As
we mark the 78th anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust, it is
fitting to focus on the summer of 1944 and examine the enigmatic Hungarian
leader of that time, Admiral Miklos Horthy. Horthy was a complicated war figure
whose Holocaust past is debated. While Horthy is customarily painted by World
War II historians as Hitler’s “buddy,” a recent Moment magazine article entitled, “How Anti-Semite Miklos Horthy
Saved the Jews of Budapest,” sides with historical revisionists who portray him
favorably.
On the one hand, Horthy aligned his
country with Nazi Germany and, after the war, lived in seclusion in fascist
Portugal. On the other hand, he was not included by the Allies among the Nazi
war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, and he was supported after the war by
Hungarian Jews who claimed they owed their lives to him. The question before us
is, therefore, was Admiral Miklos Horthy an accomplice of the Nazis or a savior
of the Jews?
* * *
First, let’s ponder how an admiral of the
navy could become leader of a landlocked country like Hungary. And how could
someone who spoke Hungarian with a noticeable German accent come to be the
ruler of Hungary.
Horthy was groomed for leadership under
the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the great empire of Central Europe for
hundreds of years. After World War I, the empire, where Horthy served as navy admiral,
disintegrated into several new countries, including Hungary. A brief coup was
carried out by Bela Kun (Cohen), a communist Jew, who declared Hungary a Soviet
republic of the new Soviet Union. Next, Hungary suffered a Romanian invasion
which ended Kun’s rule and resulted in the humiliated Hungarians turning to
Horthy’s nationalist military to repress the communist revolutionaries
associated with Jews. The Kingdom of Hungary was restored, with a Crown
Council naming Horthy regent in 1920.
Horthy’s anti-communist dictatorship
brought him into an alliance with Nazi Germany. As a reward, Hitler eventually restored
to Hungary its lost province of Transylvania, which had been seized by Romania.
But, even while parroting the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, Horthy made Hungary
somewhat of a refuge for persecuted Jews, as Horthy refused to persecute the
Jews or delayed the persecution that was imposed by the Nazis elsewhere in
Europe. According to Rav Teichtal’s Eim
Habanim Semeicha, Jewish life in Hungary thrived.
The Jews in the
Empire
The
Austro-Hungarian Empire, under its beloved Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, was benevolent
toward Jewry throughout the 19th century and World War I, viewing the
Jews as loyal to the government (as opposed to how anti-Semitic Czarist Russia
viewed its Jews). However, the secularist Jewish proclivity toward Soviet
communism in the inter-war period – as well as the backlash of the humiliating
German defeat in World War I and its devastating reparations – allowed for the
rise of a toxic anti-Semitism. Hungarians felt threatened by a return to Bela Kun’s
short-lived Soviet republic and the loss of territory to Hungary’s neighbors.
Admiral Horthy, an icon of nationalism, became a popular leader who promised to
prevent a Soviet takeover and to regain lost territories through an alliance
with a bellicose Nazi Germany. Although somewhat protective of its Jews,
Horthy’s Hungary succumbed to anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. Hungarian Jews, ten
percent of the populace, prospered and dominated many professions to the scorn
of their neighbors.
Horthy’s own Jew baiting is archived in a
letter to the popularly elected Prime Minister Teleki, in 1940:
I
have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with
Jews…[It is] intolerable that in Hungary everything - factory, bank, large
fortune, business, theater, press, commerce - is in Jewish hands. But to raise
the standard of living we must acquire wealth… [It is] impossible to replace
the Jews, who have everything in their hands…with incompetent, unworthy, mostly
big-mouthed elements to become bankrupt. This requires a generation at least…I
cannot look with indifference at inhumanity, senseless humiliation, when we
still need them.
But Horthy was a master of deception. The Moment article debunks this statement: “Never
had contact with Jews is laughable,” it says. “He played bridge with them,
invited them to his table, and encouraged them in commerce.” The article
contends that the Admiral’s words were camouflage for the anti-Semitic public.
Although he joined the Nazi war in 1941
against the Soviets, Horthy appointed a liberal prime minister, Miklos Kallay,
to resist the Nazi pressure for Hungary to mimic the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws,
which aimed to destroy Hungarian Jewry. Numerous times, Horthy and Kallay had proposed
anti-Semitic legislation withdrawn from the parliament and refused to succumb
to their Nazi ally’s dictates in internal affairs. As war and murder expanded
across Europe, Jewish refugees flooded Hungary, where Horthy resisted the Nazis’
Final Solution designs.
May 1944: Germany
Marches into Hungary
In May 1944, after rejecting Hitler’s
outright demand to remove Kallay for resisting imposing Jewish restrictions,
Horthy and Kallay convened Hungary’s Crown Council. They notified the council
that Hitler had ordered his army to directly occupy Hungary because they had
failed to fulfill his wish to massacre the Jews.
Horthy rejected Kalley’s urging to abdicate and flee the imminent
occupation by Germany. He banged his chair and stated, “Leave this chair empty?
I have sworn not to forsake this country. Who will defend the Jews or our
refugees if I leave my post? I may not defend everything, but I believe that I
can still be of great help to our people!”
Upon the Nazi
takeover, Kalley took refuge at the Turkish embassy, while Horthy, under German
duress, appointed Dome Sztojay, leader of the Iron Cross, as prime minister.
Eichmann arrived in Budapest the next day with only a small German delegation
to coordinate with the new Nazi-affiliated Iron Cross government the
deportation of over 437,000 of Jews to Auschwitz between May and July 1944.
Given his small entourage, Eichmann could only accomplish his deportations with
the help of 200,000 Iron Cross collaborationist Hungarians, who were just as
feared as the Nazi SS.
