Miklós Horthy

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya (Vitéz nagybányai Horthy Miklós; ; German: Nikolaus von Horthy und Nagybánya; 18 June 1868 – 9 February 1957) was regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the years between World Wars I and II and throughout most of World War II, serving from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944. He was styled "His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary" (Hungarian: Ő Főméltósága a Magyar Királyság Kormányzója).

Horthy started his career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, ultimately rising to the rank of Admiral. He served in the Otranto Raid and at the Battle of the Strait of Otranto (1917) and was the Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Naval Fleet in the last year of the First World War.

After Hungarian communists under Béla Kun seized power in Hungary in 1919, proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic and commencing Hungary's Red Terror, a counterrevolutionary government was formed which asked Horthy to take command of its forces. In 1919, Romanian, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian forces invaded Hungary and later the Romanian army overthrew Kun's government. He allowed Hungary's White Terror to persist at first but eventually shut it down and imprisoned a few extremists among the anti-communists. When the Romanians evacuated Budapest in November 1919, Horthy entered at the head of the National Army.

The Hungarian Communist Party was banned, and in 1920 Horthy was declared Regent and Head of State, a position he held until his deposition in October 1944. Horthy refused to step down when the former King of Hungary, Charles IV attempted to regain his throne on two occasions. Later in 1921, the Hungarian parliament formally nullified the Pragmatic Sanction, an act that effectively dethroned the Habsburgs.

A conservative who was distinctly inclined toward the right of the political spectrum, Horthy guided Hungary through the years between the two world wars and, in exchange for the restoration of some of the Hungarian territories lost by the Treaty of Trianon, he took Hungary into an alliance with Nazi Germany.

In April 1941, Hungary entered World War II as an ally of Germany. Horthy's faltering allegiance to his German patrons, however, eventually led the Nazis to invade and take control of the country in March 1944. In October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary would surrender and withdraw from the Axis. He was forced to resign, placed under arrest and taken to Bavaria. At the end of the war, he came under the custody of American troops.

After appearing as a witness at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials in 1948, Horthy settled and lived out his remaining years in Portugal. His memoirs, Ein Leben für Ungarn (A Life for Hungary), were published in German in 1953, followed by an English translation three years later.

Early life and naval career
Miklós Horthy was born at Kenderes, into an old Calvinist noble family, making him one of the few openly Protestant politicians in a mostly Catholic country. Horthy entered the Austro-Hungarian naval academy at Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) at age 14. The naval academy's official language was German. As a result, for the rest of his life Horthy spoke Hungarian with a slight, but noticeable, Austro-German accent.

As a young man, Horthy traveled around the world and served as a diplomat for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Turkey and other countries. Horthy married Magdolna Purgly in Arad in 1901. They had four children: Magdolna (1902), Paula (1903), István (1904) and Miklós (1907). From 1911 until 1914 he was a naval aide-de-camp to Emperor Franz Joseph, for whom he had a great respect.

At the beginning of the war Horthy was commanding the pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Habsburg. In 1915 he earned a reputation for boldness while commanding the new light cruiser SMS Novara (1913). He planned the 1917 attack on the Otranto Barrage, which resulted in the largest naval engagement of the war in the Adriatic. A consolidated British, French, and, Italian Mediterranean fleet met with the Austro-Hungarian force. Despite the numerical superiority of the Entente fleet, the Austrian force victoriously emerged from the battle. The Austrian fleet remained relatively unscathed, however Horthy was wounded. After the February 1918 Cattaro mutiny, Emperor Charles selected Horthy over many more senior commanders as the new Commander in Chief of the Imperial Fleet in March 1918. In June, Horthy planned another attack on Otranto, and in a departure from the cautious strategy of his predecessors, he committed the empire's battleships to the mission. While sailing through the night, the dreadnought SMS Szent István met Italian MAS torpedo boats and was sunk, causing Horthy to abort the mission. He managed however to preserve the rest of the empire's fleet in being until he was ordered by Emperor Charles to surrender it to the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs on 31 October.

The end of the war saw Hungary turned into a landlocked nation, and hence the new government had little need for Horthy's services. He retired with his family to his private estate at Kenderes, but his role as a Hungarian leader was far from over.

