The Horthy regime: from the White Terror to the turn to the right

The National Army of Szeged and the Hungarian White Terror

On 30 May 1919 anti-Communist politicians formed a counter-revolutionary government in the southern city of Szeged, then occupied by French troops. Its prime minister, Gyula Károlyi, asked Miklós Horthy, the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy who was still regarded as a war hero, to be minister of war and to command a counter-revolutionary force; Horthy arrived in Szeged on 6 June and founded the National Army by decree. When the cabinet was reshuffled on Allied orders and he lost his ministry, he kept control of the National Army by detaching its command from the war ministry. After the Hungarian Soviet Republic fell on 1 August and Romanian troops entered Budapest on 6 August, Horthy moved the National Army without a fight on 9 August into the lands west of the Danube and set up headquarters at Siófok on Lake Balaton. Forced conscription brought it to 30,000 men by the end of September. 1 2 3

Officer detachments of the National Army, citing revenge for the Red Terror and the need to cow the population, executed suspected Communist supporters without trial and hanged them in public places as a warning. The most notorious commander was Pál Prónay; Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek, Anton Lehár and, around Kecskemét, Iván Héjjas led similar units. Formally part of the National Army, these detachments acted like private battalions fanatically loyal to their commanders. Their victims were above all Communists, Social Democrats, peasants and Jews. Most Hungarian Jews had not supported the Bolsheviks, but many leaders of the Soviet Republic had been young Jewish intellectuals, and anger at the revolution passed easily into antisemitic violence. The worst-hit areas were the lands west of the Danube around Horthy’s headquarters at Siófok and the plain between the Danube and the Tisza. 4) 1 5

The best-known massacre came just after the Romanians left Kecskemét. On the night of 19 November 1919 Héjjas’s men took 36 people from custody to the nearby forest of Orgovány, where they were killed. The victims were local Jews or prosperous-looking residents who could not be assumed to have taken part in the Red Terror. Two days earlier, on 17 November, a pogrom by Héjjas’s detachment at Izsák saw hundreds of Jews beaten, robbed and driven out, and about a third of the detachment’s victims were Jewish. On 17 February 1920 officers of Ostenburg’s detachment murdered Béla Somogyi and Béla Bacsó, journalists of the newspaper Népszava, as a warning to the forces opposed to Horthy. 6 7 8

The death toll is still disputed, with estimates ranging from 300 to 6,000. English-language accounts give 1,500 to 6,000, or 1,000 to 5,000, people killed in 1919–1921; more cautious assessments in Hungarian historiography put it at 500 to 600, in any case well under 1,000, and one estimate is 300. Hungarian accounts regard the figure of about 5,000 given by the émigrés Vilmos Böhm and Oszkár Jászi as exaggerated. Tens of thousands were imprisoned or interned without trial. Horthy was never found to have taken part in atrocities himself, but his biographer Thomas Sakmyster concluded that he “tacitly supported” the officer detachments, whom Horthy called “my best men”. He later declined to apologise, writing that “an iron broom alone could sweep the country clean”. 4) 3 9 1

A kingdom without a king: Regent Horthy and King Charles’s return attempts

Having promised the British diplomat George Clerk that he would not set up a military dictatorship, Horthy led the National Army into Budapest on 16 November 1919, after the Romanians had withdrawn. In a speech he arraigned the city for having “clothed herself in red rags” and disowned a thousand years of tradition, then declared it forgiven. Romanian troops finally left Hungary on 25 February 1920. Before the National Assembly election of January 1920 the Social Democrats decided on a boycott because the terror made campaigning impossible, and Károly Peyer, minister of labour and welfare, resigned on 16 January and fled to Austria. On 1 March the National Assembly restored the kingdom and, with National Army officers controlling the parliament building, elected Horthy regent. He defeated Albert Apponyi by 131 votes to 7 and took the oath only after he had been granted the king’s prerogatives, including the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers, to convene and dissolve parliament and to command the armed forces, except the right to create nobles and the patronage of the Church. 2 1 10

