http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/e ... 4.asp#4.3h(h) The Antonescu/Horthy Meetings with Hitler in April 1943
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(i) Background
1. The next link in the chain is provided by documentation on Germany’s relations with Hungary in 1943. During the Second World War, Hungary was ruled by a strongly authoritarian, right-wing regime, which had come to power in a bloody counter-revolution at the end of the First World War. Led by Admiral Horthy, whose title derived from the defunct Habsburg Empire and who functioned as Regent for the absent Habsburg Emperor, the Hungarian regime allied itself to Nazi Germany from early on, principally in order to recover territory from small neighbouring countries which it considered belonged to Hungary by the historic right of the Habsburg tradition.
2. In 1938-39 it joined Germany in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In return for German backing in obtaining territory from Romania in August 1940 and Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Hungarian government sent troops to participate in the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. Having achieved its principal goals in annexing territory from its small neighbouring states, Hungary now tried to pull out of the war on the Eastern front, and withdrew substantial numbers of troops. Following the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad, Hitler began to put pressure on Admiral Horthy to reverse this policy, and summoned him to a meeting on 16 and 17 April 1943, at which the German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, was also present. Hitler and Ribbentrop also used this opportunity to discuss with Horthy the question of Hungary's Jewish population.
3. A substantial number of Jews lived in Hungary; a figure of around three-quarters of a million in 1943-44 is widely accepted by historians. These people were already subjected to massive legal discrimination by the strongly antisemitic Horthy regime, which denied them basic rights such as entering the professions and enforced on them restrictions comparable to those obtaining in Germany under the Nazis before 1939. The Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross, was putting pressure on the Horthy government to introduce harsh new policies against the Jews. These measures, enacted from 1938 onwards, had been partly designed to appease it.
4. The subject of Hungary's Jews had already been the cause of friction between the two regimes of Hitler and Horthy. After the invasion of Russia, on learning of the Nazis’ intentions of deporting Jews to Russia, the Horthy regime began deporting 'alien Jews' (including Jewish refugees from Austria, Slovakia, Poland and Germany) to Körösmezo, close to the border with the General Government. From here, they were forcibly transported over the border into German-controlled territory. By late August 1941, when the operation was completed, 16,000-18,000 Jews had been transferred. The great majority of the Jews pushed out of Hungary in this way were exterminated by SS units in Kamenets-Podolsk (Ukraine), in a massacre on 27-28 August 1941. Only about 2,000 Jews who had arrived from Hungary initially survived.
5. In the following year, the ‘Third Reich’ stepped up its efforts to include the remaining Jews in Hungary in the 'Final Solution'. On 15 August 1942, the Hungarian representative in Berlin, Döme Szt"jay, reported to his government that
the Germans are determined to rid Europe of the Jewish elements without further delay and intend...to deport them to the occupied territories in the East, where they will be settled in ghettos or labour camps and made to work. The authorities have been instructed to complete these deportations while the war is still on. According to absolutely reliable information, Reichsleiter Himmler has informed a meeting of SS leaders that it is the wish of the German Government to complete these deportations within a year.
6. Two months later, the Germans officially approached the Hungarian government in this matter. On 14 October 1942, the senior Foreign Office official Martin Luther instructed the German embassy in Budapest to inform the Hungarian government of the reasons ‘which are moving us according to the will of the Führer to attempt a complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe soon, and to ask the Hungarian government to drive forward on its part the measures which are necessary for this purpose.’ These measures included the 'immediate labelling of all Jews’ as well as the preparation for 'deportation and transport off to the East'. These demands were passed on by the German representative in Budapest on 17 October 1942 to the Hungarian government.
7. However, the Hungarians comprehensively rejected the demands. In its reply on 2 December 1942, the Hungarian government made clear that it was extremely jealous of its sovereign rights and insisted that any 'solution' of the Hungarian dimension of the 'Jewish question' would have to take the specific circumstances in Hungary into account. It rejected the special marking of Jews and informed the Germans that as far as the ‘deportation of Jewry out of Hungary’ was concerned, ‘the Hungarian government possesses today neither the possibilities nor the technical means of lending governmental measures practical validity in this matter.’