Dates of rank and assignments



 * 1896 Fregattenleutnant (Frigate Lieutenant) (fregatthadnagy – Sub-Lieutenant)
 * 1900 Linienschiffleutnant (Ship-of-the-Line Lieutenant) (sorhajóhadnagy – Lieutenant)
 * January 1901 SMS Sperber (commander)
 * 1902 SMS Kranich (commander)
 * June 1908 SMS Taurus (commander)
 * August 1908 SMS Kaiser Karl VI (GDO-Gesamtdetailoffizier-First Officer, temporary)
 * 1 January 1909 Korvettenkapitän (Corvette Captain) (korvettkapitány – Lieutenant-Commander)
 * 1 November 1909 aide-de-camp to Emperor Franz Josef
 * 1 November 1911 Fregattenkapitän (Frigate Captain) (fregattkapitány – Commander)
 * December 1912 March 1913 SMS Budapest (commander)
 * 20 January 1914 Linienschiffskapitän (Ship-of-the-Line Captain) (sorhajókapitány – Captain)
 * August 1914 SMS Habsburg (commander)
 * December 1914 SMS Novara (1912) (commander)
 * 1 February 1918 SMS Prinz Eugen (commander)
 * 27 February 1918 Konteradmiral (ellentengernagy – Rear Admiral)
 * 27 February 1918 appointed (last) Commander in Chief of the fleet (over 11 admirals and 24 senior Linienschiffskapitän) by Emperor Karl I
 * 30 October 1918 Vizeadmiral (altengernagy – Vice Admiral)

Commander of the National Army


Two national traumas immediately following the First World War profoundly shaped the spirit and future of the Hungarian nation. The first was the loss, as dictated by the Entente powers, of large portions of Hungarian territory that had bordered other countries. These were lands which had been Hungary's as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; they were ceded to the nations of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria and Yugoslavia. The excisions, eventually ratified in the Treaty of Trianon at Versailles, cost Hungary two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its native Hungarian speakers, and dealt the population a terrible psychological blow. The second trauma in some sense sprang from the first: in March 1919, after the first proto-democratic efforts at government in Hungary faltered, Communist Béla Kun seized power in the capital of Budapest.

Kun and his colleagues proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and promised the restoration of Hungary's former grandeur. Instead, his efforts at reconquest failed, and Hungarians were treated to a Soviet-style repression in the form of armed gangs who intimidated or murdered enemies of the regime. This period of violence came to be known as the Red Terror. Tibor Szamuely, a close collaborator of Bela Kun, even boasted that, "Terror is the principal weapon of our regime." Figures vary, but one generally accepted number of victims of the Red Terror is around 500 killed.

Within weeks of his coup, Kun's popularity plummeted. On 30 May 1919, anti-Communist politicians formed a counter-revolutionary government in the southern city of Szeged, occupied by French forces at the time. There, Gyula Károlyi asked former admiral Horthy, still considered a war hero, to be the Minister of War in the new government and take command of a counter-revolutionary force which would be named the National Army (Nemzeti Hadsereg). Horthy consented, and arrived in Szeged on 6 June. Soon after, because of orders from the Entente, the cabinet was reformed, and Horthy was not given a seat in it. Undaunted, Horthy managed to retain control of the National Army by detaching the Army command from the War ministry.

On 6 August French-supported Romanian forces entered Budapest. The Communist government collapsed and its leaders fled. In retaliation for the Red Terror, reactionary crews now exacted revenge in a two-year wave of violent repression known today as the White Terror. These reprisals – which almost certainly exceeded the Red Terror in scope and cruelty – were organized and carried out by officers of Horthy's National Army, particularly Pál Prónay Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek and Iván Héjjas. Their victims were primarily Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews. Most Hungarian Jews were not supporters of the Bolsheviks, but much of the leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had been young Jewish intellectuals, and anger about the Communist revolution easily translated into anti-Semitic hostility.

In Budapest, Prónay installed his unit in Hotel Britannia, where the group swelled to battalion size. Their program of vicious attacks continued; they planned a city-wide pogrom until Horthy found out and put a stop to it. In his diary, Prónay reported that Horthy

Horthy's liability for Prónay's excesses is controversial. On several occasions, Horthy reached out to stop Prónay from a particularly excessive burst of anti-Jewish cruelty. And the Jews of Pest went on record absolving Horthy of the White Terror as early as the fall of 1919, when they released a statement disavowing the Kun revolution, and blaming the terror on a few units within the National Army. Horthy has never been found to have personally engaged in White Terror atrocities. But his American biographer, Thomas Sakmyster, concluded that he "tacitly supported the right wing officer detachments" who carried out the terror. The admiral also had practical reasons for turning a blind eye to the terror his officers wrought: he needed the dedicated White Guard officers to stabilize and reclaim Hungary. Nevertheless, it was at least another year before the terror died down. In the summer of 1920, Horthy's government took measures to rein in and eventually disperse the reactionary battalions. Prónay managed to undermine these anti-White Guard measures, but only for a short time. Prónay was put on trial for extorting a wealthy Jewish politician, and for "insulting the President of the Parliament" by trying to cover up the extortion. Found guilty on both charges, Prónay was now a liability and an embarrassment. His command was revoked, and he was denounced as a common criminal on the floor of the Hungarian parliament.

