Miklós Horthy

Miklós Horthy was Regent of Hungary from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. He delivered around 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz between 15 May and 9 July 1944, the most concentrated single piece of killing in the entire Holocaust. Three quarters of those deported were murdered on arrival. Horthy was 76 years old at the time of the deportations and held the constitutional authority to stop them. He stopped them on 7 July 1944, after international pressure including from the King of Sweden, the Pope, and Roosevelt. The 200,000 Jews of Budapest, who had not yet been deported, mostly survived. The 437,000 from the Hungarian provinces did not.

The pre-occupation period, 1938 to 1944

Hungary under Horthy had passed extensive antisemitic legislation before the German occupation. The First Jewish Law of 1938 limited Jewish participation in the professions to twenty per cent. The Second Jewish Law of 1939 reduced the limit to six per cent and introduced a racial rather than religious definition of Jewishness. The Third Jewish Law of 1941 banned intermarriage. The legislation was passed by the Horthy government on Horthy’s authority. It was Hungarian, not German, in origin, and it was passed before any German pressure on the Hungarian Jewish question.

Hungary also conducted, on its own initiative, the Kamenets-Podolsk killing of August 1941. Around 18,000 Jews of contested citizenship status were rounded up by the Hungarian authorities, deported across the border into German-occupied Ukraine, and shot by Einsatzgruppe C and Hungarian troops at Kamenets-Podolsk on 27 and 28 August 1941. The deportation was a Horthy-government decision. The killing, in which around 23,500 people died including around 5,000 local Jews, was one of the first mass shootings of the Holocaust.

The 19 March 1944 occupation

Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. Horthy met with Hitler at Schloss Klessheim on 18 March 1944 and was pressured to accept the occupation and to install a more pro-German government. The Sztójay government took office on 22 March 1944. Eichmann arrived in Budapest on the same day. The deportations began eight weeks later.

The Hungarian operation, May to July 1944

The Hungarian deportation was conducted at the operational level by Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando of around 100 SS men, but the work was done by the Hungarian gendarmerie under Hungarian command, with the cooperation of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, the Hungarian railways, and the Hungarian civil administration. László Endre and László Baky, the two Interior Ministry undersecretaries Horthy had appointed in March 1944, ran the Hungarian side of the operation. They worked closely with Eichmann.

Trains left for Auschwitz from 15 May 1944. By 9 July 1944, when the deportations were halted, 437,402 Hungarian Jews had been deported. Around three quarters were gassed on arrival. The figures are precise because Eichmann’s daily reports survive. The Hungarian operation ran the Auschwitz killing apparatus to its operational limit. Open-air burning pits were dug in the surrounding fields when the crematoria could not keep up.

What Horthy knew, and when

The standard Horthy defence is that he had been ill, isolated by his German-imposed advisers, and unaware of what was being done. The argument does not survive contact with the documentary record. The Auschwitz Protocols, the report by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler describing in detail the gas chamber operation at Auschwitz, were prepared in April 1944 and reached Hungarian Jewish leaders in May 1944. The full text was provided to Horthy through his cabinet office. He had it in mid-June 1944. The deportations continued for another three weeks.

The international pressure that finally moved Horthy was extensive. King Gustav V of Sweden wrote to Horthy on 30 June 1944. Pope Pius XII telegraphed him on 25 June 1944. Roosevelt issued a public statement on 26 March 1944 warning of post-war consequences for participants in the deportations. The Allies bombed Budapest on 2 July 1944 in a raid widely understood as a warning. On 7 July 1944 Horthy ordered Endre and Baky to halt the deportations. The order was transmitted on 9 July. The trains stopped.

The Budapest survival

The 200,000 Jews of Budapest were due to be deported in mid-July 1944 in the next phase of the operation. Horthy’s halt order spared them. Many of them, around 100,000, were nonetheless killed in the next nine months by the Arrow Cross regime that overthrew Horthy in October 1944, by the death marches to the Austrian border, and by the Soviet siege of Budapest. The remainder, around 100,000, survived the war. The Budapest survival is the single largest urban Jewish community to come through the Holocaust intact in any German-occupied or German-allied country.

The 15 October 1944 fall

Horthy attempted on 15 October 1944 to take Hungary out of the war by announcing an armistice with the Soviet Union. The attempt failed within hours. The Germans had already arranged a counter-coup with Otto Skorzeny’s commando unit and the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. Horthy’s son Miklós Junior was kidnapped. Horthy was forced to abdicate the same evening and was held in German custody for the rest of the war. The Arrow Cross under Ferenc Szálasi took power and restarted the killings.

The post-war

Horthy was held in US custody after the war and was not tried, on the personal intervention of regents and dignitaries who argued that he had ultimately stopped the deportations. He spent his last years in Estoril, Portugal. He died there on 9 February 1957, aged 88.

What he was

Horthy was the case of the conservative authoritarian who used the language of Christian Hungary to license the persecution of his country’s Jews, then drew back at the last moment when the deportations had become both internationally damaging and personally horrifying to him. The drawing back saved 100,000 lives in Budapest. The earlier course had killed 437,000 in seven weeks. The decision came after the Auschwitz Protocols had been on his desk for three weeks. The 437,000 cannot be balanced against the 100,000. They are the moral measure of his rule.

See also

Sources

  • Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Columbia University Press, two volumes, 1981
  • Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, Routledge, 2003
  • Vrba-Wetzler Report (the Auschwitz Protocols), April 1944
  • Eichmann’s daily reports, captured RSHA files
  • USHMM: Hungary