8. The German government was clearly unhappy with this response from its military ally, and increased its pressure on Hungary to give in to its demands. On 15 January 1943, Luther reminded the Hungarian representative in Berlin, Döme Szt"jay,
that the Führer is resolved under all circumstances to remove all Jews from Europe already during the war, because these, as he (Szt"jay), to be sure, knows exactly, constitute an element of subversion, and in most cases carry the guilt for acts of sabotage which occur, and otherwise also occupy themselves mainly with espionage for the enemy. It fills us with very great concern that just one country in the middle of Europe that is friendly to us harbours about 1 million Jews. We cannot look on this danger in the long run without taking action.
However, in the following months the Hungarian government did not change its stance on the matter.
The meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943 was in part designed to escalate the pressure which the German government had already put on Horthy to 'solve' the 'Jewish question' in Hungary once and for all and to persuade Horthy to remove the obstacles which he had so far put in the way of the forcible deportation of all of Hungary’s Jews to territory controlled by the Nazi regime.
(ii) The meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943.
1. The meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16 and 17 April 1943 has generally been regarded by historians as one of the few occasions on which Hitler openly admitted the extermination of the Jews in Poland. The minutes of the meeting were taken by Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, who confirmed them and added his own recollections at the Nuremberg trials. There is no doubt about their authenticity. The minutes for the meeting on 17 April 1943 record a statement by Ribbentrop, in Hitler's presence, to a point made by Horthy:
On Horthy's retort, what should he do with the Jews then, after he had pretty well taken all means of living from them - he surely couldn't beat them to death - The Reich Foreign Minister replied that the Jews must either be annihilated or taken to concentration camps. There was no other way.
2. This blunt statement by Ribbentrop contributed to the conclusion of the judges at the Nuremberg trials in October 1946, that Ribbentrop had played an important part in the 'final solution' and was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
3. On 17 April 1943, Hitler almost immediately confirmed Ribbentrop's explicitly murderous statement at some length:
Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews there didn't want to work, they were shot. If they couldn't work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body could be infected. That was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism more? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.
4. Despite this open language, Horthy was clearly not convinced about the need to murder large numbers of Jews, much to Hitler's annoyance.
5. Some three weeks after Hitler's meeting with Horthy, on 8 May 1942, Propaganda Minister Goebbels noted down in his diary the following statement by Hitler:
The Jewish question is solved worst of all by Hungary. The Hungarian state is completely permeated by Jews, and the Führer met with no success during his discussion with Horthy in convincing him of the necessity for harsher measures. To be sure, Horthy is himself, together with his family, extraordinarily strongly interwoven with Jews and will also in future struggle with all his might against getting a really active grip on the Jew-problem. Here he is bringing forward thoroughly humanitarian counter-arguments, which naturally possess absolutely no importance in this connection. There can be no talk of humanity towards Jewry. Jewry must be thrown to the ground. The Führer has been at great pains to convince Horthy of this point of view, but he has only succeeded to a very small extent.
6. Thus it is clear that the statements by Ribbentrop (in Hitler's presence) and of Hitler himself on 17 April 1943 pose an insurmountable problem for anyone who wishes to argue, as Irving does, that Hitler neither knew nor approved of the extermination of the Jews. Whilst Irving never openly challenges the authenticity of the minutes of Hitler's meeting with Horthy, he attempts in various ways to minimise their significance, as we shall now see.
(iii) Irving's account of the meeting between Hitler and Horthy: Bending reliable sources to fit preconceived ideas, invention and fabrication
(A) Hiding key statements in footnotes
1. In the 1977 edition of Hitler's War, Irving starts off by hiding away in a footnote Ribbentrop's statement that all Jews had to be either 'annihilated or taken to concentration camps'. Irving resorts to the same tactic in his 1991 edition of Hitler's War. One might think, of course, that putting this statement in a footnote is no great crime against honest scholarship in itself - after all, it is still there in the book for everyone to read. But everyone, of course, does not read footnotes, and placing it there allows Irving to marginalise it almost out of existence.
(B) Citing other documents to discredit the minutes of the meeting.