After serving short jail sentences, Prónay tried to convince Horthy to restore his battalion command. The Prónay Battalion lingered for a few months more under the command of a junior officer, but the government officially dissolved the unit in January 1922 and expelled its members from the army. Prónay entered politics as a member of the government's right-wing opposition. In the 1930s, he sought and failed to emulate the Nazis by generating a Hungarian fascist mass movement. In 1932, he was charged with incitement, sentenced to six months in prison and stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel. Prónay would support the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross and lead attacks on Jews before being killed by Soviet troops sometime during or after the siege of Budapest.

Precisely how much Horthy knew or approved of the White Terror is not known. Horthy himself declined to apologize for the savagery of his officer detachments, writing later: "I have no reason to gloss over deeds of injustice and atrocities committed when an iron broom alone could sweep the country clean." And he endorsed Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli's poetic justification of the White reprisals ("Hell let loose on earth cannot be subdued by the beating of angels' wings") remarking, "the Communists in Hungary, willing disciples of the Russian Bolshevists, had indeed let hell loose."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in an internal report by delegate George Burnier, said in April, 1920:

This deep hostility and fear towards Communism would be the more lasting legacy of Kun's abortive revolution: a conviction shared by Horthy and his country's ruling elite that would help drive Hungary into what might have been a fatal alliance with Adolf Hitler.

The Romanian army retreated from Budapest on 14 November, leaving Horthy to enter the city, where in a fiery speech he accused the capital's citizens of betraying Hungary by supporting Bolshevism.

Following the orders of the Entente, Romanian troops finally evacuated Hungary on 25 February 1920.

Regent
On 1 March 1920, the National Assembly of Hungary re-established the Kingdom of Hungary. However, it was apparent that the Entente powers would not accept any return of King Charles IV (Karoly IV of Hungary) from exile. Instead, with National Army officers controlling the parliament building, the assembly voted to install Horthy as Regent; he defeated Count Albert Apponyi by a vote of 131 to 7.

Bishop Ottokár Prohászka then led a small delegation to meet Horthy, announcing, "Hungary's Parliament has elected you Regent! Would it please you to accept the office of Regent of Hungary?" To their astonishment, Horthy declined, unless the powers of the office were expanded. As Horthy stalled, the politicians folded, and granted him "the general prerogatives of the King, with the exception of the right to name titles of nobility and of the patronage of the Church." The prerogatives he was given included the power to appoint and dismiss prime ministers, to convene and dissolve parliament, and to command the armed forces. With those sweeping powers guaranteed, Horthy took the oath of office. (Charles I did try to regain his throne twice; see Charles I of Austria's attempts to retake the throne of Hungary for more details.) Among 20th-century heads of state, Horthy's role was unique. His official position is usually translated into English as "Regent", but is better translated as "Royal Governor" or "Protector". The Hungarian state was legally a kingdom, but it had no king, and sought none, as the Entente powers would not have tolerated any return of the Habsburgs. The national government actually took the form of a parliamentary republic, with a prime minister at its head. Thus, Horthy was a constitutional figurehead, but he was by no means an impotent one. He reigned, but for the most part did not rule; he wrote no laws, but had powerful influence over his country's destiny by means of his constitutional powers, his prestige, and the loyalty of his ministers to the crown. His regal bearing, military reputation, and devotion to Hungary lent him a royal authority as the country edged out of its Imperial past into the modern era.

A Hungarian witticism sums up the oddity of the arrangements: for the next 24 years, Hungary would be not merely a kingdom without a king but also a country with no coastline ruled by an admiral.

Seeking redress for Trianon


The first decade of Horthy's reign was primarily consumed by stabilizing the Hungarian political system and economy. Horthy's chief partner in these efforts was his prime minister, István Bethlen. The British political and economical support for the commonly known anglophile Horthy  played a significant role in the stabilization and consolidation of the early Horthy era in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Bethlen sought to stabilize the economy while building alliances with weaker nations which could advance Hungary's cause. That cause was, primarily, reversing the losses of the Treaty of Trianon. The humiliations of Trianon continued to occupy the central place in Hungarian foreign policy, and in the popular imagination; the indignant anti-Trianon slogan "Nem, nem soha!" ("No, no never!") became a ubiquitous motto of Hungarian outrage. When in 1927 the British newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere denounced, in the pages of his Daily Mail, the partitions ratified at Trianon, an official letter of gratitude was eagerly signed by 1.2 million Hungarians.

