What Hungary Lost When It Obeyed in Advance

In March 1944, the Third Reich occupied Hungary, a country that until then had been one of Berlin’s closest allies. One of those who arrived with the invading forces was a lieutenant colonel in the SS named Kurt Becher. The SS leader Heinrich Himmler, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidants, had tasked Becher with stealing the wealth and resources of the country’s Jews. Himmler, in ferocious rivalry with other high-ranking Nazis, was keen to expand his economic empire. Becher, a rakish equestrian and collector of paramours, was happy to assist—making sure to line his pockets in the process.

The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II by Adam LeBor Public Affairs, 457 pp.

Becher’s masterstroke was expropriating the family-owned Weiss steelworks and arms factory, one of Hungary’s most critical industrial assets. By this point, the Nazis had already exterminated millions of European Jews, so it wasn’t hard for Becher to bully the Weiss clan into handing their property to the SS. (Judicious application of torture and threats likely helped move things along.) Once the paperwork was finished, Becher arranged for the Weiss family to be ferried to safety in Switzerland—just as he had promised. Becher “was well educated, courteous, a gentleman who kept his word,” recalled one member of the Weiss clan after the war. “He was polite and businesslike.” 

One might ask why this “gentleman” didn’t simply kill the owners and take what he wanted. The answer provided by the Budapest-based British journalist Adam LeBor is at the heart of his fascinating book, which charts the fate of a country that became one of Nazi Germany’s closest wartime allies—and then tried, unsuccessfully, to extricate itself when it realized it was on the losing side. Becher sealed his deal with the Weiss family when both Berlin and Budapest were striving to maintain the illusion that Hungary was independent despite its occupation. By preserving the facade of a conventional business transaction, he could preempt complaints from the Hungarian leadership about the theft of one of their leading industrial enterprises. “Germany,” LeBor writes, “still needed Hungary as an ally.” Hitler required the cooperation of Hungary’s bureaucracy to wipe out the country’s Jews—the last large Jewish population left in Europe. 

As LeBor shows, the story of Hungary’s relationship with Hitler’s Germany was a complicated one. Right up until the occupation, Budapest had spent years as a close ally of the Third Reich. Like Germany, Hungary emerged from World War I bitter about its treatment by the victorious powers. (Hungary had fought as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but ended up as an independent nation after the empire’s collapse in 1918.) In the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Allies imposed a harsh peace that stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory and 3.3 million people. A brief communist revolution in 1919 and the far-right backlash that ensued reinforced a sense that Hungarian society faced an existential threat. The man who offered the only viable solution, in the eyes of many Hungarians, was Miklós Horthy, a rare figure to emerge from the war as a genuine hero. (Horthy had finished it as commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy—hence his peculiar status as an ex-admiral who ruled a landlocked country.) Having assumed wide-ranging powers as the national leader in 1920, in the immediate aftermath of the war, he embodied the feudal and reactionary mind-set of the Hungarian elite, which included a virulent strain of anti-Semitism.

And yet, as LeBor notes, “Horthy was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist.” His ideology “was a synthesis of authoritarian national conservatism, while Hungary was a managed quasi-democracy.” There was a measure of press freedom, and opposition parties were seated in parliament. But elections were fixed. 

The admiral looked with suspicion on all revolutionary impulses, on the right as well as the left. He included a few Jews (rendered acceptable by their social status and conservative views) among his friends. Even so, Horthy’s desperation to restore his national greatness throughout the interwar period brought him into sync with Germany. Hitler, another ex-subject of the Hapsburg Empire, knew how to exploit Hungarian weaknesses. On several occasions, the Führer made a point of handing Horthy snippets from his territorial gains. Hungary was the fourth country to join the Axis powers (in November 1940). In 1941, Budapest allowed German troops to pass through its (ostensibly neutral) country to invade Yugoslavia. Hitler lost no time in rewarding the Hungarians: “Northern Yugoslavia was added to the lands returned to Hungary under the two Vienna awards and the occupation of Carpatho-Ruthenia,” writes Lebor. “By the end of April, Hungary had recovered 53 percent of the territories lost at Trianon.”

Budapest would not get much time to enjoy the new turf. Within months, its soldiers joined Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union. It was soon clear that Hungary’s partnership with the Third Reich would drag the country into the abyss. In November 1944, as Soviet forces pushed into central Europe, Hitler declared Budapest a “fortress city,” meaning its defenders would fight to the last man. Three months later, the former jewel of central Europe looked like Stalingrad. Around 40,000 German and Hungarian troops had been killed; 80,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives. The savagery of the fighting helps to explain the viciousness of the Soviet invaders, who raped thousands of Hungarian women. Overall, some 300,000 Hungarian soldiers would lose their lives fighting for the Axis. 