Because the Allies would not tolerate a Habsburg restoration, Hungary became a kingdom in law but without a king. The last king, Charles IV (Charles I as Austrian emperor), twice tried to regain his throne. On Holy Saturday, 26 March 1921, he left Switzerland on a forged passport and appeared in Szombathely; the next day he called on Horthy in the royal palace in Budapest and demanded power, but Horthy told him to leave at once. After this “Easter crisis” Prime Minister Pál Teleki stepped down, and István Bethlen became prime minister on 14 April. In October Ostenburg’s detachment, stationed in Sopron, and Colonel Antal Lehár set off for Budapest in armoured trains with Charles. On 23 October government troops rallied by Horthy and Gyula Gömbös stopped them in the Battle of Budaörs, in which 14 government soldiers and five of Ostenburg’s men were killed. Prónay too joined this second attempt. 1 11 5

The defeated Charles was arrested and exiled to Madeira. On 29 October the Czechoslovak foreign minister Edvard Beneš issued an ultimatum threatening invasion unless the Habsburgs were dethroned, and on 6 November the Hungarian parliament passed a law nullifying the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 and ending the Habsburgs’ right to the throne. Hungary remained a monarchy but chose no king, and Horthy stayed on as regent, in a president-like position, until 1944. The era of the officer detachments was ending too. From the summer of 1920 the government moved to rein them in and disband them; in 1921 Prónay was convicted of extorting a wealthy Jewish politician and lost his command, and his battalion was formally dissolved in January 1922. Horthy, however, used the regent’s amnesty to shield the perpetrators of the killings from prosecution. 11 12) 5 9

The Treaty of Trianon and “No, no, never!”

The Hungarian peace delegation, led by Albert Apponyi, arrived in Paris on 7 January 1920. On 16 January Apponyi addressed the Supreme Council, speaking in French, translating himself into English and concluding in Italian; invoking the Hungarians’ right of self-determination and the geographical and economic unity of historic Hungary, he declared that Hungary would never accept these borders and would pursue their revision. The delegation’s material included the so-called Red map, on which the geographer Pál Teleki combined population density with ethnic distribution from the 1910 census. The Allies did not change the terms, and the covering letter of the conference chairman, Millerand, kept the borders as drafted in 1919, stating that “the continuation of a situation, even if it is a thousand years old, is not justified if it is against justice”. 13 14 15

The treaty was signed in the Grand Trianon palace at Versailles on 4 June 1920. It was dictated rather than negotiated, to be accepted or rejected as a whole, and the Hungarian delegation signed under protest. Hungary ratified it on 16 November and it came into force on 26 July 1921. Post-Trianon Hungary was a landlocked state of 93,073 square kilometres and 7.6 million people — 28 per cent of the land and 36 per cent of the population of the pre-war kingdom. Another calculation, measured against the historical territory, has Hungary losing 72 per cent of its territory and 58 per cent of its population. The areas transferred to Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Austria held 3.3 million Hungarians, who became minorities. The army was limited to 35,000 men without conscription, the navy ceased to exist, and Hungary had to pay reparations to its neighbours. 13 12)

Trianon became the central issue of interwar Hungarian politics. The slogan “Nem, nem, soha!” (“No, no, never!”) was everywhere, and when the British press magnate Lord Rothermere denounced the Trianon borders in his Daily Mail in 1927, 1.2 million Hungarians signed a letter of thanks. In 1921 Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes formed the Little Entente, a defensive alliance against a Hungarian attack, and France backed it with treaties of alliance with Czechoslovakia in 1924, Romania in 1926 and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1927. Every Hungarian government made border revision the aim of its foreign policy, but the combined forces of the Little Entente ruled out achieving it by war. 1 16

The numerus clausus of 1920 and the “Christian national” course

The historian István Deák calls Hungary between 1919 and 1944 “a rightist country”: born of the counter-revolution, its governments advocated a “nationalist Christian” policy, despised the French Revolution and spurned the liberal and socialist ideologies of the nineteenth century, and saw Hungary as a bulwark against Bolshevism and what they took to be its instruments — socialism, cosmopolitanism and freemasonry. The first law to embody this course was the numerus clausus law of 1920 (Act XXV of 1920). The original bill, tabled by the education minister István Haller on 22 June, merely limited enrolment to the number of students who could be properly taught, but pressure within the governing party added a clause that the share of students of each “race and nationality” should reach its share of the national population, or at least nine-tenths of it. The law also aimed to keep “subversive” participants in the revolutions out of the universities. 1 17

