met Italian MAS torpedo boats and was sunk, causing Horthy to abort the mission. He managed to preserve the rest of the empire's fleet until he was ordered by Emperor Charles to surrender it to the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (the predecessor of Yugoslavia) on 31 October.[22]

The end of the war saw Hungary turned into a landlocked nation, and with that, the new government had little need for Horthy's naval expertise. He retired with his family to his private estate at Kenderes.

Dates of rank and assignments

 
The damaged SMS Novara after the Battle of Otranto
 
Horthy, seriously wounded, commanded the fleet at the Battle of the Strait of Otranto until falling unconscious

Interwar period, 1919–1939

Historians agree on the conservatism of interwar Hungary. Historian István Deák states:

Between 1919 and 1944 Hungary was a rightist country. Forged out of a counter-revolutionary heritage, its governments advocated a "nationalist Christian" policy; they extolled heroism, faith, and unity; they despised the French Revolution, and they spurned the liberal and socialist ideologies of the 19th century. The governments saw Hungary as a bulwark against Bolshevism and bolshevism's instruments: socialism, cosmopolitanism, and Freemasonry. They perpetrated the rule of a small clique of aristocrats, civil servants, and army officers, and surrounded with adulation by the head of the state, the counterrevolutionary Admiral Horthy.[23]

Commander of the National Army

Horthy enters Budapest, 16 November 1919 (1080p film footage)

Two national traumas that followed the First World War profoundly shaped the spirit and future of the Hungarian nation. The first was the loss, as dictated by the Allies of World War I, of large portions of Hungarian territory that had bordered other countries. These were lands that had belonged to Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary) but were now ceded mainly to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The excisions, eventually ratified in the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, cost Hungary two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its native Hungarian speakers; this dealt the population a terrible psychological blow. The second trauma began in March 1919, when Communist leader Béla Kun seized power in the capital, Budapest, after the first proto-democratic government in Hungary faltered.[24]

 
With the Treaty of Trianon, the Kingdom of Hungary lost 72% of its territory (including Croatia) and 3.3 million people of Hungarian ethnicity.

Kun and his loyalists proclaimed a Hungarian Soviet Republic and promised the restoration of Hungary's former grandeur. Instead, his efforts at reconquest failed, and Hungarians were treated to Soviet-style repression in the form of armed gangs who intimidated or murdered enemies of the regime. This period of violence came to be known as the Red Terror.[25]

Within weeks of his coup, Kun's popularity plummeted. On 30 May 1919, anti-communist politicians formed a counter-revolutionary government in the southern city of Szeged, which was occupied by French forces at the time. There, Gyula Károlyi, the prime minister of the counter-revolutionary government, asked former Admiral Horthy, still considered a war hero, to be the Minister of War in the new government and take command of a counter-revolutionary force that would be named the National Army (Hungarian: Nemzeti Hadsereg). Horthy consented, and he arrived in Szeged on 6 June. Soon afterward, because of orders from the Allied powers, a cabinet was reformed, and Horthy was not given a seat in it. Undaunted, Horthy managed to retain control of the National Army by detaching the army command from the War Ministry.

After the Communist government collapsed and its leaders fled, French-supported Romanian forces entered Budapest on 6 August 1919. In retaliation for the Red Terror, reactionary crews now exacted revenge in a two-year wave of violent repression known today as the White Terror. These reprisals were organized and carried out by officers of Horthy's National Army, particularly Pál Prónay,[26] Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek and Iván Héjjas.[27] Their victims were primarily communists, social democrats, and Jews. Most Hungarian Jews were not supporters of the Bolsheviks, but much of the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been young Jewish intellectuals, and anger about the Communist revolution easily translated into anti-Semitic hostility.[26]

In Budapest, Prónay installed his unit in the Hotel Britannia, where the group swelled to battalion size. Their program of vicious attacks continued; they planned a citywide pogrom against the Jews until Horthy found out and put a stop to it. In his diary, Prónay reported that Horthy:

reproached me for the many Jewish corpses found in the various parts of the country, especially in the Transdanubia. This, he emphasized, gave the foreign press extra ammunitions against us. He told me that we should stop harassing small Jews; instead, we should kill some big (Kun government) Jews such as Somogyi or Vázsonyi – these people deserve punishment much more... in vain, I tried to convince him that the liberal papers would be against us anyway, and it did not matter that we killed only one Jew or we killed them all[28]

The degree of Horthy's responsibility for the excesses of Prónay is disputed. On several occasions, Horthy reached out to stop Prónay from a particularly excessive burst of anti-Jewish cruelty, and the Jews of Pest went on record absolving Horthy of the White Terror as early as the autumn of 1919 when they released a statement disavowing the Kun revolution and blaming the terror on a few units within the National Army. Horthy has never been found to have personally engaged in White Terror atrocities. But his American biographer Thomas L. Sakmyster concluded that he "tacitly supported the right-wing officer detachments" who carried out the terror;[29] Horthy called them "my best men".[30] The admiral also had practical reasons for overlooking the terror his officers wrought, since he needed the dedicated officers to help stabilize the country. Nevertheless, it was at least another year before the terror died down. In the summer of 1920, Horthy's government took measures to rein in and eventually disperse the reactionary battalions. Prónay managed to undermine these measures, but only for a short time.[27] Prónay was put on trial for extorting a wealthy Jewish politician, and for "insulting the President of the Parliament" by trying to cover up the extortion. Found guilty on both charges, Prónay was now a liability and an embarrassment. His command was revoked, and he was denounced as a common criminal on the floor of the Hungarian parliament.[27]

After serving short jail sentences, Prónay tried to convince Horthy to restore his battalion command. The Prónay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer, but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922, and expelled its members from the army.[27] Prónay entered politics as a member of the government's right-wing opposition. In the 1930s, he sought and failed to emulate the Nazis by generating a Hungarian fascist mass movement. In 1932, he was charged with incitement, sentenced to six months in prison, and stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel. Prónay would support the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross and lead attacks on Jews before being captured by Soviet troops sometime during or after the Battle of Budapest of 1944–45, dying in captivity in 1947/48.[27]

Precisely how much Horthy knew about the excesses of the White Terror is not known. Horthy himself declined to apologize for the savagery of his officer detachments, writing later, "I have no reason to gloss over deeds of injustice and atrocities committed when an iron broom alone could sweep the country clean."[31] He endorsed Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli's poetic justification of the White reprisals ("Hell let loose on earth cannot be subdued by the beating of angels' wings") remarking, "the Communists in Hungary, willing disciples of the Russian Bolshevists, had indeed let hell loose."[31]

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in an internal report by delegate George Burnier, stated the following in April 1920:

There are two distinct military organizations in Hungary: the national army and a kind of civil guard which was formed when the communist régime fell. It is the latter that has been responsible for all the reprehensible acts committed. The Government managed to regain control of these organizations only a few weeks ago. They are now well-disciplined and collaborate with the municipal police forces.[32]

This deep hostility toward Communism would be the more lasting legacy of Kun's abortive revolution. It was a conviction shared by Horthy and his country's ruling class that would help drive Hungary into a fateful alliance with Adolf Hitler.

The nation of the Hungarians loved and admired Budapest, which became its polluter in the last years. Here, on the banks of the Danube, I arraign her. This city has disowned her thousand years of tradition, she has dragged the Holy Crown and the national colors in the dust, she has clothed herself in red rags. The finest of the nation she threw into dungeons or drove into exile. She laid in ruin our property and wasted our wealth. Yet the nearer we approached to this city, the more rapidly did the ice in our hearts melt. We are now ready to forgive her.[33]

 
Admiral Miklós Horthy enters Budapest at the head of the National Army, 16 November 1919. He is greeted by city officials in front of the Gellért Hotel. The Romanian army retreated from Budapest on 14 November, leaving Horthy to enter the city, where in a fiery speech he accused the capital's citizens of betraying Hungary by supporting Bolshevism

Following the pressure of the Allied powers, Romanian troops finally evacuated Hungary on 25 February 1920.

Regent

On 1 March 1920, the National Assembly of Hungary re-established the Kingdom of Hungary. It was apparent that the Allies of World War I would not accept any return of King Charles IV (the former Austro-Hungarian emperor) from exile. Instead, with National Army officers controlling the parliament building, the assembly voted to install Horthy as Regent; he defeated Count Albert Apponyi by a vote of 131 to 7.

Bishop Ottokár Prohászka then led a small delegation to meet Horthy, announcing, "Hungary's Parliament has elected you Regent! Would it please you to accept the office of Regent of Hungary?" To their astonishment, Horthy declined, unless the powers of the office were expanded. As Horthy stalled, the politicians gave in to his demands and granted him "the general prerogatives of the king, with the exception of the right to name titles of nobility and of the patronage of the Church."[31] The prerogatives he was given included the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers, to convene and dissolve parliament, and to command the armed forces. With those sweeping powers guaranteed, Horthy took the oath of office.[34] He was styled His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (Hungarian: Ő Főméltósága a Magyar Királyság Kormányzója). (Charles I did try to regain his throne twice; see Charles IV of Hungary's attempts to retake the throne for more details.)

 
Standard of Miklós Horthy

The Hungarian state was legally a kingdom, but it had no king, as the Allied powers would not have tolerated any reinstatement of the Habsburg dynasty. The country retained its parliamentary system following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, with a prime minister appointed as head of government. As head of state, Horthy retained significant influence through his constitutional powers and the loyalty of his ministers to the crown.[35] Although his involvement in drafting legislation was minuscule, he nevertheless had the ability to ensure that laws passed by the Hungarian parliament conformed to his political preferences.

Seeking redress for the Treaty of Trianon

 
Horthy in Budapest, August 1931
 
Miklós Horthy with King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in Rome on 25 November 1936, during a military parade in Via dell'Impero

The first decade of Horthy's reign was primarily consumed by stabilizing the Hungarian economy and political system. Horthy's chief partner in these efforts was his prime minister István Bethlen. It was commonly known that Horthy was an Anglophile,[36][37][38] and British political and economic support played a significant role in the stabilization and consolidation of the early Horthy era in the Kingdom of Hungary.[39]

Bethlen sought to stabilize the economy while building alliances with weaker nations that could advance Hungary's cause. That cause was, primarily, reversing the losses of the Treaty of Trianon. The humiliations of the Trianon treaty continued to occupy a central place in Hungarian foreign policy and the popular imagination. The indignant anti-Trianon slogan "Nem, nem soha!" ("No, no never!") became a ubiquitous motto of Hungarian outrage. When in 1927 the British newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere denounced the partitions ratified at Trianon in the pages of his Daily Mail, an official letter of gratitude was eagerly signed by 1.2 million Hungarians.[31]

But Hungary's stability was precarious, and the Great Depression derailed much of Bethlen's economic balance. Horthy replaced him with an old reactionary confederate from his Szeged days: Gyula Gömbös. Gömbös was an outspoken anti-Semite and a budding fascist. Although he agreed to Horthy's demands that he temper his anti-Jewish rhetoric and work amicably with Hungary's large Jewish professional class, Gömbös's tenure began swinging Hungary's political mood powerfully rightward. He strengthened Hungary's ties to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist state. Fatefully, when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, he found in Gömbös an admiring and obliging colleague.[citation needed] John Gunther stated that Horthy,

though reactionary as far as social or economic ideas are concerned, is in effect the guardian of constitutionalism and what vestigial democracy remains in the country, because it is largely his influence that prevents any prime minister from abolishing parliament and setting up a dictatorial rule.[30]

Gömbös rescued the failing economy by securing trade guarantees from Germany – a strategy that positioned Germany as Hungary's primary trading partner and tied Hungary's future even more tightly to Hitler's. He also assured Hitler that Hungary would quickly become a one-party state modeled on the Nazi party control of Germany. Gömbös died in 1936 before he realized his most extreme goals, but he left his nation headed into a firm partnership with the German dictator.

World War II and the Holocaust

Main article: Hungary in World War II

Uneasy alliance

Hungary now entered into intricate political maneuvers with the regime of Adolf Hitler, and Horthy began to play a greater and more public role in navigating Hungary along this dangerous path.

 
German and Hungarian flags in Berlin

For Horthy, Hitler served as a bulwark against Soviet encroachment or invasion. Horthy was obsessed with the Communist threat. One American diplomat remarked that Horthy's anti-communist tirades were so common and ferocious that diplomats "discounted it as a phobia".[40]

Horthy clearly saw his country as trapped between two stronger powers, both of them dangerous; evidently, he considered Hitler to be the more manageable of the two, at least at first. Hitler was able to wield greater influence over Hungary than the Soviet Union could – not only as of the country's major trading partner but also because he could assist with two of Horthy's key ambitions: maintaining Hungarian sovereignty and satisfying the nationwide yearning to recover former Hungarian lands. Horthy's strategy was one of cautious, sometimes even a grudging, alliance. The means by which the regent granted or resisted Hitler's demands, especially with regard to Hungarian military action and the treatment of Hungary's Jews, remain the central criteria by which his career has been judged. Horthy's relationship with Hitler was, by his own account, a tense one – largely due, he said, to his unwillingness to bend his nation's policies to the German leader's desires.[41]

Horthy's attitude to Hitler was ambivalent. On one hand, Hungary was an irredentist state that refused to accept the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Trianon. Furthermore, the three states with which Hungary had territorial disputes, namely Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania, were all allies of France, so a German-Hungarian alliance seemed logical. On the other hand, Admiral Horthy was a good navalist who believed that sea power was the most important factor in war. He felt that Britain, as the world's greatest sea power, would inevitably defeat Germany should another war begin.[42] During a meeting with Hitler in 1935, Horthy was well pleased that Hitler informed him that he wanted Germany and Hungary to partition Czechoslovakia, but Horthy went on to tell Hitler that he must be careful not to do anything that might cause an Anglo-German war because British sea power would sooner or later cause the defeat of Nazi Germany. Horthy was always torn between his belief that an alliance with Germany was the only way to revise Trianon and his belief that war against the international order could only end in defeat.[42]

In August 1938, when Horthy, his wife, and some Hungarian politicians took a special train from Budapest to Germany, SA and other National Socialist formations ceremonially welcomed the delegation at the Passau train station. The train then continued to Kiel for the christening of the German cruiser Prinz Eugen.[43]

During his ensuing state visit, Hitler asked Horthy for troops and matériel to participate in Germany's planned invasion of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, Horthy later reported, "He gave me to understand that as a reward we should be allowed to keep the territory we had invaded."[31] Horthy said he declined, insisting to Hitler that Hungary's claims on the disputed lands should be settled by peaceful means.[44]

 
Horthy at the annexation of south-east Czechoslovakia, Kassa (present-day Košice), 11 November 1938

Three months later, after the Munich Agreement put control of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in Hitler's hands, by the First Vienna Award Hungary annexed some of the south-eastern parts of Czechoslovakia. Horthy enthusiastically rode into the re-acquired territories at the head of his troops, greeted by emotional ethnic Hungarians: "As I passed along the roads, people embraced one another, fell upon their knees, and wept with joy because liberation had come to them at last, without war, without bloodshed."[31] But as "peaceful" as this annexation was, and as just as it may have seemed to many Hungarians, it was a dividend of Hitler's brinksmanship and threats of war, in which Hungary was now inextricably complicit. Hungary was now committed to the Axis agenda: on 24 February 1939, it joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, and on 11 April, it withdrew from the League of Nations. American journalists began to refer to Hungary as "the jackal of Europe".[45]

This combination of menace and reward drifted Hungary closer to the status of a Nazi client state.[46] In March 1939, when Hitler took what remained of Czechoslovakia by force, Hungary was allowed to annex Carpathian Ruthenia. After a conflict with the First Slovak Republic during the Slovak–Hungarian War of 1939, Hungary gained further territories. In August 1940, Hitler intervened on Hungary's behalf once again. After the failed Hungarian-Romanian negotiations, Hungary annexed Northern Transylvania from Romania by the Second Vienna Award.

 
Horthy during the Hungarians' entry into Komárom (present-day Komárno), following the First Vienna Award, November 1938

But despite their cooperation with the Nazi regime, Horthy and his government would be better described as "conservative authoritarian"[47] than "fascist". Certainly, Horthy was as hostile to the home-grown fascist and ultra-nationalist movements that emerged in Hungary between the wars (particularly the Arrow Cross Party) as he was to Communism. The Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi, was repeatedly imprisoned at Horthy's command.