But Hungary's stability was precarious, and the Great Depression derailed much of Bethlen's economic balance. Horthy replaced him with an old reactionary confederate from his Szeged days: Gyula Gömbös. Gömbös was an outspoken anti-Semite and a budding fascist. And although he agreed to Horthy's demands that he temper his anti-Jewish rhetoric and work amicably with Hungary's large Jewish professional class, Gömbös's tenure began swinging Hungary's political mood powerfully rightward. He strengthened Hungary's ties to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist state. And most fatefully, when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, he found in Gömbös an admiring and obliging colleague.

Gömbös rescued the failing economy by securing trade guarantees from Germany – a strategy which positioned Germany as Hungary's primary trading partner and tied Hungary's future even more tightly to Hitler's. He also assured Hitler that Hungary would quickly become a one-party state modeled on the Nazi party control of Germany. Gömbös died in 1936, before he realized his most extreme goals, but he left his nation headed into firm partnership with the German dictator.

Uneasy alliance
Hungary now entered into an intricate dance of influence with Hitler's regime, and Horthy began to play a greater and more public role in navigating Hungary along this dangerous path.

For Horthy, Hitler served as a bulwark against Soviet encroachment or invasion. Horthy was, in the eyes of observers, obsessed with the Communist threat. One American diplomat remarked that Horthy's anti-Communist tirades were so common and ferocious that diplomats "discounted it as a phobia."

Horthy clearly saw his country as trapped between two stronger powers, both of them dangerous; evidently he considered Hitler to be the more manageable of the two. Hitler was also able to wield great influence over Hungary not only as the country's major trading partner; he also fed several of Horthy's key ambitions: maintaining Hungarian sovereignty and satisfying the nationwide yearning to reclaim former Hungarian lands. Horthy's strategy was one of cautious, sometimes even grudging, alliance. How the regent granted or resisted Hitler's demands, especially with regard to Hungarian military action and the treatment of Hungary's Jews, remains the central topic by which his career has been judged.

Horthy's relationship with Hitler was, by his own account, a tense one – largely due, he said, to his unwillingness to bend his nation's policies to the German dictator's desires. On a state visit by Horthy to Germany in August 1938, Hitler asked Horthy for troops and materiel to participate in Germany's planned invasion of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, Horthy later reported, "He gave me to understand that as a reward we should be allowed to keep the territory we had invaded." Horthy said he declined, insisting to Hitler that Hungary's claims on the disputed lands should be settled by peaceful means.

Three months later, after the Munich Agreement put control of southern Czechoslovakia in Hitler's hands, Hitler allowed Hungary to annex nearly one-fourth of Slovakia. Horthy enthusiastically rode into the re-acquired territory (which was predominantly populated by Hungarians to about 88%) at the head of his troops, greeted by emotional ethnic Hungarians: "As I passed along the roads, people embraced one another, fell upon their knees, and wept with joy because liberation had come to them at last, without war, without bloodshed." But as "peaceful" as this annexation was, and as just as it may have seemed to many Hungarians, it was a dividend of Hitler's brinksmanship and threats of war, in which Hungary was now inextricably complicit.

Hungary was now committed to the Axis agenda: on 24 February 1939, it joined the Anti-Comintern pact, and on 11 April withdrew from the League of Nations. American journalists began to refer to Hungary as "the jackal of Europe."

This combination of menace and reward drifted Hungary closer to a Nazi client state. In March 1939, when Hitler took what remained of Czechoslovakia by force, Hungary was allowed to annex Carpathian Ruthenia, as well after a conflict with the First Slovak Republic during the Slovak-Hungarian War Hungary gained further territories. Regarding Transcarpathia, minor conflicts had occurred between Ukrainian nationalist groups and the Hungarian military before it was secured.

In August 1940, Hitler intervened on Hungary's behalf once again, taking Northern Transylvania away from Romania, and awarding it to Hungary. (Second Vienna Award).

But in spite of their cooperation with the Nazi regime, Horthy and his government would be better described as "conservative authoritarian" than "fascist". Certainly Horthy was as hostile to the home-grown fascist and ultra-nationalist movements which emerged in Hungary between the wars (particularly the Arrow Cross Party) as he was to Communism. The Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi, was repeatedly imprisoned at Horthy's command.