The text did not use the word Jew, but Jews were practically the only group over-represented in the universities: about 6 per cent of the population, they had made up some 15 per cent of students in the 1910s and more than 30 per cent in the popular faculties of medicine and law (10.4 per cent of all higher education in 1920). In September 1920, of the 219-member National Assembly, 64 deputies voted, 57 in favour and 7 against, while some, including Prime Minister Pál Teleki, stayed away in protest. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum regards it as the first anti-Jewish law enacted in Europe after the First World War. After the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained to the League of Nations Council in 1925 that it breached the minority-protection clauses of the Treaty of Trianon and the Council upheld the complaint, the Bethlen government in 1928 (Act XIV of 1928) dropped the nationality quota and replaced it with social categories: civil servants, war veterans and officers, smallholders and artisans, industrialists and merchants. The historians Mária M. Kovács and Géza Komoróczy call it the “zeroth” Jewish law, the forerunner of the anti-Jewish laws from 1938. 18 17 19 16 12)

Bethlen’s consolidation (1921–1931)

István Bethlen, scion of an old Transylvanian noble family, became prime minister on 14 April 1921 and held office for ten years. He first brought the officer detachments and radical students into the system through bribery, civil-service posts, promotions and seats in parliament. Bethlen regarded the paramilitaries as a “necessary evil” that had done much to destroy the Communist Party by killing most of its members in Hungary, but in the long run as a threat that could drag the country into a reckless war. In early 1922 he gathered the right into the Unity Party (officially the Christian Farmers’, Smallholders’ and Civic Party), which won a landslide that year and, under changing names, remained the governing party until 1944. 16 20)

The Franchise Act of 1922 made income, six years’ residence and six years’ schooling conditions of the vote, cutting the electorate to 29.5 per cent of the population, and outside Budapest and the larger towns it brought back the open ballot that had existed before 1918. Rural districts received 199 seats in the lower house and urban ones 46, and opposition candidates needed far more nominating signatures than those of the governing party. Lord lieutenants appointed by the prime minister supervised the elections, and the police and gendarmerie under the interior ministry harassed opposition candidates in the countryside. The Unity Party averaged 61 per cent of the vote in the four general elections between 1922 and 1935. Urban elections were comparatively free and returned opposition deputies, whom Bethlen used as a barometer of public opinion and a safety valve for discontent. 16 12)

On 22 December 1921 the government and the Social Democratic Party concluded the Bethlen–Peyer Pact. It was signed for the party by the trade-union leader Károly Peyer together with István Farkas and Ferenc Miákits, and for the government by Bethlen and four ministers. The party undertook not to organise civil servants, railway and postal workers, to limit its agitation among agricultural labourers, and to give up mass strikes, republican propaganda and criticism of Bethlen’s foreign policy. In return it was guaranteed legal activity, the rebuilding of its unions and participation in elections; its seats were capped at 24, but an amnesty decree ended the reprisals against the left. Meant to be secret, the pact was published in full by the party paper Népszava on 31 December 1924. The Social Democrats held seats in parliament from 1922 to 1944; the Communists saw the pact as a betrayal, a deal between the “labour aristocracy” and capital. The Communist Party stayed outside it, illegal and persecuted. 21 10

To obtain a loan Bethlen set aside his campaign against Trianon for the time being. Hungary joined the League of Nations on 18 September 1922 and in December 1923 agreed to pay Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 200 million gold crowns in reparations over twenty years, which opened the way to credit. In July 1924 a loan of 250 million gold crowns under League supervision was floated in London, half from the City and the rest from the United States, Italy and Switzerland. The loan tamed inflation, a new currency, the pengő, was introduced in 1927, and industrial and farm output rose quickly in the late 1920s. The share of workers with medical insurance grew from 30 per cent in 1913 to 80 per cent in 1927. In 1927 Bethlen signed a treaty of friendship with Fascist Italy, and once the economy had recovered he again attacked Trianon openly, declaring in 1928: “We did not lose provinces. We were partitioned.” 16 12)

