I am neither a writer nor a historian, but in 1944 my father (Kálmán József) was more than an acquaintance of Admiral Horthy and has been a friend of Horthy’s Senior Aide-de-Camp, General Gábor Gerloczy. In November 1944 I was 18 1/2 years old, a labor camp escapee surviving in Budapest in a self designed military uniform and having freed […]
On June 21, 2017, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the Hungarian nation was able to survive in the 1920s and 1930s due to “some exceptional statesmen like Regent Miklós Horthy.” Never before did the Hungarian Prime Minister identify pro-Hitler Horthy, who served as Hungarian head of state from 1920 to 1944, as an “exceptional statesman.” The attempt to […]
In a bizarre speech Hungary’s right-wing authoritarian strongman, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, recently called Miklós Horthy an “exceptional statesman.” Admiral Horthy, also an authoritarian (although some called him a dictator) led his country as Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary following the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. He turned pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler in the 1930s and […]
I have known the dark ages of Hungary. As a child, during World War Two, I experienced first-hand Hungarian ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism. I managed to avoid deportation and murder in Auschwitz by fleeing to Palestine in 1943, along with 49 other Jewish children. Decades later, I returned to Hungary during the years of Communism. As a journalist writing for major […]
On December 12, 1941, just days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary declared war on the United States. His Prime Minister was László Bárdossy who was executed as a war criminal in 1946. Relations between anti-American Imperial Japan and pro-Hitler Hungary were warm and friendly and the Japanese frequently praised Horthy. (See rare Japanese newsreel […]
In 1956 about 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled to the West–among them 20,000 “unaccompanied minors,” mostly teenagers. These kids travelled alone; many of them came from state orphanages. A great number were apprentices who participated in the fights and also peasant and poor children from the countryside. Lajos Kiss was 13 years old when he escaped from an orphanage at Dorog, […]
Ronald Lauder, an American billionaire, prominent Republican politician, former ambassador to Austria and head of the World Jewish Congress, has Hungarian ancestry; his grandmother was born in Sátoraljaújhely. Recently, in an interview he named Hungary the most anti-Semitic country in Europe. (read here) . Lauder specifically mentioned the statues of Hitler-supporter Regent Miklós Horthy, a self-proclaimed anti-Semite who declared war on the United States. Horthy’s policies resulted in the death […]