John F. Montgomery, who served in Budapest as U.S. ambassador from 1933 to 1941, openly admired this side of Horthy's character and reported the following incident in his memoir: in March 1939, Arrow Cross supporters disrupted a performance at the Budapest opera house by chanting "Justice for Szálasi!" loud enough for the regent to hear. A fight broke out, and when Montgomery went to take a closer look, he discovered that:

two or three men were on the floor and he [Horthy] had another by the throat, slapping his face and shouting what I learned afterward was: "So you would betray your country, would you?" The Regent was alone, but he had the situation in hand.... The whole incident was typical not only of the Regent's deep hatred of alien doctrine, but of the kind of man he is. Although he was around seventy-two years of age, it did not occur to him to ask for help; he went right ahead like a skipper with a mutiny on his hands.[48]

 
Hungary in 1941, after recovering territories from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia

And yet, by the time of this episode, Horthy had allowed his government to give in to Nazi demands that the Hungarians enact laws restricting the lives of the country's Jews. The first Hungarian anti-Jewish Law, in 1938, limited the number of Jews in the professions, the government, and commerce to twenty percent, and the second reduced it to five percent the following year; 250,000 Hungarian Jews lost their jobs as a result. A "Third Jewish Law" of August 1941 prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jews and defined anyone having two Jewish grandparents as "racially Jewish". A Jewish man who had non-marital sex with a "decent non-Jewish woman resident in Hungary" could be sentenced to three years in prison.[49]

Horthy's personal views on Jews and their role in Hungarian society are the subjects of some debate. In an October 1940 letter to Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki, Horthy echoed a widespread national sentiment: that Jews enjoyed too much success in commerce, the professions, and industry – success that needed to be curtailed:

As regards the Jewish problem, I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theatre, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad. Since, however, one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard of living, i.e., we have to acquire wealth, it is impossible, in a year or two, to replace the Jews, who have everything in their hands, and to replace them with incompetent, unworthy, mostly big-mouthed elements, for we should become bankrupt. This requires a generation at least.[50]

War

 
Horthy with Hitler in 1938

The Kingdom of Hungary was gradually drawn into the war itself. In 1939 and 1940, Hungarian volunteers were sent to Finland's Winter War, but did not have time to partake in the fighting before the end of the war. In April 1941, Hungary became, in effect, a member of the Axis. Hungary permitted Hitler to send troops across Hungarian territory for the invasion of Yugoslavia and ultimately sent its own troops to claim its share of the dismembered Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Prime Minister Pál Teleki, horrified that he had failed to prevent this collusion with the Nazis, despite the fact that he had signed a non-aggression pact with Yugoslavia in December 1940, committed suicide.[citation needed]

In June 1941, the Hungarian government finally yielded to Hitler's demands that the nation contribute to the Axis war effort. On 27 June, Hungary became part of Operation Barbarossa and declared war on the Soviet Union. The Hungarians sent in troops and material only four days after Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

Eighteen months later, less well-equipped and less motivated than their German allies, 200,000 troops of the Hungarian Second Army ended up holding the front on the Don River west of Stalingrad.[51]

The first massacre of Jewish people from Hungarian territory took place in August 1941, when government officials ordered the deportation of Jews without Hungarian citizenship (principally refugees from other Nazi-occupied countries) to Ukraine. Roughly 18,000–20,000 of these deportees were slaughtered by Friedrich Jeckeln and his SS troops; only 2,000–3,000 survived. These killings are known as the Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre. This event, in which the slaughter of Jews for the first time numbered in the tens of thousands, is considered to be among the first large-scale massacre of the Holocaust. Because of the objections of Hungary's leadership, the deportations were halted.[52]

By early 1942, Horthy was already seeking to put some distance between himself and Hitler's regime. That March, he dismissed the pro-German prime minister László Bárdossy and replaced him with Miklós Kállay, a moderate whom Horthy expected to loosen Hungary's ties to Germany.[53] Kállay successfully sabotaged economic cooperation with Nazi Germany, protected refugees, and prisoners, resisted Nazi pressure regarding Jews, established contact with the Allies and negotiated conditions under which Hungary would switch sides against Germany. However, the Allies were not close enough. When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944 Kállay went into hiding. He was finally captured by the Nazis, but was liberated when the war ended.[54]

In September 1942, personal tragedy struck the Hungarian Regent. 37-year-old István Horthy, Horthy's eldest son, was killed. István Horthy was the Deputy Regent of Hungary and a Flight Lieutenant in the reserves, 1/1 Fighter Squadron of the Royal Hungarian Air Force. He was killed when his Hawk (Héja) fighter crashed at an air field near Ilovskoye.

In January 1943, Hungary's enthusiasm for the war effort, never especially high, suffered a tremendous blow. The Soviet army, in the full momentum of its triumphant turnaround after the Battle of Stalingrad, punched through Romanian troops at a bend in the Don River and virtually obliterated the Second Hungarian Army in a few days' fighting. In this single action, Hungarian combat fatalities jumped by 80,000. Jew and non-Jew suffered together in this defeat, as the Hungarian troops had been accompanied by some 40,000 Jews and political prisoners in forced-labor units whose job had been to clear minefields.[55]

German officials blamed Hungary's Jews for the nation's "defeatist attitude." In the wake of the Don bend disaster, Hitler demanded at an April 1943 meeting that Horthy punish the 800,000 Jews still living in Hungary, who according to Hitler were responsible for this defeat. In response, Horthy and his government-supplied 10,000 Jewish deportees for labor battalions. With the growing awareness the Allies might well win the war, it became more expedient not to comply with further German requests. Cautiously, the Hungarian government began to explore contacts with the Allies in hopes of negotiating a surrender.[56]

Prior to the German occupation within the area of Hungary around 63,000 Jews perished.[57] Overall, Hungarian Jews suffered close to 560,000 casualties.[58]

Occupation

Main article: Operation Margarethe
 
A German Tiger II with a column of Arrow Cross soldiers in Budapest

By 1944, the Axis was losing the war, and the Red Army was at Hungary's borders. Fearing that the Soviets would overrun the country, Kállay, with Horthy's approval, put out numerous feelers to the Allies. He even promised to surrender unconditionally to them once they reached Hungarian territory. An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Klessheim Castle near Salzburg. He pressured Horthy to make greater contributions to the war effort and again commanded him to assist in the killing of more of Hungary's Jews.[citation needed] Horthy now permitted the deportation of a large number of Jews (the generally accepted figure is 100,000), but would not go further.[59]

The conference was a ruse. As Horthy was returning home on 19 March, the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Hungary. Horthy was told he could only stay in office if he dismissed Kállay and appointed a new government that would fully cooperate with Hitler and his plenipotentiary in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer. Knowing the likely alternative was a gauleiter who would treat Hungary in the same manner as the other countries under Nazi occupation, Horthy acquiesced and appointed his ambassador to Germany, General Döme Sztójay, as prime minister. The Germans originally wanted Horthy to reappoint Béla Imrédy (who had been prime minister from 1938 to 1939), but Horthy had enough influence to get Veesenmayer to accept Sztójay instead. Contrary to Horthy's hopes, Sztójay's government eagerly proceeded to participate in the Holocaust.[citation needed]

The chief agents of this collaboration were Andor Jaross, the Minister of the Interior, and his two rabidly anti-Semitic state secretaries, László Endre and László Baky (later to be known as the "Deportation Trio"). On 9 April, Prime Minister Sztójay and the Germans obligated Hungary to place 300,000 Jewish people at the "disposal" of the Reich, in effect, sentencing most of Hungary's remaining Jews to death.[citation needed] Five days later, on 14 April, Endre, Baky, and SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann commenced the deportation of the remaining Hungarian Jews. The Yellow Star, Ghettoization laws and deportation were accomplished in less than 8 weeks with the help of the new Hungarian government and authorities. The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began on 14 May 1944 and continued at a rate of 12–14,000 a day until 24 July.[60]

Upon learning about the deportations, Horthy wrote the following letter to the prime minister:

Dear Sztójay: I was aware that the Government in the given forced situation has to take many steps that I do not consider correct, and for which I can not take responsibility. Among these matters is the handling of the Jewish question in a manner that does not correspond to the Hungarian mentality, Hungarian conditions, and, for the matter, Hungarian interests. It is clear to everyone that what among these were done by Germans or by the insistence of the Germans was not in my power to prevent, so in these matters, I was forced into passivity. As such, I was not informed in advance, or I am not fully informed now, however, I have heard recently that in many cases in inhumaneness and brutality we exceeded the Germans. I demand that the handling of the Jewish affairs in the Ministry of Interior be taken out of the hands of Deputy Minister László Endre. Furthermore, László Baky's assignment to the management of the police forces should be terminated as soon as possible.[31]

Just before the deportations began, two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and passed details of what was happening inside the camps to officials in Slovakia. This document, known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, was quickly translated into German and passed among Jewish groups and then to Allied officials. Details from the report were broadcast by the BBC on 15 June and printed in The New York Times on 20 June.[61] World leaders, including Pope Pius XII (25 June), President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 26 June, and King Gustaf V of Sweden on 30 June,[62] subsequently pleaded with Horthy to use his influence to stop the deportations. Roosevelt specifically threatened military retaliation if the transports were not ceased. On 2 July 1944 Horthy put down a coup attempt by Hungarists by using loyal forces. Thereby he temporarily neutralized the men who planned to deport Jews. This enabled Horthy to issue the order halting deportations on 7 July. The transports halted.[63][64] By that time, 437,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz, most of them to their deaths.[61] Horthy was informed about the number of the deported Jews some days later: "approximately 400,000".[65] By many estimates, one of every three people murdered at Auschwitz during its operation was a Hungarian Jew killed between May and July 1944.[66]

There remains some uncertainty over how much Horthy knew about the number of Hungarian Jews being deported, their destination, and their intended fate – and when he knew it as well as what he could have done about it. According to historian Péter Sipos, the Hungarian government had already known about the Jewish genocide since 1943.[67] Some historians[who?] have argued that Horthy believed that the Jews were being sent to the camps to work and that they would be returned to Hungary after the war.[65] Horthy himself wrote in his memoirs: "Not before August," he wrote, "did secret information reach me of the horrible truth about the extermination camps."[31] The Vrba-Wetzler statement is believed to have been passed to Hungarian Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner no later than 28 April 1944, Kastner did not make it public.[68] He made an agreement with the SS to remain silent in order to save the Jews who escaped on the Kastner train. The "Kastner train", a convoy that enabled Hungarian Jews to escape to Switzerland, left Budapest on 30 June 1944.

Deposition and arrest

Main articles: Operation Panzerfaust and Government of National Unity (Hungary)

In August 1944, Romania withdrew from the Axis and turned against Germany and its allies. This development, a sign of the failing German war effort, led Horthy in Budapest to reconsolidate his political position. He ousted Sztójay and the other Nazi-friendly ministers installed the preceding spring, replacing them with a new government under Géza Lakatos. He stopped the mass deportations of Jews and ordered the police to use deadly force if the Germans attempted to resume them. While some smaller groups continued to be deported by train, the Germans did not press Horthy to ramp the pace back up to pre-August levels. Indeed, when Horthy turned down Eichmann's request to restart the deportations, Heinrich Himmler ordered Eichmann to return to Germany.[69]

Realizing that Hungary's position was untenable, Horthy also renewed peace feelers to the Allies and began considering strategies for surrendering to the Allied force he distrusted the most: the Red Army. Although Horthy was still bitterly anticommunist, his dealings with the Nazis led him to conclude that the Soviets were the lesser evil. Working through his trustworthy General Béla Miklós, who was in contact with Soviet forces in eastern Hungary, Horthy sought to surrender to the Soviets while preserving the Hungarian government's autonomy. The Soviets willingly promised this, and on 11 October Horthy and the Soviets finally agreed to surrender terms. On 15 October 1944, Horthy told his government ministers that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. He said,

"It is clear today that Germany has lost the war... Hungary has accordingly concluded a preliminary armistice with Russia, and will cease all hostilities against her."[70]

Horthy informed a representative of the German Reich that "we were about to conclude a military armistice with our former enemies and to cease all hostilities against them."[31]

The Nazis had anticipated Horthy's move. On 15 October, after Horthy announced the armistice in a nationwide radio address, Hitler initiated Operation Panzerfaust, sending commando Otto Skorzeny to Budapest with instructions to remove Horthy from power. Horthy's son Miklós Horthy, Jr., was meeting with Soviet representatives to finalize the surrender when Skorzeny and his troops forced their way into the meeting and kidnapped the younger Horthy at gunpoint. Trussed up in a carpet, Miklós Jr. was immediately driven to the airport and flown to Germany to serve as a hostage. Skorzeny then brazenly led a convoy of German troops and four Tiger II tanks to the Vienna Gates of Castle Hill, where the Hungarians had been ordered not to resist. Though one unit had not received the order, the Germans quickly captured Castle Hill with minimal bloodshed; seven soldiers were killed and twenty-six wounded.[70]

Horthy was captured by Veesenmayer and his staff later on the 15th and taken to the Waffen SS office, where he was held overnight. Veesenmayer told Horthy that unless he recanted the armistice and abdicated, his son would be killed the next morning. The fascist Arrow Cross Party swiftly took over Budapest. With his son's life in the balance, Horthy consented to sign a document officially abdicating his office and naming Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross, as both head of state and prime minister. Horthy understood that the Germans merely wanted the stamp of his prestige on a Nazi-sponsored Arrow Cross coup, but he signed anyway. As he later explained his capitulation:

"I neither resigned nor appointed Szálasi Premier. I merely exchanged my signature for my son's life. A signature wrung from a man at machine-gun point can have little legality."[31]

Horthy met Skorzeny three days later at Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's apartment and was told he would be transported to Germany in his own special train. Skorzeny told Horthy that he would be a "guest of honour" in a secure Bavarian castle. On 17 October, Horthy was personally escorted by Skorzeny into captivity[70] at Schloss Hirschberg am Haarsee [de] in Bavaria, where he was guarded closely, but allowed to live in comfort.[31]

With the help of the SS, the Arrow Cross leadership moved swiftly to take command of the Hungarian armed forces, and to prevent the surrender that Horthy had arranged, even though Soviet troops were now deep inside the country. Szálasi resumed persecution of Jews and other "undesirables". In the three months between November 1944 and January 1945, Arrow Cross death squads shot 10,000 to 15,000 Jews on the banks of the Danube. The Arrow Cross also welcomed Adolf Eichmann back to Budapest, where he began the deportation of the city's surviving Jews. Eichmann never successfully completed this phase of his plans, thwarted in large measure by the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Out of a pre-war Hungarian Jewish population estimated at 825,000, only 260,000 survived.

By December 1944, Budapest was under siege by Soviet forces. The Arrow Cross leadership retreated across the Danube into the hills of Buda in late January, and by February the city surrendered to the Soviet forces.

Horthy remained under house arrest in Bavaria until the war in Europe ended. On 29 April, his SS guardians fled in the face of the Allied advance. On 1 May, Horthy was first liberated, and then arrested, by elements of the U.S. 7th Army.[31]

Exile

After his arrest, Horthy was moved through a variety of detention locations before finally arriving at the prison facility at Nuremberg in late September 1945. There he was asked to provide evidence to the International Military Tribunal in preparation for the trial of the Nazi leadership. Although he was interviewed repeatedly about his contacts with some of the defendants, he did not testify in person. In Nuremberg, he was reunited with his son, Miklós Jr.

Horthy gradually came to believe that his arrest had been arranged and choreographed by the United States in order to protect him from the Russians. Indeed, the former regent reported being told that Josip Broz Tito, the new ruler of Yugoslavia, asked that Horthy be charged with complicity with the 1942 Novi Sad raid by Hungarian troops in the Bačka region of Vojvodina.[31] Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubović has claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres but had approved of them.[9] American trial officials did not indict Horthy for war crimes. The former ambassador John Montgomery, who had some influence in Washington, also contributed to Horthy's release in Nuremberg.[71]

According to the memoirs of Ferenc Nagy, who served for a year as prime minister in post-war Hungary, the Hungarian Communist leadership was also interested in extraditing Horthy for trial. Nagy said that Joseph Stalin was more forgiving: that Stalin told Nagy during a diplomatic meeting in April 1945 not to judge Horthy, because he was old and had offered an armistice in 1944.[72]

On 17 December 1945, Horthy was released from Nuremberg prison and allowed to rejoin his family in the German town of Weilheim, Bavaria. The Horthys lived there for four years, supported financially by ambassador John Montgomery, his successor, Herbert Pell, and by Pope Pius XII, whom he knew personally.