John F. Montgomery, who served in Budapest as U.S. ambassador from 1933 to 1941, openly admired this side of Horthy's character and reported the following incident in his memoir: in March 1939, Arrow Cross supporters disrupted a performance at the Budapest opera house by chanting "Justice for Szálasi!" loud enough for the regent to hear. A fight broke out, and when Montgomery went to take a closer look, he discovered that

And yet, by the time of this episode, Horthy had allowed his government to give in to Nazi demands that the Hungarians enact laws restricting the lives of the country's Jews. The first Hungarian anti-Jewish Law, in 1938, limited the number of Jews in the professions, the government and commerce to twenty percent, and the second reduced it to five percent the following year; 250,000 Hungarian Jews lost their jobs as a result. A "Third Jewish Law" of August 1941 prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jews, and defined anyone having two Jewish grandparents as "racially Jewish." A Jewish man who had non-marital sex with a "decent non-Jewish woman resident in Hungary" could be sentenced to three years in prison.

Horthy's personal views on Jews and their role in Hungarian society are the subject of some debate. In an October 1940 letter to prime minister Pál Teleki, Horthy echoed a widespread national sentiment: that Jews enjoyed too much success in commerce, the professions, and industry – success which needed to be curtailed:

Nevertheless, as the war years progressed, Horthy proved to be more protective of Hungary's Jews than many of his political colleagues, and much more so than his political rivals. In this light, his insistence that he was an "anti-Semite" may have been an effort to give himself political cover against the attacks from the extreme antisemitic elements of Hungarian politics.

War
The Kingdom of Hungary was gradually drawn into the war itself. In 1939 and 1940, volunteer units fought in Finland's Winter War. In April 1941, Hungary became, in effect, a member of the Axis. Hungary permitted Hitler to send troops across Hungarian territory for the invasion of Yugoslavia and ultimately sent its own troops to claim its share of the dismembered Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Prime Minister Pál Teleki, horrified that he had failed to prevent this collusion with the Nazis against a former ally, committed suicide.

In June 1941, the Hungarian government finally yielded to Hitler's demands that the nation contribute to the Axis war effort. On 27 June, Hungary became part of Operation Barbarossa and declared war on the Soviet Union. The Hungarians sent in troops and materiel only four days after Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Eighteen months later, more poorly equipped and less motivated than their German allies, the 200,000 troops of the Hungarian Second Army ended up holding the front on the Don River west of Stalingrad.

The first massacre of Jewish people from Hungarian territory took place in August 1941, when government officials ordered the deportation of Jews without Hungarian citizenship (principally refugees from other Nazi-occupied countries) to Ukraine. Roughly 18,000–20,000 of these deportees were slaughtered by Friedrich Jeckeln and his SS troops; only 2,000–3,000 survived. These killings are known as the Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacre. This event, in which the slaughter of Jews numbered for the first time in the tens of thousands, is considered the first large-scale massacre of the Holocaust. Because of the objections of Hungary's leadership, the deportations were halted.

By early 1942, Horthy was already seeking to put some distance between himself and Hitler's regime. That March, he dismissed the pro-German prime minister László Bárdossy, and replaced him with Miklós Kállay, a moderate whom Horthy expected to loosen Hungary's ties to Germany.

In September 1942, personal tragedy struck the Hungarian Regent. 37-year-old István Horthy, Horthy's eldest son, was killed. István Horthy was the Deputy Regent of Hungary and a Flight Lieutenant in the reserves, 1/1 Fighter Squadron of the Royal Hungarian Air Force. He was killed when his Hawk (Héja) fighter crashed at an air field near Ilovskoye.

Then, in January 1943, Hungary's enthusiasm for the war effort, never especially high, suffered a tremendous blow. The Soviet army, in the full momentum of its triumphant turnaround after the Battle of Stalingrad, punched through Romanian troops at a bend in the Don River and virtually obliterated the Second Hungarian Army in a few days' fighting. In this single action, Hungarian combat fatalities jumped by 80,000. Jew and non-Jew suffered together in this defeat as the Hungarian troops had been accompanied by some 40,000 Jews and political prisoners in forced-labor units whose job had been to clear minefields.

German officials blamed Hungary's Jews for the nation's "defeatist attitude." In the wake of the Don Bend disaster, Hitler demanded at an April 1943 meeting that Horthy punish the 800,000 Jews still living in Hungary, who according to Hitler were responsible for this defeat. In response Horthy and his government supplied 10,000 Jewish deportees for labor battalions. However with the growing awareness that the Allies might well win the war, it became more expedient not to comply with further German requests. Cautiously, the Hungarian government began to explore contacts with the Allies in hopes of negotiating a surrender.