But the number of civilians who died was even greater—most of them Jews murdered in the Holocaust. (The total also includes 23,000 Roma and Sinti killed in Auschwitz.) One million Jews lived in Hungary by the end of the 1930s (out of a population of around 15 million). By the war’s end, 550,000 were dead, gassed at Auschwitz, or worked to death in brutal “labor battalions.” The slaughter was engineered mainly by the “emigration expert” Adolf Eichmann, who had sent hundreds of thousands of other Jews to the killing centers.

The Jews of Budapest knew what this blue-eyed SS bureaucrat in the Hotel Majestic stood for. “When one of Eichmann’s officials asked for a piano, he was offered eight,” LeBor writes. “He replied that he simply wished to play the instrument, not open a shop.” One can easily imagine the terror Jewish leaders felt in his presence. They were even more astounded when Eichmann proposed a deal—an exchange of 1 million Jews for goods and materials. By this time, well into 1944, Eichmann’s boss, Himmler, was positioning himself for German defeat. Perhaps it was time to build “good will” with the Jews.

In November 1944, as Soviet forces pushed into central Europe, Hitler declared Budapest a “fortress city,” meaning that its defenders would fight to the last man. Three months later, the former jewel of central Europe looked like Stalingrad. Around 40,000 German and Hungarian troops had been killed.

That deal came to nothing. However, another would prove more successful, mediated by the “gentleman” Kurt Becher (Eichmann’s nemesis within the SS). Two Jewish leaders, Joel Brand and Rezső Kasztner, collected enough gold, jewels, and money to persuade Becher to authorize a VIP train out of Hungary for well-connected individuals; 1,700 Jews were ultimately saved. But Kasztner, who found a new home in Israel, would remain haunted by his dealings with the SS for the rest of his life. After the war, he vouched for Becher, helping him avoid Allied prosecution. Becher became a wealthy West German industrialist and, like so many other high-ranking Nazis, faced no accountability for his role in mass murder. Kasztner, in a sick twist of fate, was accused by fellow Jews of collaboration and was shot and killed by an assassin—an Israeli—in 1957.

Yet LeBor’s dark tale does offer moments of consolation. He has opened rich veins of reporting on the heroic efforts of neutral diplomats—the Spaniard Giorgio Perlasca, the Swiss Carl Lutz, and the Swede Raoul Wallenberg—who saved countless Jewish lives by offering havens in protected buildings or providing them with spurious citizenship. In many cases, LeBor notes, “the whole operation had no real basis in international law. It was all a giant bluff, a deadly game of wartime poker.” Wallenberg and Becher, who shared a love of horses, became friends. (The heroic Swede did not, however, manage to find common cause with the Soviets, who abducted him in January 1945; his fate is unknown to this day.)

Particularly compelling is LeBor’s account of Zionist fighters who passed as members of the fascist Arrow Cross militia during the occupation:

On one such mission, one of the young Jewish men in Arrow Cross uniform was recognized by someone from his hometown, who started yelling he was a Jew. A hostile crowd soon gathered, demanding that he be taken to the police station. At that moment, two more Arrow Cross militiamen appeared, drew their guns and jabbed the two fake Arrow Cross men in the back, and marched them off down a side street. Once out of sight of the mob, they embraced. The new Arrow Cross gunmen were actually members of Dror, one of the Zionist youth movements, who came to rescue their comrades. 

Many Hungarians protected their Jewish neighbors—a reminder that far from all collaborated with the Nazis. “In 1945, the Budapest Jewish community was the largest single group of survivors in Nazi-occupied Europe, although a large number emigrated to the West or Palestine,” LeBor writes. However, he notes, survivors faced a cold welcome from those who had appropriated their homes and possessions in their absence. As LeBor writes, Hungarians can’t claim the same inspiring record of behavior as the Danes or even the Bulgarians, who showed that it was possible to defy the Germans with determined policies.

It should come as little surprise that Holocaust commemorations in today’s Hungary are correspondingly mixed. Budapest boasts a Holocaust Memorial Center and a number of smaller memorials around the city, including a “row of metal shoes along the Danube embankment” where Hungarian Nazis shot their victims into the river. But LeBor notes a widespread nostalgia for the Horthy era and detects a “reluctance” to acknowledge Hungarian deportations of Jewish citizens to the death camps. (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has condemned anti-Semitism but has also been accused of flirting with it, has spent much of his term in office rehabilitating Horthy as a great Hungarian patriot.) When LeBor sets out to find the Majestic Hotel, where Adolf Eichmann once decided the fate of thousands, he discovers that it has been turned into an apartment building, with no indication of what occurred there. We should be thankful that Adam LeBor’s book fills the gaps.

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