In March 1948, Horthy returned to testify at the Ministries Trial, the last of the twelve U.S.-run Nuremberg Trials; he testified against Edmund Veesenmayer, the Nazi administrator who had controlled Hungary during the deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.[31] Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment but was released in 1951.

For Horthy, returning to Hungary was impossible; it was now firmly in the hands of a Soviet-sponsored Communist government. In an extraordinary twist of fate, the chief of Hungary's post-war Communist apparatus was Mátyás Rákosi, one of Béla Kun's colleagues from the ill-fated Communist coup of 1919. Kun had been executed during Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, but Rákosi had survived in a Hungarian prison cell. In 1940, Horthy had permitted Rákosi to emigrate to the Soviet Union in exchange for a series of highly symbolic Hungarian battle-flags from the 19th century that were in Russian hands.

In 1950, the Horthy family managed to find a home in Portugal, thanks to Miklós Jr.'s contacts with Portuguese diplomats in Switzerland. Horthy and members of his family were relocated to the seaside town of Estoril, in the house address Rua Dom Afonso Henriques, 1937 2765.573 Estoril. His American supporter, John Montgomery, recruited a small group of wealthy Hungarians to raise funds for their upkeep in exile. According to Horthy's daughter-in-law, Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, Hungarian Jews also supported Horthy's family in exile,[71] including industrialist Ferenc Chorin and lawyer László Pathy.[73]

In exile, Horthy wrote his memoirs, Ein Leben für Ungarn (English: A Life for Hungary), published under the name of Nikolaus von Horthy, in which he narrated many personal experiences from his youth until the end of World War II. He claimed that he had distrusted Hitler for much of the time he knew him and tried to perform the best actions and appoint the best officials in his country. He also highlighted Hungary's mistreatment by many other countries since the end of World War I. Horthy was one of the few Axis heads of state to survive the war, and thus to write post-war memoirs.

 
The Horthy family crypt in Kenderes, where Horthy himself was reburied in 1993

Horthy never lost his deep contempt for communism, and in his memoirs he blamed Hungary's alliance with the Axis on the threat posed by the "Asiatic barbarians" of the Soviet Union. He railed against the influence that the Allies' victory had given to Stalin's totalitarian state. "I feel no urge to say 'I told you so,' " Horthy wrote, "nor to express bitterness at the experiences that have been forced upon me. Rather, I feel wonder and amazement at the vagaries of humanity."[31]

Horthy married Magdolna Purgly de Jószáshely in 1901; they were married for just over 56 years, until his death. He had two sons, Miklós Horthy, Jr. (often rendered in English as "Nicholas" or "Nikolaus") and István Horthy, who served as his political assistants; and two daughters, Magda and Paula. Of his four children, only Miklós outlived him.

He died in 1957 in Estoril and was initially buried in the British Cemetery, Lisbon. According to footnotes in his memoirs, Horthy was very distraught about the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In his will, Horthy asked that his body not be returned to Hungary "until the last Russian soldier has left." His heirs honored the request. In 1993, two years after the Soviet troops left Hungary, Horthy's body was returned to Hungary and he was buried in his hometown of Kenderes. The reburial in Hungary was the subject of some controversy on the part of the left.[74]

Honours

National honours

Foreign honours

 
Coat of arms of Miklós Horthy as Knight of the Order of Charles III (Spain)

Postage stamps

  • Horthy was honoured by issuance of many postage stamps by Hungary. Some of them issued: on 1 March 1930,[76] on 1 January 1938,[77] on 1 March 1940,[78] on 18 June 1941[79] and on 18 June 1941.[80]

Legacy

 
In 2013, the unveiling of Horthy's bust in a Calvinist Church in Budapest was followed by national and international criticisms.[15]

What did the average Hungarian learn in the good old days? He learned that the Horthy regime was restorationist, fascist, fascistoid, half-fascist, dictatorial, militaristic, nationalist, selfish, exploitative, power-hungry, servile, and so on. And primarily: counterrevolutionary. Now he hears and reads: conservative, autocratic, authoritarian, undemocratic, patriotic, self-interested, dynamic, reformist, abandoned, deceived, etc. Now I think that here and now a new, considered synthesis has not yet seen the light of day, even if it has in most of the world. For the Hungarian obviously does not wish to surrender his own history when he finally, and rightly, believes it could be his.[81]

— Mária Ormos

I consider Miklós Horthy a patriot, who also must be found a respected place in the national memory.

— József Antall

The interwar period dominated by Horthy's government is known in Hungarian as the Horthy-kor ("Horthy age") or Horthy-rendszer ("Horthy system"). Its legacy, and that of Horthy himself, remain among the most controversial political topics in Hungary today, tied inseparably to the Treaty of Trianon and the Holocaust. According to one school of thought, Horthy was a strong, conservative, but not undemocratic leader who only entered into an alliance with Hitler's Germany in order to restore lands Hungary lost after the First World War and was reluctant, or even defiant, in the face of Germany's demands to deport the Hungarian Jewry.[12] Others see Horthy's alliance with Germany as foolhardy,[12] or think that a positive view of Horthy serves a revisionist historical agenda,[82] pointing to Horthy's passage of various anti-Jewish laws – the earliest in Europe, in 1920 – as a sign of his anti-Semitism and the prelude for Hungary's collaboration in the Holocaust.[15]

During the Horthy era

During his own reign, Horthy's reception was fairly positive, though by no means monolithic. Opponents of the short-lived Soviet Republic saw him as a "national saviour", in contrast to the Communist "losers of the nation."[83] Because Horthy distanced himself from everyday politics, he was able to cultivate the image of the nationally governing admiral. The peaceful re-acquisition of Hungarian-majority lands lost after Trianon greatly bolstered this image.[84] The regime's efforts at economic development and modernization also improved contemporaries' opinions, and although the Great Depression initially hurt his image, Horthy's wide-ranging social programs saved face for the most part.[85]

On the other hand, Horthy's right-wing tendencies were not without their critics even in his time. Bourgeois liberals, among them Sándor Márai, criticized Horthy's authoritarian style as much as they disdained the violent tendencies of the far-left.[86] He was also criticized by monarchists and elements of the aristocracy and clergy.[87] While the harshest opposition to Horthy initially came from the Communist parties he had overthrown and outlawed, the later 1930s saw him come under increasing criticism from the far-right. After the Arrow Cross Party took control of the country in 1944, Horthy was denounced as a "traitor" and "Jew-lover".

 
Hungary's borders (in increasing color) in 1920, 1938, 1940 and 1941

Horthy's reception in the West was positive until the outbreak of the Second World War, and while Hitler initially backed Horthy, relations between the two leaders were soured by Horthy's denial of involvement in the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Horthy likewise viewed the Nazis as "brigands and clowns."[88] The Little Entente criticized Horthy, mainly for his irredentist policy goals.[89]

During the Communist era

Under the Marxism–Leninism mandated during the Communist era, the Horthy era was generally depicted negatively. Scholars[who?] agree that due to political pressure, Horthy's positive achievements were unmentioned while his shortcomings were exaggerated.

The Communist takeover in 1945 saw the same powers[who?] that had denounced Horthy as an "executioner" and a "murdering monster" assume control of the state. During the 1950s, Mátyás Rákosi's hardliner Stalinist government systematically disseminated, through propaganda and state education, the idea that the Horthy era constituted the "lowest point in Hungarian history."[12] These views were supported by socialist or communist activists persecuted under the Horthy administration. Especially critical in this campaign was the 1950 publication of the textbook The Story of the Hungarian People, which denounced Horthy's military as a "genocidal band" consisting of "sociopathic officers, kulaks, and the dregs of society."[12] It further characterized Horthy himself as a "slave of the Habsburgs", a "red-handed dictator" who "spoke broken Hungarian" and was known for his "hatred of workers and soviets."[12] The Story of the Hungarian People was required reading in middle schools throughout the 1950s.[12]

The Kádár era's relative liberalization, coupled with the concomitant professionalization of Hungarian history and historiography, allowed for more objective historical assessments of Horthy's career. Popular volumes still painted him negatively, openly leveling ad hominem attacks: Horthy was accused of bastardy, lechery, sadism, greed, nepotism, bloodthirst, warmongering, and cowardice, among other vices.[12] Academic evaluations became more nuanced, however. Péter Gosztony's 1973 biography, for example, portrayed Horthy as a conscientious, traditional conservative.[90] Gostony argued that Horthy did not seek a dictatorship until the 1930s and, although he was unable to prevent the German invasion of Yugoslavia, sought to maintain a moderately liberal government, citing his replacement of hardliner László Bárdossy with Miklós Kállay as prime minister as evidence of this. Thomas Sakmyster was also sympathetic while acknowledging Horthy's "narrow-mindededness."[91] Contemporary Hungarian-American historian István Deák regards Horthy as typical of other strongmen of the era, especially dictators Francisco Franco of Spain and Philippe Pétain of Vichy France. Deák writes that during the war, Horthy

alternatively promoted and opposed German influence in his country, depending on how he judged the probable outcome of the war... Similarly, Horthy both persecuted and protected his Jewish subjects, depending on the turn of military events and the social status and degree of assimilation of the Jews under his reign. In the end, he was neither tried nor imprisoned but at the urging of Stalin was allowed to go into exile in Portugal.[92]

Reburial and contemporary politics

 
Horthy's 4 September 1993 reburial in Kenderes. The government's open support of the ceremony incited protests and international attention

The transition to a Western-style democracy allowed the privatization of media, which led to a shift in how Horthy was viewed in Hungary. In 1993, only a few years after the first democratic elections, Horthy's body was returned from Portugal to his hometown of Kenderes. Tens of thousands of people, as well as almost the entirety of József Antall's MDF cabinet, attended the ceremony. Antall had prefaced the burial with a series of interviews praising Horthy as a "patriot."[93] The reburial was broadcast on state television and was accompanied by large-scale protests in Budapest.[93]

In contemporary Hungary, the hagiography of Horthy is associated with the far-right Jobbik party and its allies. The national-conservative Fidesz has also voiced some positive opinions of Horthy's legacy. Since 2012, Horthy statues, squares have been renamed after, and memorials have been erected to him in numerous villages and cities including Csókakő,[13] Kereki, Gyömrő, and Debrecen.[14] In November 2013, the unveiling of a Horthy statue at a Calvinist church in Budapest drew international attention and criticism.[15]

Der Spiegel has written about the resurgence of what its writers call "the Horthy cult", claiming that Horthy's popularity indicates returning irredentist, reactionary, and ultranationalistic elements.[14] Critics have more specifically connected Horthy's popularity to the Magyar Gárda, a paramilitary group that uses Árpád dynasty imagery and to recent incidents of antiziganist and antisemitic vandalism in Hungary.[13] Meanwhile, Fidesz has, according to reporters, "hedged its bets" on the Horthy controversy, refusing to outright condemn Horthy statues and other commemorations for fear of losing far-right voters to Jobbik. Some Fidesz politicians have labeled Horthy memorials "provocative," however.[15] This tension has led some to label Fidesz as "implicitly anti-semitic" and to accuse Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of a "revisionist" agenda.[14]

Left-wing groups such as the Hungarian Socialist Party have condemned positive historiography of Horthy. In 2012, for instance, then-party leader Attila Mesterházy condemned the Orbán government's position as "inexcusable", claiming that Fidesz was "openly associating itself with the ideology of the regime that collaborated with the fascists."[13] Words have led to actions in some instances, as when leftist activist Péter Dániel vandalized a rural bust of Horthy by dousing it in red paint and hanging a sign that read "Mass Murderer – War Criminal" around its neck. Ultranationalist vandals reacted by desecrating a Jewish cemetery in Székesfehérvár and vandalizing several Holocaust memorials in Budapest.[14][94]

In 2017, Orbán affirmed his positive view of Horthy, commenting in a speech that he considers Horthy an "exceptional statesman" and giving him credit for the survival of the Hungarian state in the First World War's aftermath. The U.S. Holocaust Museum responded in a statement denouncing Orbán and the Hungarian government for trying to "rehabilitate the reputation of Hungary's wartime leader, Miklós Horthy, who was a vocal anti-Semite and complicit in the murder of the country's Jewish population during the Holocaust."[95]

Film and television portrayals

In the 1985 NBC TV film Wallenberg: A Hero's Story, the role of Horthy was taken by Hungarian-born actor Guy Deghy, who appeared bearded although Horthy (as photographs bore out) appeared consistently clean-shaven throughout his life.

