I will preface this by saying that I am neither of Hungarian ancestry nor citizenship.
ZheShiWo wrote:
Because revisionists regimes in states like hungary joined the Nazis in an allience and declared war on the Soviet Union?
While Hungary's choice to enter WW II "on the Nazi side" may have been a poor choice it was probably the best of many even poorer choices. Too many look back at WW II and see things as black and white, “with us or against us” (to quote a modern foolish politician) but the reality is that most countries faced some very difficult choices in 1939. The Treaty of Trianon between Hungary and the Allies in 1920 was an intrinsically unjust treaty, born not of an Allied commitment to amending local aggravating issues but rather of French political intrigue. France was attempting to construct a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Central Europe ostensibly against the Germans but as well to maintain a level of French political leverage on the Continent against the British, who survived the war better than France did. This project, which came to be known as l'Entente petit, ultimately became distorted and twisted by France's new "allies" in the region - Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the future Yugoslavia. This alliance was a failure from the start because it excluded the region's largest country by population - Poland (because of Czech fears) - and instead of an anti-German alliance it morphed into an anti-Hungarian alliance because all the local members wanted to keep the real estate they'd gained from Hungary. The alliance was already a virtual dead letter by 1929, and when in 1938-39 Hitler dismantled one of its signatory members (with France's acquiescence) none of the other members lifted a finger in Prague's defense. Robert Seton-Watson, the British historian who championed the South Slav cause at the Paris peace talks and who was rabidly anti-Hungarian, would later write of his disgust with the nations of the region as they set about doing exactly the same things he had chastised pre-war Hungary for doing with its minorities.
In the Treaty of Trianon Hungary lost two-thirds of its pre-war territory, and in a single day Hungarians became the largest ethnic minoritry in Europe as 3 million were left outside the Hungarian state borders. U.S. President Wilson pleaded strongly for thin revisions of territory, only a few miles wide, along the Slovak and Partium Romanian borders which would have put almost 1 million of those 3 million back in Hungary (with almost no minorities), but to no avail. Hungary lost more territory than Austria, the senior partner of the Austro-Hungarian dual-monarchy, and indeed Hungary even lost some territory (Burgenland) to Austria. Austria lost very few ethnically German-Austrian regions (South Tyrol) while Hungary lost a substantial amount of ethnically Hungarian regions. France was willing to entertain some of the most extreme territorial claims by its new allies against Hungary to keep them in the l’Entente petit, including Romania’s claim to all Hungarian lands up to the Tisza (Theiss) River – about one-third of modern Hungary (which was refused over Anglo-American complaints) – and Yugoslavia’s claim to Baranya County in southwest Hungary (including the city of Pécs, the 3rd largest city in modern Hungary) which ended with France having to threaten Belgrade to free Pécs from two years of occupation by Serbian troops. The city of Eszék (modern Osijek, Croatia) was ceded to Yugoslavia exclusively on the premise that it was needed as a local rail connection hub. Eduard Benes began to deport ethnic Hungarians from Czechoslovakia after he lost a war with the Kun regime in 1919 but the ACC halted these deportations. (He would try this again after WW II but while he was given the go-ahead for Germans in the Südetenland, he was not allowed to deport Hungarians.)
For this reason Hungary obviously fell into the revisionist camp in interbellum Europe, with those countries (Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Soviet Russia) who wanted to change the Versailles Treaty system borders, versus those (France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia) who wanted them preserved at all costs. Interbellum Hungary was lead by the old feudal aristocracy after the failed Kun experiment and the country became increasingly militant in its revisionism. L'Entente petit, in its furor to contain the Hungarians, also cut nearly all economic ties with Hungary - which did a great deal of damage to all of the region's economies, but most of all to Hungary. This meant that in 1929 Hungary had a far more developed and larger volume of trade with the United States across the Atlantic (despite being a land-locked country) than with neighboring Czechoslovakia or Romania, despite economic "synergies". Modern Hungarian historians acknowledge that a fatal flaw in the interbellum Horthy regime’s revisionist policy was its insistence on the recovery of all 1914 borders, and not just those with majority ethnic Hungarian populations – but Hungary was hardly alone with absurd border claims in 1920s and 30s Europe. Italy created the first fascist regime over its desire for the Adriatic in 1922, Greece attempted to conquer most of Anatolia in 1922 and failed leading to an exodus of 1.2 million Greeks to the Greek mainland, Yugoslavia coveted Albania; Poland, Lithuania, Simeon Petlura’s Ukraine and Soviet Russia struggled over western Ukraine and Byelorussia; while France and Britain neatly divided the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern possessions – some of the consequences of which the world is currently struggling with.