Occupation
By 1944, the Axis was losing the war, and the Red Army was at Hungary's borders. Fearing that the Soviets would overrun the country, Kállay, with Horthy's approval, put out numerous feelers to the Allies. He even promised to surrender unconditionally to them once they reached Hungarian territory. An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to a conference in Klessheim (today in Austria). He pressured Horthy to make greater contributions to the war effort, and again commanded him to assist in the killing of more of Hungary's Jews. Horthy now permitted the deportation of a large number of Jews (the generally accepted figure is 100,000) to extermination camps, but would not go further.

The conference was a ruse. As Horthy was returning home on 19 March the Wehrmacht invaded and occupied Hungary. Horthy was told he could only stay in office if he fired Kállay and appointed a new government that would fully cooperate with Hitler and his plenipotentiary in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer. Knowing the likely alternative was a gauleiter who would treat Hungary in the same manner as the other countries under Nazi occupation, Horthy acquiesced and appointed his ambassador to Germany, General Döme Sztójay, as prime minister. The Germans originally wanted Horthy to reappoint Béla Imrédy (who had been prime minister from 1938 to 1939), but Horthy had enough influence to get Veesenmayer to accept Sztójay instead. Contrary to Horthy's hopes, Sztójay's government eagerly proceeded to participate in the Holocaust.

The chief agents of this collaboration were Andor Jaross, the Minister of the Interior, and his two rabidly anti-Semitic state secretaries, László Endre and László Baky (later to be known as the "Deportation Trio"). On 9 April, Prime Minister Sztójay and the Germans obligated Hungary to place 300,000 Jewish people at the "disposal" of the Reich--in effect, sentencing most of Hungary's remaining Jews to death. Five days later, on 14 April Endre, Baky, and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann commenced the deportation of the remaining Hungarian Jews. The Yellow Star and Ghettoization laws, and deportation were accomplished in less than 8 weeks with the enthusiastic help of the new Hungarian government and authorities, particularly the gendarmerie (csendőrség). The deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began on 15 May 1944 and continued at a rate of 12,000 a day until 9 July.

Upon learning about the deportations, Horthy wrote the following letter to the Prime Minister:

Just before the deportations began, two Slovakian Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and passed details of what was happening inside the camps to officials in Slovakia. This document, known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, was quickly translated into German and passed among Jewish groups and then to Allied officials. Details from the report were broadcast by the BBC on 15 June and printed in The New York Times on 20 June. World leaders, including Pope Pius XII (25 June), President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 26 June, and King Gustaf V of Sweden on 30 June, subsequently pleaded with Horthy to use his influence to stop the deportations. Roosevelt specifically threatened military retaliation if the transports were not ceased. On 2 July, Allied bombers executed the heaviest bombings inflicted on Hungary during the war. Hungarian radio accused Jews of guiding the bombers to their targets with radio transmissions and light signals, but on 7 July Horthy at last ordered the transports halted. By that time, 437,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz, most of them to their deaths. Horthy was informed about the number of the deported Jews some days later: "approximately 400,000". By many estimates, one of every three people murdered at Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew killed between May and July 1944.

There remains some uncertainty over how much Horthy could have known about the number of Hungarian Jews being deported, their destination, and their intended fate – and when he knew it as well as what he could have done about it. Some historians have argued that Horthy believed that the Jews were being sent to the camps to work, and that they would be returned to Hungary after the war. Horthy himself could not have been clearer in his memoirs: "Not before August," he wrote, "did secret information reach me of the horrible truth about the extermination camps." But the Vrba-Wetzler statement is believed to have been passed to Hungarian Zionist Rudolf Kasztner no later than 28 April 1944, and according to Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Kasztner passed it on to contacts who gave it to both Horthy's son and daughter-in-law by mid-May, when the deportations were about to begin.

It is often argued that Hungary's "relatively mild" anti-Jewish Laws, which were passed under German pressure, appeased the Nazis enough to create a relatively safe environment for the Jews before the 1944 German invasion. It seems certain that the survival of 124,000 Hungarian Jews in Budapest until the arrival of the Soviets would have been impossible without Horthy's years of foot-dragging reluctance to implement German orders. On 15 July 1944 Anne McCormick, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times wrote in defense of Hungary as the last refuge of Jews in Europe, declaring that "as long as they exercised any authority in their own house, the Hungarians tried to protect the Jews."