In the 2011 Spanish TV film series, El ángel de Budapest (The angel of Budapest), also set during Wallenberg's time in Hungary in 1944, he is portrayed by actor László Agárdi. In the 2014 American action drama film Walking with the Enemy, Horthy is portrayed by Ben Kingsley. The movie depicts a story of a young man during the Arrow Cross Party takeover in Hungary.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Vitéz" refers to a Hungarian knightly order founded by Miklós Horthy ("Vitézi Rend"); literally, "vitéz" means "knight" or "valiant".
  2. ^ Owen Rutter, Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, Lily Doblhoff (baroness.): Regent of Hungary: the authorized life of Admiral Nicholas Horthy
  3. ^ (PDF) http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%201149.pdf. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  4. ^ John Laughland: A History of Political Trials: From Charles I to Saddam Hussein, Peter Lang Ltd, 2008
  5. ^ "Orbán's explicit praise of Horthy is a denial of Hungary's fascist past". 6 July 2017.
  6. ^ "Museum Condemns Attempts to Rehabilitate Hungarian Fascist Leader — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum".
  7. ^ "La Cluj e comemorat dictatorul fascist Horthy Miklos pe bani publici".
  8. ^ Hungary and the Holocaust Confrontation with the Past (2001) (Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); Tim Cole; Hungary, the Holocaust, and Hungarians: Remembering Whose History? p. 3-5; [1]
  9. ^ a b Zvonimir Golubović, Racija u Južnoj Bačkoj, 1942. godine, Novi Sad, 1991. (page 194)
  10. ^ von Papen, Franz, Memoirs, London, 1952, pps:541-23, 546.
  11. ^ Miklos Horthy (2011). A life for Hungary: memoirs. Ishi Press International. ISBN 978-4-87187-913-2. OCLC 781086313.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h Romsics, Ignác. . Mozgó Világ Online. Archived from the original on 19 July 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  13. ^ a b c d Simon, Zoltán (13 June 2012). "Hungary Lauds Hitler Ally Horthy as Orban Fails to Stop Hatred". Bloomberg. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
  14. ^ a b c d e Verseck, Keno (6 June 2012). "'Creeping Cult': Hungary Rehabilitates Far-Right Figures". Spiegel Online International. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
  15. ^ a b c d e "His contentious legacy". The Economist. No. 9 November 2013. 9 November 2013. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  16. ^ Bencsik, Gábor (2004). Horthy Miklós (4. javított ed.). Budapest: Magyar Mercurius. p. 9. ISBN 9638552859.
  17. ^ a b Genealogy Euweb. "Horthy de Nagybánya family". Retrieved 28 January 2009.
  18. ^ a b Bencsik, Gábor. Homo Monarchicus – Az első 25 év. Budapest: Rubicon Történelmi Magazin, 2007/10. szám. pp. 54–56.
  19. ^ Myth and Remembrance: The Dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the Memoir Literature of the Austro-Hungarian Political Elite. Social Science Monographs. 2006. ISBN 9780880335669.
  20. ^ Horthy, Nicholas (2000). (PDF). Simon Publications. pp. 11 (3. jegyzet). ISBN 0966573439. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 March 2006.
  21. ^ "Miklos Horthy (Hungarian statesman)". Encyclopædia Britannica. 9 February 1957. Retrieved 21 August 2014.
  22. ^ a b Spencer Tucker; Laura Matysek Wood (1996). The European powers in the First World War: an encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis US. p. 348. ISBN 978-0-8153-0399-2.
  23. ^ Deák, István, "Hungary" in Hans Rogger and Egon Weber (eds.), The European right: A historical profile (1963) p. 364-407 quoting p. 364.
  24. ^ Lázár, István, Hungary: A Brief History, Budapest: Corvina, 1993 (English edition) Translated by Albert Tezla; Chapter 13
  25. ^ Deák, István, "A Hungarian Admiral on Horseback", from Essays on Hitler's Europe, University of Nebraska Press, 2001, pp. 150–151
  26. ^ a b Patai, Raphael, The Jews of Hungary, Wayne State University Press, pp. 468–469
  27. ^ a b c d e Bodó, Béla: Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War, East European Quarterly, No. 2, Vol. 38, 22 June 2004
  28. ^ Szabo and Pamlenyi: A hatarban a halal kaszal, pp.160 and 131
  29. ^ Sakmyster, Thomas L. Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944. Columbia University Press = date = 1993.
  30. ^ a b Gunther, John (1940). Inside Europe. Harper & Brothers. pp. 422–423.
  31. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Horthy, Admiral Nicholas (2000). Admiral Nicholas Horthy Memoirs. Nicholas Horthy, Miklós Horthy, Andrew L. Simon, Nicholas Roosevelt (illustrated ed.). Simon Publications LLC. p. 348. ISBN 0-9665734-3-9.
  32. ^ Durand, André (1984). History of the International Committee of the Red Cross, from Sarajevo to Hiroshima. Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute. p. 136. ISBN 9782880440091.
  33. ^ "1919 speech of Horthy". Archived from the original on 1 July 2007.
  34. ^ Sakmyster, p. 56
  35. ^ Deák, István, "A Fatal Compromise? The Debate Over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary," in The Politics of Retribution: World War II and Its Aftermath, edited by Deák, Gross, and Judt, Princeton University Press, pp. 39–52
  36. ^ Sakmyster, Thomas L. (1994). Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944. East European Monographs. pp. 156, 244.
  37. ^ Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger: The road to life: the rescue operation of Jewish refugees on the Hungarian-Romanian border in Transylvania, 1936–1944. Shengold, 1994. p. 33.
  38. ^ Eve Blau – Monika Platzer: Shaping the great city: modern architecture in Central Europe, 1890–1937. Prestel, 1999. p. 34.
  39. ^ E. G. Walters: The Other Europe: Eastern Europe To 1945. Syracuse University Press, 1988. p. 154.
  40. ^ The comments of U.S. Minister to Hungary Nicholas Roosevelt, quoted in Frank, Tibor, Discussing Hitler: Advisors of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934–1941, Central European University press, 2003, pp. 14–16
  41. ^ Nandor F. Dreisziger, "Bridges to the West: The Horthy Regime's ‘Reinsurance Policies’ in 1941." War & Society 7.1 (1989): 1–23.
  42. ^ a b Eby, Cecil Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War II, University Park: Penn State Press, 2007 page 9.
  43. ^ Anna Rosmus, Hitlers Nibelungen, Samples Grafenau 2015, pp. 166f
  44. ^ Miklós Horthy, Memoirs. R. Speller, 1957, reprinted in 2000. page 159, citation: "I have already stated that my aim was to achieve the revision of the Treaty of Trianon by peaceful means."
  45. ^ William Wohlforth, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest (Columbia University Press 1998), pp. 78–79
  46. ^ John Flournoy Montgomery, Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite Part Two: An Oasis in Hitler's Desert
  47. ^ Miklós Lojkó. Meddling in Middle Europe: Britain and the 'Lands Between, 1919–1925, Central European University Press, 2005 p 180
  48. ^ Montgomery, John F. Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite, Part One: What Price Independence?
  49. ^ Patai, Raphael. The Jews of Hungary, Wayne State University Press, p. 548
  50. ^ Patai, p. 546
  51. ^ Deák, István, Endgame in Budapest, Hungarian Quarterly, Autumn 2005
  52. ^ "Holocaust in Hungary. About the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre (in Hungarian language)". Holokausztmagyarorszagon.hu. Retrieved 21 August 2014.
  53. ^ Borhi, László, Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956: Between the United States and the Soviet Union, Central European University Press, New York 2004
  54. ^ Nicholas Kállay, Hungarian Premier: A Personal Account of a Nation's Struggle in the Second World War (1954).
  55. ^ Lázár, István, Hungary: A Brief History, Chapter 14
  56. ^ Deák, István, Endgame in Budapest
  57. ^ Hungary and the Holocaust Confrontation with the Past (2001) (Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); Tim Cole; Hungary, the Holocaust, and Hungarians: Remembering Whose History? p. 3-5; [2]
  58. ^ Randolph L. Braham; (2010) Hungarian, German, and Jewish calculations and miscalculations in the last chapter of the Holocaust p. 9-10; Washington, D.C. : Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, [3]
  59. ^ Braham, Randolph, The Politics of Genocide, Wayne State University Press, pp. 59–62
  60. ^ Richard J Evans, The Third Reich at War, pg 617–618.
  61. ^ a b Rees, Laurence, Auschwitz: A New History, Public Affairs, 2005. ISBN 1-58648-357-9
  62. ^ A holokauszt Magyarországon: A deportálások leállítása (in Hungarian. Retrieved 11 September 2006)
  63. ^ Tsvi Erez, "Hungary—Six Days in July 1944." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3.1 (1988): 37–53.
  64. ^ Szabolcs Szita, Trading in Lives? (Central European University Press, Budapest, 2005), pp. 50–54
  65. ^ a b Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, Becsület és kötelesség, part I, page 264. Európa press, Budapest, 2001. ISBN 963-07-6544-6
  66. ^ Wilkinson, Alec, Picturing Auschwitz, New Yorker Magazine, 17 March 2008. pp. 49–51
  67. ^ Péter Sipos, Horthy Miklós és Magyarország német megszállása, História (volume 04), 1994
  68. ^ Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler's Mass Murder (1981) pp=201–205.
  69. ^ Robert J. Hanyok (2004). "Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939–1945" (PDF). NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, UNITED STATES CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY. In late July there was a lull in the deportations. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life, the Germans backed off from pressing Horthy's regime to continue further, large-scale deportations. Smaller groups continued to be deported by train. At least one German police message decoded by GC&CS revealed that one trainload of 1,296 Jews from the town of Sarvar in western Hungary Hungarian Jews being rounded up in Budapest (Courtesy: USHMM) had departed for Auschwitz on August 4.112 In late August Horthy refused Eichmann's request to restart the deportations. Himmler ordered Eichmann to leave Budapest
  70. ^ a b c Williamson, Mitch. . Archived from the original on 8 July 2011. Retrieved 16 April 2009.
  71. ^ a b Tibor Frank (2003). Discussing Hitler: Advisers of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934–41. Central European University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-963-9241-56-5.
  72. ^ Nagy's 1948 memoirs, The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain, are quoted in Andrew Simon's annotations to Horthy's Memoirs, in this case for Chapter 22
  73. ^ From the Annotated Memoirs of Admiral Miklós Horthy 14 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine (accessed 2009 September 5).
  74. ^ Perlez, Jane, '"Reburial is Both a Ceremony and a Test for Today's Hungary," The New York Times, 5 September 1993
  75. ^ "Untitled Document". www.vitezirend.co.hu.
  76. ^ "Stamp: Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary (Hungary) (10th Governing Anniversary of Regent Miklós Horhty) Mi:HU 458,Sn:HU 445,Yt:HU 423,Sg:HU 513". Colnect.
  77. ^ "Stamp: Admiral Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) regent (Hungary) (Miklós Horthy) Mi:HU 566,Sn:HU 526,Yt:HU 507,Sg:HU 616,AFA:HU 540". Colnect.
  78. ^ "Stamp: Miklós Horthy at Szeged (Hungary) (20th Governing Anniversary of Regent Miklós Horhty) Mi:HU 626,Sn:HU 555,Yt:HU 547,Sg:HU 661,AFA:HU 587". Colnect.
  79. ^ "Stamp: Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary (Hungary) (Miklós Horthy) Mi:HU 657,Sn:HU 570,Yt:HU 570,Sg:HU 686A,AFA:HU 614A". Colnect.
  80. ^ "Stamp: Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary (Hungary) (Miklós Horthy) Mi:HU 659,Sn:HU 572,Yt:HU 572,Sg:HU 688A,AFA:HU 617". Colnect.
  81. ^ Ormos 1997, p. 179.
  82. ^ LaCouter, Travis. "Miklós Horthy, Addressing A Troubled Past". Paprika Politik. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  83. ^ Rubicon Történelmi Magazin/A Horthy-kép változásai/Országmentő 6. oldal
  84. ^ Rubicon Történelmi Magazin/A Horthy-kép változásai/Hongyarapító 10. oldal
  85. ^ Magyarország a XX. században. A világháború árnyékában.
  86. ^ Márai Sándor: Napló (1943–1944) 292. oldal; „S a végső felelősség mégis Horthyé és embereié, akik engedték nőni, tenyészni a szellemet, amelyből mindez kérlelhetetlen végzettel következett."
  87. ^ Rubicon Történelmi Magazin: A Horthy-kép változásai
  88. ^ http://zsofika.com/ormos-maria-a-a-gyilkossagrol-es-a-hazugsagrol/ 13 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine Ormos Mária: A gyilkosságról és a hazugságról (csurgói beszéd)(gondolatok a nemzetiszocializmusról)
  89. ^ "85 éve alakult meg a Kisantant. A múlt-kor cikke Németh István: Európa-tervek 1300–1945. című tanulmánya alapján". Mult-kor.hu. 6 June 2011. Retrieved 21 August 2014.
  90. ^ Peter Gosztony, Miklós von Horthy: Admiral u. Reichsverweser (German Edition, 1973).
  91. ^ Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary's Admiral on Horseback: Miklo's Horthy, 1918–1944 (1994).
  92. ^ Deák, István, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution During World War II (2015) p. 9.
  93. ^ a b Perlez, Jane (5 September 1993). "Reburial Is Both a Ceremony and a Test for Today's Hungary". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
  94. ^ "Global Anti-Semitism: Selected Incidents Around the World: Hungary". New York City: Anti-Defamation League. 31 December 2012. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
  95. ^ Krupkin, Taly. "U.S. Holocaust museum denounces Hungarian PM for erasing wartime crimes – U.S. News". Haaretz. Retrieved 30 June 2017.

Further reading and references

  • Bodó, Béla, Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War. East European Quarterly, No. 2, Vol. 38, 22 June 2004
  • Deák, István, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution During World War II (2015), 9, 88—102.
  • Deák, István. "Admiral and Regent Miklós Horthy: Some Thoughts on a Controversial Statesman" Hungarian Quarterly (Fall 1996) 37#143 pp 78–89.
  • Dreisziger, N. F. "Introduction. Miklos Horthy and the Second World War: Some Historiographical Perspectives." Hungarian Studies Review 23.1 (1996): 5–16.
  • Dreisziger, Nandor F. "Bridges to the West: The Horthy Regime's ‘Reinsurance Policies’ in 1941." War & Society 7.1 (1989): 1–23.
  • Fenyo, Mario D. Hitler, Horthy, and Hungary: German-Hungarian Relations, 1941–1944 (Yale UP, 1972).
  • Kállay, Nicholas. Hungarian Premier: A Personal Account of a Nation's Struggle in the Second World War (1954) online review
  • Rutter, Owen, Regent of Hungary: The Authorized Life of Admiral Nicholas Horthy London, Rich and Cowan, 1938
  • Sakmyster, Thomas. Hungary's Admiral on Horseback. (East European Monographs, Boulder, CO 1994). ISBN 0-88033-293-X
  • Sakmyster, Thomas. "From Habsburg Admiral to Hungarian Regent: The Political Metamorphosis of Miklós Horthy, 1918–1921." East European Quarterly 17.2 (1983): 129–148.

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Miklós Horthy.
 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Miklós Horthy.
  • Trianon Hungary. U.S. Library of Congress Country Study
  • e-book version on historicaltextarchive.com
  • Miklós Horthy Association 6 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  • Biography of Admiral Miklós Horthy
Political offices
Preceded by Minister of War of the Counter-Government
1919 		Succeeded by
Preceded byas acting Head of State Regent of Hungary
1920–1944 		Succeeded byas Leader of the Nation
Military offices
Preceded by Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Naval Fleet
1918 		Succeeded by
Honorary titles
New title Captain General of the Order of Vitéz
1920–1957 		Succeeded by