This economic aspect is what principally drove Hungary into German arms, and the very first German-Hungarian agreements in the interbellum era are indeed trade agreements. As Hungary became more and more dependent on the German economy, Hitler enticed Horthy and the aristocrats who ruled Budapest with the two Vienna awards that gave part of the Hungarian lands back in Slovakia and Transylvania (Romania), but the country resisted war when it first broke out. Hungary refused transit rights for the Wehrmacht when it attacked Poland in 1939 as well as refusing to provide food or medical aid to the Germans, and provided safe haven for many Polish refugees fleeing the Nazi and Soviet onslaught. (For instance there is a plaque on Fõ utca along the river in Buda commemorating a secret Polish military hospital the Hungarians allowed to be set up.) There are also reports of French POWs escaping from Germany in 1940 finding refuge in Hungary, much to Hitler’s ire. Hungary also refused Hitler’s demands that Hungarian Jews be rounded up and “ghetto-ized”, passing only mild anti-Jewish laws (as compared to those elsewhere). Budapest also maintained good relations with the West, especially Britain, despite Germany’s state of war with them, and quietly suppressed the Hungarian fascist party, Nyilaskereszt (“Arrow Cross”) despite its rabidly pro-Hitler policies.
The Hungarians fumbled into the war when Hitler would no longer accept “No” for an answer, with Yugoslavia in April 1941. Initially they demanded that the Wehrmacht be allowed to use the Hungarian rail system to attack Yugoslavia and when Hungary caved in, Hitler demanded they join in. Hungary had signed a pact of friendship with the Yugoslavs only weeks before, and after caving in to German pressure and ordering the invasion, the Hungarian Prime Minister (Pál Teleki) sat down and blew his brains out with a pistol. (Churchill thought this noble despite the circumstances and preserved an empty chair in memory of Teleki at the Paris peace conferences in 1946-47.) After participating in taking over Bácska, the Hungarian-inhabited part of Yugoslavia (modern Vojvodina) the Hungarians still balked at military cooperation when Hitler brought up Operation Barbarossa. That issue was solved when bombers attacked the eastern Hungarian cities of Kassa (modern Kosice, Slovakia), Munkács and Ruhó; it’s never been proven but everyone assumes it was the Germans using planes with Soviet markings to drag Hungary into the war. It worked; the Hungarians joined the Germans in late June, 1941.
The Hungarian relations with the USSR were complex, but resolved around fear. We have to remember that in pre-1939 Europe Hitler didn’t look so bad to many Continental Europeans. We know him now as the author of the Holocaust and the slaughterer of millions but in 1939 he looked like the guy who was going to finally break the Versailles system. The Polish historian Jan T. Gross reports that even Jews in 1939-1940 occupied Poland fled in large numbers from the Soviet parts to the German occupation parts out of fear of the mythical Russian anti-Semitism. Also, to the smaller states of Eastern Europe, Hitler looked like the guy who could save them from the USSR. The Soviet Union had large land claims against several states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Romania) and repeatedly made its intentions clear. The communist rhetoric about world revolution didn’t help matters, nor its active support for the various communist revolutionary parties in these states. In the 1930s many states feared the USSR more than Germany, or at least as much as Germany. Even in countries like Poland, no friend of Germany, the Germans were remembered as the people who finally broke up the Tsarist Russian empire. In a state like 1930s Hungary, ruled by old-style feudal aristocrats, communist propaganda (as well as memories of Béla Kun’s 1919 Red Terror among Hungarian peasants) and Soviet land claims produced very real fear. The Soviets belatedly launched a charm offensive to keep Hungary out of any German-Soviet war, but Stalin fumbled with his usual mixed messages – sending for instance a collection of captured banners from the failed Hungarian 1848-49 War for Independence back to Budapest in 1940 when the Tsarist Russian army helped defeat the Hungarians, in effect giving the modern Hungarians a gift but as well a warning that another Russian army could cross into Hungary if need be. The Hungarians sought refuge from what they saw as a Soviet threat by keeping close to the Germans – in other words, they hid between a rock and a hard place.
