Was it a mistake for Miklos Horthy (the Hungarian regent) to seek a separate peace?

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Guys,

A presumption here seems to be that Horthy was well disposed towards Hungary's Jews. He wasn't.

Horthy's regime put tens of thousands of its Jews into unarmed labour battalions and sent them to work behind the Eastern Front. According to Yad Vashem some 40,000 of them never returned.

Horthy was a Hungarian nationalist and the recovery of Hungarian populations lost after WWI was his priority. This was achieved through his alliance with Germany. Once Germany had clearly lost the war, the only hope of retaining any of these, or even just preventing rump Hungary from becoming a battleground, was to seek peace with the Allies.

By comparison, the particular fate of Hungary's Jews was not a priority. Indeed, the Hungarian authorities aided the Germans by rounding up the Jews of Northern Transilvania for them while Horthy was still nominally head of state. Over 100,000 of them were killed.

The Jews of Hungary were not safe under Horthy, peace feelers or no peace feelers.

Cheers,

Sid

[wm]

The fact that many--very possibly a majority--of the Jews of Budapest survived the Holocaust suggests that something could have been and had been done in regards to this. The crucial question is, of course, was it actually possible to act earlier and thus to save more lives?

The Holocaust was unstoppable but in individual cases rescue actually was possible.
But it required planning, coordination, an intelligence-gathering network - i.e., a Jewish central authority, a group, a pseudo-government doing all that.

Individual haphazard (frequently contradictory), at the spur of the moment efforts were pointless. The Jews, world Jewry is directly responsible for that, that it wasn't done. Their leaders were disinterested, unable to cooperate with each other, preoccupied with the reconquest of Palestine.

The Poles had their Government in Exile, but the Jews had nothing. In desperation, the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto sent their pleas to individual Jewish leaders in the US!

In the case of Hungary some Jews demanding bombings, others protested that valuable Jewish lives would be lost. And all that almost two months after the first news about the Holocaust of the Hungarian Jews arrived. That was frankly criminal.

[wm]

Horthy's regime put tens of thousands of its Jews into unarmed labour battalions and sent them to work behind the Eastern Front. According to Yad Vashem some 40,000 of them never returned.

In contrast with armed real Hungarian battalions sent to fight and die by thousands on the Eastern Front?
The Jews were excluded from military service, it was reasonable they served in (the relatively safe) labor battalions.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

No, What was reasonable was that Hungarian Jews should serve in the armed forces like any other Hungarian.

The labour battalions were not "relatively safe". They were unarmed, in a hostile environment and abused by their own army.

About 5% (1/20) of Hungary's population were Jewish. About 42,000 members of the Labour battalions did not return. Proportionally, this is about three times as high as Hungary's military fatalities. How is this "relatively safe"?

Cheers,

Sid

[Futurist]

Hi Guys,

A presumption here seems to be that Horthy was well disposed towards Hungary's Jews. He wasn't.

Horthy's regime put tens of thousands of its Jews into unarmed labour battalions and sent them to work behind the Eastern Front. According to Yad Vashem some 40,000 of them never returned.

Sure, sending them to the Hungarian military to fight along with the rest of the Hungarian population would have been better, assuming that Hitler would have actually approved.

Horthy was a Hungarian nationalist and the recovery of Hungarian populations lost after WWI was his priority. This was achieved through his alliance with Germany. Once Germany had clearly lost the war, the only hope of retaining any of these, or even just preventing rump Hungary from becoming a battleground, was to seek peace with the Allies.

Well, Horthy did try to seek and make peace with the Allies and all that he got was a return to Hungary's 1920 borders as well as decades of Communist rule for Hungary. All of this might have perhaps been done with less--perhaps even much less--dead Hungarian Jews.

By comparison, the particular fate of Hungary's Jews was not a priority. Indeed, the Hungarian authorities aided the Germans by rounding up the Jews of Northern Transilvania for them while Horthy was still nominally head of state. Over 100,000 of them were killed.

The Jews of Hungary were not safe under Horthy, peace feelers or no peace feelers.

Cheers,

Sid

Do you blame Mussolini for the Holocaust in the Salo Republic? He was, after all, the nominal head of state there.