May 04, 2023
miklós, horthy, horthy, redirects, here, surname, horthy, surname, native, form, this, personal, name, nagybányai, horthy, miklós, this, article, uses, western, name, order, when, mentioning, individuals, nagybánya, hungarian, vitéz, nagybányai, horthy, miklós. Horthy redirects here For the surname see Horthy surname The native form of this personal name is nagybanyai Horthy Miklos This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya Hungarian Vitez 1 nagybanyai Horthy Miklos Hungarian pronunciation ˈviteːz ˈnɒɟbaːɲɒi ˈhorti ˈmikloːʃ English Nicholas Horthy 2 German Nikolaus Horthy Ritter von Nagybanya 18 June 1868 9 February 1957 was a Hungarian admiral and statesman who served as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary between the two World Wars and throughout most of World War II from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944 His Serene Highness VitezMiklos HorthyOfficial portraitRegent of HungaryIn office 1 March 1920 15 October 1944MonarchVacantPrime MinisterSee list Karoly HuszarS Simonyi SemadamPal TelekiIstvan BethlenGyula KarolyiGyula GombosKalman DaranyiBela ImredyPal TelekiF Keresztes Fischer acting Laszlo BardossyF Keresztes Fischer acting Miklos KallayDome SztojayGeza LakatosDeputyIstvan Horthy 1942 Preceded byKaroly Huszar acting Succeeded byFerenc SzalasiaPersonal detailsBornMiklos Horthy de Nagybanya 1868 06 18 18 June 1868Kenderes Hungary Austria HungaryDied9 February 1957 1957 02 09 aged 88 Estoril Lisbon PortugalSpouseMagdolna Purgly m 1901 wbr Children4 including Istvan and MiklosParent s Istvan HorthyPaula HalassySignatureMilitary serviceAllegiance Austria HungaryBranch service Austro Hungarian NavyYears of service1896 1918RankVice AdmiralCommandsFlottenkommandantBattles warsWorld War Ia As Leader of the Nation Horthy started his career as a sub lieutenant in the Austro Hungarian Navy in 1896 and attained the rank of rear admiral in 1918 He saw action in the Battle of the Strait of Otranto and became commander in chief of the Navy in the last year of World War I he was promoted to vice admiral and commander of the Fleet when Emperor King Charles dismissed the previous admiral from his post following mutinies During the revolutions and interventions in Hungary from Czechoslovakia Romania and Yugoslavia Horthy returned to Budapest with the National Army the parliament subsequently invited him to become regent of the kingdom Through the interwar period Horthy led an administration which was national conservative and antisemitic 3 4 Hungary under Horthy banned the Hungarian Communist Party as well as the Arrow Cross Party and pursued an irredentist foreign policy in the face of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon Emperor Charles I of Austria Hungary the former king attempted twice to return to Hungary before the Hungarian government caved in to Allied threats to renew hostilities in 1921 Charles was then escorted out of Hungary into exile Ideologically a national conservative Horthy has sometimes been labeled as fascist 5 6 7 In the late 1930s Horthy s foreign policy led him into an alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union With the support of Adolf Hitler Hungary succeeded in redeeming certain areas ceded to neighbouring countries by the Treaty of Trianon Under Horthy s leadership Hungary gave support to Polish refugees in 1939 and participated in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 Some historians view Horthy as unenthusiastic in contributing to the German war effort and the Holocaust in Hungary out of fear that it may sabotage peace deals with Allied forces in addition coupled with several attempts to strike a secret deal with the Allies of World War II after it had become obvious that the Axis would lose the war therefore eventually leading the Germans to invade and take control of the country in March 1944 in Operation Margarethe However prior to the Nazi occupation within the area of Hungary 63 000 Jews were killed In late 1944 437 000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz Birkenau where the majority were gassed on arrival 8 Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubovic has claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres but had approved of them such as those in the Novi Sad Raid 9 In October 1944 Horthy announced that Hungary had declared an armistice with the Allies and withdrawn from the Axis He was forced to resign placed under arrest by the Germans and taken to Bavaria At the end of the war he came under the custody of American troops 10 After providing evidence for the Ministries Trial of war crimes in 1948 Horthy settled and lived out his remaining years in exile in Portugal His memoirs Ein Leben fur Ungarn A Life for Hungary 11 were first published in 1953 He has a reputation as a controversial historical figure in contemporary Hungary 12 13 14 15 Contents 1 Early life and naval career 1 1 Dates of rank and assignments 2 Interwar period 1919 1939 2 1 Commander of the National Army 2 2 Regent 2 3 Seeking redress for the Treaty of Trianon 3 World War II and the Holocaust 3 1 Uneasy alliance 3 2 War 3 3 Occupation 3 4 Deposition and arrest 4 Exile 5 Honours 5 1 National honours 5 2 Foreign honours 5 3 Postage stamps 6 Legacy 6 1 During the Horthy era 6 2 During the Communist era 6 3 Reburial and contemporary politics 7 Film and television portrayals 8 See also 9 Notes 10 Further reading and references 11 External linksEarly life and naval career Edit Admiral Miklos Horthy during World War I Miklos Horthy s parents Paula Halassy and Istvan Horthy Magdolna Purgly wife of Admiral Miklos Horthy Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya was born at Kenderes to an untitled lower nobility descended from Istvan Horti ennobled by King Ferdinand II in 1635 16 His father Istvan Horthy de Nagybanya was a member of the House of Magnates the upper chamber of the Diet of Hungary and lord of a 610 hectare 1 500 acre estate 17 He married Hungarian noblewoman Paula Halassy de Devavanya in 1857 17 18 Miklos was the fourth of their eight children raised as Protestants 19 20 Horthy entered the Austro Hungarian Imperial and Royal Naval Academy k u k Marine Akademie at Fiume now Rijeka Croatia at age 14 21 Because the official language of the naval academy was German Horthy spoke Hungarian with a slight but noticeable Austro German accent for the rest of his life He also spoke Italian Croatian English and French 18 As a young man Horthy traveled around the world and served as a diplomat for Austria Hungary in the Ottoman Empire and other countries Horthy married Magdolna Purgly de Joszashely in Arad in 1901 They had 4 children Magdolna 1902 Paula 1903 Istvan 1904 and Miklos 1907 From 1911 until 1914 he was a naval aide de camp to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria for whom he had a great respect 22 At the beginning of World War I Horthy was commander of the pre dreadnought battleship SMS Habsburg In 1915 he earned a reputation for boldness while commanding the new light cruiser SMS Novara He planned the 1917 attack on the Otranto Barrage which resulted in the Battle of the Strait of Otranto the largest naval engagement of the war in the Adriatic Sea A consolidated British French and Italian fleet met the Austro Hungarian force Despite the numerical superiority of the Allied fleet the Austrian force emerged from the battle victorious The Austrian fleet remained relatively unscathed however Horthy was wounded After the Cattaro mutiny of February 1918 Emperor Charles I of Austria selected Horthy over many more senior commanders as the new Commander in Chief of the Imperial Fleet in March 1918 In June Horthy planned another attack on Otranto and in a departure from the cautious strategy of his predecessors he committed the empire s battleships to the mission While sailing through the night the dreadnought SMS Szent Istvan met Italian MAS torpedo boats and was sunk causing Horthy to abort the mission He managed to preserve the rest of the empire s fleet until he was ordered by Emperor Charles to surrender it to the new State of Slovenes Croats and Serbs the predecessor of Yugoslavia on 31 October 22 The end of the war saw Hungary turned into a landlocked nation and with that the new government had little need for Horthy s naval expertise He retired with his family to his private estate at Kenderes Dates of rank and assignments Edit The damaged SMS Novara after the Battle of Otranto Horthy seriously wounded commanded the fleet at the Battle of the Strait of Otranto until falling unconscious 1896 Fregattenleutnant Frigate Lieutenant fregatthadnagy Sub Lieutenant 1900 Linienschiffleutnant Ship of the Line Lieutenant sorhajohadnagy Lieutenant January 1901 SMS Sperber commander of the vessel 1902 SMS Kranich commander of the vessel June 1908 SMS Taurus commander of the vessel August 1908 SMS Kaiser Karl VI GDO Gesamtdetailoffizier First Officer temporary 1 January 1909 Korvettenkapitan Corvette Captain korvettkapitany Lieutenant Commander 1 November 1909 aide de camp to Emperor Franz Josef 1 November 1911 Fregattenkapitan Frigate Captain fregattkapitany Commander December 1912 March 1913 SMS Budapest commander of the vessel 20 January 1914 Linienschiffskapitan Ship of the Line Captain sorhajokapitany Captain August 1914 SMS Habsburg commander of the vessel December 1914 SMS Novara commander of the vessel 1 February 1918 SMS Prinz Eugen 1912 commander of the vessel 27 February 1918 Konteradmiral ellentengernagy Rear Admiral 27 February 1918 appointed last Commander in Chief of the fleet over 11 admirals and 24 senior Linienschiffskapitan by Emperor Karl I 30 October 1918 Vizeadmiral altengernagy Vice Admiral Interwar period 1919 1939 EditHistorians agree on the conservatism of interwar Hungary Historian Istvan Deak states Between 1919 and 1944 Hungary was a rightist country Forged out of a counter revolutionary heritage its governments advocated a nationalist Christian policy they extolled heroism faith and unity they despised the French Revolution and they spurned the liberal and socialist ideologies of the 19th century The governments saw Hungary as a bulwark against Bolshevism and bolshevism s instruments socialism cosmopolitanism and Freemasonry They perpetrated the rule of a small clique of aristocrats civil servants and army officers and surrounded with adulation by the head of the state the counterrevolutionary Admiral Horthy 23 Commander of the National Army Edit source source source source source source source source source source source source source source Horthy enters Budapest 16 November 1919 1080p film footage Two national traumas that followed the First World War profoundly shaped the spirit and future of the Hungarian nation The first was the loss as dictated by the Allies of World War I of large portions of Hungarian territory that had bordered other countries These were lands that had belonged to Hungary then part of Austria Hungary but were now ceded mainly to Czechoslovakia Romania Austria and the Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes The excisions eventually ratified in the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 cost Hungary two thirds of its territory and one third of its native Hungarian speakers this dealt the population a terrible psychological blow The second trauma began in March 1919 when Communist leader Bela Kun seized power in the capital Budapest after the first proto democratic government in Hungary faltered 24 With the Treaty of Trianon the Kingdom of Hungary lost 72 of its territory including Croatia and 3 3 million people of Hungarian ethnicity Kun and his loyalists proclaimed a Hungarian Soviet Republic and promised the restoration of Hungary s former grandeur Instead his efforts at reconquest failed and Hungarians were treated to Soviet style repression in the form of armed gangs who intimidated or murdered enemies of the regime This period of violence came to be known as the Red Terror 25 Within weeks of his coup Kun s popularity plummeted On 30 May 1919 anti communist politicians formed a counter revolutionary government in the southern city of Szeged which was occupied by French forces at the time There Gyula Karolyi the prime minister of the counter revolutionary government asked former Admiral Horthy still considered a war hero to be the Minister of War in the new government and take command of a counter revolutionary force that would be named the National Army Hungarian Nemzeti Hadsereg Horthy consented and he arrived in Szeged on 6 June Soon afterward because of orders from the Allied powers a cabinet was reformed and Horthy was not given a seat in it Undaunted Horthy managed to retain control of the National Army by detaching the army command from the War Ministry After the Communist government collapsed and its leaders fled French supported Romanian forces entered Budapest on 6 August 1919 In retaliation for the Red Terror reactionary crews now exacted revenge in a two year wave of violent repression known today as the White Terror These reprisals were organized and carried out by officers of Horthy s National Army particularly Pal Pronay 26 Gyula Ostenburg Moravek and Ivan Hejjas 27 Their victims were primarily communists social democrats and Jews Most Hungarian Jews were not supporters of the Bolsheviks but much of the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been young Jewish intellectuals and anger about the Communist revolution easily translated into anti Semitic hostility 26 In Budapest Pronay installed his unit in the Hotel Britannia where the group swelled to battalion size Their program of vicious attacks continued they planned a citywide pogrom against the Jews until Horthy found out and put a stop to it In his diary Pronay reported that Horthy reproached me for the many Jewish corpses found in the various parts of the country especially in the Transdanubia This he emphasized gave the foreign press extra ammunitions against us He told me that we should stop harassing small Jews instead we should kill some big Kun government Jews such as Somogyi or Vazsonyi these people deserve punishment much more in vain I tried to convince him that the liberal papers would be against us anyway and it did not matter that we killed only one Jew or we killed them all 28 The degree of Horthy s responsibility for the excesses of Pronay is disputed On several occasions Horthy reached out to stop Pronay from a particularly excessive burst of anti Jewish cruelty and the Jews of Pest went on record absolving Horthy of the White Terror as early as the autumn of 1919 when they released a statement disavowing the Kun revolution and blaming the terror on a few units within the National Army Horthy has never been found to have personally engaged in White Terror atrocities But his American biographer Thomas L Sakmyster concluded that he tacitly supported the right wing officer detachments who carried out the terror 29 Horthy called them my best men 30 The admiral also had practical reasons for overlooking the terror his officers wrought since he needed the dedicated officers to help stabilize the country Nevertheless it was at least another year before the terror died down In the summer of 1920 Horthy s government took measures to rein in and eventually disperse the reactionary battalions Pronay managed to undermine these measures but only for a short time 27 Pronay was put on trial for extorting a wealthy Jewish politician and for insulting the President of the Parliament by trying to cover up the extortion Found guilty on both charges Pronay was now a liability and an embarrassment His command was revoked and he was denounced as a common criminal on the floor of the Hungarian parliament 27 After serving short jail sentences Pronay tried to convince Horthy to restore his battalion command The Pronay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922 and expelled its members from the army 27 Pronay entered politics as a member of the government s right wing opposition In the 1930s he sought and failed to emulate the Nazis by generating a Hungarian fascist mass movement In 1932 he was charged with incitement sentenced to six months in prison and stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel Pronay would support the pro Nazi Arrow Cross and lead attacks on Jews before being captured by Soviet troops sometime during or after the Battle of Budapest of 1944 45 dying in captivity in 1947 48 27 Precisely how much Horthy knew about the excesses of the White Terror is not known Horthy himself declined to apologize for the savagery of his officer detachments writing later I have no reason to gloss over deeds of injustice and atrocities committed when an iron broom alone could sweep the country clean 31 He endorsed Edgar von Schmidt Pauli s poetic justification of the White reprisals Hell let loose on earth cannot be subdued by the beating of angels wings remarking the Communists in Hungary willing disciples of the Russian Bolshevists had indeed let hell loose 31 The International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC in an internal report by delegate George Burnier stated the following in April 1920 There are two distinct military organizations in Hungary the national army and a kind of civil guard which was formed when the communist regime fell It is the latter that has been responsible for all the reprehensible acts committed The Government managed to regain control of these organizations only a few weeks ago They are now well disciplined and collaborate with the municipal police forces 32 This deep hostility toward Communism would be the more lasting legacy of Kun s abortive revolution It was a conviction shared by Horthy and his country s ruling class that would help drive Hungary into a fateful alliance with Adolf Hitler The nation of the Hungarians loved and admired Budapest which became its polluter in the last years Here on the banks of the Danube I arraign her This city has disowned her thousand years of tradition she has dragged the Holy Crown and the national colors in the dust she has clothed herself in red rags The finest of the nation she threw into dungeons or drove into exile She laid in ruin our property and wasted our wealth Yet the nearer we approached to this city the more rapidly did the ice in our hearts melt We are now ready to forgive her 33 Admiral Miklos Horthy enters Budapest at the head of the National Army 16 November 1919 He is greeted by city officials in front of the Gellert Hotel The Romanian army retreated from Budapest on 14 November leaving Horthy to enter the city where in a fiery speech he accused the capital s citizens of betraying Hungary by supporting Bolshevism Following the pressure of the Allied powers Romanian troops finally evacuated Hungary on 25 February 1920 Regent Edit On 1 March 1920 the National Assembly of Hungary re established the Kingdom of Hungary It was apparent that the Allies of World War I would not accept any return of King Charles IV the former Austro Hungarian emperor from exile Instead with National Army officers controlling the parliament building the assembly voted to install Horthy as Regent he defeated Count Albert Apponyi by a vote of 131 to 7 Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka then led a small delegation to meet Horthy announcing Hungary s Parliament has elected you Regent Would it please you to accept the office of Regent of Hungary To their astonishment Horthy declined unless the powers of the office were expanded As Horthy stalled the politicians gave in to his demands and granted him the general prerogatives of the king with the exception of the right to name titles of nobility and of the patronage of the Church 31 The prerogatives he was given included the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers to convene and dissolve parliament and to command the armed forces With those sweeping powers guaranteed Horthy took the oath of office 34 He was styled His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary Hungarian O Fomeltosaga a Magyar Kiralysag Kormanyzoja Charles I did try to regain his throne twice see Charles IV of Hungary s attempts to retake the throne for more details Standard of Miklos Horthy The