The counter-revolutionary admiral Miklós Horthy ruled Hungary from 1920 following the fall of Béla Kun’s short-lived communist regime. In exchange for supporting the Third Reich, the country got back territories it had lost after the first world war. The Horthy government passed antisemitic laws (in 1938, 1939 and 1941) and sent 100,000 Jews aged 21-60 to forced labour battalions where nearly half perished. Hungary did, however, resist Hitler’s demands to surrender Jews to the Nazis.

That might have been the end of it had Hungary – feeling the winds shift after 1943 – not attempted to negotiate peace separately with the Allies. ‘Horthy was not a fanatical antisemite,’ writes Ladislaus Löb, a scholar of German culture and Holocaust survivor. He was ‘an opportunist who tried to walk a tightrope between the German and Hungarian demands for more decisive anti-Jewish action and his fear of international ostracism and Allied retaliation’. Wise to the talks, Hitler sent in troops in March 1944. The process honed in other countries played out in Hungary in record time: a central Jewish Council was established to find, ghettoise, expropriate and then deport Jews. Between May and early July, 250 trains left the country for Auschwitz. Adolf Eichmann, the Shoah’s orchestrator, oversaw operations in person with help from police and local authorities. Of the 440,000 Jews deported during this period, 330,000 were slaughtered upon arriving in the camp.

Horthy walked a tightrope between the German and Hungarian demands for more decisive anti-Jewish action and his fear of international ostracism

Ladislaus Löb

The Vaada (Aid and Rescue) committee – which had already managed to evacuate Jews from Romania and Slovakia by sheltering them temporarily in Hungary – had already shifted into high gear. Löb calls Rezső Kasztner ‘the outstanding figure in [this] small group of Zionists who embarked on an unlikely attempt to halt the extermination of the (…)

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