Hungary in World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Hungary in World War II ended the war with its borders pulled back to the lines that existed before 1938, after years of fighting as a member of the Axis powers. Every acre won through that alliance was handed back. The path to that outcome passed through three very different Hungarys. The first was a proud state that recovered lost land through diplomacy. The second sent armies deep into the Soviet Union and watched them break. The third was occupied by the partner it had chosen. This documentary asks why a kingdom tied its fate to Hitler's Germany, what it gained, and what it paid. It also asks how a country that shielded most of its Jews for years became the scene of mass deportation once German troops arrived, and who tried to stop it.

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• 2. Trianon's Long Shadow

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  The Treaty of Trianon, imposed on the defeated nations of the First World War, cut Hungary's territory by two-thirds. Combined with the Great Depression, that loss pushed the country's politics steadily to the right. Reversing the treaty became the central aim of Hungarian public life for the next two decades.

  In 1932 the regent, Miklós Horthy, appointed Gyula Gömbös as prime minister. Gömbös was tied to a nationalist group called the Hungarian National Defence Association, known as MOVE. He steered foreign policy toward Germany and began an effort to assimilate minorities inside Hungary. On the 21st of February 1934 he signed a trade agreement with Berlin. The deal sparked fast economic growth and pulled Hungary out of the Depression. It also made the country dependent on Germany for raw materials and for export income.

  Gömbös wanted one-party government, social reforms, and a Hungarian exit from the League of Nations. A parliament full of supporters of István Bethlen blocked him, and so did foreign creditors who demanded conventional policies. The 1935 elections strengthened his hand, and he took control of the finance, industry, and defense ministries. He died of kidney problems in October 1936 without achieving his goals.

  In 1935 an extremist named Ferenc Szálasi founded a fascist movement called the Party of National Will. It grew into the Arrow Cross Party, which copied Nazi politics and Nazi antisemitism closely.

  In 1938 Hungary openly repudiated the treaty's limits on its armed forces. Hitler offered promises of returned territory, backed by threats of military and economic pressure. Gömbös' successor, Kálmán Darányi, tried to satisfy both Nazis and Hungarian antisemites with the First Jewish Law. It capped the share of Jews in several professions at 20 percent, and it pleased nobody. Darányi resigned in May 1938, and Béla Imrédy took his place.

  Imrédy first courted Britain, which angered Berlin and Rome. After the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, he turned firmly pro-German and pro-Italian by autumn. He banned the Arrow Cross to remove a rival, then proposed a totalitarian reorganization of government and drafted a harsher Second Jewish Law. In February 1939 his opponents forced him out by producing documents showing that his grandfather was a Jew.

  The next prime minister, Count Pál Teleki, still approved the Second Jewish Law. It cut the quotas for Jews in the professions and in business. It also defined Jews by race rather than religion, which changed the status of people who had converted to Christianity. Teleki would soon be the man who carried Hungary into the Axis.

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• 3. Redrawn Borders

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  On the 5th of October 1938, about 500 members of the Hungarian Ragged Guard slipped into Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia posing as guerrillas. The Munich Agreement had just broken up the Czechoslovak Republic and replaced it with a weaker Czecho-Slovak Republic. Talks over Magyar-populated areas began on the 9th of October. Two days later, Czecho-Slovak troops beat the Ragged Guard at Berehovo and Borzsava, inflicting roughly 350 casualties. By the 29th of October the talks were deadlocked.

  Germany and Italy then stepped in with arbitration. On the 2nd of November 1938 the First Vienna Award handed Hungary parts of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. The territory covered 11,927 square kilometres and held 869,299 people, of whom 86.5 percent were Hungarians. Hungarian forces occupied it between the 5th and the 10th of November.

  In March 1939 Germany invaded the rump Czecho-Slovak state and created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia declared independence on the 14th of March, and Carpatho-Ukraine did the same the next day. Hungary refused to accept the second declaration. Between the 14th and the 18th of March its troops occupied the rest of Carpathian Ruthenia and ousted the government of Avgustyn Voloshyn. Hungary did recognize Slovakia, a German puppet state led by Jozef Tiso. Even so, on the 23rd of March Hungarian forces attacked Slovakia's east, citing a border dispute. This short clash, known as the Slovak-Hungarian War or the Little War, gave Hungary a strip of 1,697 square kilometres.

