Mindszenty the Martyr: Internal Catholic Debates on the Catholic Church's Approach toward Communist Eastern Europe

A common narrative describing the role that the Catholic Church played during the Cold War often goes like this: after Pope Pius XII's strict anticommunist “lonely Cold War,” his successors John XXIII and Paul VI changed the diplomatic approach toward the communist regimes. There is some evidence supporting this interpretation. It was John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris and its warning of a nuclear war that qualified the extinction of humankind as a major problem, not so much the fight against communism. Later, it was Vatican Ostpolitik, a diplomatic initiative under Paul VI, which aimed at a modus vivendi between the church and communist regimes to safeguard the sheer survival of local churches.Footnote ⁹ Even Frank J. Coppa, who regarded the transition from Pius XII to John XXIII as more fluid and saw greater continuity in Vatican diplomacy through the 1950s and 1960s, still emphasizes the difference between Vatican policies in the two decades and under the two popes.Footnote ¹⁰ However, we still do not know much about what impact these changes in Vatican diplomacy had on ordinary Catholics and their ideas about the Cold War and world peace.

Regarding Italy, Rosario Forlenza argues that Catholic anticommunism was not just a manipulative, negative strategy of right-wing political elites—a view that dominated earlier studies on anticommunism.Footnote ¹¹ It was, according to him, a popular ideology that was based on certain anxieties and experiences of many Italian Catholics. For West Germany, Siegfried Weichlein discussed the intellectual traditions of Catholic anticommunism and how they began to change already during the mid-1950s when their antidemocratic and anti-modern roots from the Weimar Republic slowly receded while new, liberal interpretations, particularly with regard to concepts of the Christliche Abendland, became more common.Footnote ¹² Vatican Ostpolitik, Weichlein argues, was favored by many German bishops because it supported their attempts of reconciliation with Poland. Even among Catholic expellee organizations, which had been very critical of negotiations with communist regimes, support for the new Ostpolitik initiatives grew after the 1960s.Footnote ¹³ Catholic peace activists on the other side of the political spectrum understood Pacem in Terris as papal endorsement of their positions because Pope John XXIII had avoided the harsh anticommunist rhetoric of his predecessors, and Pope Paul VI had sent his emissary, Agostino Casaroli (1914–1998) to eastern Europe, who signed a partial agreement with communist Hungary in 1964.Footnote ¹⁴

The debates around Cardinal Mindszenty's first visit to West Germany add more nuance to this debate: his qualification as a martyr who embodied an “extraordinary life” enabled West German Catholics and Catholics who did not agree with his political positions to still admire him as a person.

Even a left-leaning political magazine like Der Spiegel described Mindszenty in a mixture of admiration and irony as the “most stubborn Christian martyr of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵ Mindszenty, the magazine concluded, “was a useful figure for the anticommunist Pope Pius XII during the Cold War. But he became annoying for the Vatican since John XXIII and Paul VI had begun to negotiate with the East hoping for more liberal church policies.”Footnote ¹⁶ The differences between the Vatican and Mindszenty may have been exaggerated by Der Spiegel, but they certainly revealed rifts between Catholics that the Second Vatican Council had further opened.

Some conservative Catholics celebrated Mindszenty, who represented for them traditionalist Catholicism, the anti-modernist church of the pre–Second Vatican Council era.Footnote ¹⁷ They saw in him someone who withstood the tides of radical political, economic, and cultural change that characterized the period since the 1960s. For them détente and dialogue, the new phase in the Cold War, was merely another symptom of the much more comprehensive political, social, and cultural decline of Western societies. Such views collided with new initiatives for a “Christian-Marxist Dialogue,” a movement in the Catholic Church that had its center in Vienna, where Mindszenty resided.Footnote ¹⁸ Because of these controversies, Mindszenty's visits created problems for those Catholics who either represented the Vatican and its policy or who had sympathies for the old cardinal without fully agreeing with his political and social attitudes. They could bridge such contradictions by emphasizing his extraordinary life as a Catholic martyr or his credentials as an opponent to various totalitarian regimes. Such nuances were not easy, however, because the cardinal never really toned down his staunch anticommunism or his anti-reformist tendencies.

