On several occasions during my time living and researching in Budapest, I had the pleasure of visiting the superb World War I exhibit called A New World Was Born – 1914-1922. It matched in quality, if not scope, Kansas City’s National World War I Museum and Memorial. Intended as a temporary exhibit, it remained open by popular demand for several years.
One recurring theme was that of a rider on horseback. Visitors to the exhibit first encountered life-sized riders in full parade dress, ca. summer 1914, eager to fight in a brief, patriotic war. In the next room, a horse fitted with a gas mask attested to the war’s true nature. At the end, visitors encountered Admiral Miklós Horthy astride his hallmark white horse, on which he rode into Budapest at the head of a counterrevolutionary army in 1919. He became head of state under the style of Regent in the following year and led the country until Nazi Germany deposed him in 1944.
While touring for the first time with an exhibit curator, I asked how Hungarians view Horthy today. I had my own understanding of the Regent but wanted to hear a Hungarian discuss the topic. The question made an impact and, at first, I worried that it had been insensitive. But the curator assured me that there isn’t an easy answer. Horthy’s legacy is controversial. It is often dependent on a particular Hungarian’s political views and conception of the nation. She struggled admirably, wanting to convey the appropriate nuance of a delicate topic.
Two years later, the United States Ambassador to Hungary weighed in on the same issue with a decided lack of nuance: “Miklós Horthy was complicit in the slaughter of Hungary’s Jewish population during the Holocaust,” he wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter). “The United States is concerned by the participation of a senior Orbán government official in efforts to rehabilitate and promote his brutal legacy.” Pressman was referring to János Lázár, a Hungarian member of parliament and former cabinet member, who praised the Regent at a ceremony commemorating his reburial. Conversely, Pressman and his U.S. State Department colleagues were conspicuously silent about Canada’s embarrassing commemoration of SS-Galizien veteran Yaroslav Hunka.
David Pressman is not a diplomat by trade. His pedigree includes stints in the Clinton and Obama administrations, experience at a white-shoe law firm and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and projects with the likes of George Clooney. That he does not speak Hungarian or have any particular expertise in the region (or in diplomacy generally) never factored into the conversation. His mission was never intended to be of the bridge-building sort.
Pressman’s actions in Budapest have been predictable. Politico, among others, has praised his tendency to “call out—and even troll” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. One post from his embassy’s official X account featured a joke quiz inviting readers to guess whether quotes came from Vladimir Putin or a Hungarian government official. Pressman appears with opposition political leaders more often than with high-level figures of his host country’s government. Social media controversies like the Lázár-Horthy fracas have been commonplace. By all accounts, Pressman is a serious, purposeful operator. I am confident that he is knowledgeable about complex topics like this one, and that he is aware of his impact on an audience that is less well-informed. I offer this humble analysis for that audience.
When Horthy rode his white horse into Budapest, he inherited a country in shambles in the wake of World War I. Romanian and Czechoslovakian troops ravaged Hungarian territory. Béla Kun’s ‘Red Terror’ had given Hungarians an early taste of Stalinism; the subsequent ‘White Terror’ brought comparable violence. Horthy’s regime restored much-needed stability.
In 1920, the victorious Allies punished Hungary with a cruel fate through the Treaty of Trianon. Though it was only the junior partner of a second-rate empire, Hungary suffered what was arguably the most severe punishment meted out to the defeated powers. It lost two-thirds of its territory, millions of ethnic Hungarians, and most of its valuable natural resources. Transylvania, an integral part of Hungarian national consciousness, now lay outside Hungary’s borders. Curiously, Woodrow Wilson’s belief in political self-determination did not apply here.
Two factors impacted the policies most associated with Horthy’s legacy today: the zeal to reclaim lost territory and the popular association of Jews with communism—an association common in the region but particularly pronounced in Hungary after Kun’s Red Terror. The modern observer need not sympathize with these considerations, but it would be naïve to dismiss them. Both influenced Hungary’s wartime relationship with Germany.
In 1920, Prime Minister Pál Teleki introduced a bill that capped, proportionally by population, the university enrollment of various ethnicities. Though the law did not mention Jews, it disproportionately harmed them. Some consider it Europe’s first twentieth-century antisemitic law, and Horthy did not block it. Conversely, Horthy brought to trial, for antisemitic crimes, members of the “Awakening Magyars Party” and blocked the parliamentary ambitions of the “Race Defenders Party”—both were early fascist groups. He also refused to grant any office to the virulently anti-Semitic Ferenc Szálasi. Considerations such as these led British historian Norman Stone to write, “It is quite wrong to identify Horthy with Fascism.” However, the Regent’s most damning legacy was his tolerance of a trifecta of antisemitic laws in 1938, 1939, and 1941. These laws limited Jews’ rights to employment, citizenship, and marriage. The laws proliferated under direct pressure from Germany. The impact on Hungarian Jews varied significantly by geography, profession, and wealth.