Hungarian state was legally a kingdom but it had no king as the Allied powers would not have tolerated any reinstatement of the Habsburg dynasty The country retained its parliamentary system following the dissolution of Austria Hungary with a prime minister appointed as head of government As head of state Horthy retained significant influence through his constitutional powers and the loyalty of his ministers to the crown 35 Although his involvement in drafting legislation was minuscule he nevertheless had the ability to ensure that laws passed by the Hungarian parliament conformed to his political preferences Seeking redress for the Treaty of Trianon Edit Horthy in Budapest August 1931 Miklos Horthy with King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in Rome on 25 November 1936 during a military parade in Via dell Impero The first decade of Horthy s reign was primarily consumed by stabilizing the Hungarian economy and political system Horthy s chief partner in these efforts was his prime minister Istvan Bethlen It was commonly known that Horthy was an Anglophile 36 37 38 and British political and economic support played a significant role in the stabilization and consolidation of the early Horthy era in the Kingdom of Hungary 39 Bethlen sought to stabilize the economy while building alliances with weaker nations that could advance Hungary s cause That cause was primarily reversing the losses of the Treaty of Trianon The humiliations of the Trianon treaty continued to occupy a central place in Hungarian foreign policy and the popular imagination The indignant anti Trianon slogan Nem nem soha No no never became a ubiquitous motto of Hungarian outrage When in 1927 the British newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere denounced the partitions ratified at Trianon in the pages of his Daily Mail an official letter of gratitude was eagerly signed by 1 2 million Hungarians 31 But Hungary s stability was precarious and the Great Depression derailed much of Bethlen s economic balance Horthy replaced him with an old reactionary confederate from his Szeged days Gyula Gombos Gombos was an outspoken anti Semite and a budding fascist Although he agreed to Horthy s demands that he temper his anti Jewish rhetoric and work amicably with Hungary s large Jewish professional class Gombos s tenure began swinging Hungary s political mood powerfully rightward He strengthened Hungary s ties to Benito Mussolini s Italian fascist state Fatefully when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 he found in Gombos an admiring and obliging colleague citation needed John Gunther stated that Horthy though reactionary as far as social or economic ideas are concerned is in effect the guardian of constitutionalism and what vestigial democracy remains in the country because it is largely his influence that prevents any prime minister from abolishing parliament and setting up a dictatorial rule 30 Gombos rescued the failing economy by securing trade guarantees from Germany a strategy that positioned Germany as Hungary s primary trading partner and tied Hungary s future even more tightly to Hitler s He also assured Hitler that Hungary would quickly become a one party state modeled on the Nazi party control of Germany Gombos died in 1936 before he realized his most extreme goals but he left his nation headed into a firm partnership with the German dictator World War II and the Holocaust EditMain article Hungary in World War II Uneasy alliance Edit Hungary now entered into intricate political maneuvers with the regime of Adolf Hitler and Horthy began to play a greater and more public role in navigating Hungary along this dangerous path German and Hungarian flags in Berlin For Horthy Hitler served as a bulwark against Soviet encroachment or invasion Horthy was obsessed with the Communist threat One American diplomat remarked that Horthy s anti communist tirades were so common and ferocious that diplomats discounted it as a phobia 40 Horthy clearly saw his country as trapped between two stronger powers both of them dangerous evidently he considered Hitler to be the more manageable of the two at least at first Hitler was able to wield greater influence over Hungary than the Soviet Union could not only as of the country s major trading partner but also because he could assist with two of Horthy s key ambitions maintaining Hungarian sovereignty and satisfying the nationwide yearning to recover former Hungarian lands Horthy s strategy was one of cautious sometimes even a grudging alliance The means by which the regent granted or resisted Hitler s demands especially with regard to Hungarian military action and the treatment of Hungary s Jews remain the central criteria by which his career has been judged Horthy s relationship with Hitler was by his own account a tense one largely due he said to his unwillingness to bend his nation s policies to the German leader s desires 41 Horthy s attitude to Hitler was ambivalent On one hand Hungary was an irredentist state that refused to accept the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Trianon Furthermore the three states with which Hungary had territorial disputes namely Czechoslovakia Yugoslavia and Romania were all allies of France so a German Hungarian alliance seemed logical On the other hand Admiral Horthy was a good navalist who believed that sea power was the most important factor in war He felt that Britain as the world s greatest sea power would inevitably defeat Germany should another war begin 42 During a meeting with Hitler in 1935 Horthy was well pleased that Hitler informed him that he wanted Germany and Hungary to partition Czechoslovakia but Horthy went on to tell Hitler that he must be careful not to do anything that might cause an Anglo German war because British sea power would sooner or later cause the defeat of Nazi Germany Horthy was always torn between his belief that an alliance with Germany was the only way to revise Trianon and his belief that war against the international order could only end in defeat 42 In August 1938 when Horthy his wife and some Hungarian politicians took a special train from Budapest to Germany SA and other National Socialist formations ceremonially welcomed the delegation at the Passau train station The train then continued to Kiel for the christening of the German cruiser Prinz Eugen 43 During his ensuing state visit Hitler asked Horthy for troops and materiel to participate in Germany s planned invasion of Czechoslovakia In exchange Horthy later reported He gave me to understand that as a reward we should be allowed to keep the territory we had invaded 31 Horthy said he declined insisting to Hitler that Hungary s claims on the disputed lands should be settled by peaceful means 44 Horthy at the annexation of south east Czechoslovakia Kassa present day Kosice 11 November 1938 Three months later after the Munich Agreement put control of Czechoslovakia s Sudetenland in Hitler s hands by the First Vienna Award Hungary annexed some of the south eastern parts of Czechoslovakia Horthy enthusiastically rode into the re acquired territories at the head of his troops greeted by emotional ethnic Hungarians As I passed along the roads people embraced one another fell upon their knees and wept with joy because liberation had come to them at last without war without bloodshed 31 But as peaceful as this annexation was and as just as it may have seemed to many Hungarians it was a dividend of Hitler s brinksmanship and threats of war in which Hungary was now inextricably complicit Hungary was now committed to the Axis agenda on 24 February 1939 it joined the Anti Comintern Pact and on 11 April it withdrew from the League of Nations American journalists began to refer to Hungary as the jackal of Europe 45 This combination of menace and reward drifted Hungary closer to the status of a Nazi client state 46 In March 1939 when Hitler took what remained of Czechoslovakia by force Hungary was allowed to annex Carpathian Ruthenia After a conflict with the First Slovak Republic during the Slovak Hungarian War of 1939 Hungary gained further territories In August 1940 Hitler intervened on Hungary s behalf once again After the failed Hungarian Romanian negotiations Hungary annexed Northern Transylvania from Romania by the Second Vienna Award Horthy during the Hungarians entry into Komarom present day Komarno following the First Vienna Award November 1938 But despite their cooperation with the Nazi regime Horthy and his government would be better described as conservative authoritarian 47 than fascist Certainly Horthy was as hostile to the home grown fascist and ultra nationalist movements that emerged in Hungary between the wars particularly the Arrow Cross Party as he was to Communism The Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalasi was repeatedly imprisoned at Horthy s command John F Montgomery who served in Budapest as U S ambassador from 1933 to 1941 openly admired this side of Horthy s character and reported the following incident in his memoir in March 1939 Arrow Cross supporters disrupted a performance at the Budapest opera house by chanting Justice for Szalasi loud enough for the regent to hear A fight broke out and when Montgomery went to take a closer look he discovered that two or three men were on the floor and he Horthy had another by the throat slapping his face and shouting what I learned afterward was So you would betray your country would you The Regent was alone but he had the situation in hand The whole incident was typical not only of the Regent s deep hatred of alien doctrine but of the kind of man he is Although he was around seventy two years of age it did not occur to him to ask for help he went right ahead like a skipper with a mutiny on his hands 48 Hungary in 1941 after recovering territories from Czechoslovakia Romania and Yugoslavia And yet by the time of this episode Horthy had allowed his government to give in to Nazi demands that the Hungarians enact laws restricting the lives of the country s Jews The first Hungarian anti Jewish Law in 1938 limited the number of Jews in the professions the government and commerce to twenty percent and the second reduced it to five percent the following year 250 000 Hungarian Jews lost their jobs as a result A Third Jewish Law of August 1941 prohibited Jews from marrying non Jews and defined anyone having two Jewish grandparents as racially Jewish A Jewish man who had non marital sex with a decent non Jewish woman resident in Hungary could be sentenced to three years in prison 49 Horthy s personal views on Jews and their role in Hungarian society are the subjects of some debate In an October 1940 letter to Prime Minister Count Pal Teleki Horthy echoed a widespread national sentiment that Jews enjoyed too much success in commerce the professions and industry success that needed to be curtailed As regards the Jewish problem I have been an anti Semite throughout my life I have never had contact with Jews I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything every factory bank large fortune business theatre press commerce etc should be in Jewish hands and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary especially abroad Since however one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard of living i e we have to acquire wealth it is impossible in a year or two to replace the Jews who have everything in their hands and to replace them with incompetent unworthy mostly big mouthed elements for we should become bankrupt This requires a generation at least 50 War Edit Horthy with Hitler in 1938 The Kingdom of Hungary was gradually drawn into the war itself In 1939 and 1940 Hungarian volunteers were sent to Finland s Winter War but did not have time to partake in the fighting before the end of the war In April 1941 Hungary became in effect a member of the Axis Hungary permitted Hitler to send troops across Hungarian territory for the invasion of Yugoslavia and ultimately sent its own troops to claim its share of the dismembered Kingdom of Yugoslavia Prime Minister Pal Teleki horrified that he had failed to prevent this collusion with the Nazis despite the fact that he had signed a non aggression pact with Yugoslavia in December 1940 committed suicide citation needed In June 1941 the Hungarian government finally yielded to Hitler s demands that the nation contribute to the Axis war effort On 27 June Hungary became part of Operation Barbarossa and declared war on the Soviet Union The Hungarians sent in troops and material only four days after Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 Eighteen months later less well equipped and less motivated than their German allies 200 000 troops of the Hungarian Second Army ended up holding the front on the Don River west of Stalingrad 51 The first massacre of Jewish people from Hungarian territory took place in August 1941 when government officials ordered the deportation of Jews without Hungarian citizenship principally refugees from other Nazi occupied countries to Ukraine Roughly 18 000 20 000 of these deportees were slaughtered by Friedrich Jeckeln and his SS troops only 2 000 3 000 survived These killings are known as the Kamianets Podilskyi Massacre This event in which the slaughter of Jews for the first time numbered in the tens of thousands is considered to be among the first large scale massacre of the Holocaust Because of the objections of Hungary s leadership the deportations were halted 52 By early 1942 Horthy was already seeking to put some distance between himself and Hitler s regime That March he dismissed the pro German prime minister Laszlo Bardossy and replaced him with Miklos Kallay a moderate whom Horthy expected to loosen Hungary s ties to Germany 53 Kallay successfully sabotaged economic cooperation with Nazi Germany protected refugees and prisoners resisted Nazi pressure regarding Jews established contact with the Allies and negotiated conditions under which Hungary would switch sides against Germany However the Allies were not close enough When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944 Kallay went into hiding He was finally captured by the Nazis but was liberated when the war ended 54 In September 1942 personal tragedy struck the Hungarian Regent 37 year old Istvan Horthy Horthy s eldest son was killed Istvan Horthy was the Deputy Regent of Hungary and a Flight Lieutenant in the reserves 1 1 Fighter Squadron of the Royal Hungarian Air Force He was killed when his Hawk Heja fighter crashed at an air field near Ilovskoye In January 1943 Hungary s enthusiasm for the war effort never especially high suffered a tremendous blow The Soviet army in the full momentum of its triumphant turnaround after the Battle of Stalingrad punched through Romanian troops at a bend in the Don River and virtually obliterated the Second Hungarian Army in a few days fighting In this single action Hungarian combat fatalities jumped by 80 000 Jew and non Jew suffered together in this defeat as the Hungarian troops had been accompanied by some 40 000 Jews and political prisoners in forced labor units whose job had been to clear minefields 55 German officials blamed Hungary s Jews for the nation s defeatist attitude In the wake of the Don bend disaster Hitler demanded at an April 1943 meeting that Horthy punish the 800 000 Jews still living in Hungary who according to Hitler were responsible for this defeat In response Horthy and his government supplied 10 000 Jewish deportees for labor battalions With the growing awareness the Allies might well win the war it became more expedient not to comply with further German requests Cautiously the Hungarian government began to explore contacts with the Allies in hopes of negotiating a surrender 56 Prior to the German occupation within the area of Hungary around 63 000 Jews perished 57 Overall Hungarian Jews suffered close to 560 000 casualties 58 Occupation Edit Main article Operation Margarethe A German Tiger II with a column of Arrow Cross soldiers in Budapest By 1944 the Axis was losing the war and the Red Army was at Hungary s borders Fearing that the Soviets would overrun the country Kallay with Horthy s approval put out numerous feelers to the Allies He even promised to surrender unconditionally to them once they reached Hungarian territory An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Klessheim Castle near Salzburg He pressured Horthy to make greater contributions to the war effort and again commanded him to assist in the killing of more of Hungary s Jews citation needed Horthy now permitted the deportation of a large number of Jews the generally accepted figure is 100 000 but would not go further 59 The conference was a ruse As Horthy was returning home on 19 March the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Hungary Horthy was told he could only stay in office if he dismissed Kallay and appointed a new government that would fully cooperate with Hitler and his plenipotentiary in Budapest Edmund Veesenmayer Knowing the likely alternative was a gauleiter who would treat Hungary in the same manner as the other countries under Nazi occupation Horthy acquiesced and appointed his ambassador to Germany General Dome Sztojay as prime minister The Germans originally wanted Horthy to reappoint Bela Imredy who had been prime minister from 1938 to 1939 but Horthy had enough influence to get Veesenmayer to accept Sztojay instead Contrary to Horthy s hopes Sztojay s government eagerly proceeded to participate in the Holocaust citation needed The chief agents of this collaboration were Andor Jaross the Minister of the Interior and his two rabidly anti Semitic state secretaries Laszlo Endre and Laszlo Baky later to be known as the Deportation Trio On 9 April Prime Minister Sztojay and the Germans obligated Hungary to place 300 000 Jewish people at the disposal of the Reich in effect sentencing most of Hungary s remaining Jews to death citation needed Five days later on 14 April Endre Baky and SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann commenced the deportation of the remaining Hungarian Jews The Yellow Star Ghettoization laws and deportation were accomplished in less than 8 weeks with the help of the new Hungarian government and authorities The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began on 14 May 1944 and continued at a rate of 12 14 000 a day until 24 July 60 Upon learning about the deportations Horthy wrote the following letter to the prime minister Dear Sztojay I was aware that the Government in the given forced situation has to take many steps that I do not consider correct and for which I can not take responsibility Among these matters is the handling of the Jewish question in a manner that does not correspond to the Hungarian mentality Hungarian conditions and for the matter Hungarian interests It is clear to everyone that what among these were done by Germans or by the insistence of the Germans was not in my power to prevent so in these matters I was forced into passivity As such I was not informed in advance or I am not fully informed now however I have heard recently that in many cases in inhumaneness and brutality we exceeded the Germans I demand that the handling of the Jewish affairs in the Ministry of Interior be taken out of the hands of Deputy Minister Laszlo Endre Furthermore Laszlo Baky s assignment to the management of the police forces should be terminated as soon as possible 31 Just before the deportations began two Slovak Jewish prisoners Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and passed details of what was happening inside the camps to officials in Slovakia This document known as the Vrba Wetzler Report was quickly translated into German and passed among Jewish groups and then to Allied officials Details from the report were broadcast by the BBC on 15 June and printed in The New York Times on 20 June 61 World leaders including Pope Pius XII 25 June President Franklin D Roosevelt on 26 June and King Gustaf V of Sweden on 30 June 62 subsequently pleaded with Horthy to use his influence to stop the deportations Roosevelt specifically threatened military retaliation if the transports were not ceased On 2 July 1944 Horthy put down a coup attempt by Hungarists