In his Bamberg speech on Pentecost Sunday, as in other statements, Mindszenty openly condemned the communist regime in Hungary. He described the current time as a “desert” where only a few “oases” were left that could ensure the survival of the Hungarian nation and a few guardians (“Mahner”) of the nation who would make a renaissance possible.Footnote ¹⁹ The cardinal compared the communists to the Mongolians who had attacked medieval Hungary in the thirteenth century. Their politics showed, according to Mindszenty, “the hand of the devil.” In short: the country had reached its lowest point in history.Footnote ²⁰ The high number of abortions, which had been made more accessible in Hungary in 1960, was a sign of the “nearing end of the nation.”Footnote ²¹ The latter could also be understood as a comment on the current discussions on abortion all over the West and particularly in West Germany and the United States, where the cardinal went on to visit numerous cities and communities in 1973 and 1974.Footnote ²² In Bamberg, Mindszenty called abortion a “fashion” that was spreading all over the world.

Although Catholics in West Germany might not have shared overwhelmingly Mindszenty's harsh condemnation of the West, they could still support him as a powerful symbol of the Catholic Church. By 1972, Mindszenty had been an example of a man with an “extraordinary life” for a quarter of a century.Footnote ²³ His experiences in communist prisons and the fifteen long years as an uncomfortable “guest” of the US embassy in Budapest had added to his earlier media image. Already in February 1949, the cardinal had made it to the cover of Time magazine, which depicted him in front of a blood red prison window with the caption “To die is to gain.” By this time, he had become the undisputed leader of anticommunism in Hungary, mobilizing hundreds of thousands who were opposed to the establishment of a Stalinist dictatorship. In the 1950s, two motion pictures fictionalized his martyrdom.Footnote ²⁴

Now, twenty years later, although many people had come to see this “living legend” in person, they did not necessarily subscribe to the specifics of his worldview. For many Catholics, Mindszenty was a modern martyr who celebrated Mass in a church that had once accommodated the relics of medieval Hungarian saints. Although these relics were only a faint memory, Mindszenty was alive and real, even if he had to use a microphone so that the crowd could hear his voice through loudspeakers inside and outside the church.

The local journals tried to capture the phenomenon of an ancient religious practice—a Mass in remembrance of a saint—in a mostly secularized context. One example shows how Mindszenty was described as an extraordinary persona with a body that held great symbolic meaning: “The image is deeply moving: This prince of the Roman Catholic Church, marked by the eighty years on his back but more by the suffering of many years of Communist imprisonments, it [the suffering] could not break his spirit and it could not bow his dignity.”Footnote ²⁵

Another journalist wrote that the cardinal was “marked by the suffering of the last decades” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 23, 1972, 16) Even the photographers seemed to have tried to capture the story inscribed in the body and the face of Mindszenty (see figure 2).

Figure 2.

Mindszenty, center, Archbishop Schneider to his left (ErzbfAB, Rep. 80, Slg. 6-3, Nr. 3309).

Of course, someone who did not know the story of the man could have thought that he was just an old man. But the superimposing of the extraordinary life on the body and face of the man gave those Catholics who did not necessarily support Mindszenty's strict anticommunist and antiliberal ideas a chance to admire the person and his strong faith. This was certainly true of Pope Paul VI and the archbishop of Bamberg, Josef Schneider. Schneider, who had participated in the Second Vatican Council as a council father, was a Catholic reformer who was not known for being critical of Vatican Ostpolitik. But he, otherwise not sharing Mindszenty's extremely conservative positions within the church, still praised him as “a martyr who was ready to heroically sacrifice in the defense of faith and human rights.”Footnote ²⁶ His status as a martyr bridged political differences. This becomes even clearer when we look at a short comment in the Bamberg church weekly, St. Heinrichsblatt, where the author, Hans Zech, states: “We encounter a personage that has almost become a legend, a symbolic figure of the harsh fate that the churches of the East have endured in this century. We experienced a personality almost not from this world, a person brutal violence cannot break but only elevate: Cardinal József Mindszenty.”Footnote ²⁷

