On October 15, 1944, Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, stepped before a radio microphone in Budapest and announced that his nation had concluded an armistice with the Soviet Union and was withdrawing from the war. It was the moment Hungary had been trying to reach for over a year, the desperate final attempt to escape the alliance with Nazi Germany before the Red Army overran the country. It lasted only hours. German special operations units had already kidnapped Horthy’s son, wrapping him in a carpet and flying him to Germany as a hostage.
With his son’s life as leverage and German tanks surrounding the castle, Horthy capitulated, withdrew his proclamation, and appointed the leader of Hungary’s own fascist Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, as head of government. The armistice was crushed before it could take effect, and Hungary’s fate was sealed for the most catastrophic months of the war. To understand how Hungary arrived at this moment, one must begin with the wound that defined its politics for two decades. After the First World War, Hungary lost roughly two-thirds of its territory under the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
Transylvania went to Romania, Slovakia and Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia to Yugoslavia. Millions of ethnic Hungarians suddenly lived in foreign countries. The grief and outrage over Trianon became the defining obsession of Hungarian political life, and it drove Hungary into Hitler’s arms. When Germany began redrawing the map of Europe in the late 1930s, Hitler offered Hungary something the Western democracies would not provide: the return of its lost lands.
The First Vienna Award in 1938 returned southern Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine, and the Second Vienna Award in 1940 returned northern Transylvania. The logic seemed inescapable to a generation of politicians who had spent twenty years nursing the humiliation of Trianon. Hungary’s prime minister, Pál Teleki, saw the trap closing. He had signed a treaty of eternal friendship with Yugoslavia in December 1940, only months before Germany demanded that Hungary allow German troops to cross its territory to attack that very country.
Facing an impossible choice, Teleki shot himself on April 3, 1941. His suicide note condemned Hungary for throwing away its honor and allying itself with scoundrels. It did not stop the invasion. Hungary participated anyway and acquired additional territory.
The true turning point came when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Hungary did not initially join the invasion, but on June 26, bombs fell on the city of Kassa, today’s Košice. The Hungarian government blamed the Soviet Union, and within days Hungary declared war. The bombing remains a mystery, many historians suspect it was a German provocation or an operation by Hungarian hardliners, but it gave Horthy the pretext he needed to enter the war.
The initial Hungarian contribution was modest. The Carpathian Group fought in Ukraine and acquitted itself adequately, though its equipment was outdated and its anti-tank guns were obsolete. By early 1942, the lightning victory Hitler had promised had failed to materialize, and Germany demanded that its allies contribute more troops. Hungary sent the Second Army, roughly 200,000 men under Colonel General Gusztáv Jány, deployed along the Don River in the summer of 1942 to hold a flank of the advance toward Stalingrad.
The soldiers had inadequate winter equipment, minimal logistical support, and weapons incapable of penetrating the armor of Soviet T-34 tanks. Through the bitter winter they froze on the riverbank, their officers reporting dire shortages of food, ammunition, and clothing. On January 12, 1943, the Soviet Union launched Operation Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh, a massive offensive aimed directly at the Hungarian-held stretch of the Don. The attack was overwhelming.
Within days, the Hungarian Second Army had ceased to exist. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Hungarian soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or swallowed by the frozen landscape in a matter of weeks. Entire divisions were annihilated. Of the roughly 26,000 Hungarians taken prisoner, fewer than 6,000 ever returned home.
The rest died in Soviet camps from cold, starvation, and disease. The Don bend disaster became a national trauma that wiped out a generation of Hungarian manhood, and it convinced much of the leadership that Hungary needed to find a way out of the war. Prime Minister Miklós Kállay began putting out secret feelers to the Western Allies through 1942 and 1943. The message was always the same: Hungary had been forced into the war by German pressure and would be willing to change sides.
The negotiations went nowhere decisive, but German intelligence was watching with growing alarm. After Italy’s collapse in September 1943, Hitler was determined that Hungary would not follow the same path. On March 19, 1944, German forces occupied Hungary in Operation Margarethe, a swift and nearly bloodless takeover of a nominal ally. Horthy was kept occupied at a meeting with Hitler in Austria while German troops crossed the border.
When he returned to Budapest, the Germans were already in control. The occupation had catastrophic consequences beyond the political and military ones. Hungary had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, roughly 800,000 people. Before the occupation, despite anti-Jewish laws and discrimination, Hungarian Jews had largely survived as a community.
