In the wake of the victory of the Italian right in the recent elections, much has been written in the international press about the return of ’fascism’.

From the spring of 1920, the regent travelled around the country in his private train to observe the results of his national leadership in all the important settlements.

It is important to point out that the anti-Semitic authorities were just as cruel to Jewish policemen as they were to any other Jew.

It must have been clear to everyone that a decision had to be made about whether they wanted to be on the side of the government, collaborating with the German invaders, or whether they would resign or perhaps join the resistance.

The ghettoisation of Jews and the establishment of Jewish police units took place in rural Hungary after the German occupation of 19 March 1944. The police was set up with the aim of maintaining the internal order of the ghettos and internment camps, as well as controlling entry and exit. In contemporary records, the police was variably referred to as ghetto police, auxiliary police, house police, internal police, but the most common name was Jewish police.

The picture of Horthy that emerges from the contemporary reports of Western ambassadors is hardly that of a gullible politician, but rather of a shrewd, albeit immoral manipulator. 

Objectively speaking, hundreds of unauthorized executions took place in the country, the victims of which were either ex-functionaries of the communist system or innocent Jewish traders and citizens.

This final piece deals with his even more chaotic relationship to the contemporary governing right, and his rocky road from Liebling-author to opposition prophet during the twenties and the rest of the Horthy-era.

The writer Dezső Szabó had many periods in his career—pro-Catholic, strongly protestant, bourgeoise radical, communist, anti-semitic and finally, anti-Nazi—, but in the early twenties, he was definitely going through a nationalist and anti-semitic phase. His contemporary speeches and articles provide much of the reason why contemporary historians label him an extremist.

Dezső Szabó was not only a nationalist, but also a strong opponent of capitalism during his entire life. The fact that this was hidden by socialist historiography only shows that many more myths have to be debunked by the Hungarian historians of today. 

In the articles of the years of transition, it was a basic guideline that the Roma are the people who avoid work and have a criminal tendency; who must be forcefully integrated into the system of the new, “democratic”, socialist Hungary.

In this article, we attempt to present the contradictory situation the Hungarian royal police found itself in after the German occupation of 1944.

The fact that Austria, which also lost the war, was being compensated at the expense of Hungary, made the situation even more unacceptable for Hungarians.

Hungary joining the League of Nations transferred the country from the shameful spot of a ‘warmonger’ to the ranks of ‘recognised’ nations.

‘I myself believe that extreme politics, whether right-wing or left-wing, is equally half-hearted, harmful and dangerous.’

Perhaps few in Hungary know why a Hungarian Jew who helped Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust and was later executed by the British is so revered in Israel today.

It is a fact that even between the two wars, what Hungarian Jews remembered about the Habsburgs between the two world wars was the inclusive liberalism of a bygone era, the period of the first Jewish minister, as well as Jewish emancipation and acceptance.

The early twenties in Hungary brought about not only a fervent nationalist discussion about Trianon, the Romani or antisemitism, but also illusory concepts regarding the Eastern roots of the Hungarian people.

Left-wing Zionism is barely alive, while right-wing secular Zionism has been dominant until now, but the previous Israeli prime minister was already something Nordau could never have envisioned: a kippah-wearing ex-officer of the IDF, Naftali Bennett.

This chapter of the interwar system needs to be reckoned with, if only to illustrate the progress the Hungarian right has made since then: today, small neo-Protestant Christian churches are allies of the right in Hungary, and not treated as adversaries.

If one spends some time in Hungary, one may come to the opinion that the Serbs a ‘stubborn’ and ‘rather barbaric people’. This kind of anti-Serbian language dominated contemporary British reports.

The British were tallying all the myths and legends about Kun, and sometimes they even gave credence to them.

The “Jewish world conspiracy” behind the Jewish swindler from Baltavár sounds like a bad joke, even though Istóczy was not joking: he became the most decisive and perhaps the only truly famous antisemitic politician of Dualist Hungary.

Sometimes post-war transformative justice did catch real war criminals, but sometimes completely innocent men like Antl were caught in its machine.

The question was posed as follows: was Hungary truly occupied, or did enough of Hungarian sovereignty remain to label the country “independent”?

Dov Gruner went on to become one of the finest examples of pre-state military heroism in Israeli history.

Few know that he spent his final years not battling Jews, but the Nazis, and most likely ended his life as an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, like his well-known friend, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky.

During this period, both sides tried to quote the writings of the Budapest-born founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, and both sides seemed to find their own version of Herzl that fit their arguments.

The report explicitly referred to Baltazár as an ‘enemy.’ The investigators were quite obviously not interested in identifying the real culprits.

In this two-part article we will explore the main reasons behind the conflict, which proved to be one of the most serious anti-Calvinist offenses of the period.