Admiral and Regent Miklós Horthy

[Marcus Marulus]

István Deák

Admiral and Regent Miklós Horthy


Some Thoughts on a Controversial Statesman

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But now, by 1920, all this was history: there were no more significant national minorities, and there had come into being a competitive non-Jewish middle class. It had also become clear that at least some Jews were not satisfied with making money but wanted political power as well. The Jewish Bolsheviks who seized power in 1919 and governed the country for 133 days never admitted their Jewishness in public and were completely uninterested in Jewish issues. Still, in a small country, everybody knew who was and who was not a Jew. The result was a greatly heightened anti-Semitism, in which it was im-material that the vast majority of the Hungarian Jews had wished to have nothing to do with the Bolshevik regime. The anti-Semitism of the counter-revolutionary regime did not, however, mean any kind of anti-Jewish uniformity. Indeed, anti-Semitism ranged from the mildly economic through the political to the racist, and it is no exaggeration to say that the history of "Horthy Hungary" was marked by a political competition among anti-Semites. Even the degree of the country's alignment with Nazi Germany was largely determined, aside from the goal of territorial revisionism, by whether one aimed at a moderate or a radical solution of the Jewish question. As in so many other cases, Horthy occupied a middle position regarding the Jews, or better to say, his position swung from the middle to a moderate or a radical stance, depending on the times and on the persuasive power of those around him.

In 1921, when King Charles twice attempted to reclaim his throne, Horthy behaved most ambiguously: he assured the King of his absolute loyalty yet forced Charles into exile by claiming the threat of Entente and Little Entente military intervention. No doubt there was such a threat, but there is no proof that an invasion of Hungary would have truly ensued if Horthy had given up his post in favour of Charles. In any case, the Czechoslovak and other neighbouring governments showed themselves most shortsighted in protesting the return of the Habsburgs; it is inconceivable that King Charles (or his son Otto) would have allied himself with Hitler. Domestically, the liberal and anti-anti-Semitic Charles would have been a blessing compared with Horthy and his cronies.

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The German alliance and immense domestic pressure brought a series of anti-Semitic measures. The three laws bearing on the issue that were adopted between 1938 and 1941 can be seen either as absolute abominations or as manoeuvres aimed at taking the wind out of the sails of the Germans and the domestic fascists. The truth is that while these laws visited considerable economic hardship on a number of middle-class Jews, and even led to the death of thousands in the Jewish labour formations sent to the frontline by the army, their destructive effect cannot be compared with the persecution that descended on the Jews in other parts of Europe. In March 1944, at a time when most of the over three million Polish Jews were dead, 95 per cent of the Hungarian Jews and thousands of Jewish refugees from abroad were alive, and the Jewish factory owners and bankers in Budapest derived immense profits from the manufacture of arms for the German and Hungarian armies. Whenever Hitler pushed Horthy to take drastic measures against the 800,000 Hungarian Jews, the latter replied that this would produce the collapse of the Hungarian war industry. Whenever the Hungarian government planned a little more quiet resistance to German demands, the Hungarian Jewish leaders put in their plea for more collaboration so as to save the Jewish community.

No one likes to discuss this subject to- day, but it must be said here that the immediate interest of the Jews, namely survival, was not necessarily identical with the interest of the Allies, which was to defeat Germany, or with the interest of such satellite regimes as that of Hungary, for whom some resistance to German demands might conceivably have brought better treatment after the war. It is wrong to say, as some Hungarian conservative politicians are arguing today, that Hungary collaborated with the Germans mainly so as to save Jewish lives, but it is also wrong to say, as the allies did during the war or as left-wing critics of the Horthy regime have been asserting ever since, that Hungary should have resisted the Germans outright. How was such a resistance to be achieved when arms for resisting the Germans could only have been had from Germany; when most of the army officers were Nazi sympathizers; and when the population generally expected its economic betterment to come from Germany? It is easy to counter, of course, that the army should have been purged and the populace re-educated, but such a statement ignores the consequences of the Peace Treaty at Trianon, the nature of Hungarian interwar politics, and the hostility of Hungary's fascist neighbours. Moreover, Horthy was correct in saying that in the case of military resistance the Jewish community would have been annihilated - as it was in Poland or in the Netherlands. Horthy was also correct in arguing in his memoirs that, in the long run, nothing made any difference, for the Poles, who had consistently resisted the Germans, were badly punished after the war, whereas the Czechs who generally did not resist, were rewarded in many ways by the Allies. Ultimately, all these countries, including Hungary, fell to the Communists. And while it is true that anti-Semitic legislation in Hungary prepared the way for the wholesale robbery of Jewish property in 1944 as well as for the deportation, by brutal Hungarian gendarmes, of half a million Jews before the eyes of an indifferent public, it is also true that in such countries as for instance France, where there had been no anti-Semitic laws before the German occupation, thousands of Jews were also deported, by brutal French gendarmes, before the eyes of an indifferent public. Meanwhile, in fascist Italy, where Mussolini had introduced some anti-Semitic measures as early as 1938, the public rather successfully resisted the efforts of the German occupiers and their Italian henchmen to deport the Jews to Auschwitz.

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The Horthy regime had failed: it did not protect the country against German and Soviet imperialism; it was unable to preserve its territorial reacquisitions (in fact, Hungary lost some additional territory after the Second World War); it gave up half a million of its most industrious citizens to the German murder factory; it did not save the country from devastation and ruin; it did not even succeed in protecting the privileged social classes in whose interests the counter-revolution had been made. It is unlikely, however, that any other regime would have done better; some others in Hitler's Europe did definitely worse. It should be understood that the material and human losses suffered by states during the war, and their postwar treatment, depended on luck, geography, and great power politics. At no time was their postwar fate a function of wartime merits and demerits; witness the relative luck of National Socialist Austria, collaborationist France, and fascist Slovakia, but also the catastrophic experiences of anti-Nazi Poland.

Miklós Horthy himself was neither better nor worse than most other military men who emerged as political leaders in the interwar years. He was neither a fascist nor a liberal; he was not a monster, but he was not a humanitarian either. He was no democrat but never tried to be a dictator. He claimed to have been a lifelong anti-Semite; still, under his reign and despite the deportations, more Jews survived the Nazi terror than in any other country within Hitler's Europe. He was no more unintelligent than Marshal Pétain or Generalissimo Franco, and he was certainly less cruel than General Antonescu of Romania. Like so many other statesmen of the period, Miklós Horthy deserved both to be rewarded and to be punished severely after the war. He might even merit a little sympathy, but he does not deserve admiration.

Notes

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3 * On the subject of officers' memoirs, see István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1990), pp. 213-224.

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5 * Back in February 1942, Horthy had his son István elected by parliament as Vice-Regent. It remains unclear whether this was done, as the far Right and the far Left claimed, in order to create a Horthy dynasty, or whether the main purpose was to prevent a fascist take-over following the death of the Regent. The fact is that István Horthy was a liberal and a friend of the Jews and he hated the Nazis. His accidental death at the front as a combat pilot, in August 1942, was a tragedy for Hungary.

István Deák

is an American historian born in Hungary. He holds the Seth Low Chair of European History at Columbia University where he teaches modern Central and East European history. His books on Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals, the 1848 revolution in Hungary, and the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy have appeared in English, German, and Hungarian.

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