1. Irving has referred repeatedly to other documents, which, he claims, indicate that Hitler, in fact, did not mention the extermination of the Jews during his meeting with Horthy. These arguments by Irving are utterly pointless, as the authenticity of the original minutes is beyond doubt, and never directly challenged by Irving. Not surprisingly, the documents used by Irving indirectly to undermine the official minutes fail to support his case and once more illustrate his flawed methodology.
2. First, in his footnote, Irving casts doubt on the reliability of the official minute by claiming that
Secret Hungarian records do not echo the wording in such bluntness. In a draft letter to Hitler on May 7, Horthy included a sentence - later deleted - "Your Excellency further reproached me that my government does not proceed with stamping out Jewry with the same radicalism as is practised in Germany."
3. This is pure invention by Irving. It is based on the fact that the draft letter by Horthy (disclosed by Irving to the court) uses the term Ausrottung, which Irving insists on translating as 'stamping out'. However, its true and generally agreed meaning is 'extermination', which is of course no less blunt than the term 'annihilated' used by Ribbentrop in the minutes. The complete passage in Horthy's draft letter should thus be translated as follows: ‘Your Excellency further reproached me that my government did not proceed in the extermination of Jewry with the same radicalism with which this is being carried out in Germany and there is also regarded as desired for other countries too.’ Clearly, this draft letter comprehensively fails to support the claim which Irving attaches to it.
4. Secondly, in his plea to the court, Irving cites a report submitted by the Hungarian representative in Berlin, Szt"jay, to Prime Minister Kallay in Budapest. According to Irving, the report summarised 'the talks between Hitler and Horthy and Ribbentrop' and did not say that the Hungarian Jews 'were to be liquidated, only interned'. In fact, the document is concerned with a separate conversation between Szt"jay and Ribbentrop. Only a very brief passage of the document deals with the Hitler-Horthy meeting. In this brief passage, Szt"jay reports that Hitler 'personally drew the attention of His Highness the Regent [Horthy] to the necessity of settling in a more thorough and penetrating manner the Jewish question in Hungary. No doubt His Highness the Regent has informed Your Excellency [Kallay] of this'.
5. Clearly, Irving completely misrepresents this source. As is plain to see, Szt"jay in his reference to the Hitler-Horthy talks does not mention that Hungarian Jews were 'only' to be interned. Also, it is no surprise that Szt"jay speaks merely of 'more thorough and penetrating' measures, and does not directly mention killing. Possibly, Szt"jay was not aware of the explicit statements made by Ribbentrop and Hitler on 17 April 1943. After all, Szt"jay himself had not been present during the meeting. More likely, though, Szt"jay was well aware of Nazi extermination policy, and merely cloaked the murderous programme in more neutral, euphemistic language. This was common practice. For instance, Horthy himself in his letter of 7 May 1943 to Hitler (see above) deleted the sentence which spoke of the 'extermination' of the Jews. The remaining letter made no direct reference to the fate of the Jews.
6. Thus neither Horthy's draft letter to Hitler on 7 May 1943, nor Szt"jay's report of April 1943 can cast any doubt on the remarks made by Hitler and Ribbentrop at the meeting on 17 April 1943. Irving's claims are totally irrelevant and simply designed - not very effectively - to undermine a reliable source, namely the minutes drawn up by Schmidt of the meeting.
(C) Invention, fabrication and falsification: placing Hitler's remarks at the meeting with Horthy on 17 April 1943 into a false context, in order to bend a reliable source.
1. As has been described above, Ribbentrop's comments to Horthy at the meeting on 17 April 1943 were almost immediately followed by a murderously antisemitic outburst on the part of Hitler. However, by removing Ribbentrop's preceding remark to a footnote, Irving places Hitler's subsequent statement addressed to Horthy on 17 April 1943 in an entirely different context:
Events in Poland were pointed to as providing an ugly precedent: there were reports of Jews roaming the country, committing acts of murder and sabotage... In Warsaw, the fifty thousand Jews surviving in the ghetto were on the point of staging an armed uprising - with weapons and ammunition evidently sold to them by Hitler's fleeing allies as they passed westward through the city. Himmler ordered the ghetto destroyed and its ruins combed out for Jews. "This is just the kind of incident that shows how dangerous these Jews are".
