Operation Panzerfaust

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Panzerfaust was the name Germany gave to a scheme conceived in October 1944 to prevent Hungary from abandoning the war. At its center was a single alarming piece of intelligence: Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent who governed Hungary from a fortress on a hill in central Budapest, was quietly trying to surrender his country to the advancing Red Army. What Hitler did next would involve kidnapping, a carpet, four Tiger II tanks, and a signature extracted at machine-gun point. The questions that follow are these: how did Germany learn of Horthy's plans, what happened to the people caught between two empires, and what did it cost a father to save his son?

• 2. The Southern Flank

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  Hitler's alarm at Horthy's secret negotiations was not sentimental. Romania had just switched sides and joined the Soviets, and Hungary's departure from the Axis would have exposed Germany's entire southern flank. A million German troops were still fighting the Soviet advance in the Balkans, and a Hungarian armistice would have cut them off. Germany had already tried to lock Hungary in place earlier that year. Operation Margarethe, carried out in March 1944, was a full German occupation of Hungary intended to secure the country's loyalty. That occupation had a secondary consequence: it brought Hungarian Jews within reach of the Nazi deportation machinery, a population previously protected by the uneasy distance between Berlin and Budapest. As Soviet forces drew closer and American bombers flying from Italy began striking Budapest, even that cooperation between German and Hungarian authorities began to fray.

• 3. The Lure and the Carpet

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  Skorzeny, the Waffen-SS commando leader sent by Hitler to handle the crisis, had been tracking Horthy's son Miklós Horthy Jr., who had been meeting with Soviet representatives. German intelligence set a trap. Through intermediaries, agents told Miklós Jr. that envoys of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia wanted to meet with him. He had backed out of one earlier appointment after noticing suspicious individuals near the meeting point. A second meeting was arranged for the morning of the 15th of October at the offices of Felix Bornemisza, the Director of the Hungarian Danube ports. When Miklós Jr. walked in, Skorzeny and his troops attacked him, beat him, and kidnapped him at gunpoint. They wrapped him in a carpet, drove him immediately to the airport, flew him to Vienna, and transported him from there to Mauthausen concentration camp.

• 4. The Armistice Broadcast

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  Even before his son was seized, Horthy had been working through General Béla Miklós, an officer in contact with Soviet forces in eastern Hungary, to negotiate a surrender that would preserve Hungarian governmental autonomy. Though a committed anti-Communist, Horthy had concluded after his dealings with the Nazis that the Soviets represented the lesser danger. At a meeting of the Crown Council, he read aloud a declaration quoting Bismarck: "No nation ought to sacrifice itself on the altar of an alliance." He stated openly that Germany had lost the war and announced that Hungary had concluded a military armistice with its former enemies. At 2:00 in the afternoon on the 15th of October 1944, that declaration went out on national radio. Germany had already been moving. Within minutes of Horthy signing off, the Arrow Cross Party, backed by Nazi support, seized the radio station. A party member read a counter-proclamation using the name of General Vörös, the Hungarian Army's Chief of the General Staff, without his authorization.

• 5. Tigers at the Gate

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  While the radio war played out, Skorzeny made his move on Castle Hill itself. He led a convoy of German troops and four Tiger II tanks directly to the Vienna Gates of the ancient fortress. Horthy recognized that his forces could not resist German armor. He issued an order that "no resistance should be made." One unit never received the order and fought the Germans for about thirty minutes before the position fell. The commanding officers of the two remaining Hungarian army units in Budapest were arrested or disappeared, and their soldiers were folded into the Arrow Cross structure. Edmund Veesenmayer and his staff took Horthy into custody later that same afternoon. He was held overnight in the Waffen SS offices before being allowed to return to the palace for his belongings.

• 6. The Signature

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  At the palace, Horthy was handed a typewritten statement by Premier Géza Lakatos, a man Horthy considered a loyal friend. The document announced that Horthy was renouncing the armistice and abdicating in favor of Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi. Horthy was astonished that Lakatos would press him to sign. Lakatos told him his son's life depended on it. When Horthy turned to Veesenmayer to ask whether this was true, Veesenmayer confirmed the threat. Horthy understood that his signature was being sought to lend the legitimacy of his name to a Nazi-sponsored coup. He signed anyway. He later described what happened plainly: "I neither resigned nor appointed Szálasi Premier, I merely exchanged my signature for my son's life. A signature wrung from a man at machine-gun point can have little legality." Veesenmayer solemnly promised that Miklós Jr. would be released from the concentration camp. That promise was never kept.

• 7. Captivity and Release

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  Horthy was transported to Schloss Hirschberg near Weilheim, Germany, and kept under guard by one hundred Waffen SS men. Miklós Jr. remained a prisoner at Mauthausen until the war ended on the 8th of May 1945. On the 1st of May 1945, Lieutenant General Alexander Patch, the commander of the US 7th Army, visited Horthy at the castle. Because Hungary had continued fighting on Germany's behalf to the very end, Horthy was classified as a prisoner of war rather than a liberated detainee. Seven months after the war ended, on the 17th of December 1945, Horthy was released from the Nuremberg penitentiary and reunited with his family in a private home in Weilheim.