In the same short editorial of the Catholic weekly, Zech criticized the Vietnam War—a war strongly supported by MindszentyFootnote ²⁸—as causing “national misery” for the United States, concluding: “Will Nixon find a solution during or after the talks in Moscow, a solution which is, according to the Vatican ‘possible, necessary and urgent’?”

Discussing Mindszenty's martyrdom in a general way allowed this Catholic journalist to praise Mindszenty and his life of suffering, and, at the same time, to stay loyal to Vatican policy and support Nixon's negotiations with Moscow. In this phase of the Cold War, many Catholics needed to praise Mindszenty as a “legend” and “martyr,” while at the same time supporting the Vatican's conciliatory politics toward the communist states.

The attitudes of exiled Hungarian priests, for whom anticommunism was part of their self-understanding, show an even more complex picture in their reactions to Mindszenty.

Although Mindszenty's martyrdom could be understood in a more general Catholic way, almost apolitically, this was not the case for those hundreds of Hungarian priests, nuns, and monks who had suffered persecution by the communist regime, who had been arrested, tortured, imprisoned in labor camps, and forced into exile. For most of them, anticommunism was a key element to their identity, an important part of how they understood their lives and told their biographical narratives. Discussions about trusting the Soviets and engaging in negotiations for them, therefore, meant that the proponents of dialogue or rapprochement had not understood, and, most of all, not experienced, the terrible reality of communist regimes. That said, almost all of them had lived in the West much longer than Mindszenty, mostly escaping during the 1956 revolution or even before.

For example, when Mindszenty arrived in Austria, conflicts arose with the bishop of the Hungarian minority in the Burgenland, an Austrian of Hungarian descent, who found that the cardinal overstepped his authority.Footnote ²⁹ In this case, a conflict over the question of who was entitled to represent this specific group of Austrian-Hungarian Catholics combined with the fear, expressed by many in Austria, that Mindszenty's loud anticommunism could harm the good relations with communist neighboring countries.

Similarly critical of Mindszenty were those priests and theologians, some Hungarian Jesuits among them, who actively supported the Christian-Marxist Dialogue, a movement that had started at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna.Footnote ³⁰ They expressed concerns about Mindszenty's “narrow political views” and said that his conservatism could be “harmful to the Hungarian Catholic Church.”Footnote ³¹

Very critical of Mindszenty's confrontational course against the communist regime in Hungary were also those Catholic priests who kept a close relationship with representatives of the Catholic Church in Hungary, a church that was trying to survive inside a hostile dictatorship. The 1964 agreement between the Vatican and the regime had not brought much relief although it did bring some form of “normalization” and the possibility for Hungarian priests to visit Rome and Western countries. The participation of bishops from Hungary in the second part of the Second Vatican Council had opened channels of communication between the beleaguered church and Rome, but the relationship remained difficult and full of suspicions on both sides, partly because some of them were informants to the Hungarian Secret Police.Footnote ³²

Even the priests closest to Mindszenty, his secretaries and advisers, represented different positions and painted different images of the cardinal in their publications or statements. One of the most influential priests around him was his secretary, József Vecsey (1913–1977), who organized and perhaps even, as some claimed, “manipulated” Mindszenty's activities and visits.Footnote ³³ Vecsey was a generation younger than Mindszenty and not yet sxity at the time, and he came from the same West Hungarian region as the cardinal and had fled Hungary in 1952. For some time, he worked at Radio Free Europe in Munich as the editor of the Catholic program. Afterward, Vecsey worked as a priest in Switzerland and France until he became Mindszenty's secretary in 1971. Since 1956, Vecsey had published various books about the cardinal, mostly hagiographic in character.Footnote ³⁴ Some of the other priests in Mindszenty's surroundings did not trust Vecsey; they even called him the cardinal's “bad angel.”Footnote ³⁵ They were concerned that he would push Mindszenty too far toward political activities the Vatican could find objectionable.

