The horror of Hungary in the second world war

I suspect Adam LeBor and his publishers must have struggled to come up with the title The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. The book certainly does what it says on the cover, but its pages contain other Magyar-themed subjects. We are offered a wide-ranging reflection on Hungary in the first half of the 20th century, from the harsh measures of the 1920 Trianon treaty to the devastating arrival of the Soviet army in Budapest in 1944.

LeBor switches between an Olympian view of European geopolitics, trawling diplomatic archives and political memoirs and focusing on individuals – Hungarian aristocrats, Zionists and nightclub singers – to show how history felt on the ground. He is particularly concerned with the fate of Hungarian Jewry.

The central figure in this period of Hungarian history is Admiral Miklos Horthy, the regent. Those who know little about Hungarian history tend to lump him in with the fascist dictators of the era; but Horthy wasn’t a fascist (he banned the Nazis) and he wasn’t a dictator. He was a figure who seemed to have wandered out of an operetta, an admiral without a navy, a regent without a king, who exercised undemocratic power but who presided over a parliamentary democracy.

LeBor, a longtime Budapest resident, is too knowledgeable to make that mistake; and there’s no doubt that the report card standard ‘could have done better’ applies to Horthy, like most leaders. But even historians who give Horthy a break on the fascism front tend to focus on the poverty and racism of Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s (as if those phenomena were unknown in the US, Britain or elsewhere in Europe at the time). Hungary’s anti-Jewish law of 1920, the Numerus Clausus, which limited the intake of Jewish university students is often cited, although this percentage-of-the-population representation is exactly the sort of policy that current DEI zealots are espousing.

Most popular

Douglas Murray

The day DEI went up in smoke

Martin Vander Weyer

Rachel Reeves owes Brompton bikes an apology

Matthew Parris

Why was everyone fooled by Rachel Reeves?

Horthy was a reactionary, who thought the British Empire was rather well run, and an anti-Semite in that he wouldn’t have liked his children to marry anyone Jewish (although it should be remembered that there were Jewish families who wouldn’t have wanted their children to marry Horthys) but who had Jewish friends.