Hitler's Last Prize

By Steve Rodan

 “I have been an anti-Semite all my life.” Miklos Horthy.

As the longtime dictator of Hungary, Miklos Horthy belied his nation's aristocratic roots. After World War I, he became an admiral without a navy, a regent without a monarchy. But he managed to put down a Bolshevik coup, and for 20 years ruled a little country in dire need of a powerful ally. Horthy found one in Adolf Hitler.

Hitler's proposal was simple: Germany would help Hungary regain much of its territory lost after 1918. But Hungary, rich in oil, coal, timber and bauxite, would have to participate in the adventures of the Third Reich.

"If you want to join the banquet, you'll have to help first in the kitchen," Hitler said.

Territory for soldiers

At first, the fuhrer kept his word. In November 1938, Germany handed over pieces of Czechoslovakia to Hungary. Then, Horthy received a slice of Romania and Yugoslavia. In return, Hungary, convinced that Berlin would conquer Europe, sent some 400,000 soldiers for the invasion of the Soviet Union under the banner of the Waffen SS. Much of the Hungarian economy had already been taken over by Germany. By the summer of 1941, Budapest became part of the Final Solution.

From July 1941 through January 1942, Horthy, encouraged by a pro-Nazi elite, took the plunge into genocide. He rounded up tens of thousands of Jews without citizenship and handed more than 18,000 of them to Germany. The SS quickly killed all but 2,000 of the Jews in Ukraine. Another 1,000 Jews were killed by Hungarian soldiers and police in the territory seized from Yugoslavia.

In Budapest and other cities, young Jews were grabbed off the streets and sent to the East to walk through minefields. That was Horthy's test of loyalty.

Demand for the Jews

By September 1942, Hitler demanded that Hungary begin deporting its 800,000 Jews. Despite his contempt for Jews, Horthy was wary. The regent, now fearing threats of Allied retribution, expressed skepticism that mass deportations were feasible. What Hitler understood was that the toy admiral was hedging his bets: The war in Russia was going badly. The regent's son had already been killed and the battle for Stalingrad was destroying his army. At least 100,000 Hungarian soldiers were dead. [1]

For a while, Hitler ignored Horthy and focused on the failing military campaign in the East. But he was not blind to Horthy's hints to disengage. The clearest signal came in March 1942, when Horthy replaced the pro-German Laslo Bardossy as prime minister. The new premier was Miklos Kallay who began saying no to Berlin, including the continued deportations of Jews to Poland. In April 1943, after Germany admitted defeat in Stalingrad, Hitler summoned Horthy and warned that he could no longer allow the Jews to live.

With the destruction of the Jewish communities in neighboring Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hungary became the last refuge of Jews. By 1944, there were nearly one million Jews, including hundreds of thousands of refugees, nearly all of them deemed illegal. Although he spoke tough, Kallay had largely left the Jews alone.

Assimilated elite

As in neighboring Austria and Slovakia, the Jews of Hungary were led by an assimilated elite. Intermarriage was rampant and synagogues were converted into so-called temples. At least 20 percent of the pre-war Jewish community had converted to Christianity. As in Germany, the assimilated exhibited a grotesque devotion to their homeland. Despite the anti-Semitism, the assimilated had thrived, and they dominated the professions in Hungary. More than half of the private physicians, nearly 50 percent of the attorneys and about a third of journalists and merchants were Jews. Even Horthy admitted their usefulness to the nation's economy.  [2]

The assimilated blamed rampant anti-Semitism on the devout Jews. Since Hungary's alliance with Germany, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Romania and Slovakia had been absorbed into the country. Most of them wore the frocks, beaver hats and knee-high socks as part of a tradition that went back hundreds of years. They read the Torah rather than the daily newspaper. They spoke Yiddish rather than Hungarian. Their children attended rabbinical seminaries rather than universities. They consulted rabbis rather than psychologists.

In contrast, the Zionist movement in Hungary was tiny. The assimilated were concerned that the Zionist preachings of the Land of Israel would call into question their fidelity; the Orthodox regarded the Zionists, who used Jewish symbols for recruitment, as even worse than the assimilated.