Poland should have been an object lesson to Horthy, Hitler argued. He related how Jews who refused to work there were shot; those who could not work just wasted away. Jews must be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, he said, using his favourite analogy. Was that so cruel when one considered that even innocent creatures like hares and deer had to be put down to prevent their doing damage? Why preserve a bestial species whose ambition was to inflict bolshevism on us all? Horthy apologetically noted that he had done all he decently could against the Jews: "But they can hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated", he protested. Hitler reassured him: "There is no need for that."
2. Thus, Irving implies, Jews were violent and disruptive in Eastern Europe and posed a threat. They had to be dealt with and 'combed out' like lice. But despite all this, Hitler did not want them killed.
3. This is pure invention on Irving's part. Whoever said "This is just the kind of incident that shows how dangerous these Jews are", Adolf Hitler certainly did not say it to Admiral Horthy at their meeting on 16-17 April 1943. Hitler did not mention the Warsaw ghetto uprising at all, which is not surprising, since it did not even begin until two days later. Nor did the uprising involve 50,000 armed Jews, as Irving implies, but at most a few thousand of them. Nor did Hitler mention Jewish partisan activity or Jewish violence, but simply poverty and degeneracy, something quite different. Irving also waters down the expression used by Hitler to describe the fate of those Polish Jews who could not work - verkommen - by translating it as 'wasted away', as if they had no assistance towards this fate by Nazi authorities who deliberately starved them of food.
4. Most seriously of all, however, the exchange reported at the end of Irving's account, beginning 'Horthy apologetically noted', did not occur on 17 April, as Irving clearly portrays by placing it immediately after his summary of Hitler's speech, but on the previous day, and in another context, namely during the first of the two men's meetings. On 16 April, namely, Horthy stated: 'He had done everything which one could decently undertake against the Jews, but one could surely not murder them or kill them in some other way. The Führer replied that this was also not necessary. Hungary could accommodate the Jews in concentration camps just like Slovakia did.' At this point in the meeting, Hitler and Ribbentrop were not being as open as they became on 17th. It was because he was not satisfied with Hitler's response, and was aware that he had still not satisfied the Nazi leaders with his, that Horthy repeated his question on 17th ('he surely couldn't beat them to death'), eliciting this time far more explicit statements of what they expected him to do, both from Ribbentrop and from Hitler, namely that they were to be put in camps if they could work, and killed if they could not.
5. One might add here that the majority of the Slovakian Jews were by no means 'only' put into concentration camps, as Hitler claimed on 16 April 1943. In fact, they were killed. According to SS statistics, 57,545 Slovakian Jews had been transported to Nazi-occupied Polish territory between 26 March 1942 and 31 March 1943 (only about 25,000 Jews were still left behind in Slovakia). The transports went to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Lublin. At the end of the war, only 284 survivors of these transports could be registered. The rest were dead.
6. What Irving does, therefore, is to bend this reliable source to suit his argument, misprepresenting the historical data and skewing the documents on which he relies, by placing quotations in a false context, removing part of the record to a footnote, and mixing up two different conversations in the text so that it looks as if Hitler is telling Horthy that the Jews should not be killed, only interned in camps. Irving increases the force of Hitler's statement by putting it into direct speech instead of the indirect, reported speech in which it appears in the original minutes.
7. In fact, the real sequence of statements on 17 April is perfectly clear: Horthy, unclear as to why the Nazi leaders were still putting pressure on him after all the measures he had already taken against the Hungarian Jews, repeated his question to Hitler and Ribbentrop: surely you can't want me to kill them? Ribbentrop replied yes, that is exactly what they wanted, kill them or put them in camps, and Hitler immediately followed by saying he should do as had been done in Poland, namely shoot those who refused to work in the camps, and ensure that those who were unable to work perished. Just to make it absolutely clear, Hitler used the analogy of a healthy human body ridding itself of tuberculosis bacilli. His meaning could hardly have been clearer.