The Germans never fully trusted any of its satellite armies and rarely allowed them near the front lines in the Soviet war. The Hungarians were left mostly to rear-guard duty, as was the case when the Soviets broke out of the Stalingrad salient in January 1943 and caught up with the Hungarian 2nd Army, utterly mauling it (killing more than 150,000). After this battle the Hungarian military’s activities were restricted almost exclusively to Hungary itself. In 1943 the Hungarians found out about an Allied plan to invade Europe through the Balkans and Horthy began negotiations for Hungary to switch sides as soon as the Allied armies reached Hungary. Unfortunately the Allies switched for strategic reasons to an Italian invasion, and worse yet Hitler found out about the negotiations. After prolonged negotiations between Berlin and Budapest (in which Horthy’s son was taken as a hostage) the Germans gave up and occupied Hungary in March, 1944. Still, Horthy tried to exit the war and requested an armistice with the dreaded Soviets in October – which when it became public via Magyar Rádió resulted in the Nazis’ overthrow of Horthy and installation of the Nyilaskereszt with its clinically insane fascist leader, Ferenc (Franz) Szálasi. This is when the Jewish deportations began, and when most Hungarian atrocities against Jews and minorities took place.
As to the accusation that Hungary “got what it deserved” as a German ally through its treatment by the Soviets, I would remind everyone that the Soviet military made little distinction between friends or foes in its march across Central Europe. Soviet soldiers raped and pillaged their way across allied Poland, tearing up all industry they could find (German, Polish or otherwise) and committing mass atrocities along the way. At a time when coal production in Poland was running at about 45% capacity in the immediate post-war years (completely inadequate for Poland’s needs), the Soviets forced Poland to export massive quantities of coal to the USSR until 1955. Thousands of Poles remained in Soviet gulags until Khrushchov’s amnesty in 1955, and of course we all had to lie about the 14,000 murdered Polish pre-war officers killed by the NKVD in 1941 at Katyn (but admitted by Gorbachov in 1990). Let’s face it: Russia achieved in 1945-1989 what Britain and France had achieved in the 18th and 19th centuries; an overseas Empire. The Soviet Union was little more than a vehicle for Russian imperial ambitions, and it treated the victors and vanquished of WW II equally (equally viciously, that is) within its realm.
Webbrave wrote:
quote:
Originally posted by Zoltan
Millions were forced to leave their homes,in East-Prussia hundred thousands(millions) of Germans were murdered,to make Königsberg a Russian city.
relocated to Germany - yes, but murdered - absolutely not. Sure, a lot of people died there during the war, but to say that after the war millions of Germans were killed to make the city Russian is simply preposterous. In 1947-48 there was a well-documented resettlement of East Prussian Germans that coincided with the explulsion of Germans from other formerly German territories.
The resettlement was a grisly business. Open murder, perhaps not, but murder through negligence perhaps. If you thought the pictures of the plight of the several hundred thousand Kosovars whom Milosevic had “ethnically cleansed” (expelled) from their homes in 1999 was horrific, then imagine some 10 million ethnic Germans being forced in the dead of a very harsh winter to vacate their homes in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia (as well as another couple million from the Südetenland). They were allowed to take only what they could carry, rarely were given any food or water provisions for a several hundred kilometer journey, and were quite literally dropped off at train stations in Germany with no place to go, no money, no shelter, no food, etc. Many thousands died. My own family were Poles who were ethnically cleansed by the Soviets from Soviet-occupied Lithuania, part of a group of 2 million Poles expelled from the new Soviet empire, from lands they’d lived in some cases since the 11th century. Of course Polish sympathy for Germans in 1946-47 was non-existent given their behavior in war, but still I feel great shame for how innocent German civilians were treated in this period. I am not alone; in 1966 Polish bishops got together and sent a very unpopular letter asking forgiveness from Germans for Polish behavior in the expulsions. Hungary, BTW, was ordered by the Allies in 1946 to deport its German population (the result of waves of immigrants from medieval times) but the Hungarians refused until absolutely threatened, and even then only deporting the absolute exact number listed by the Allies. Pécs today has a very large and visible “Schwab” German population, a thriving minority.