by using loyal forces Thereby he temporarily neutralized the men who planned to deport Jews This enabled Horthy to issue the order halting deportations on 7 July The transports halted 63 64 By that time 437 000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz most of them to their deaths 61 Horthy was informed about the number of the deported Jews some days later approximately 400 000 65 By many estimates one of every three people murdered at Auschwitz during its operation was a Hungarian Jew killed between May and July 1944 66 There remains some uncertainty over how much Horthy knew about the number of Hungarian Jews being deported their destination and their intended fate and when he knew it as well as what he could have done about it According to historian Peter Sipos the Hungarian government had already known about the Jewish genocide since 1943 67 Some historians who have argued that Horthy believed that the Jews were being sent to the camps to work and that they would be returned to Hungary after the war 65 Horthy himself wrote in his memoirs Not before August he wrote did secret information reach me of the horrible truth about the extermination camps 31 The Vrba Wetzler statement is believed to have been passed to Hungarian Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner no later than 28 April 1944 Kastner did not make it public 68 He made an agreement with the SS to remain silent in order to save the Jews who escaped on the Kastner train The Kastner train a convoy that enabled Hungarian Jews to escape to Switzerland left Budapest on 30 June 1944 Deposition and arrest Edit Main articles Operation Panzerfaust and Government of National Unity Hungary In August 1944 Romania withdrew from the Axis and turned against Germany and its allies This development a sign of the failing German war effort led Horthy in Budapest to reconsolidate his political position He ousted Sztojay and the other Nazi friendly ministers installed the preceding spring replacing them with a new government under Geza Lakatos He stopped the mass deportations of Jews and ordered the police to use deadly force if the Germans attempted to resume them While some smaller groups continued to be deported by train the Germans did not press Horthy to ramp the pace back up to pre August levels Indeed when Horthy turned down Eichmann s request to restart the deportations Heinrich Himmler ordered Eichmann to return to Germany 69 Realizing that Hungary s position was untenable Horthy also renewed peace feelers to the Allies and began considering strategies for surrendering to the Allied force he distrusted the most the Red Army Although Horthy was still bitterly anticommunist his dealings with the Nazis led him to conclude that the Soviets were the lesser evil Working through his trustworthy General Bela Miklos who was in contact with Soviet forces in eastern Hungary Horthy sought to surrender to the Soviets while preserving the Hungarian government s autonomy The Soviets willingly promised this and on 11 October Horthy and the Soviets finally agreed to surrender terms On 15 October 1944 Horthy told his government ministers that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union He said It is clear today that Germany has lost the war Hungary has accordingly concluded a preliminary armistice with Russia and will cease all hostilities against her 70 Horthy informed a representative of the German Reich that we were about to conclude a military armistice with our former enemies and to cease all hostilities against them 31 The Nazis had anticipated Horthy s move On 15 October after Horthy announced the armistice in a nationwide radio address Hitler initiated Operation Panzerfaust sending commando Otto Skorzeny to Budapest with instructions to remove Horthy from power Horthy s son Miklos Horthy Jr was meeting with Soviet representatives to finalize the surrender when Skorzeny and his troops forced their way into the meeting and kidnapped the younger Horthy at gunpoint Trussed up in a carpet Miklos Jr was immediately driven to the airport and flown to Germany to serve as a hostage Skorzeny then brazenly led a convoy of German troops and four Tiger II tanks to the Vienna Gates of Castle Hill where the Hungarians had been ordered not to resist Though one unit had not received the order the Germans quickly captured Castle Hill with minimal bloodshed seven soldiers were killed and twenty six wounded 70 Horthy was captured by Veesenmayer and his staff later on the 15th and taken to the Waffen SS office where he was held overnight Veesenmayer told Horthy that unless he recanted the armistice and abdicated his son would be killed the next morning The fascist Arrow Cross Party swiftly took over Budapest With his son s life in the balance Horthy consented to sign a document officially abdicating his office and naming Ferenc Szalasi leader of the Arrow Cross as both head of state and prime minister Horthy understood that the Germans merely wanted the stamp of his prestige on a Nazi sponsored Arrow Cross coup but he signed anyway As he later explained his capitulation I neither resigned nor appointed Szalasi Premier I merely exchanged my signature for my son s life A signature wrung from a man at machine gun point can have little legality 31 Horthy met Skorzeny three days later at Pfeffer Wildenbruch s apartment and was told he would be transported to Germany in his own special train Skorzeny told Horthy that he would be a guest of honour in a secure Bavarian castle On 17 October Horthy was personally escorted by Skorzeny into captivity 70 at Schloss Hirschberg am Haarsee de in Bavaria where he was guarded closely but allowed to live in comfort 31 With the help of the SS the Arrow Cross leadership moved swiftly to take command of the Hungarian armed forces and to prevent the surrender that Horthy had arranged even though Soviet troops were now deep inside the country Szalasi resumed persecution of Jews and other undesirables In the three months between November 1944 and January 1945 Arrow Cross death squads shot 10 000 to 15 000 Jews on the banks of the Danube The Arrow Cross also welcomed Adolf Eichmann back to Budapest where he began the deportation of the city s surviving Jews Eichmann never successfully completed this phase of his plans thwarted in large measure by the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg Out of a pre war Hungarian Jewish population estimated at 825 000 only 260 000 survived By December 1944 Budapest was under siege by Soviet forces The Arrow Cross leadership retreated across the Danube into the hills of Buda in late January and by February the city surrendered to the Soviet forces Horthy remained under house arrest in Bavaria until the war in Europe ended On 29 April his SS guardians fled in the face of the Allied advance On 1 May Horthy was first liberated and then arrested by elements of the U S 7th Army 31 Exile EditAfter his arrest Horthy was moved through a variety of detention locations before finally arriving at the prison facility at Nuremberg in late September 1945 There he was asked to provide evidence to the International Military Tribunal in preparation for the trial of the Nazi leadership Although he was interviewed repeatedly about his contacts with some of the defendants he did not testify in person In Nuremberg he was reunited with his son Miklos Jr Horthy gradually came to believe that his arrest had been arranged and choreographed by the United States in order to protect him from the Russians Indeed the former regent reported being told that Josip Broz Tito the new ruler of Yugoslavia asked that Horthy be charged with complicity with the 1942 Novi Sad raid by Hungarian troops in the Backa region of Vojvodina 31 Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubovic has claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres but had approved of them 9 American trial officials did not indict Horthy for war crimes The former ambassador John Montgomery who had some influence in Washington also contributed to Horthy s release in Nuremberg 71 According to the memoirs of Ferenc Nagy who served for a year as prime minister in post war Hungary the Hungarian Communist leadership was also interested in extraditing Horthy for trial Nagy said that Joseph Stalin was more forgiving that Stalin told Nagy during a diplomatic meeting in April 1945 not to judge Horthy because he was old and had offered an armistice in 1944 72 On 17 December 1945 Horthy was released from Nuremberg prison and allowed to rejoin his family in the German town of Weilheim Bavaria The Horthys lived there for four years supported financially by ambassador John Montgomery his successor Herbert Pell and by Pope Pius XII whom he knew personally In March 1948 Horthy returned to testify at the Ministries Trial the last of the twelve U S run Nuremberg Trials he testified against Edmund Veesenmayer the Nazi administrator who had controlled Hungary during the deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 31 Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment but was released in 1951 For Horthy returning to Hungary was impossible it was now firmly in the hands of a Soviet sponsored Communist government In an extraordinary twist of fate the chief of Hungary s post war Communist apparatus was Matyas Rakosi one of Bela Kun s colleagues from the ill fated Communist coup of 1919 Kun had been executed during Stalin s purges of the late 1930s but Rakosi had survived in a Hungarian prison cell In 1940 Horthy had permitted Rakosi to emigrate to the Soviet Union in exchange for a series of highly symbolic Hungarian battle flags from the 19th century that were in Russian hands In 1950 the Horthy family managed to find a home in Portugal thanks to Miklos Jr s contacts with Portuguese diplomats in Switzerland Horthy and members of his family were relocated to the seaside town of Estoril in the house address Rua Dom Afonso Henriques 1937 2765 573 Estoril His American supporter John Montgomery recruited a small group of wealthy Hungarians to raise funds for their upkeep in exile According to Horthy s daughter in law Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai Hungarian Jews also supported Horthy s family in exile 71 including industrialist Ferenc Chorin and lawyer Laszlo Pathy 73 In exile Horthy wrote his memoirs Ein Leben fur Ungarn English A Life for Hungary published under the name of Nikolaus von Horthy in which he narrated many personal experiences from his youth until the end of World War II He claimed that he had distrusted Hitler for much of the time he knew him and tried to perform the best actions and appoint the best officials in his country He also highlighted Hungary s mistreatment by many other countries since the end of World War I Horthy was one of the few Axis heads of state to survive the war and thus to write post war memoirs The Horthy family crypt in Kenderes where Horthy himself was reburied in 1993 Horthy never lost his deep contempt for communism and in his memoirs he blamed Hungary s alliance with the Axis on the threat posed by the Asiatic barbarians of the Soviet Union He railed against the influence that the Allies victory had given to Stalin s totalitarian state I feel no urge to say I told you so Horthy wrote nor to express bitterness at the experiences that have been forced upon me Rather I feel wonder and amazement at the vagaries of humanity 31 Horthy married Magdolna Purgly de Joszashely in 1901 they were married for just over 56 years until his death He had two sons Miklos Horthy Jr often rendered in English as Nicholas or Nikolaus and Istvan Horthy who served as his political assistants and two daughters Magda and Paula Of his four children only Miklos outlived him He died in 1957 in Estoril and was initially buried in the British Cemetery Lisbon According to footnotes in his memoirs Horthy was very distraught about the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 In his will Horthy asked that his body not be returned to Hungary until the last Russian soldier has left His heirs honored the request In 1993 two years after the Soviet troops left Hungary Horthy s body was returned to Hungary and he was buried in his hometown of Kenderes The reburial in Hungary was the subject of some controversy on the part of the left 74 Honours EditNational honours Edit Military Order of Maria Theresa Grand Cross 75 Military Order of Maria Theresa Knight s Cross Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen Grand Cross Cross of Merit of the Kingdom of Hungary Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Kingdom of Hungary Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Kingdom of Hungary imposed with the Holy Crown of Hungary Grand Cross Hungarian Red Cross Decoration Star Military Merit Cross 2nd Class with war decoration Order of Leopold Knight s Cross with war decoration Order of the Iron Crown 3rd Class with war decoration Military Merit Cross 1st Class with war decoration and crossed swords Bronze Military Merit Medal Signum Laudis with war ribbon and crossed swords Bronze Military Merit Medal Signum Laudis on red civil ribbon Order of the Iron Crown 3rd Class with war decoration and crossed swords Hungarian Bronze Military Merit Medal Signum Laudis Hungarian Bronze Military Merit Medal Signum Laudis on war ribbon Franz Joseph Commemorative Badge 1st Class Karl Troop Cross Wound Medal Hungarian War Memorial Medal with Swords Military Service Cross 1st Class for 50 years of continuous service Military Service Cross 2nd Class for 30 years of continuous service Military Service Cross 3rd Class for 25 years of continuous service 1898 Jubilee Medal Signum Memoriae 1908 Jubilee Cross Mobilization Cross 1912 13 Order of VitezForeign honours Edit Coat of arms of Miklos Horthy as Knight of the Order of Charles III Spain Albania Order of Besa Grand Cross Austria War Commemorative Medal Order of Merit Grand Cross Belgium Order of Leopold Grand Cordon Bulgaria Memorial medal For Participation In The European War 1915 1918 Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius Grand Cross Chile Order of Merit Grand Cross Croatia Grand Order of King Dmitar Zvonimir Denmark Order of the Elephant Kingdom of Egypt Order of Muhammad Ali Grand Cross Estonia Order of the Cross of the Eagle 1st Class Cross of Liberty Order of the Estonian Red Cross 1st Class Collar of the Order of the White Star Finland Order of the White Rose of Finland Grand Cross Memorial Medal of the Winter War 1939 1940 German Empire Iron Cross 1st Class 1914 2nd Class 1914 Kingdom of Bavaria Order of Saint Michael 2nd Class Prussia Order of Saint John Bailiwick of Brandenburg Order of the Red Eagle 2nd Class with Swords Order of the Crown 3rd Class Nazi Germany Knight s Cross of the Iron Cross Iron Cross Clasp to the Iron Cross 1st Class Clasp to the Iron Cross 2nd Class The Honour Cross of the World War 1914 1918 Order of the German Eagle Grand Cross Greece Order of the Redeemer Grand Cross Kingdom of Italy Order of the Crown of Italy Grand Officer Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation Japanese Empire Order of the Chrysanthemum Grand Cross Latvia Order of the Three Stars Commander Grand Cross with Chain SMOM Sovereign Military Order of Malta 1st Class Montenegro Jubilee Medal 1908 Montenegro Order of Prince Danilo I 2nd Class Netherlands Order of the Netherlands Lion Grand Cross Norway Order of St Olav Grand Cross Ottoman Empire Imtiyaz Medal Order of Osmanieh 2nd Class Iron Crescent Poland Order of the White Eagle Grand Cross Spain Order of Charles III Collar and Grand Cross of Collar Sweden Royal Order of the Seraphim Thailand Order of the White Elephant Grand Cross Vatican Order of the Golden Spur Cross Order of the Holy Sepulchre Grand Cross Kingdom of Yugoslavia Order of Karađorđe s Star Grand CrossPostage stamps Edit Horthy was honoured by issuance of many postage stamps by Hungary Some of them issued on 1 March 1930 76 on 1 January 1938 77 on 1 March 1940 78 on 18 June 1941 79 and on 18 June 1941 80 Legacy Edit In 2013 the unveiling of Horthy s bust in a Calvinist Church in Budapest was followed by national and international criticisms 15 What did the average Hungarian learn in the good old days He learned that the Horthy regime was restorationist fascist fascistoid half fascist dictatorial militaristic nationalist selfish exploitative power hungry servile and so on And primarily counterrevolutionary Now he hears and reads conservative autocratic authoritarian undemocratic patriotic self interested dynamic reformist abandoned deceived etc Now I think that here and now a new considered synthesis has not yet seen the light of day even if it has in most of the world For the Hungarian obviously does not wish to surrender his own history when he finally and rightly believes it could be his 81 Maria Ormos I consider Miklos Horthy a patriot who also must be found a respected place in the national memory Jozsef Antall The interwar period dominated by Horthy s government is known in Hungarian as the Horthy kor Horthy age or Horthy rendszer Horthy system Its legacy and that of Horthy himself remain among the most controversial political topics in Hungary today tied inseparably to the Treaty of Trianon and the Holocaust According to one school of thought Horthy was a strong conservative but not undemocratic leader who only entered into an alliance with Hitler s Germany in order to restore lands Hungary lost after the First World War and was reluctant or even defiant in the face of Germany s demands to deport the Hungarian Jewry 12 Others see Horthy s alliance with Germany as foolhardy 12 or think that a positive view of Horthy serves a revisionist historical agenda 82 pointing to Horthy s passage of various anti Jewish laws the earliest in Europe in 1920 as a sign of his anti Semitism and the prelude for Hungary s collaboration in the Holocaust 15 During the Horthy era Edit During his own reign Horthy s reception was fairly positive though by no means monolithic Opponents of the short lived Soviet Republic saw him as a national saviour in contrast to the Communist losers of the nation 83 Because Horthy distanced himself from everyday politics he was able to cultivate the image of the nationally governing admiral The peaceful re acquisition of Hungarian majority lands lost after Trianon greatly bolstered this image 84 The regime s efforts at economic development and modernization also improved contemporaries opinions and although the Great Depression initially hurt his image Horthy s wide ranging social programs saved face for the most part 85 On the other hand Horthy s right wing tendencies were not without their critics even in his time Bourgeois liberals among them Sandor Marai criticized Horthy s authoritarian style as much as they disdained the violent tendencies of the far left 86 He was also criticized by monarchists and elements of the aristocracy and clergy 87 While the harshest opposition to Horthy initially came from the Communist parties he had overthrown and outlawed the later 1930s saw him come under increasing criticism from the far right After the Arrow Cross Party took control of the country in 1944 Horthy was denounced as a traitor and Jew lover Hungary s borders in increasing color in 1920 1938 1940 and 1941 Horthy s reception in the West was positive until the outbreak of the Second World War and while Hitler initially backed Horthy relations between the two leaders were soured by Horthy s denial of involvement in the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia Horthy likewise viewed the Nazis as brigands and clowns 88 The Little Entente criticized Horthy mainly for his irredentist policy goals 89 During the Communist era Edit Under the Marxism Leninism mandated during the Communist era the Horthy era was generally depicted negatively Scholars who agree that due to political pressure Horthy s positive achievements were unmentioned while his shortcomings were exaggerated The Communist takeover in 1945 saw the same powers who that had denounced Horthy as an executioner and a murdering monster assume control of the state During the 1950s Matyas Rakosi s hardliner Stalinist government systematically disseminated through propaganda and state