Hungarian Nazism, 80 Years On
80 years ago today, Hungary entered its brief, dark period of proper Nazi rule. But the lessons are still to be drawn.
Today marks the 80th anniversary of one of the darkest days in Hungarian history. On 15 October 1944, Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, attempted to exit WW2, as the old war criminal felt the (metaphorical if not literal) rope around his neck. However, Horthy’s attempt at the ceasefire was so botched and borderline amateurish that he was instead overthrown by the German military and their far-right Hungarist allies, the Arrow Cross Party. Arrow Cross Party leader Ferenc Szálasi was appointed by the Germans as the head of government and as head of state, in a position entitled the ‘Leader of the Nation’, modelled on the Führer and il Duce.
From 15 October until around early April lasted Hungarian history’s only attempt at Fascist, nay, Nazi governance, in an ever-dwindling territory not yet occupied by the Red Army and its allies. (The front was already within the post-Trinanon borders of Hungary when Horthy attempted his ceasefire.) In the conditions of a war being waged within the country, its capital besieged from December and then captured by 13 February, and both Hungary and Nazi Germany collapsing economically and militarily, luckily there was no opportunity for properly remodelling the Hungarian state in light of Hungarist ideology.
Instead, the Arrow Cross Party ruled through a more direct, almost premodern form of terror, a war against much of the population. While Budapest’s Jewish population was forced into a ghetto, into hiding or to seek international protection, and deportations and death marches were also restarted, mass deportation to death camps was simply no longer an option. Instead of the mechanistic, impersonal, industrial-scale killing usually (and simplifyingly) associated with the Shoah, Arrow Cross Party brigades hunted down Budapest’s remaining Jewish population, tortured them and shot them into the Danube. The haunting image of the shoes of the dead that they were forced to leave on the Danube embankment, depicted by Félix Máriássy’s 1955 film Springtime in Budapest, serves as the basis of Budapest’s main Shoah memorial.
Crucially, this was focusing on Budapest, because the Horthy regime had already deported Hungary’s Jewish population earlier in 1944. In one of the fastest operations in the Shoah, around 400 to 450 thousand Jewish Hungarians were deported to Auschwitz in less than two months, but – again most likely as an attempt by Horthy to secure his literal survival – the Jewish population of Budapest mostly escaped this faith. Importantly, Hungary at the time wasn’t a Hungarist or Nazi or Fascist country, but a conservative monarchy, despite all its Fascistic tendencies, a traditional state with a traditional civil service. In this sense, this new, radical form of the Hungarian right was only continuing the work of the old right, indeed, for all their brutality, being much less ‘effective’ in it.
Another aspect where Szálasi’s regime mostly continued what the Horthy regime started but shied away from when pure self-interest overcame their ideological commitments (this time not to antisemitism but overturning the Treaty of Trianon), was continuing Hungary’s participation in the war as by then the last ally of Germany. This resulted in the meaningless death of many Hungarians (soldiers and civilians alike) and the complete devastation of the nation’s capital in the Siege of Budapest, one of the last and deadliest battles of the European theatre in WW2. All this was to serve the glorious war aim of prolonging the complete collapse of what was left of the Axis by at most a couple of weeks.
Thus, despite their postures as right-wing revolutionaries offering fake solutions to the very real social ills of old Hungary, Szálasi and the Arrow Cross Party were simply finishing the job that the less ideologically zealous and perhaps more self-interested leaders of the old Hungarian right (Horthy and much of the political elite of pre-1944 Hungary, but with clear historical links to the pre-WW1 right-liberal mainstream, even though they had long ceased to be liberals) didn’t finish.
But being slightly less of an antisemitic monster isn’t a virtue, and the post-89 revisionism of the Horthy era is a national scandal. These people created a highly unequal society combining the worst of capitalism and feudalism (the famous ‘dual society’), and creating a grotesque, pseudo-Baroque hierarchical ideology to justify it. And this was a regime that ‘successfully’ put Hungary on a track towards national catastrophe, both morally, but also politically and economically, by aligning Hungary with Germany.
This scandal doesn’t only affect the right. Venerating the suicide note of Count Pál Teleki, former Prime Minister who killed himself when he couldn’t prevent Hungary’s entry into WW2, is also popular among so-called Hungarian liberals. While his suicide might have been one of Teleki’s very few good decisions, he was also an infamous antisemite responsible for many laws restricting the rights of Jewish Hungarians (including one as early as 1920), and he was primarily responsible for the foreign policy orientation of Hungary, alignment with Germany, that drew our country into the war on the side of the Axis. He was a person to be despised, not to be put up as an example.
80 years on, the lesson of Hungary’s brief and dark experiment of Nazism is still not drawn: this is where old Hungary had led itself. It is high time to start building one anew.
Iván Merker