Deposition and arrest
In August 1944, the Nazis were distracted by their failing war effort, and Romania withdrew from the Axis and turned on Hitler and his allies. In Budapest, Horthy moved to reconsolidate his influence. He ousted Sztójay and the other Nazi-friendly ministers installed in the spring, replacing them with a new government under Géza Lakatos. He stopped the mass deportations of Jews, and ordered the police to use deadly force if the Germans attempted to resume them. He also reopened the peace feelers to the Allies, and began considering strategies for surrendering to the Allied force he deeply distrusted: the Red Army. As bitterly anti-Communist as Horthy was, his dealings with the Nazis led him to conclude that the Communists were the far lesser evil.

Working through his trustworthy General Béla Miklós who was in contact with Soviet forces in eastern Hungary, Horthy sought to surrender to the Soviets while preserving the Hungarian government's autonomy. The Soviets willingly promised this, and on 11 October Horthy and the Soviets finally agreed to surrender terms. On 15 October 1944, Horthy told his government ministers that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. "It is clear today that Germany has lost the war… Hungary has accordingly concluded a preliminary armistice with Russia, and will cease all hostilities against her." Horthy "…informed a representative of the German Reich that we were about to conclude a military armistice with our former enemies and to cease all hostilities against them."

The Nazis had anticipated Horthy's move. On 15 October, after Horthy announced the armistice in a nationwide radio address, Hitler initiated Operation Panzerfaust, sending commando Otto Skorzeny to Budapest with instructions to remove Horthy from power. Horthy's son Miklós Horthy, Jr., was meeting with Soviet representatives to finalize the surrender when Skorzeny and his troops forced their way into the meeting and kidnapped the younger Horthy at gunpoint. Trussed up in a carpet, Miklós Jr. was immediately driven to the airport and flown to Germany to serve as a hostage. Skorzeny then brazenly led a convoy of German troops and four Tiger II tanks to the Vienna Gates of Castle Hill, where the Hungarians had been ordered not to resist. Though one unit had not received the order, the Germans quickly captured Castle Hill with minimal bloodshed: only seven soldiers were killed and twenty-six wounded.

Horthy was captured by Veesenmayer and his staff later on the 15th and taken to the Waffen SS office, where he was held overnight. Vessenmayer told Horthy that unless he recanted the armistice and abdicated, his son would be killed the next morning. The fascist Arrow Cross swiftly took over Budapest. With his son's life in the balance, the Regent consented to sign a document officially abdicating his office and naming Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Arrow Cross, as his successor. Horthy understood that the Germans merely wanted the stamp of his prestige on a Nazi-sponsored Arrow Cross coup—but he signed anyway. As he later explained his capitulation: "I neither resigned nor appointed Szálasi Premier. I merely exchanged my signature for my son's life. A signature wrung from a man at machine-gun point can have little legality."

Horthy met Skorzeny three days later at Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's apartment and was told he would be transported to Germany in his own special train. Skorzeny told Horthy that he would be a "guest of honor" in a secure Bavarian castle. On 17 October, Horthy was personally escorted by Skorzeny into captivity at Schloss Hirschberg in Bavaria, where he was guarded closely, but allowed to live in comfort.

With the help of the SS, the Arrow Cross leadership moved swiftly to take command of the Hungarian armed forces, and to prevent the surrender that Horthy had arranged even though Soviet troops were now deep inside the country. Szálasi resumed persecution of Jews and other "undesirables". In the three months between November 1944 and January 1945, Arrow Cross death squads shot 10,000 to 15,000 Jews on the banks of the Danube. The Arrow Cross also welcomed Adolf Eichmann back to Budapest, where he began the deportation of the city's surviving Jews (Eichmann never successfully completed this phase of his plans, thwarted in large measure by the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg). Out of a pre-war Hungarian Jewish population estimated at 825,000, only 260,000 survived.

By December 1944, Budapest was under siege by Soviet forces. The Arrow Cross leadership retreated across the Danube into the hills of Buda in late January, and by February the city surrendered to the Soviet forces.

Horthy remained under house arrest in Bavaria until the war in Europe ended. On 29 April, his SS guardians fled in the face of the Allied advance. On 1 May, Horthy was first liberated, and then arrested, by elements of the U.S. 7th Army.

Post-war life


After his arrest, Horthy was moved between a variety of detention locations before finally arriving at the prison facility at Nuremberg in late September 1945. There he was asked to provide evidence to the International Military Tribunal in preparation for the trial of the Nazi leadership. Although he was interviewed repeatedly about his contacts with some of the defendants, he did not testify in person. In Nuremberg he was reunited with his son, Miklos.