Another direction was represented by Father József Közi-Horváth (1903–1988), a writer and pastor of the Catholic Hungarian community in Munich who also played an important role in the propagation of the cult around Mindszenty. As a young priest, Közi-Horváth had supported the Christian Socialist movement.Footnote ³⁶ In 1939, he became the secretary of the Catholic mass organization Actio Catholica and sat as a member of the ruling Unified Christian Party in the Hungarian Parliament. Közi-Horváth was known as the only member of parliament who protested against the German occupation of the country in March 1944. In 1948, disappointed by the lack of a new democratic beginning, he left Hungary and escaped to western Europe, where he remained active in the Christian Democratic movement of central European exiles until the mid-1960s.Footnote ³⁷ It was Közi-Horváth who gave a long speech during Mindszenty's visit in Bamberg on the Sunday afternoon after the Mass. He portrayed Mindszenty mostly as a Hungarian patriot and enemy of National Socialism but also as a protector of the German minority. This was a different image of the cardinal that could appeal to a more liberal West German society.

Debates around Cardinal Mindszenty reflected a number of conflicts among Catholics in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. These questions included not only the relationship between the church and communist regimes but also questions about the representation of the Hungarian exiled Catholics in Austria, West Germany, and other Western societies. For many, Mindszenty was still the primate of the church he had headed since 1945, while others did not take his authority for granted. Some would admire him as a martyr even though they did not share his political views or his conservative attitudes in rapidly modernizing societies. But Mindszenty's triumphant visit to Bamberg not only revealed conflicts and complex reactions among Catholics but also covered up the deep crisis of Hungarian émigré politics in the West during that time.

Mindszenty, the Hungarian Diaspora and the Decline of Anticommunism

One specific group within the Hungarian diaspora in the West was particularly prominent in the propagation of the cult of Cardinal Mindszenty: they called themselves “freedom fighters” and cultivated the memory of the 1956 revolution against the Stalinist system and the Soviet invasion.Footnote ³⁸ They represented a very loud minority among the Hungarian diaspora.

Others, especially those Hungarians who had fled the country years after the 1956 revolution, about ten thousand in number, seemed to have been less interested in politics and more interested in creating better living conditions.

Shortly before Mindszenty's visit, the Hungarian state security apparatus, which closely watched the Hungarian diaspora, noticed that the most active, right-wing émigré organizations were in decline. This was more than just wishful thinking. The reasons for this decline were manifold. One of them was simply time. The memory of the 1956 revolution was waning, and it was not enough to commemorate every “round anniversary” of the events that represented the suffering of Hungarians (and others) under a communist dictatorship. The extremely dynamic West German economy produced so many jobs that by 1966 most of the about fifteen thousand refugees the country had accepted a decade before were mostly well-integrated into society. Footnote ³⁹ Some of them had married Germans, accepted German citizenship, or declared themselves to be ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). In this context, fewer and fewer Hungarians were interested in active participation or even passive support of the émigré organizations, especially the extreme right-wing ones.