This stability rested on deep rural inequality. Despite the land reform of the early 1920s Hungary remained a typical agrarian country, with half of its nine million people living off the land. Great landowners, just 0.06 per cent of the population, held nearly a third of the farmland in 1,070 estates; medium owners held another third; and the farm labourers, dwarf-holders, landless estate servants, navvies and day labourers — a third of the population — shared the remaining third. The 1928 book about them, Three Million Beggars, is counted as Hungary’s first sociography; its author, György Oláh, was a far-right journalist who later sided with Béla Imrédy. Budapest enjoyed a standard of living comparable to Western Europe, while most country people lived in isolated farmsteads without roads, schools or doctors, in dire poverty and often illiterate. 22 23) 12)

The illegal Communist Party: from the Rákosi trials to the hanging of Sallai and Fürst

After the fall of the Soviet Republic the Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) was outlawed. Its leaders, Béla Kun among them, went into exile in Vienna and then Moscow and tried to hold the party together through a provisional central committee; inside Hungary they set up a legal front party, which government repression had reduced to a name by 1927. Membership shrank year by year and was minuscule. Zoltán Vas’s career shows what members faced. Having joined the party at sixteen in 1919, he came back in 1921, was caught and sentenced to ten years, and went to the Soviet Union in a prisoner exchange in 1922. Sent back by the Comintern in 1925, he was soon arrested again, sentenced in 1926 to six years, and in 1929 the sentence was raised to thirteen and a half. 3 24)

Mátyás Rákosi, a people’s commissar of the Soviet Republic who had since worked as a Comintern agent, returned in 1924 to rebuild the underground party and was arrested. The case of the Communists seized in September 1925 went before a summary court on 14–16 November, but after domestic and international protests it was referred to a regular court, and at the first trial in July–August 1926 Rákosi was sentenced to eight and a half years. When his term expired in April 1934 the authorities charged him again over his role in the Soviet Republic — with high treason, rebellion, complicity in and incitement to murder, and counterfeiting — and the second trial, in January–February 1935, sentenced him to life. Rákosi became a cause célèbre of the international Communist movement, and a battalion of the International Brigades in Spain bore his name. Paroled on 30 October 1940, he left for the Soviet Union on 2 November in exchange for the Hungarian revolutionary banners captured by Russian troops at Világos in 1849, and arrived in Moscow with Zoltán Vas on 6 November. 25

At about 12.20 a.m. on 13 September 1931 an express bound for Vienna was blown up on the Biatorbágy viaduct west of Budapest, killing 22 people and injuring 120. A letter found at the scene beginning “Workers, you have no rights, so we will win them against the capitalists…” led the government of Gyula Károlyi to treat the attack as the start of a Communist terror campaign; the next day it proclaimed summary jurisdiction (martial law) across the country and on 20 September extended it to anyone suspected of anti-state organising. The real culprit was Szilveszter Matuska, who had also derailed trains in Germany and Austria; he was arrested in Vienna in October and confessed. Martial law nevertheless stayed in force. A widespread suspicion at the time, still held by some historians, was that defence minister Gömbös had organised the attack, but there is no concrete evidence, and Matuska’s earlier attacks abroad tell against it. 26 27

In July 1932 two leaders of the underground Communist Party, Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst, were arrested. Sallai had been Ottó Korvin’s deputy in the political department of the people’s commissariat of the interior in 1919, had worked for International Red Aid in Moscow exile, and had been sent home on Béla Kun’s proposal to run the illegal party press. Fürst, a clerical worker, had joined the party in 1926 and entered its leadership in 1930. Neither had anything to do with Biatorbágy, but both were tried under the summary procedure and, after two weeks of torture, sentenced to death. Despite a campaign by the Hungarian Red Aid, international protests and a leaflet written by the poet Attila József, they were hanged on 29 July 1932 (the literature on Biatorbágy also gives the 28th). Sallai shouted Béla Kun’s name on the gallows. The party, badly weakened, was dissolved by the Comintern in 1936. 28 29 26 3