That protection ended on the day the Germans arrived. Adolf Eichmann flew to Budapest to oversee the deportation operation. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, approximately 437,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces were deported to Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered immediately upon arrival. It was the most rapid mass murder of any Jewish community during the entire Holocaust, accomplished with the active cooperation of the Hungarian state apparatus and the gendarmerie, who organized the ghettos, loaded the trains, and implemented German directives with considerable operational independence.
In early July 1944, facing enormous international pressure, including detailed information about Auschwitz from what became known as the Auschwitz Protocols, Horthy ordered the deportations halted. The decision saved the roughly 200,000 Jews remaining in Budapest, at least temporarily. But by the summer of 1944, the military situation was collapsing. The Allied landings in Normandy, the Soviet destruction of Army Group Center, and Romania’s sudden switch to the Allied side in August all demonstrated that Germany was losing the war.
Horthy authorized desperate negotiations with the Soviet Union, and when the armistice was announced on October 15, 1944, the Germans and the Arrow Cross crushed it within hours. The period of Arrow Cross rule that followed was catastrophic for what remained of Budapest’s Jewish community. Szálasi’s militias conducted a campaign of murder in the streets, dragging Jews from their homes, marching them to the banks of the Danube, forcing them to remove their shoes, and shooting them into the freezing water. Thousands perished in these street massacres, and thousands more died in a ghetto under conditions of overcrowding, disease, and starvation.
Yet this period also produced extraordinary acts of rescue. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, and the papal nuncio Angelo Rotta saved tens of thousands of lives through protective passports, safe houses, and sheer personal courage. The Soviet siege of Budapest began in late October 1944 and lasted until February 13, 1945. German and Hungarian forces trapped inside the city, roughly 80,000 troops, fought with desperate ferocity while the civilian population suffered terribly.
Food ran out, water systems failed, disease spread, and people burned their furniture for warmth. On February 11, 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, approximately 40,000 troops attempted a breakout. It was a catastrophe. Fewer than a thousand reached German lines.
An estimated 38,000 civilians died during the siege. One of the most beautiful cities in Europe was left in ruins. After the fall of Budapest, the last Hungarian territory was liberated by Soviet forces in early April 1945, completing an occupation that imposed profound changes on the country. The price of Hungary’s wartime choices was staggering.
Between 550,000 and 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian soldiers died on the Eastern Front, in the Don bend disaster, in the Carpathian battles, and in the fighting across Hungary itself. Hundreds of thousands more died in Soviet prisoner of war camps, where conditions were so brutal that the total death toll is estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the bombing and siege, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were expelled after the war.
The immediate postwar period saw genuine attempts at justice. The Arrow Cross leaders, including Szálasi himself, were tried and executed. Szálasi was hanged in Budapest on March 12, 1946, after a public trial in which he remained as delusional as ever, lecturing the court about his ideology to the end. Several of his colleagues, including the interior minister Gábor Vajna, were executed alongside him.
Döme Sztójay, the prime minister who presided over the deportations, was executed in 1946. László Endre, the state secretary who had pursued his role with genuine ideological fervor, was executed in 1946 as well. Justice was real in some cases, but it was also selective and politically manipulated. Horthy himself was never tried.
Held in German captivity until the end of the war, then captured by American forces, he was released in 1948 and lived out his life in comfortable exile in Portugal, dying in 1957 at the age of eighty-eight. Hungary’s borders were returned essentially to those of Trianon, reversing every territorial gain purchased through alliance with Hitler. The country was occupied by the Soviet Union, and by 1948 the Communist Party under Mátyás Rákosi had taken complete control, imposing one of the most repressive Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. Hungary did not regain its sovereignty for four decades.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks, caused another two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee into exile, another hemorrhage of talent and population that traced its roots back to the wartime choices that had placed Hungary in the Soviet sphere. The final reckoning is complex. Hungary was neither simply a victim nor simply a perpetrator, though it was at different times both. Its political elite made calculated choices in pursuit of territorial revision and aligned itself with a criminal regime in exchange for gains that lasted only a few years and cost far more than they were worth.
It participated actively in the Holocaust with its state apparatus and too many of its citizens cooperating in the murder of hundreds of thousands of its own Jewish population. And it contained individuals of extraordinary courage who demonstrated that different choices were possible even in the worst circumstances. The soldiers frozen on the Don, the Jews murdered at Auschwitz, the civilians caught in the siege, and the rescuers who defied the machinery of death all demand an honest reckoning.
Understanding that full complexity, rather than retreating to comfortable simplifications, remains the essential historical task.