Also, in stark contrast to the cardinal, these former Hungarians had not been in isolation since 1956. Still, they had come to Bamberg in May 1972 to celebrate the cardinal and Hungarian culture. The local Bavarian press was impressed by the number of Hungarian émigrés paying homage to the cardinal during his visit in Bamberg. They counted several thousand Hungarians, some of whom had come from many places in western Europe and from overseas.Footnote ⁴⁰ One newspaper wrote that “On Pentecost, Bamberg was Hungarian.”Footnote ⁴¹ Notably, this was long before Bamberg became a World Heritage site and tourist destination. Further, the local press wrote that Mindszenty was “a symbol for the Hungarian people, unified in the Roman-Catholic faith and a symbol for national unity.”Footnote ⁴² This ignored the fact that a full third of the Hungarian population was Calvinist or Lutheran. The cardinal reminded the audience that the Hungarian diaspora was responsible for safeguarding the nation, the family, and Hungarian national traditions.

Many journalists found that the gathering demonstrated a strong symbolic relationship between young people in allegedly “authentic” folk costume and the octogenarian. However, this was basically a show of the Hungarian Gymnasium Burg Kastl, a high school only a few kilometers away from Bamberg. It was the leadership of that unique school, the only Hungarian institute of secondary education in the Western world, that organized the celebrations. The school had been founded in 1957 with support from the Bavarian state government, the West German Ministry for Expellees (Vertriebenenministerium), which had not only supported German expellees but also eastern European refugees with money from the West German Catholic Bishops Conference.Footnote ⁴³ Many of the teachers had been Benedictine monks, an order with a long tradition in Hungarian secondary education. The pupils came from Hungarian émigré families from western Europe, and some came even from the United States, Canada, and Latin America. In 1972, the Catholic priest Ferenc Harangozó (1908–1991) was the managing director of the school.Footnote ⁴⁴

Harangozó had served almost a decade (1948–1956) in various Soviet labor camps before he fled to Austria. From 1960 to 1973, he taught at Burg Kastl until he became one of Mindszenty's secretaries, an event that demonstrates the close relationship between the school and Mindszenty's Austrian home, the Pazmaneum in Vienna.Footnote ⁴⁵ From the perspective of the communist Hungarian state security services, Burg Kastl Gymnasium educated its almost three hundred pupils in an “irredentist” spirit because they used the old Hungarian crest of arms with the crown and had a map of greater Hungary on display inside the school.Footnote ⁴⁶

Burg Kastl and its pupils and the Hungarian Boy and Girl Scouts gathered in Bamberg represented the ideals and hopes of Mindszenty and his followers: Hungarian youth educated in the spirit of “nation,” “faith,” and “tradition.” Wherever he would later go, the cardinal would always urge the Hungarian diaspora to raise their children in the national Hungarian spirit. But this was, as he would hear everywhere, an uphill struggle. The younger generations of the Hungarian diaspora quickly integrated into their dynamically developing host societies. Figure 3, which shows Mindszenty receiving flowers from a young girl in Hungarian costume in Bamberg, therefore, does not show the full picture.

Figure 3.

Mindszenty receives flowers from a young girl in Hungarian costume, probably on Saturday, May 20, 1972 (Hungarian Dance and Song Evening). (ErzbfAB, Rep. 80, Slg. 6-3, Nr. 3299).

If we look at the audience (see figure 4), we can see that popular youth culture, in the form of what was considered “long hair” at the time, was also visible among the attendees of Mindszenty's speech in Bamberg.

Figure 4.

Mindszenty and audience during the folk dance and song evening on May 20, 1972 (ErzbfAB, Rep. 80, Slg. 6-3, Nr. 3301).

This indicates that not all visitors shared the same strictly conservative attitudes that Mindszenty and his followers propagated. We, therefore, have to ask what other motivations they might have had to gather around the eighty-year-old Hungarian primate.

For one thing, the Hungarian diaspora did not have many occasions to come together, and since 1956, they never gained the attention of the West German media. Now they had a chance to assemble, to get noticed by the media, and, most importantly, to celebrate the living legend who would later (1986) be nominated for sainthood.Footnote ⁴⁷ But as for Catholics, Mindszenty's visit created both opportunities and problems for the Hungarian diaspora: it gave the diaspora an opportunity to celebrate their community and certain traditions and receive attention also from the German and local media, but it also led to inner conflicts and to questions about its place in West German society.