education the idea that the Horthy era constituted the lowest point in Hungarian history 12 These views were supported by socialist or communist activists persecuted under the Horthy administration Especially critical in this campaign was the 1950 publication of the textbook The Story of the Hungarian People which denounced Horthy s military as a genocidal band consisting of sociopathic officers kulaks and the dregs of society 12 It further characterized Horthy himself as a slave of the Habsburgs a red handed dictator who spoke broken Hungarian and was known for his hatred of workers and soviets 12 The Story of the Hungarian People was required reading in middle schools throughout the 1950s 12 The Kadar era s relative liberalization coupled with the concomitant professionalization of Hungarian history and historiography allowed for more objective historical assessments of Horthy s career Popular volumes still painted him negatively openly leveling ad hominem attacks Horthy was accused of bastardy lechery sadism greed nepotism bloodthirst warmongering and cowardice among other vices 12 Academic evaluations became more nuanced however Peter Gosztony s 1973 biography for example portrayed Horthy as a conscientious traditional conservative 90 Gostony argued that Horthy did not seek a dictatorship until the 1930s and although he was unable to prevent the German invasion of Yugoslavia sought to maintain a moderately liberal government citing his replacement of hardliner Laszlo Bardossy with Miklos Kallay as prime minister as evidence of this Thomas Sakmyster was also sympathetic while acknowledging Horthy s narrow mindededness 91 Contemporary Hungarian American historian Istvan Deak regards Horthy as typical of other strongmen of the era especially dictators Francisco Franco of Spain and Philippe Petain of Vichy France Deak writes that during the war Horthy alternatively promoted and opposed German influence in his country depending on how he judged the probable outcome of the war Similarly Horthy both persecuted and protected his Jewish subjects depending on the turn of military events and the social status and degree of assimilation of the Jews under his reign In the end he was neither tried nor imprisoned but at the urging of Stalin was allowed to go into exile in Portugal 92 Reburial and contemporary politics Edit Horthy s 4 September 1993 reburial in Kenderes The government s open support of the ceremony incited protests and international attention The transition to a Western style democracy allowed the privatization of media which led to a shift in how Horthy was viewed in Hungary In 1993 only a few years after the first democratic elections Horthy s body was returned from Portugal to his hometown of Kenderes Tens of thousands of people as well as almost the entirety of Jozsef Antall s MDF cabinet attended the ceremony Antall had prefaced the burial with a series of interviews praising Horthy as a patriot 93 The reburial was broadcast on state television and was accompanied by large scale protests in Budapest 93 In contemporary Hungary the hagiography of Horthy is associated with the far right Jobbik party and its allies The national conservative Fidesz has also voiced some positive opinions of Horthy s legacy Since 2012 Horthy statues squares have been renamed after and memorials have been erected to him in numerous villages and cities including Csokako 13 Kereki Gyomro and Debrecen 14 In November 2013 the unveiling of a Horthy statue at a Calvinist church in Budapest drew international attention and criticism 15 Der Spiegel has written about the resurgence of what its writers call the Horthy cult claiming that Horthy s popularity indicates returning irredentist reactionary and ultranationalistic elements 14 Critics have more specifically connected Horthy s popularity to the Magyar Garda a paramilitary group that uses Arpad dynasty imagery and to recent incidents of antiziganist and antisemitic vandalism in Hungary 13 Meanwhile Fidesz has according to reporters hedged its bets on the Horthy controversy refusing to outright condemn Horthy statues and other commemorations for fear of losing far right voters to Jobbik Some Fidesz politicians have labeled Horthy memorials provocative however 15 This tension has led some to label Fidesz as implicitly anti semitic and to accuse Prime Minister Viktor Orban of a revisionist agenda 14 Left wing groups such as the Hungarian Socialist Party have condemned positive historiography of Horthy In 2012 for instance then party leader Attila Mesterhazy condemned the Orban government s position as inexcusable claiming that Fidesz was openly associating itself with the ideology of the regime that collaborated with the fascists 13 Words have led to actions in some instances as when leftist activist Peter Daniel vandalized a rural bust of Horthy by dousing it in red paint and hanging a sign that read Mass Murderer War Criminal around its neck Ultranationalist vandals reacted by desecrating a Jewish cemetery in Szekesfehervar and vandalizing several Holocaust memorials in Budapest 14 94 In 2017 Orban affirmed his positive view of Horthy commenting in a speech that he considers Horthy an exceptional statesman and giving him credit for the survival of the Hungarian state in the First World War s aftermath The U S Holocaust Museum responded in a statement denouncing Orban and the Hungarian government for trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Hungary s wartime leader Miklos Horthy who was a vocal anti Semite and complicit in the murder of the country s Jewish population during the Holocaust 95 Film and television portrayals EditIn the 1985 NBC TV film Wallenberg A Hero s Story the role of Horthy was taken by Hungarian born actor Guy Deghy who appeared bearded although Horthy as photographs bore out appeared consistently clean shaven throughout his life In the 2011 Spanish TV film series El angel de Budapest The angel of Budapest also set during Wallenberg s time in Hungary in 1944 he is portrayed by actor Laszlo Agardi In the 2014 American action drama film Walking with the Enemy Horthy is portrayed by Ben Kingsley The movie depicts a story of a young man during the Arrow Cross Party takeover in Hungary See also EditEl angel de Budapest European interwar dictatorships History of Hungary Mediterranean naval engagements during World War INotes Edit Vitez refers to a Hungarian knightly order founded by Miklos Horthy Vitezi Rend literally vitez means knight or valiant Owen Rutter Averil Mackenzie Grieve Lily Doblhoff baroness Regent of Hungary the authorized life of Admiral Nicholas Horthy PDF http www yadvashem org odot pdf Microsoft 20Word 20 201149 pdf a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a Missing or empty title help John Laughland A History of Political Trials From Charles I to Saddam Hussein Peter Lang Ltd 2008 Orban s explicit praise of Horthy is a denial of Hungary s fascist past 6 July 2017 Museum Condemns Attempts to Rehabilitate Hungarian Fascist Leader United States Holocaust Memorial Museum La Cluj e comemorat dictatorul fascist Horthy Miklos pe bani publici Hungary and the Holocaust Confrontation with the Past 2001 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Tim Cole Hungary the Holocaust and Hungarians Remembering Whose History p 3 5 1 a b Zvonimir Golubovic Racija u Juznoj Backoj 1942 godine Novi Sad 1991 page 194 von Papen Franz Memoirs London 1952 pps 541 23 546 Miklos Horthy 2011 A life for Hungary memoirs Ishi Press International ISBN 978 4 87187 913 2 OCLC 781086313 a b c d e f g h Romsics Ignac Horthy kepeink Mozgo Vilag Online Archived from the original on 19 July 2014 Retrieved 14 July 2014 a b c d Simon Zoltan 13 June 2012 Hungary Lauds Hitler Ally Horthy as Orban Fails to Stop Hatred Bloomberg Retrieved 15 July 2014 a b c d e Verseck Keno 6 June 2012 Creeping Cult Hungary Rehabilitates Far Right Figures Spiegel Online International Retrieved 15 July 2014 a b c d e His contentious legacy The Economist No 9 November 2013 9 November 2013 Retrieved 14 July 2014 Bencsik Gabor 2004 Horthy Miklos 4 javitott ed Budapest Magyar Mercurius p 9 ISBN 9638552859 a b Genealogy Euweb Horthy de Nagybanya family Retrieved 28 January 2009 a b Bencsik Gabor Homo Monarchicus Az elso 25 ev Budapest Rubicon Tortenelmi Magazin 2007 10 szam pp 54 56 Myth and Remembrance The Dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the Memoir Literature of the Austro Hungarian Political Elite Social Science Monographs 2006 ISBN 9780880335669 Horthy Nicholas 2000 Memoirs Annotated by Andrew L Simon PDF Simon Publications pp 11 3 jegyzet ISBN 0966573439 Archived from the original PDF on 6 March 2006 Miklos Horthy Hungarian statesman Encyclopaedia Britannica 9 February 1957 Retrieved 21 August 2014 a b Spencer Tucker Laura Matysek Wood 1996 The European powers in the First World War an encyclopedia Taylor amp Francis US p 348 ISBN 978 0 8153 0399 2 Deak Istvan Hungary in Hans Rogger and Egon Weber eds The European right A historical profile 1963 p 364 407 quoting p 364 Lazar Istvan Hungary A Brief History Budapest Corvina 1993 English edition Translated by Albert Tezla Chapter 13 Deak Istvan A Hungarian Admiral on Horseback from Essays on Hitler s Europe University of Nebraska Press 2001 pp 150 151 a b Patai Raphael The Jews of Hungary Wayne State University Press pp 468 469 a b c d e Bodo Bela Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War East European Quarterly No 2 Vol 38 22 June 2004 Szabo and Pamlenyi A hatarban a halal kaszal pp 160 and 131 Sakmyster Thomas L Hungary s Admiral on Horseback Miklos Horthy 1918 1944 Columbia University Press date 1993 a b Gunther John 1940 Inside Europe Harper amp Brothers pp 422 423 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Horthy Admiral Nicholas 2000 Admiral Nicholas Horthy Memoirs Nicholas Horthy Miklos Horthy Andrew L Simon Nicholas Roosevelt illustrated ed Simon Publications LLC p 348 ISBN 0 9665734 3 9 Durand Andre 1984 History of the International Committee of the Red Cross from Sarajevo to Hiroshima Geneva Henry Dunant Institute p 136 ISBN 9782880440091 1919 speech of Horthy Archived from the original on 1 July 2007 Sakmyster p 56 Deak Istvan A Fatal Compromise The Debate Over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary in The Politics of Retribution World War II and Its Aftermath edited by Deak Gross and Judt Princeton University Press pp 39 52 Sakmyster Thomas L 1994 Hungary s Admiral on Horseback Miklos Horthy 1918 1944 East European Monographs pp 156 244 Moshe Carmilly Weinberger The road to life the rescue operation of Jewish refugees on the Hungarian Romanian border in Transylvania 1936 1944 Shengold 1994 p 33 Eve Blau Monika Platzer Shaping the great city modern architecture in Central Europe 1890 1937 Prestel 1999 p 34 E G Walters The Other Europe Eastern Europe To 1945 Syracuse University Press 1988 p 154 The comments of U S Minister to Hungary Nicholas Roosevelt quoted in Frank Tibor Discussing Hitler Advisors of U S Diplomacy in Central Europe 1934 1941 Central European University press 2003 pp 14 16 Nandor F Dreisziger Bridges to the West The Horthy Regime s Reinsurance Policies in 1941 War amp Society 7 1 1989 1 23 a b Eby Cecil Hungary at War Civilians and Soldiers in World War II University Park Penn State Press 2007 page 9 Anna Rosmus Hitlers Nibelungen Samples Grafenau 2015 pp 166f Miklos Horthy Memoirs R Speller 1957 reprinted in 2000 page 159 citation I have already stated that my aim was to achieve the revision of the Treaty of Trianon by peaceful means William Wohlforth Deadly Imbalances Tripolarity and Hitler s Strategy of World Conquest Columbia University Press 1998 pp 78 79 John Flournoy Montgomery Hungary The Unwilling Satellite Part Two An Oasis in Hitler s Desert Miklos Lojko Meddling in Middle Europe Britain and the Lands Between 1919 1925 Central European University Press 2005 p 180 Montgomery John F Hungary The Unwilling Satellite Part One What Price Independence Patai Raphael The Jews of Hungary Wayne State University Press p 548 Patai p 546harvnb error no target CITEREFPatai help Deak Istvan Endgame in Budapest Hungarian Quarterly Autumn 2005 Holocaust in Hungary About the Kamianets Podilskyi massacre in Hungarian language Holokausztmagyarorszagon hu Retrieved 21 August 2014 Borhi Laszlo Hungary in the Cold War 1945 1956 Between the United States and the Soviet Union Central European University Press New York 2004 Nicholas Kallay Hungarian Premier A Personal Account of a Nation s Struggle in the Second World War 1954 Lazar Istvan Hungary A Brief History Chapter 14 Deak Istvan Endgame in Budapest Hungary and the Holocaust Confrontation with the Past 2001 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Tim Cole Hungary the Holocaust and Hungarians Remembering Whose History p 3 5 2 Randolph L Braham 2010 Hungarian German and Jewish calculations and miscalculations in the last chapter of the Holocaust p 9 10 Washington D C Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 3 Braham Randolph The Politics of Genocide Wayne State University Press pp 59 62 Richard J Evans The Third Reich at War pg 617 618 a b Rees Laurence Auschwitz A New History Public Affairs 2005 ISBN 1 58648 357 9 A holokauszt Magyarorszagon A deportalasok leallitasa in Hungarian Retrieved 11 September 2006 Tsvi Erez Hungary Six Days in July 1944 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3 1 1988 37 53 Szabolcs Szita Trading in Lives Central European University Press Budapest 2005 pp 50 54 a b Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai Becsulet es kotelesseg part I page 264 Europa press Budapest 2001 ISBN 963 07 6544 6 Wilkinson Alec Picturing Auschwitz New Yorker Magazine 17 March 2008 pp 49 51 Peter Sipos Horthy Miklos es Magyarorszag nemet megszallasa Historia volume 04 1994 Martin Gilbert Auschwitz and the Allies A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler s Mass Murder 1981 pp 201 205 Robert J Hanyok 2004 Eavesdropping on Hell Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust 1939 1945 PDF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY UNITED STATES CRYPTOLOGIC HISTORY In late July there was a lull in the deportations After the failed attempt on Hitler s life the Germans backed off from pressing Horthy s regime to continue further large scale deportations Smaller groups continued to be deported by train At least one German police message decoded by GC amp CS revealed that one trainload of 1 296 Jews from the town of Sarvar in western Hungary Hungarian Jews being rounded up in Budapest Courtesy USHMM had departed for Auschwitz on August 4 112 In late August Horthy refused Eichmann s request to restart the deportations Himmler ordered Eichmann to leave Budapest a b c Williamson Mitch War and Game Operation Panzerfaust Archived from the original on 8 July 2011 Retrieved 16 April 2009 a b Tibor Frank 2003 Discussing Hitler Advisers of U S Diplomacy in Central Europe 1934 41 Central European University Press p 4 ISBN 978 963 9241 56 5 Nagy s 1948 memoirs The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain are quoted in Andrew Simon s annotations to Horthy s Memoirs in this case for Chapter 22 From the Annotated Memoirs of Admiral Miklos Horthy Archived 14 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine accessed 2009 September 5 Perlez Jane Reburial is Both a Ceremony and a Test for Today s Hungary The New York Times 5 September 1993 Untitled Document www vitezirend co hu Stamp Miklos Horthy Regent of Hungary Hungary 10th Governing Anniversary of Regent Miklos Horhty Mi HU 458 Sn HU 445 Yt HU 423 Sg HU 513 Colnect Stamp Admiral Miklos Horthy 1868 1957 regent Hungary Miklos Horthy Mi HU 566 Sn HU 526 Yt HU 507 Sg HU 616 AFA HU 540 Colnect Stamp Miklos Horthy at Szeged Hungary 20th Governing Anniversary of Regent Miklos Horhty Mi HU 626 Sn HU 555 Yt HU 547 Sg HU 661 AFA HU 587 Colnect Stamp Miklos Horthy Regent of Hungary Hungary Miklos Horthy Mi HU 657 Sn HU 570 Yt HU 570 Sg HU 686A AFA HU 614A Colnect Stamp Miklos Horthy Regent of Hungary Hungary Miklos Horthy Mi HU 659 Sn HU 572 Yt HU 572 Sg HU 688A AFA HU 617 Colnect Ormos 1997 p 179 sfn error no target CITEREFOrmos1997 help LaCouter Travis Miklos Horthy Addressing A Troubled Past Paprika Politik Retrieved 14 July 2014 Rubicon Tortenelmi Magazin A Horthy kep valtozasai Orszagmento 6 oldal Rubicon Tortenelmi Magazin A Horthy kep valtozasai Hongyarapito 10 oldal Magyarorszag a XX szazadban A vilaghaboru arnyekaban Marai Sandor Naplo 1943 1944 292 oldal S a vegso felelosseg megis Horthye es embereie akik engedtek noni tenyeszni a szellemet amelybol mindez kerlelhetetlen vegzettel kovetkezett Rubicon Tortenelmi Magazin A Horthy kep valtozasai http zsofika com ormos maria a a gyilkossagrol es a hazugsagrol Archived 13 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine Ormos Maria A gyilkossagrol es a hazugsagrol csurgoi beszed gondolatok a nemzetiszocializmusrol 85 eve alakult meg a Kisantant A mult kor cikke Nemeth Istvan Europa tervek 1300 1945 cimu tanulmanya alapjan Mult kor hu 6 June 2011 Retrieved 21 August 2014 Peter Gosztony Miklos von Horthy Admiral u Reichsverweser German Edition 1973 Thomas Sakmyster Hungary s Admiral on Horseback Miklo s Horthy 1918 1944 1994 Deak Istvan Europe on Trial The Story of Collaboration Resistance and Retribution During World War II 2015 p 9 a b Perlez Jane 5 September 1993 Reburial Is Both a Ceremony and a Test for Today s Hungary The New York Times Retrieved 15 July 2014 Global Anti Semitism Selected Incidents Around the World Hungary New York City Anti Defamation League 31 December 2012 Retrieved 23 December 2020 Krupkin Taly U S Holocaust museum denounces Hungarian PM for erasing wartime crimes U S News Haaretz Retrieved 30 June 2017 Further reading and references EditBodo Bela Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War East European Quarterly No 2 Vol 38 22 June 2004 Deak Istvan Europe on Trial The Story of Collaboration Resistance and Retribution During World War II 2015 9 88 102 Deak Istvan Admiral and Regent Miklos Horthy Some Thoughts on a Controversial Statesman Hungarian Quarterly Fall 1996 37 143 pp 78 89 Dreisziger N F Introduction Miklos Horthy and the Second World War Some Historiographical Perspectives Hungarian Studies Review 23 1 1996 5 16 Dreisziger Nandor F Bridges to the West The Horthy Regime s Reinsurance Policies in 1941 War amp Society 7 1 1989 1 23 Fenyo Mario D Hitler Horthy and Hungary German Hungarian Relations 1941 1944 Yale UP 1972 Kallay Nicholas Hungarian Premier A Personal Account of a Nation s Struggle in the Second World War 1954 online review Rutter Owen Regent of Hungary The Authorized Life of Admiral Nicholas Horthy London Rich and Cowan 1938 Sakmyster Thomas Hungary s Admiral on Horseback East European Monographs Boulder CO 1994 ISBN 0 88033 293 X Sakmyster Thomas From Habsburg Admiral to Hungarian Regent The Political Metamorphosis of Miklos Horthy 1918 1921 East European Quarterly 17 2 1983 129 148 External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Miklos Horthy Wikimedia Commons has media related to Miklos Horthy Trianon Hungary U S Library of Congress Country Study Horthy Miklos The Annotated Memoirs pdf John Flournoy Montgomery The Unwilling Satellite e book version on historicaltextarchive com Miklos Horthy Association Archived 6 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine Biography of Admiral Miklos Horthy Montgomery John Flournoy Hungary The unwilling satellitePolitical officesPreceded byZoltan Szabo Minister of War of the Counter Government1919 Succeeded bySandor BelitskaPreceded byKaroly Huszaras acting Head of State Regent of Hungary1920 1944 Succeeded byFerenc Szalasias Leader of the NationMilitary officesPreceded byMaximilian Njegovan Commander in Chief of the Austro Hungarian Naval Fleet1918 Succeeded byJanko VukovicHonorary titlesNew title Captain General of the Order of Vitez1920 1957 Succeeded byArchduke Joseph August Portals Biography Hungary World War IIMiklos Horthy at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from Commons Quotations from Wikiquote Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Miklos Horthy amp oldid 1150573659, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.