The Depression and Gömbös’s turn to the right (1931–1936)

The Great Depression, which began in 1929, swiftly wrecked Hungary’s prosperity, and the failure of the Creditanstalt bank in Vienna deepened the blow. Amid the economic collapse of 1929–1931 Bethlen resigned, and after the cabinet of Gyula Károlyi Horthy appointed his old ally from Szeged, Gyula Gömbös, prime minister in 1932. Gömbös had led the organisation of the National Army in 1919, founded the paramilitary MOVE and set up an avowedly racist group calling itself “the race protectors”. Bethlen, who still controlled the Unity Party, made him promise to govern through parliament and the cabinet, to enact no land reform and to pass no racist laws, and hemmed him in with his own allies, such as Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer at the interior and Miklós Kállay at agriculture. On taking office Gömbös publicly recanted his antisemitism, and the Jewish leadership under Béla Szántó backed him in return for a promise of no racial legislation — a promise he kept. 12) 16 30

Abroad Gömbös sought backing for revising Trianon and trade to pull the economy out of the Depression. In 1933 he flew to Italy, where Mussolini approved revision of the Treaty of Trianon and promised Italian help if Hungary went to war with Yugoslavia and Romania to regain its former lands. When Hitler became German chancellor, Gömbös was the first foreign head of government to visit him, and soon signed a major trade agreement with Germany. On 17 March 1934 he signed the Rome Protocols with Mussolini and the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. The three protocols provided for regular consultation, the removal of trade barriers among the signatories, help for Hungary against the fall in the price of wheat and easier transit through the Adriatic ports, and were also aimed against German expansion into Austria. Hitler, by contrast, would back Hungary’s claims only against Czechoslovakia, not against Romania or Yugoslavia, and considered Gömbös far too pro-Jewish. 30 31

At home Gömbös renamed the Unity Party the National Unity Party, declared its aim to be “total control of the nation’s social life”, and in the 1935 election promoted a “unitary Hungarian nation with no class distinctions”. He assured Hitler that Hungary would soon be a one-party state on the model of the Nazi party, and over four years purged conservatives from the officer corps and promoted radicals who shared his views, so that by 1936 the army was a stronghold of the radicals. Trade guarantees made Germany Hungary’s main trading partner, and the Hungarian economy became dependent on Germany’s. Gömbös died of illness in Munich on 6 October 1936 without realising his most extreme goals. 20) 1 16 12) 30

Darányi and the Győr programme: the threshold of 1938

Kálmán Darányi, who became prime minister on 12 October 1936, promised a return to Bethlen’s constitutional course while avoiding a sharp break with Gömbös’s legacy. In April 1937 he banned the Party of National Will, forerunner of the Arrow Cross, and its leader Ferenc Szálasi was sentenced to three years in prison; but the March Front, a progressive intellectual movement, was also subjected to police harassment and prosecution. The regent’s powers were widened again: Horthy could now delay the implementation of laws for up to a year and was no longer accountable to parliament. The franchise law of 1938 at last restored the secret ballot, but by raising the voting age to 26–30 for men and 30 for women it cut the electorate by 250,000–300,000. 32

On 5 March 1938, at a rally of the National Unity Party in Győr, Darányi announced the Győr programme, a rearmament plan of one billion pengő. Drawn up by Béla Imrédy, president of the Hungarian National Bank, it was to be financed by a one-off capital levy of 600 million pengő and loans of 400 million; 600 million would go to armaments and 400 million to indirect defence in agriculture, transport and mining. The plan became Act XX of 1938, and the arms limits of the Treaty of Trianon were in effect abandoned. When the Anschluss that same March made Hungary a neighbour of Nazi Germany, Darányi brought pro-German politicians into his cabinet and negotiated with the extreme right, agreeing to let Arrow Cross members stand for parliament. Amid the distrust of conservatives and Horthy’s displeasure he resigned on 11 May. The First Jewish Law his government had introduced passed under his successor Imrédy in May 1938, capping the share of Jews in certain sectors of the economy at 20 per cent. Those laws, and Hungary’s drift toward the Axis, belong to the next event. 33 32 19