Mindszenty, Hungarian Right-Wing “Freedom Fighters,” and West Germany under Willy Brandt

Although anticommunism was in decline in West Germany, Cold War polarization and the question of the Ostverträge, the treaties with communist governments in eastern Europe, could still be mobilized for political gain, especially because these treaties touched upon sensitive questions of the eastern borders and the territories from where Germans had been expelled.Footnote ⁴⁸ With this, the oppositional Christian Democratic Union (CDU) gained ground in various regional elections and held an almost absolute majority on the federal level even though the party itself was not fully unified in its opposition to Ostpolitik. Still, this was in strong contrast to Austria, where anticommunism had to be toned down and all political parties respected the idea of “neutrality” in the conflict among the superpowers.Footnote ⁴⁹ When the social democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt brought the most important treaties with the Soviet Union and other communist states to the German Federal Parliament in the early 1970s, it passed only with extremely narrow majorities. As it happened, after the opening of the Stasi-Archives, the East German secret police paid a lot of money to bribe two CDU/CSU representatives to vote against their own parties to ensure the necessary votes.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this context, a visit by Cardinal Mindszenty had much broader political meaning for German domestic politics than an ordinary visit by an aged church leader.

Another aspect of the debate on communism during the 1960s and 1970s was its relation to the politics of memory in West Germany. At that time, a growing number of liberals associated anticommunism, not completely without reason, with right-wing political ideas.Footnote ⁵¹ Left-leaning liberals argued that the narrative of anticommunism had helped right-wing extremists, fascists, and even Nazi war criminals to find a place within the democratic societies of the West or even gain new elite functions as “specialists” in secret services or other operations.Footnote ⁵² Such accusations extended to former allies of Nazi Germany like Hungarians, Croatians, and Ukrainians. Since the 1970s, the growing debates around the meaning of anticommunism developed into a major conflict on memory politics focusing on the Holocaust. As we will see in the context of Mindszenty's most loyal public supporters, the suspicion of a connection between (extreme) right-wing politics and anticommunism was not completely unfounded.

The importance of the Cold War for West German society also explains why there was so much media attention around Mindszenty's visit. Radio Free Europe broadcast live the Mass Mindszenty celebrated in St Michael's Church in Bamberg. The radio station, which was based in Munich, had been one of the major contributors to Cold War culture.Footnote ⁵³ As Melissa Feinberg has demonstrated in her book on the early Cold War, this was a culture that both Western and Eastern propaganda had constructed, creating images of “totalitarian regimes,” concepts of “truth” and “lies,” thus creating a specific atmosphere of the time and its emotional regime.Footnote ⁵⁴ Since the 1960s, however, the Cold War culture in West Germany had changed. While the new SPD/FDP coalition government in Bonn discussed a possible closing of Radio Free Europe, which they regarded as a “child of the Cold War,” the radio station had been advised, prior to the Munich Olympic Games that started at the end of August, to keep the “Olympic peace” and not provoke the Soviets or other communist countries in the months leading up to the games.Footnote ⁵⁵ Furthermore, the improvement of relations between Bonn and eastern European governments, including the Kádár regime in Budapest, also altered the attitude of the West German government toward the Hungarian diaspora and refugees from Hungary in general.