8. In the 1991 edition of Hitler's War, Irving omits all reference to the Warsaw uprising in this disussion of the meeting. Instead, he offers two different accounts of Hitler's words:
In Hitler's warning to Horthy that the "Jewish Bolsheviks" would liquidate all Europe's intelligentsia, we can identify the influence of the Katyn episode - a propaganda windfall about which Goebbels had just telephoned him...Hitler warmly approved Goebbels’s suggestion that Katyn should be linked in the public's mind with the Jewish question. But the most persuasive argument used to reconcile Hitler with the harsher treatment of the Jews was the bombing war: From documents and target maps found in crashed bombers he knew that the British aircrews were instructed to aim only at the residential areas. Only one race murdered, he lectured the quailing Horthy, and that was the Jews. It was they who had provoked this war and given it its present character against civilians, women, and children.
9. Irving provides no factual evidence for these two claims in his footnotes. The word 'Katyn' does not even occur a single time in Horthy's conversations with Hitler.
10. To be sure, Hitler did know about the massacre, since Goebbels had recorded Hitler’s decision that it should be used for propaganda in his diary on 14 April 1943. But all of Hitler's statements in his conversations with Horthy were couched in general terms and differed little from his previous warnings about 'Jewish-Bolshevism':
It would surely be madness to believe that if the German army should not be in a position to stop the Russians, a Turkish-Bulgarian-Hungarian combination would be capable of it. It would be swept aside, and the Bolshevist Jews in Moscow would annihilate the intelligentsia and exterminate the masses by unimaginable means.
11. Katyn thus had nothing to do with it, and there is no evidence that knowledge of it made Hitler more antisemitic than he had been previously. The reference is pure invention on Irving's part.
12. Similarly with Allied bombing raids. Irving's claims that these lay behind Hitler's antisemitic outbursts in his conversations with Horthy rest on Hitler's statement to Horthy on 16 April 1943 that there was no need to be soft towards the Jews because
they were also responsible for the present war and the form which it has taken, in particular for the bombardment of the civil population and the numerous victims among women and children...Only one murdered, namely the Jew, who sparked wars and through his influence given them their present character directed against civilians, women and children.
13. And on the following day, Hitler told Horthy at the beginning of their conversation that the Germans had found detailed plans which showed that during a recent raid on Frankfurt the British bombers were not specifically instructed to destroy industrial targets but had been told they could also bomb residential areas (not quite the same as Irving's claim that they were told to aim only at residential areas). Also, there is no mention of Jews in this passage.
14. Immediately after this statement, Hitler added that ''the attacks themselves had been irritating but wholly trivial.' In view of the fact that he dismissed them as unimportant, it is highly unlikely that these bombing raids roused Hitler to an unprecedented antisemitic fury which he then expressed to Horthy. The antisemitic outbursts in his conversations with the Hungarian leader in fact only need explaining in Irving's scheme of things by such inventions and fabrications because Irving denies the normal antisemitic virulence of Hitler's views at other times. In fact, of course, there is massive evidence for the extreme nature of Hitler's antisemitism at other times, stretching back over several decades.
15. This boundless antisemitism is also evident throughout Hitler’s talks with Horthy. Hitler had mentioned among other things during these conversations that (in his view) the Jews were to blame for the 1918 revolution, the First World War and the Second World War, that they had had a very destructive impact on morals, on the currency and on the economy, that they were parasites, that they ran the black market in wartime, and that any country or city that did not get rid of them would go under.
16. In another passage not quoted or referred to by Irving, Hitler told Horthy that
one did not need to fight shy of pursuing the struggle against the Jews energetically on his part either. There must be no deviation in this, and anyone who believed in compromises in this question was fundamentally deceiving himself. Why should the Jews be treated with kid gloves?...They were also responsible for the present war and the form which it had taken on, and for the numerous victims among women and children.
Later, he added that 'the Jews had indeed started the war, and one need have no sympathy for them if the war now brought serious consequences for them with it.'