The smallest faction in the movement was Mapai, the party led by Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion in Palestine. Horthy saw most of the Zionists as little better than the communists he had ousted after World War I. With the exception of the Mizrahi and General Zionists, the movement was denied control over money or institutions. Authorities would confiscate Zionist assets and hand them over to government-supported Jewish groups. In Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion retaliated against the Jews, withholding entry certificates to Palestine throughout the late 1930s and World War II. At one point, he lobbied the Zionist leadership in Palestine to impose a boycott on Hungarian products. [3]

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Agents of the Reich

Instead, the Zionists worked with the Third Reich. Both the assimilated and the Zionists became agents of Germany's military intelligence service, Abwehr. Abwehr allowed Mapai apparatchiks to use military facilities to directly contact their superiors in Switzerland or Turkey. Gestapo and SS agents were paid through Jewish donations for tasks that ranged from transporting money and letters to the Jewish ghettos of Poland and Slovakia to facilitating the escape of the occasional dignitary or those whose families had paid huge ransoms. One of the SS contacts was Adolf Eichmann. [4]

One German agent was given access to the offices of the Zionist movement in Budapest. There, the SS agent, Rudy Schultz, born Schwartz, learned all the Nazis needed to know about the Jewish community in Hungary, including its leaders and interests. This would prove critical in March 1944.

Still, while German pressure mounted on Horthy to resume deportations, the Jewish community remained sanguine. The assimilated clung to the belief that Hungary would not let its Jewish sons fall prey to the Germans. The Orthodox, shut out of Palestine, looked to G-d. The Zionists were divided: The rank and file desperately sought escape. The leadership was confident that the cooperation with Berlin would continue even during German occupation.

It is probable that Hitler decided to take over Hungary in August 1943. In wake of the overthrow of Mussolini in Italy, Kallay broadcast a speech seen as a message to the Allies that Hungary wanted out of the war. When Hitler demanded a meeting with Horthy and his government, the prime minister refused to attend. By the end of the year, it was clear to most Hungarian politicians that the fuhrer was ready to act.

Another summons

The German move was set for March 1944. Again, it began with another summons to Horthy. The fuhrer told the regent that Hungary was no longer acting like an ally and that the Wehrmacht would be sent in to restore obedience. Horthy did not threaten resistance and told his paper military the same.

Why did Hitler decide to invade Hungary? Budapest was no threat -- militarily or otherwise -- to the Reich. The Wehrmacht, informed of a planned Allied invasion of France, did not have enough men to defend the Eastern Front, let alone the West. The regent, by all accounts a coward, would never have dared to annul Hungary's pact with Berlin.

What is clear is that by mid-1943, Hitler was forced to conclude that Germany was rapidly losing the war. For a while, he considered invading several nearby countries, including Romania and Switzerland. But both nations signaled that they would vigorously fight any German attack. The overwhelming force he had used against Yugoslavia in 1941 could not again be mustered.

The defeats in Russia, North Africa and Italy left Hitler with the only reason he had started the war -- the elimination of the Jews. For years, Hungary, had avoided the Final Solution. As he withdrew from the German military command, Hitler embraced SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the man who destroyed most of the Jews in Poland and western Russia. Without fresh batches of Jews, the gas chambers at Auschwitz were forced to run at half speed while Treblinka and other death camps teetered on the brink of collapse. The assessment of the Allies was that 1944 would be Germany's final year.

The Jews of Hungary would be Hitler's last prize.

Notes

1. Hungarian Premier: a personal account of a nation's struggle in the Second World War. Miklos Kallay. Pages 10-11, 14-15. Greenwood Press. Westport, Conn 1970.

2. The Destruction of the European Jews. Raoul Hilberg. Page 514. New Viewpoints, New York. 1973

3. Zionism in Hungary Between the Two World Wars. Attila Novak. Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. 2002. Also, A Man Who Was Murdered Twice? Rudolf Kasztner and the Holocaust in Hungary: a re-examination. Eli Reichenthal. Page 61. Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba. 2010. 

4. A Man Who Was Murdered Twice? Pages 65, 67, 69 and 73. Also, A Million Jews to Save: Check to the Final Solution. Andreas Biss. Page 37. A.S. Barnes, South Brunswick, N.J. 1975.

Below: Horthy [left] walks with Hitler in 1938.