Stalling the
Trains to Auschwitz
Meanwhile, back
in April, Auschwitz escapees Walter Rosenberg and Alfred Wetzler began
circulating a detailed report of the gas chambers in their “Auschwitz Notebook.”
The Notebook reached the Budapest Jewish Council and other Hungarian notables,
including Horthy’s daughter-in–law, Countess Ilona Edelsheim-Gyulai, who would
later testify: “One could feel that every word was true. I immediately brought
this to my father-in-law.” Horthy received pleas from Pope Pius XII, U.S.
President FDR, and King Gustav of Sweden to stop the deportations.
On June 26,
Horthy declared at the Crown Council meeting: “I shall not tolerate this any
further!…to bring further shame on Hungarians. Let the government take measures
for the removal of (Iron Cross leaders) Laszlo Baky and Laszlo Endre! The
deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease! The government must take the
necessary steps!”
But Horthy’s
words were in vain. No one obeyed him anymore as the Allies bombed Budapest on
July 2. On July 6, the Hungarian government immediately halted the deportation
of Jews. Horthy, recognizing that without a military showdown nobody would
listen, called upon a lone loyalist military unit under Colonel Koszorus to
confront the Iron Cross leader Baky and demand a stop to the deportations,
including the quarter-million Budapest Jews that Eichmann had ordered deported
that same day.
On July 9, the Swedish aristocrat Raoul
Wallenberg entered Budapest under Nazi direct rule, establishing numerous Jewish
safe houses under the Swedish flag and providing Jews, many destined to
Auschwitz, with refuge and identity papers as subjects of neutral Sweden. Wallenberg,
who had some Jewish ancestry, communicated to Eichmann in the name of the
Swedish crown that none of his “Swedish” subjects were to be bothered. The joke
pervading Budapest asked, “How can a Swede be distinguished? By a long chasidic
beard, peyos, and tzitis!”
On July 12, the Germans rounded up more of
the Jewish intelligentsia for deportations at Kistarcsa, a Budapest suburb. The
Hungarian commandant, Vasdenyei, assisted the Jews as much as he could,
including participating in the turning back of two trains before they crossed
the border. Vasdenyei notified the Jewish Dr. Brody of the deportation planned
by Germany for July 14. He contacted the Jewish Council, which relayed the
information to Horthy. The Regent ordered the train not to proceed, but when it
did anyway, he got a hold of the head of the gendarmie, Lullay, to halt the
train before it exited Hungarian territory; it was the first known train to
ever turn back.
Horthy Is Arrested
By August, the Germans demanded a
resumption of the deportations, and Horthy and Budapest Jewish Council leader
Sami Stern deceptively agreed, only to buy time and allow the Regent to
assemble loyal troops, cancel the deportations for good, and execute a coup
against the Iron Cross government. Horthy appointed anti-Nazi General Geza
Lakatos as the new prime minister. But the coup was only sustained until October
15, when Horthy began his negotiations with the Soviet army, which was sweeping
through eastern Hungary.
The occupying Germans had enough of
Horthy’s treasonous “Trojan horse” tactics as they amassed all their forces,
not in fighting the Soviets but in completing their Final Solution. Horthy was
overthrown in an Iron-Cross countercoup, arrested, and taken to southern
Germany.
With the Soviet army sprint to
Berlin, Aushwitz gassing stopped on October 16. but Eichmann returned to
Budapest and imposed a Jewish ghetto near the central synagogue of up to 80,000.
There, Arrow Cross bandits unleashed a massacre of another probable 15,000 Jews.
With the Iron Cross countercoup and Horthy’s
arrest, more Jews perished at the war’s end.
While most of Hungarian Jewry perished,
the late transports to Auschwitz, Horthy’s intervention, the Swedish safe
houses, and the Nazi defeat only months later enabled many Jews to survive.
As his Nazi captors fled, Horthy fell into
American military custody. Surprisingly, he was not indicted for war crimes;
rather, he resurfaced as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allies
prosecuted Nazi leaders for their Holocaust actions. The American Jewish
prosecutor, Benjamin Ferrans, who presided over the trial, did not request more
of Horthy than witness testimony. Under Soviet occupation, when Hungary became
a communist satellite, Horthy chose Portugal as a refuge, Soviet loyalist Bela
Kun was executed in the Soviet Union, and Raoul Wallenberg disappeared. It is
assumed that Wallenberg eventually died in Stalin’s gulag.
* * *
Although lone righteous gentiles mustered
their courage and hid Jews, Europeans, for the most part, collaborated with the
Nazis and enthusiastically participated in their Final Solution. Then there
were those, like Horthy, whose legacy is more muddled. Horthy remains
controversial. While Horthy’s “cozying up” to Hitler did enable Hitler’s
murderous deportations, apologists ask whether Horthy’s culpability was any
different then that of Stalin (who joined Hitler in the infamous Soviet-German
pact of August 1939), the British and French leaders at Munich (with “peace in
our time” appeaser Neville Chamberlain), or FDR (who infamously refused to bomb
the railroad tracks to Auschwitz).
The current Hungarian leader, nationalist Victor
Orban, himself controversial, seeks Horthy’s rehabilitation in Hungarian
history. At the same time, he is friendly toward Israel and is against his
fellow European Union members’ opposition to Jerusalem and to Jewish life in
Judea and Samaria.
Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed.
We continue to experience growing anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and
revisionist history. Furthermore, the great powers naively seek to enlist
another mass murderer, Iran’s Raisi, into nuclear weapons negotiations even as
he hastens his country’s nuclear potential to destroy Israel. We beseech the
ultimate Judge to avenge our enemies and bring the redemption and the
rebuilding of the binyan Bais Hamikdash.
Hashem, please thwart our enemies and be their ultimate Judge.