Horthy went out of his way to record in his memoirs every indignity suffered at American hands, but gradually he came to believe that his arrest had been arranged and choreographed by the Americans in order to protect him from the Russians. Indeed, the former regent reported being told that Josip Broz Tito, the new ruler of Yugoslavia, asked that Horthy be charged with complicity with the 1942 massacre of Serbian and Jewish civilians by Hungarian troops in the Bačka region of Vojvodina. Serbian historian Zvonimir Golubović has claimed that not only was Horthy aware of these genocidal massacres, but had approved of them. However, American trial officials did not indict Horthy for war crimes. The former ambassador John Montgomery, who had some influence in Washington, also contributed to Horthy's release in Nuremberg.

According to the memoirs of Ferenc Nagy, who served for a year as prime minister in post-war Hungary, the Hungarian Communist leadership was also interested in extraditing Horthy for trial. Nagy said that Joseph Stalin was more forgiving: that Stalin told Nagy during a diplomatic meeting in April 1945 not to judge Horthy, because he was old and had offered an armistice in 1944.

On 17 December 1945, Horthy was released from Nuremberg prison and allowed to rejoin his family in the German town of Weilheim, in Bavaria. The Horthys lived there for four years, supported financially by ambassador John Montgomery, his successor, Herbert Pell, and by Pope Pius XII, whom he knew personally.

In March 1948, Horthy returned to testify at the Ministries Trial, the last of the twelve U.S.-run Nuremberg Trials; he testified against Edmund Veesenmayer, the Nazi administrator who had controlled Hungary during the deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, but was released in 1951.

For Horthy, returning to Hungary was impossible; it was now firmly in the hands of a Soviet-sponsored Communist government. In an extraordinary twist of fate, the chief of Hungary's post-war Communist apparatus was Mátyás Rákosi, one of Béla Kun's colleagues from the ill-fated Communist coup of 1919. Kun had been executed during Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, but Rákosi had survived in a Hungarian prison cell; in 1940 Horthy had permitted Rákosi to emigrate to the Soviet Union in exchange for a series of highly-symbolic Hungarian battle-flags from the 19th century, which were in Russian hands.

In 1950, the Horthy family managed to find a home in Portugal, thanks to Miklós Jr.'s contacts with Portuguese diplomats in Switzerland. Horthy and members of his family were relocated to the seaside town of Estoril. His American supporter, John Montgomery, recruited a small group of wealthy Hungarians to raise funds for their upkeep in exile. According to Horthy's daughter-in-law, Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, Hungarian Jews also supported Horthy's family in exile covering their living expenses, including industrialist Ferenc Chorin and lawyer László Pathy.

In exile, Horthy wrote his memoirs, Ein Leben für Ungarn (English: A Life for Hungary), published under the name of Nikolaus von Horthy, in which he narrated many personal experiences from his youth until the end of World War II. He claimed that he had distrusted Hitler for much of the time he knew him and tried to perform the best actions and appoint the best officials in his country. He also highlighted Hungary's alleged mistreatment by many other countries since the end of World War I. Horthy was one of the few Axis heads of state to survive the war, and thus to write post-war memoirs.

Horthy never lost his deep contempt for Communism, and in his memoirs he blamed Hungary's alliance with the Axis on the threat posed by the "Asiatic barbarians" of the Soviet Union. He railed against the influence that the Allies' victory had given to Stalin's totalitarian state. "I feel no urge to say 'I told you so,' " Horthy wrote, "nor to express bitterness at the experiences that have been forced upon me. Rather, I feel wonder and amazement at the vagaries of humanity."

He died in 1957 in Estoril.

Horthy married Magdolna Purgly de Jószáshely in 1901; they were married for just over 56 years, until his death. He had two sons, Miklós Horthy, Jr. (often rendered in English as "Nicholas" or "Nikolaus") and István Horthy, who served as his political assistants; and two daughters, Magda and Paula. Of his four children, only Miklós outlived him.

According to footnotes in his memoirs, Horthy was very distraught about the failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In his will, Horthy asked that his body not be returned to Hungary "until the last Russian soldier has left." His heirs honored the request. In 1993, two years after the Soviet troops left Hungary, Horthy's body was returned to Hungary and he was buried in his home town of Kenderes. The reburial in Hungary was the subject of some controversy in the country.

Titles and styles

 * 1 March 1920–15 October 1944: His Serene Highness the Prince Regent of Hungary

Full title as Regent
His Serene Highness Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary.