Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Kingdom of Hungary, as it existed between 1920 and 1946, had no king. That was the paradox at the heart of this central European state. An admiral with no fleet ruled a landlocked country in the name of a monarchy with no monarch, and held that position for nearly a quarter century. Miklós Horthy, the last commanding admiral of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, became the Regent of Hungary on the 1st of March 1920. He governed over a nation that had just lost more than 70 percent of its historic territory under the Treaty of Trianon. The questions that shaped this era are not small ones. How does a country govern itself when its constitutional fiction is a throne that no one is allowed to fill? How does a conservative elite try to walk a line between Nazi Germany and its own people while a war reshapes the continent around them? And what happens when that balancing act finally collapses?

• 2. Birth of the Regency

  ›

  Béla Kun's communist government, which had launched what was known as the Red Terror, collapsed after an ill-fated war with Romania in 1919. What followed was its mirror image. Hungarian anti-communists and monarchists violently purged communists, leftist intellectuals, and Jews in a period that became known as the White Terror. Romania's occupying forces eventually withdrew, and in 1920 the Kingdom of Hungary was restored, though the Habsburgs were barred from returning. Archduke Joseph August had briefly declared himself regent but stood down within two weeks once the Allies refused to recognize him. Right-wing political forces then united on the 29th of February 1920 to re-establish a constitutional monarchy and selected Horthy as its representative. The historian István Deák described the ideological character of the resulting regime plainly: from 1919 to 1944, Hungary was a rightist country, forged from a counter-revolutionary heritage. Its governments advocated a "nationalist Christian" policy, despised the French Revolution, and viewed Hungary as a bulwark against Bolshevism and what they called its instruments, including Socialism, Cosmopolitanism, and Freemasonry. The Diet of Hungary sealed the arrangement legally on the 6th of November 1921, passing a law that nullified the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, formally dethroning Charles IV and abolishing the House of Habsburg's claim to the throne. Charles himself had made two attempts to reclaim his crown, even marching toward Budapest with rebel troops in October 1921, before most of the Royal Hungarian Army stayed loyal to Horthy. Charles was arrested and exiled to Madeira, where he died shortly after.

• 3. Horthy's Governing Power

  ›

  Horthy's authority as regent was, in practice, close to that of an absolute monarch. He could adjourn or dissolve the Hungarian Diet at his own discretion and appointed prime ministers directly. His powers were modeled on the constitutional powers previously held by the King of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian federation, a lineage that gave his rule a veneer of institutional legitimacy. The question of succession was never resolved. Parliament had appointed Horthy's eldest son, István, as Deputy Regent in January 1942, in what some read as a step toward restoring monarchy through the back door. Any such plan ended in August that same year when István was killed in an airplane crash, and no new Deputy Regent was named. Prime Minister István Bethlen governed through much of the 1920s under Horthy's regency. Bethlen changed the electoral system to reintroduce open voting outside Budapest and pushed repeatedly for revision of the Treaty of Trianon. His Party of Unity won repeated elections. After the Hungarian economy collapsed between 1929 and 1931, Bethlen resigned. The numerus clausus law of 1920 formally capped the number of minority students at universities and legalized corporal punishment for adults; though written to apply to all minorities, it functioned mainly as an instrument against Jewish students while keeping its actual targets obscured from foreign observers. Racial criteria in university admissions were eventually replaced by social categories in 1928, though the broader climate of pressure on Jews to assimilate into Hungarian mainstream culture never lifted.

• 4. The Trianon Wound

  ›

  On the 4th of June 1920, Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, and the geography of the nation was transformed overnight. Romania took all of Transylvania. Much of Upper Hungary became Czechoslovakia. Vojvodina went to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The Free State of Fiume was created. More than three million Hungarians now lived outside Hungary's new borders, most of them in adjacent territories. A significant Hungarian population remained in Székely Land within the enlarged Romania. Hungary's post-1918 politics were shaped almost entirely by the desire to undo this settlement. Gyula Gömbös, who became prime minister after the economic crisis of 1929 to 1931, openly admired fascist leaders and cultivated ties with both Germany and Italy. He is said to have coined the phrase "axis" to describe his vision of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He also persuaded Mussolini to accept Hitler's annexation of Austria in the late 1930s. Diplomatic pressure paid partial dividends. The Munich Agreement in 1938 forced Czechoslovakia and Hungary to negotiate their territorial disputes, and the First Vienna Award reassigned the southern parts of Czechoslovakia to Hungary. Shortly after, Hungary annexed the Carpatho-Ukraine. The Second Vienna Award assigned Northern Transylvania to Hungary following arbitration by Germany and Italy. These gains came at a price; Hungary was expected to align its military and racial policies with those of Nazi Germany in exchange.

• 5. The Axis Alliance and Its Costs

  ›

  On the 27th of June 1941, Prime Minister László Bárdossy declared war on the Soviet Union. The decision to participate in Operation Barbarossa was partly driven by fear: Hungary worried that failing to support Germany would push the Axis toward favoring Romania instead. Almost the entire Second Army Group of the Royal Hungarian Army was lost during the Battle of Stalingrad. Hungary had also allowed German forces through its territory in April 1941 to support the invasion of Yugoslavia, and after the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed, Hungary joined operations and was permitted to annex the Bačka region in Vojvodina, which had a Hungarian majority. The economic relationship with Germany was by then deeply entrenched. From the mid-1930s onward, Hungarian trade became increasingly tied to the German economy, and the Hungarian economy grew dependent on Germany's. Domestically, the government passed the first of its Jewish Laws, restricting Jews to 20 percent in a number of professions, before later scapegoating them for the country's economic difficulties. Gyula Gömbös had moved Hungary toward the model of a one-party state before being forced out under pressure from Germany to pursue more extreme antisemitism. Döme Sztójay, who became prime minister after the German occupation in 1944, legalized the Arrow Cross Party, deported large numbers of Hungarian Jews to Germany, and launched a violent crackdown on liberal and leftist opposition. The Soviet marshal Kliment Voroshilov headed the Allied Control Commission that would later oversee the postwar transition.

• 6. Occupation and Collapse

  ›

  By early 1944, with Soviet forces advancing rapidly from the east, Prime Minister Miklós Kállay and Horthy made secret contact with the British and Americans to negotiate a way out of the war. The Germans discovered the effort. On the 19th of March 1944, German forces invaded Hungary in Operation Margarethe, occupied key locations, placed Horthy under house arrest, and replaced Kállay with Döme Sztójay. From May to June 1944, Hungarian authorities rounded up and transported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps, where most died. Horthy eventually managed to remove Sztójay in August 1944 and installed Géza Lakatos to lead a more balanced government and seek contact with the Allies. Hitler did not accept this. In October 1944, Germany launched Operation Panzerfaust and replaced Horthy with Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi, who was appointed "Leader of the Nation," or Nemzetvezető, and prime minister of what he called the Hungarist state. Szálasi's militias were directly responsible for the murder of between 10,000 and 15,000 Hungarian Jews. In November 1944 the Red Army reached Budapest and began a long siege. Szálasi fled the capital. On the 21st of December 1944, a Hungarian Interim Assembly met in Debrecen with Soviet approval, electing Béla Miklós, former commander of the Hungarian First Army, to lead an interim counter-government. Budapest capitulated in February 1945. The Arrow Cross government in exile was disbanded at the end of May 1945 in Munich.

• 7. End of the Kingdom

  ›

  After the war, Hungary's future was already decided by the logic of Soviet occupation. A High National Council was appointed as the country's collective head of state. On the 1st of February 1946, the monarchy was formally abolished and the Second Hungarian Republic proclaimed. The new interim government in Debrecen had declared war on Germany, concluded an armistice with the Allies, established People's Tribunals to prosecute accused war criminals in January 1945, and implemented a land reform in March of that year. All of this took place under the supervision of the Soviet-dominated Allied Control Commission. The Hungarian Communist Party was represented on the High National Council from the beginning; its members included Ernő Gerő, and later Mátyás Rákosi and László Rajk, names that would dominate Hungarian politics in the years to come. The Second Hungarian Republic lasted only until 1949, when it was succeeded by the communist Hungarian People's Republic. Richard Griffiths, assessing the Horthy era, noted that the regime's growing economic dependence on Germany, its antisemitic legislation, and its role in the extermination of Hungarian Jews all place it within what he described as the realm of international fascism.