  In September 1940, troops were massing on both sides of the Hungarian-Romanian border. The Second Vienna Award averted war by giving Hungary the northern half of Transylvania. The region covered 43,492 square kilometres and held 2,578,100 people. The numbers behind the award were fiercely contested. Romania's 1930 census counted 38 percent Hungarians and 49 percent Romanians, while Hungary's 1941 census found 53.5 percent Hungarians and 39.1 percent Romanians. Hungarian rule met occasional insurgency, and the incidents at Ip and Treznea are the best known.

  After these awards, counties lost under Trianon returned to their pre-1920 boundaries. In Sub-Carpathia, a bill proposed special autonomous status that would eventually let the Ruthenian minority govern itself. It never passed. A governorate was created instead, split into three administrative offices named Ung, Bereg, and Máramaros, with Hungarian and Rusyn as official languages.

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• 4. Marching With Berlin

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  On the 20th of November 1940, Prime Minister Pál Teleki signed the Tripartite Pact under German pressure. That made Hungary the fourth member of the Axis powers. In December, Teleki also signed a Treaty of Eternal Friendship with Yugoslavia, whose regent, Prince Paul, was under the same German pressure.

  On the 25th of March 1941, Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact for Yugoslavia. Two days later a coup removed him and installed the pro-British King Peter, threatening the German plan to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler asked Hungary to join the attack on Yugoslavia and promised territory in return. On the 3rd of April, Teleki, unable to keep Hungary out of the war, killed himself. The radical right-winger László Bárdossy replaced him. Three days later, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade without warning. Horthy sent the Hungarian Third Army to occupy Vojvodina.

  Hungary annexed sections of Baranja, Bačka, Međimurje, and Prekmurje. Together they covered 11,417 square kilometres and held 1,025,508 people. Of these, 36.6 percent were Hungarians, 19 percent Germans, and 16 percent Serbs.

  On the 22nd of June 1941, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union began without any request for Hungarian help. Many Hungarian officials still argued for joining, hoping to keep Hitler from favoring Romania in any revision of Transylvania's border. On the 26th of June, unidentified aircraft bombed the city of Košice. Hungarian authorities blamed the Soviets. Some have speculated that Germany staged the raid, possibly with Romanian help, to give Hungary a reason for war. Others think Soviet bombers simply mistook Košice for nearby Prešov. Hungary declared war on the 27th of June, less than 24 hours later.

  On the 1st of July, the Hungarian Carpathian Group attacked the Soviet 12th Army on German orders. Attached to the German 17th Army, it pushed far into Soviet Ukraine and later into southern Russia. At the Battle of Uman, fought from the 3rd to the 8th of August, its mechanized corps formed one arm of a pincer. The pincer trapped the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies and destroyed or captured twenty Soviet divisions. German observers noted the particular cruelty of Hungarian troops toward occupied peoples, and some volunteers were nicknamed practitioners of "murder tourism."

  In July 1941, Hungary's government handed 18,000 Jews from Carpato-Ruthenian Hungary to the German armed forces. These Jews lacked Hungarian citizenship. They were sent near Kamenets-Podolski, where Nazi mobile killing units shot all but about two thousand of them. It was one of the earliest mass killings of Jews in the war. In August 1941, Bárdossy passed the Third Jewish Law, which banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. In January 1942, Hungarian troops massacred 3,000 Serbian and Jewish hostages near Novi Sad.

  Alarmed by the country's deepening reliance on Germany, Horthy forced Bárdossy out and installed Miklós Kállay, a conservative from Bethlen's circle. Kállay kept backing Germany against the Red Army while quietly opening talks with the Allies. Hungary had no large army before 1939, so its role in 1941 was limited. By 1942, tens of thousands of Hungarians fought on the eastern front in the Royal Hungarian Army.

  At Stalingrad the Hungarian Second Army suffered terrible losses when the Soviet breakthrough at the Don River sliced straight through its lines. Soon after Stalingrad fell in January 1943, the Soviets crushed the army again at Voronezh. The troops had no antitank weapons and no armored support. They were harassed by partisans and air attacks, and they endured the Russian winter. Ignoring German orders to fight to the death, they tried to retreat. Most survivors were taken prisoner, and total casualties topped 100,000 men. The army ceased to exist as an effective force, and the Germans pulled it from the front.

