The Germans had demanded the deportation of the Hungarian Jewry long before the German occupation. A note in October 1942, in which German Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Luther summarised his negotiations with Sztójay, the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin at the time, openly mentions the German demand and the fact that it had come directly from Adolf Hitler. According to the text, the ‘handling’ of Jews in Hungary is ‘urgent’.

US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman caused quite an outrage with his recent decision to invite Jobbik president Márton Gyöngyösi to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Pesach at his residence. Gyöngyösi called for the creation of a list of Hungarian politicians of Jewish ancestry some years ago.

While some of the reservations regarding Easter-related folk traditions articulated from a female perspective can be appreciated, it is questionable whether it makes sense to conduct a Bolshevik-style anti-tradition campaign against rural folk customs. Of course, it is important that this Easter pouring of water in a traditional Hungarian family should be done with the consent of the girls. But it is pointless to pretend that there is any connection between that and the rape culture in the art world.

The fact that the war criminal Apaczeller was a Communist was not mentioned in the press at the time, except for the Jewish newspaper Új Élet…It is perhaps not surprising that the Communist state only dared to leak essential information about the case and that the majority of newspapers remained silent about Apaczeller’s ‘transformation’.

The Communists (should have) had to face up to the fact that their main supporter was the Soviet army, which had first liberated Hungary, only to then occupy it. This was particularly unpleasant in the context of 1848, since the revolution had been defeated by the troops of Tsarist Russia, which aided the Austrians, and the main demand of the revolution was that there should be no foreign troops in Hungary.

How long do we have to put up with the relativisation of the Holocaust, and the irresponsible usage of the ‘Nazi’ attribute? Does the wish to overthrow Viktor Orbán really justify anything now?

‘The significance of Western arms donations is grossly overestimated. This is not helped by a Western press that has sunk to the level of the Pravda, stifling even the slightest attempts at sober analysis and objective discussion.’

Beinart’s reasoning strongly echoes the views of anti-Semites, who also argue that Israel can never be a democracy because of its Jewish character. Their argument goes something like this: Jews are incapable of running a country and, because they don’t want to work, they can only survive by oppressing non-Jews. This view, incidentally, also appeared in German propaganda in the 1930s.

According to the sources reviewed, it is evident that Jewish communities were subjected to the same extent of plundering by the short-lived Communist regime in 1919 as the Christian churches.

Rodrigo Ballester of MCC Budapest warns that we should expect even stronger pressure on gender issues from the EU in the near future. This case underscores the importance of paying close attention to the fine print of EU contracts, as seemingly minor details can have significant impacts on the allocation of funds.

How come, compared to what is going on in Western Europe, Hungary seems to be an island of peace for gay and trans people? How can it be that the Hungarian government is constantly accused internationally of homophobic campaigns, yet it is not here that the murders and rapes, the thousands of atrocities that occur every year, happen, but in the liberal West?

To this day, neither the exact date nor the manner of the death of famous Hungarian novelist Jenő Rejtő is known. ‘P. Howard’ disappeared in a labour camp on the Eastern Front in early 1943.

‘Many of the causes he promoted used to be thought of (by the ignorant) as “right-wing” and have now become almost, or entirely, mainstream.’

‘The Hungarian prime minister not only understands the people, but is also able to give direction and to synthesise. He can bring the people’s expectations in line with what is achievable.’

‘We need the United States and NATO to say to Russia, “Okay, we get it. NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia.” In my view, that is not a defeat of NATO. That is just common sense.’

Turkey’s relations with NATO have been contentious over the years, but this is not unique among the member states and the parties have always managed to resolve their differences.

Paradoxically, Communist Béla Kun and the contemporary nationalist racists had more in common in terms of their views than the Communist leader had with the social-democratic and the left-leaning bourgeois émigrés.

During the great show trials of the late 1940s and 1950s, the Communists often held small ‘side trials’, which provided ample opportunity to extract and collect further compromising data and testimonies against the primary targets, as well as to conduct silent showdowns and to set the course for later trials. This is how the Archbishop Grősz trial led to the arrest and imprisonment of some 50 people, including well-known Hungarian monarchists.

Under the housing scheme, six thousand flats were handed over to families living in wagons in Budapest alone, and nearly two hundred in country towns such as Miskolc.

Just as some Christians had trouble accounting for their role in the 1918 Aster Revolution and the 1919 Communist coup d’état, some Jews also had difficulty facing their former position in terms of these events.

The majority of the refugees were intellectuals, mostly from Transylvania, followed by those from what is Slovakia, Serbia and Austria today, but there were also some who fled to Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A good politician comes to power with a ‘government of his friends’ already in his mind. The book emphasizes the concept of ‘friends’, because when you want to run a government, you have to appoint people to key positions, who have to be people that you as a leader trust.

Aversion to work was not unique to the leaders of the emigration. After a while, Mihály Révész, a social-democratic journalist in exile, had enough of living abroad and tried to get a job in Budapest. But when his left-wing friends found him a job as a manual worker, he turned it down, indignantly declaring ‘I won’t be a street sweeper’.

The gap between reality and the striving for a pure Christian social life angered many conservative public figures in the Horthy era. In his diary, Prohászka wrote that for Hungarian men, ‘using a prostitute is like drinking a cup of coffee’.

Although the official Hungarian propaganda constantly portrayed the ‘dark figures’ of the leftist emigration as plotting from abroad against Hungary, the surviving primary sources show a picture of ineffectual losers fighting among themselves.

While generational differences pushed one group of young men into the camp of the contemporary nationalist right, that did not necessarily determine their later life choices. Generational experiences did define men to some extent—but it was political and moral choices that had the final say.

According to an anti-Zionist pamphlet published during the Republic of Councils, Zionism ‘is nothing but a Jewish version of clerical reaction’ and was to be ‘fully eradicated.’

When Arrow Cross dictator Ferenc Szálasi took over on 15 October 1944, the new authorities required all civil servants to pledge allegiance to them. It was then that Mindszenty prepared a document entitled ‘Juramentum non’ (‘no oath’ in Latin.) The motto of the document was: ‘One cannot serve the [Arrow Cross] revolution and the Church at the same time.’

Budaváry’s biography needs to be amended to also include his actions during the Holocaust, which distinguish him from other antisemitic politicians.

The death rate in the French camps was horribly high: historian Tamás Stark estimates that 10,000 of the 40,000 Hungarian POWs died.