17. In view of all this, it seems very unlikely that a bombing raid which Hitler described as 'trivial' and which he did not link directly to the Jews, would have counted for very much in his mind. Hitler pursued his murderous policies against the Jews not because of the alleged criminality of Jews in Poland, the impending Warsaw uprising, or the bombing campaign of the Allies, but because of his all-consuming hatred of the Jews, whom he saw as responsible for almost every problem that faced Germany and the world. Finally, Irving's manipulation of the context of Hitler's remarks on 17 April 1943 cannot distract from the simple fact that Hitler openly admitted and justified the murder of the Jews in these conversations with the Hungarian leader.
(iv) Further suppression of evidence of Hitler’s radical antisemitism.
1. Hitler's antisemitic remarks to a meeting held with the Romanian military dictator Ion Antonescu, another of his allies whom he accused of disloyalty to Germany, on 13 April 1943, shortly before he met Horthy, are also suppressed by Irving. To be sure, on page 508 of the 1977 edition of Hitler's War, Irving does mention the fact that the two men met on 12 April to discuss Romania's position in the war. But he omits to mention altogether the fact that the official meeting went on for a second day, 13 April, during which, according to the minutes, Hitler harangued Antonescu in uncompromising terms about the 'Jewish Question':
The Führer then described the measures which had been taken in Germany in this area. The moment the Jews had been removed, the economy, cultural life and other areas had blossomed. In other countries, where the Jew-question had not been so energetically cleaned-up, as e.g. in Hungary, the circumstances were very difficult. The Jews were the natural allies of Bolshevism and the candidates for the positions occupied by the present intelligentsia who were to be murdered during Bolshevization. Therefore, in contrast to Marshal Antonescu, the Führer took the view that one must proceed against the Jews, the more radically the better. He (the Führer)...would rather burn all his bridges behind him, because the Jewish hatred is so enormously great anyway. In Germany, as a consequence of the clearing-up of the Jewish question, one had a united people without opposition at one's disposal...however, once the way had been embarked upon, there was no going back.
2. Once again, since the meetings of 12 and 13 April between Hitler and Antonescu are recorded in the same documentary collection, a collection with which Irving is fully familiar, the failure to mention the second day's discussion in a book, Hitler's War, which devotes considerable attention to Hitler's attitude towards the Jews, can only be the result of deliberate suppression.
(v) Conclusion
1. The significance of the meeting between Hitler and Horthy on 16-17 April 1943 only really becomes clear when we recall what happened subseqently. In May 1943 the Hungarian Prime Minister Kállay publicly rejected the idea of 'resettlement' of Hungary's Jews in the East until he received a satisfactory answer from the Germans as to how and where the resettlement was to take place. But the Nazi government did not abandon its designs for the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. In March 1944, Horthy was again summoned to meet Hitler. According to Horthy, at the meeting on 18 March 1944 Hitler complained that ‘Hungary did nothing in the matter of the Jewish problem, and was not prepared to settle accounts with the large Jewish population in Hungary’. Meanwhile, German troops marched into Hungary and took the country over. Szt"jay was appointed Prime Minister on 22 March 1944 of a puppet government. Already on 19 March 1944, the Eichmann Sonderkommando was in Budapest to organise the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. By July 1944, over 430,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. After a brief halt called by Horthy, who still retained some influence, the Germans staged another coup in October 1944 and installed the Hungarian fascist leader Szalasi as Prime Minister. Although plans were laid to deport more Jews and thousands were marched to Austria under terrible conditions, many of them dying en route, Auschwitz was now being wound up in the face of the Russian advance and there was no more major extermination, although thousands of Jews died in what had become a virtual ghetto in Budapest in the winter of 1944-45. All of this demonstrated clearly the paramount importance the extermination of Hungary's Jews had for Hitler.
2. Irving is at pains to obscure this in his account of the German leader's meeting with Admiral Horthy on 16-17 April 1943. Through bending reliable sources to fit his argument, misrepresenting and skewing historical data, misinterpreting sources and deliberately suppressing relevant information, he conveys the impression in his book Hitler's War that Hitler was actually opposed to the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, demanding merely their confinement in internment camps, a measure for which, Irving falsely insinuates, events in Poland (including the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which as we have seen had not actually taken place at the time of the meeting between Hitler and Horthy) provided a reasonable justification. This argument is untenable on historical grounds, and rests on a deliberate falsification of the historical record.
Regards,
Mark