An inescapable reality of Central Europe in the 1930s and ’40s was Germany’s control of the region’s geopolitical fate. Hungary also found its economy increasingly reliant on exports to the Reich. Whether Horthy intended to undo part of the Trianon dismemberment or merely avoid occupation, he would require Germany’s blessing. Consequently, Horthy walked a clumsy tightrope between the two warring Western European powers while remaining steadfast in his anti-Bolshevism. Although Hungarian troops fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front, Horthy attached great importance to naval power, and never wavered in his belief that Britain would win the war.
Hungary’s non-Jewish population maintained a semblance of normality until 1944. For Jews, life was more complex. Some were pressed into service in labor gangs on the Eastern Front, while others lived and worked normally. The existing antisemitic laws were not repealed, but Horthy’s government resisted German pressure to enact new ones. Horthy told Hitler that Jewish businesses were vital to maintaining the Hungarian economy and war effort. In some respects, Hungarian society even thrived prior to 1944. Hungary mostly escaped Allied bombing, and Horthy temporarily won back Hungarian-majority regions of Slovakia and Romania that had been lost in the Treaty of Trianon. But Hungary’s complicity with Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia, and political overextension for Hungarian-populated regions there, proved too much for Allied sensibilities and contributed to an irreversible hostility from the West.
In March 1944, Horthy followed German instructions one time too many when he accepted Hitler’s invitation to meet in Austria. German officials employed subterfuge to detain him there while their invasion of Hungary commenced. Former Hungarian politician and Minister of Foreign Affairs Géza Jeszenszky argues that this ill-fated Austrian episode was Horthy’s “most serious mistake,” as it prevented the Regent from ordering military resistance. From there, it was all downhill. Officially, Horthy remained in his role, but now he had to contend with the likes of Adolf Eichmann and Edmund Veesenmayer. By this time, although Nazi Germany was in its death throes, the tragedy of the Jewish people began in earnest. Auschwitz-Birkenau took on an increasingly Hungarian character. Most Hungarian Jews were gassed upon arrival, as Holocaust architects sought to make up for lost time.
Horthy’s legacy is most frequently tied to this catastrophic period of German occupation. The Allies and the Catholic Church increasingly pressured the Regent to resist German deportations. In June 1944, Horthy moved troops to block deportations from Budapest and sacked the main deportation organizers in his cabinet. In a recently published book, historian László Bernát Veszprémy examines new documents related to this so-called “Koszorús action,” in which Horthy ordered armored personnel carriers to block deportation routes out of Budapest. Veszprémy calls it “quite unusual, especially during an occupation” and “an exceptional, rare event throughout Europe.”
But even on the delicate subject of rescuing Jews from the Nazis, there is nuance. Some argue that Horthy prioritized the safety of Budapest Jews over their rural counterparts, because Budapest Jews fared comparatively well while rural Hungarian Jews suffered near-annihilation. Such accusations might display a degree of hindsight bias, and it is worth considering that the Nazis had also saved Budapest for last in their urban ghettoization efforts. In October, Horthy’s government botched its attempt to switch sides via a clandestine approach to the Soviets, and German commando Otto Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son to force the Regent’s abdication. Henceforth, Horthy was powerless to control events. The fascist Arrow Cross Party, under the aforementioned Ferenc Szálasi, ruled until the arrival of Soviet forces. Budapest’s “Shoes on the Danube Bank” memorial commemorates this period of terror for the Jewish people.
After his abdication, Horthy lived in exile in Portugal. He received financial support from the influential Jewish Chorin family, who had once been regulars at Horthy’s bridge table. The Soviets, hardly known for their mercy, recognized his attempt to switch sides and declared he would not be regarded as a war criminal. Slovakia’s Tiso and Romania’s Antonescu experienced a different fate.
After my tour, the New World exhibit curator again addressed the subject of Horthy. Clearly, she felt a duty to ensure that this foreigner left with an appropriate knowledge of a subject that still hasn’t been put to rest in Hungary. She wanted to offer an understanding that was productive and advanced a healthy interpretation from her country’s perspective. In short, she was a diplomat.
As I prepared to leave Hungary ten months later, I stopped in a bookstore and purchased a book about Horthy as an incentive to inspire mastery of the beautiful, inscrutable Hungarian language. Horthy’s legacy, I believe, can’t be suitably translated.