[wm]

The Jews in the labor battalions were unarmed so obviously Soviet soldiers weren't going to shot at them, weren't going to kill them. As simple as that.
Yes, the Jews were sometimes abused but really better abused that dead.
And really, Hungarian soldiers were abused too, it wasn't a soldiers friendly army, even in the ww2 torture was used as punishment (I suppose informally.)

I'm not going to believe in some found-on-the-Internet number, too frequently such numbers are divined out of thin air.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

What that tells me is that you have no answer to my points and are simply unwilling to engage with any evidence that does not confirm with your preconceptions.

If you don't like the figures I offer or their sources, what are your alternatives and their sources?

Cheers,

Sid.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Futurist,

The best way for Hungary to have emerged from the war with all sections of its population intact was not to go to war in the first place. None of its neighbours, so far as I am aware, had any claims on Hungary, so it was unlikely to be attacked.

Mussolini was voluntarily the RSI's head of government. As the RSI passed its own legislation on Jews and its police and militia took an active role in rounding up Jews, then the answer must be yes, blame has to be placed at Mussolini's door for the RSI's role in the so-called "Holocaust".

Cheers,

Sid.

[Futurist]

Hi Futurist,

The best way for Hungary to have emerged from the war with all sections of its population intact was not to go to war in the first place. None of its neighbours, so far as I am aware, had any claims on Hungary, so it was unlikely to be attacked.

Mussolini was voluntarily the RSI's head of government. As the RSI passed its own legislation on Jews and its police and militia took an active role in rounding up Jews, then the answer must be yes, blame has to be placed at Mussolini's door for the RSI's role in the so-called "Holocaust".

Cheers,

Sid.

If Mussolini can be blamed, then Yes, so can Horthy.

As for Hungary, I am unsure that staying out of the war was actually a realistic option for it given its important strategic location in between Nazi Germany and its ally Romania--a location that mattered a lot once Nazi Germany actually decided to invade the Soviet Union.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Futurist,

One thing we do know for a fact - Hungary emerged from WWII with the same borders it had at the start of 1938 but light of some 800,000 people, half of them Jews. So clearly joining the war was not a good idea.

We can never know exactly what would have happened if Hungary had remained neutral, but it is difficult to see it emerging any smaller or with the same level of military losses.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Futurist]

Hi Futurist,

One thing we do know for a fact - Hungary emerged from WWII with the same borders it had at the start of 1938 but light of some 800,000 people, half of them Jews. So clearly joining the war was not a good idea.

We can never know exactly what would have happened if Hungary had remained neutral, but it is difficult to see it emerging any smaller or with the same level of military losses.

Cheers,

Sid.

What I'm suggesting is that Nazi Germany could have forced Hungary to join the war in one way or another--as in, either through economic pressure or through some sort of invasion or military coup that would install a more pliant regime in Hungary, similar to what happened when Nazi Germany got rid of the pro-Allied King Carol II in Romania in 1940.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Futurist,

The Romanians themselves got rid of King Carol in 1940 for agreeing to the Vienna Dictat/Award.

The Germans intervened at the beginning of 1941 to make sure that General Antonescu, not the Iron Guard, led the country thereafter.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Futurist]

What was the Germans' problem with the Iron Guard?

[Sid Guttridge]

The Iron Guard was politically disruptive. It mounted a coup attempt in January 1941 with Himmler's tacit support. Hitler took the pragmatic decision to back Antonescu and the Army, despite the fact that the violently anti-Semitic Guardists were ideologically closer to Nazism, because he needed political stability in the country for the invasion of the USSR and the use of Romanian territory and its army during it.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

If you don't like the figures I offer or their sources, what are your alternatives and their sources?

It's not how it works and you should've known it. The burden of proof is on the claimant.
You haven't provided any evidence yet so don't expect any engagement.

And please don't confuse losses with deaths - two entirely different things.

btw, all the three Hungarian Armies were almost completely destroyed.
According to The Royal Hungarian Army in World War II only in the battle of Don the 211,000 strong 2nd Army sustained 105,000 casualties. And that's included 77,288 missing soldiers, never to be found.
30 percent of Hungarian POWs never returned home from the Gulag.

That it was better to be a Hungarian soldier than a Jewish laborer is a fantasy.