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• 5. Occupation and Resistance

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  In autumn 1943, Prime Minister Kállay began peace negotiations with the United States and the United Kingdom. Berlin already distrusted him, and in September 1943 the German General Staff prepared a plan to invade and occupy Hungary. In 1944 Horthy also opened secret talks with the Soviet Union.

  On the 19th of March 1944, Hitler launched Operation Margarethe, aware that Hungary might make a separate peace. German troops occupied the country. Horthy was confined to a castle, in effect under house arrest. Döme Sztójay, an avid supporter of the Nazis, became prime minister and governed alongside a German military governor, Edmund Veesenmayer. Berlin threatened to bring in Slovak, Croat, and Romanian troops if Hungary resisted. Hungarians saw those ancestral enemies as a worse prospect than German control. Hungary even kept whole divisions on the Romanian border while soldiers of both nations fought side by side in the Russian winter.

  On the 15th of October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary had requested an armistice with the Soviet Union. The Hungarian army ignored his order and kept fighting. The Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust and kidnapped his son, Miklós Horthy Jr. Under that pressure Horthy revoked the armistice, dismissed the government of Géza Lakatos, and named the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi as prime minister. Horthy was taken to Germany as a prisoner. He survived the war, lived in exile in Portugal, and died in 1957. Kállay spent that winter in the Dachau concentration camp.

  On the 15th of March 1942, a crowd of 8,000 gathered at the Sándor Petőfi monument in Budapest. The date marked the anniversary of the 1848-49 War of Independence, and the crowd demanded an "independent democratic Hungary." The underground Communist Party printed a newspaper and leaflets, and 500 activists were arrested. Party leaders Ferenc Rózsa and Zoltán Schönherz were executed.

  In July 1943 the Smallholders Party adopted Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky's policy of closer ties with the Social Democrats and Communists. On the 31st of July it demanded that the government end hostilities and join the Allies, even at the price of armed conflict with Germany. In September a joint declaration with the Social Democrats condemned the war on Germany's side. After the occupation, the Gestapo arrested most opposition leaders, and in May 1944 the remaining groups joined the Communist-inspired Hungarian Front. General János Kiss was among the leaders executed.

  Armed resistance stayed small. Most groups leaned left or consisted of fighters from neighbouring countries. Communist partisan units sent from the Soviet Union failed to become a popular movement. Hungarian historian Ákos Bartha says that non-Communist resistance has been pushed into the "no-man's land" of memory politics. László Bernát Veszprémy writes that mainstream historians conclude no armed resistance existed. Yet he cites cases described by Hungarian and German authorities and argues that postwar tribunal records still need to be explored.

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• 6. Persecution and Deportation

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  In 1939 Hungary introduced a forced labor service that fell mainly on Jews. It also drafted members of minorities, religious sectarians, leftists, and Roma. Between 35,000 and 40,000 forced laborers, mostly Jews or people of Jewish origin, served with the Second Army in the Soviet Union. Eighty percent of them, between 28,000 and 32,000 people, never came home. At the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia, about half of 6,000 Jewish laborers were executed by Germans on a death march to Győr in August-October 1944. Among the dead was the 35-year-old poet Miklós Radnóti, shot near the village of Abda for being too weak to continue after a savage beating.

  Under Kállay, Hungarian Jews lived uneasily. They lost most of their freedoms and faced rising economic and political pressure, but most were spared physical violence for a time. Horthy tried to restrain the Arrow Cross, and many Jews in Budapest were temporarily shielded from the final solution.

  German troops entered Hungary on the 19th of March 1944, and SS officer Adolf Eichmann arrived to oversee mass deportations. Between the 15th of May and the 9th of July, Hungarian authorities deported 437,402 Jews. All but 15,000 went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 90 percent of those were killed on arrival. It has been estimated that one-third of the victims murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarian. Sztójay, unlike earlier prime ministers, answered mostly to Berlin and could act without Horthy's approval. Reports from the camps still led Horthy to resist his policies.

  After pressure from Allied contacts and the Pope, Horthy halted the deportations in early July 1944. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life, the Germans eased their demands, though smaller groups were still sent off by train. In late August, Horthy refused Eichmann's request to restart the transports, and Himmler ordered Eichmann to leave Budapest. Under the Lakatos government, acting interior minister Béla Horváth ordered gendarmes to stop the deportation of Hungarian citizens. Those moves bought the Jews of Budapest a few more months.

