Chapter 3 - Lives: 1919 in the Postwar Trials of War Criminals

Summary

The standard popular history book of the 1950s on the origins of the counterrevolutionary regime that ruled Hungary between 1919 and 1944 classified the Horthy regency as a fascist system:

The Hungarian ruling class developed the first European fascism by applying old and new means of oppression, thereby showing – for the first time – what fascism, which would wildly ravage Europe two decades later and drive millions of people to war, looked like. One can hardly find a characteristic feature of Hitler's and Mussolini's dictatorships which cannot immediately be found in the Hungarian fascism. The fear of Bolshevism, the ruthless oppression of the working class and the wild racist incitement were the same in all these regimes. They all demonstrate the same unrestrained rule by the big capitalists and landowners, the same antiprogressive and anticultural attitudes, the same depreciation of the working man and the same social demagogy.

Thus, in 1919 and 1920, it was not merely the seeds of fascism which appeared in Hungary, but rather fascism itself. In the Hungarian fascism of the twenties and forties, not only the fundamental idea but even the participants were the same. In 1919 in Orgovány, and in 1942 at the massacre in Újvidék, the same Horthy stands at the helm; in the middle of the thirties, it was the same Gyula Gömbös, who adjusted the Hungarian fascism to the newly emerged Nazi movement, who was the leader of the extreme right-wing MOVE in 1920.[…]