ZheShiWo wrote:
Give me a break. Hungarians willingly joined Germany because they thought they could revisions of 1919, which they did. Romanian and Slovak consecions to Hungary were forced out of those states by Germany.[/i]
True, but these concessions were not without their rewards as well. Romania was promised “Transdniestr”, a new territory stretching from Moldavia (Soviet Bessarabia) to the Crimea, including Sevastopol. The Slovaks hoped to gain “Trans-Carpathia” (Ruthenia) from the Hungarians. Hitler played all his satellite states against each other. Stalin liked to do the same.
Hardu wrote:
From what I've been told (by the daughter of of one of these men) Stalin picked "Jewish" Communists to staff the security apparatus of the Eastern European countries he occupied. People with a Jewish background were heavily overrepresented in these Communist parties in any case.
It's not the elast surprising that the Hungarians (and Poles) vented antisemitic sentiments in the same breath as anticommunist when they had a chance. The prominence of "Jews" in the communist state-terrortist organizations must have convinced not a few that the propaganda about the Jewish Bolshevik menace was true. (Of course, the Polish communists in fact staged their own "anti-zionist" campaign in 1968 and expelled 30.000 Jews from the party and the country).
The history of the Jews of eastern Euroep since 1918 has been one of unmitigated tragedy. The antisemitism of Hungary in 1956 is just another chapter in that story.
But however antisemite the Hungarians were in 1856 that does not justify glossing over the communist repression of them - or for that matter the fact that people born as Jews were prominent in it.
Actually, anti-Semitism was relatively weak in Hungary, at least when compared to Poland, Romania, or the USSR. After 1795 when Russia, Prussia and Austria dismembered Poland-Lithuania, Russia inherited most of Poland’s massive Jewish population. They forced the Jews to live within a very restricted area (“Pale”), and introduced the concept of a pogrom to their new subjects. With all this fun many Polish/Russian Jews began to migrate to Hungary after the Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary in 1867, and the newly-created city of Budapest became a major magnet for Jewish immigration. Hungary was much more accommodating than its neighbors and offered a more modern, urbanized culture than most of its neighbors (with the exceptions of Austria itself and after 1918, Czechoslovakia) as well. As I mentioned previously, relatively mild anti-Jewish laws were only instituted under immense German pressure during the war and the deportations began only after the direct German occupation. Vichy France has a far worse record than Hungary in this regard. This is not to exonerate the Hungarians completely for the atrocities committed against Jews, but rather to point out that compared to almost all her neighbors Hungary comes out looking quite mild.
As for the communists, Stalin intentionally used local minorities, usually Jews, in high profile leadership positions specifically because they would always be dependent on Moscow for their power and they would never identify with the local majority populations. Ana Pauker in Romania, Máttyás Rákosi in Hungary, Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia, Boleslaw Bierut in Poland were all such appointees – and all replaced local native communists in the 1947-49 Stalinist purges. After Stalin died and struggles broke out in the parties between Stalinists and reformers, the reformers often targeted those who benefited most from the 1947-49 purges – mostly Jews. Gomulka in Poland, Nagy in Hungary, etc. There is a myth that the secret services and police were Jewish-dominated, but statistical evidence doesn’t bear this out; it seems that the visible leadership brought people to believe that all the evil aspects of the Soviet puppet regimes were Jewish dominated. Any popular expression of protest or anger against the regimes in the 1950s quite naturally would have an anti-Jewish aspect. I’m not condoning it; merely describing. In 1946 in Kielce (southern Poland), a mob attacked and beat to death several Jews returning from the camps. This may have been a police provocation, but that has never been proven. Also in Poland, in 1968 a power struggle in the Polish PZPR led to an attempt at a pogrom by Mieczyslaw Moczar, but happily it fizzled.