  When Szálasi took power, he tried with the Nazis to resume deportations, but Germany's collapsing communications largely stopped it. The Arrow Cross instead launched a reign of terror in Budapest. Thousands of Jews were tortured, raped, and murdered, and their property was looted or destroyed.

  Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of people with Swedish protective passports. The Soviets later took him prisoner, and he died some years afterward in a labor camp. Others forged papers and ran safehouses, among them the nuncio Angelo Rotta, Giorgio Perlasca, Carl Lutz, Friedrich Born, Harald Feller, Angel Sanz Briz, and George Mandel-Mantello. Of about 800,000 Jews living inside Hungary's expanded borders of 1941, only 200,000 survived, roughly 25 percent. An estimated 28,000 Hungarian Roma were also killed in the Porajmos.

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• 7. Siege and Surrender

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  In September 1944 Soviet forces crossed the Hungarian border. At the Battle of Debrecen, from the 6th to the 29th of October, German general Maximilian Fretter-Pico led a mixed army group that included the reformed Hungarian Second Army. It avoided encirclement and trapped three Soviet tank corps of Issa Pliyev's Mobile Group. Earlier in the same battle, Pliyev's group had sliced through the Hungarian Third Army. The win was costly, because the Axis troops could not replace armor and heavy artillery ammunition. The Second Army was defeated on the 1st of December 1944, and its remnants joined the Third Army.

  On the 28th of December 1944, a provisional government formed under acting prime minister Béla Miklós. Both he and Szálasi claimed to be the legitimate head of government. The next day, Soviet and Romanian forces completed the encirclement of Budapest. Hitler had ordered the city defended to the last man. German forces held it alongside Hungarian troops, who took up positions on the Buda side, where the high ground favored defenders. Soviet casualties were much higher, but sheer numbers overwhelmed the defenders.

  A Hungarian movement called the Sovereignty Movement, backed by Kállay even from Dachau, fought alongside the Soviets. Its famous figures included the biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who was proposed as prime minister, and the writer Zseni Várnai. On the 20th of January 1945, representatives of the Miklós government signed an armistice in Moscow. The remaining German and Hungarian units in Budapest surrendered on the 13th of February 1945.

  As the Soviets took control of Hungary and Budapest, their troops committed mass killings of Hungarian soldiers and civilians, including women and children. They also carried out mass rapes of Hungarian women.

  In January 1945-32,000 ethnic Germans from within Hungary were arrested and shipped to the Soviet Union as forced laborers. In some villages the entire adult population was taken to labor camps in the Donets Basin. Many died of hardship and poor treatment. Overall, between 100,000 and 170,000 Hungarian ethnic Germans were sent east.

  On the 6th of March 1945, the Germans launched the Lake Balaton Offensive to hold the Axis' last source of oil. It was their final operation of the war, and it failed within 13 days. Soviet troops had retaken all the lost ground by the 19th of March. Most of the Hungarian Third Army was destroyed west of Budapest between the 16th and the 25th of March. By early April the Germans and the Arrow Cross had left Hungarian soil, and Soviet operations officially ended on the 4th of April. Szálasi fled with the Germans.

  On the 8th of May 1945 at 4:10 p.m., the 259th Infantry Regiment of the US 65th Infantry Division was authorized to accept the surrender of the 1st Hungarian Cavalry Division and the 1st Hungarian Armoured Division, in what is now Austria. Their surrender and crossing of the Enns River had to be completed before midnight. In Landsberg, Bavaria, a Hungarian garrison stood in parade formation to surrender to advancing Americans. Around 12,000 Hungarian garrison troops ended the war in Denmark.

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• 8. Aftermath and Costs

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  Approximately 300,000 Hungarian soldiers and more than 600,000 civilians died during the war. The civilian dead included between 450,000 and 606,000 Jews. Many cities were damaged, and Budapest suffered most.

  The Treaty of Peace with Hungary, signed on the 10th of February 1947, declared the Vienna Award of the 2nd of November 1938 null and void. Hungary lost only a small additional area along the Czechoslovak border. In 1946-48, two-thirds of the ethnic German minority, some 202,000 people, were deported to Germany. A forced population exchange also took place between Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

  On the 1st of February 1946, the Kingdom of Hungary was formally abolished and replaced by the Second Republic of Hungary. The republic did not last. Postwar Hungary was gradually taken over by a Soviet-allied government and became part of the Eastern Bloc. The People's Republic of Hungary was declared in 1949, and it lasted until the revolutions of 1989 ended communism in the country.

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