White Terror (Hungary)
헝가리 백색테러
The retaliatory violence of 1919–1921 in which officer detachments of Horthy’s National Army killed and terrorised Communists, Social Democrats, peasants and Jews after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. It brought summary executions, pogroms and tens of thousands of imprisonments; estimates of the dead range from 300 to 6,000.
In depth
It was committed mainly by officer detachments of the National Army founded in Szeged in the summer of 1919, above all those of Pál Prónay, Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek and Iván Héjjas. Formally regular troops, they acted like private battalions loyal to their commanders, and because many leaders of the Soviet Republic had been Jewish they targeted Jews as such. In November 1919 thirty-six people were killed in the forest of Orgovány, and in February 1920 the Népszava journalists Béla Somogyi and Béla Bacsó were murdered.
Estimates of the dead vary widely: English-language accounts give 1,500–6,000 or 1,000–5,000, while cautious Hungarian assessments put it at around 500–600. The government began reining in the detachments in the summer of 1920 and Prónay’s battalion was dissolved in January 1922, but Horthy used the regent’s amnesty to shield the perpetrators from prosecution.