Already in 1965, émigré politicians were shocked when the Bavarian police handed over a Hungarian refugee to the communist authorities.Footnote ⁵⁶ This case was so unprecedented that members of the Bundestag required an explanation from the government. The Bavarian police, in this case, claimed that the young Hungarian, a locksmith, had illegally crossed the border and had stated that he did not suffer from political persecution but had only sought a better paid job in the West.Footnote ⁵⁷ For the “freedom fighters” and their newspaper Nemzetőr, published in Munich, this was a major scandal. According to their ideologically filtered worldview, anyone in communist Hungary was a victim of communism and would therefore be eligible for political asylum in the West.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) also found the action of the Bavarian police questionable for similar reasons.Footnote ⁵⁹ A year later, the West German ministers of the interior of the federal states decided to allow eastern Europeans to stay, even in cases in which they had been denied asylum.Footnote ⁶⁰ This, according to Patrice Poutrus, was less a sign of increased anticommunism and more related to general trends toward liberalization in West Germany. Similar tendencies finally led to the loss of power of the CDU/CSU and the electoral triumph of Willy Brandt's SPD, who was now in coalition with the liberal FDP in 1969. The more liberal West Germany became, the more isolated those groups of Hungarians who propagated conservative or even extreme right-wing ideas were.Footnote ⁶¹

After Willy Brandt's election, the Ministry for the Expellees was dissolved and integrated as a department into the Ministry of the Interior. With this, the financial support for anticommunist eastern European émigré associations and media was drastically reduced. Émigré organizations tried to make up for these losses by soliciting donations from rich Hungarians living in the United States or Canada. In September 1970, Bonn froze its funding to the Hungarian associations.Footnote ⁶²

On the other hand, anticommunist ideas and groups were hoping to profit from the increased polarization between supporters of the SPD/FDP government and from the opposition to Ostpolitik. In particular, the Bavarian partner of the CDU, the CSU, heightened the controversy regarding Brandt's negotiations with Moscow and Warsaw.Footnote ⁶³ For the CSU and representatives of the German expellee lobby groups, Ostpolitik signified the permanent abandoning of former German territories in eastern Europe because the communist states insisted on guarantees for the borders of 1945.Footnote ⁶⁴

Therefore, most expellee activists supported Mindszenty's attitude not to negotiate with the East.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, after the CDU and the SPD agreed on a compromise, the treaties passed the Bundestag and expellee activists “found themselves more politically sidelined than ever.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The debate on the treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland, the so-called Ostverträge, reached its peak almost exactly at the same time as when Mindszenty visited the country. On May 17, 1972, only three days before the cardinal arrived in Bavaria, the West German parliament, the Bundestag, voted in favor of the treaties.Footnote ⁶⁷ One of the main reasons why the CDU/CSU's opposition to the treaties mostly failed was the fact that Washington, DC, after some hesitation, decided that a rejection of the Ostverträge by the Bundestag could jeopardize Nixon's own détente policies and so the US administration chose to support Brandt.Footnote ⁶⁸

One of the increasingly marginalized anticommunist exile organizations, which strongly supported Mindszenty, was the “European Congress of Free Hungarians” (ECFH, orig. Európai Szabad Magyarok Kongresszus). On the morning the cardinal arrived from Vienna, the chairing committee of the ECFH held a private meeting with Mindszenty in the residence of the archbishop of Munich. The “Congress” had been founded only a year earlier in an attempt to reverse the loss of members and of activists of the West German and other émigrés’ organizations. All these were dominated by former 1956 “freedom fighters.” The founding of the ECFH was a result of their new “European” strategy, which had three components: the first was the creation of a European organization to coordinate activities of Hungarian émigré groups from various western European countries; the second was to work closely with other national émigré organizations, including anticommunist exile groups from the Baltic states, Belorussia, Croatia, Russia, and Ukraine; and the third component was to appeal directly to European organizations such as the Council of Europe and the parliament of the European Economic Community. Thus, the “free Hungarians” decided to have their founding session in Strasbourg, France, where both European institutions were located. One of the concrete aims of this new organization was to protest the beginning of the Helsinki talks of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which were a series of negotiations between NATO and Warsaw pact member states. The idea for the talks was launched in 1969 by the Finnish government and would have enormous consequences for the Cold War and its end.Footnote ⁶⁹ Casaroli signed the Helsinki accord for the Holy See.

The “European Congress of Free Hungarians” represented only a small minority of the Hungarian diaspora. The founders invited only a few émigrés who shared their right-wing ideology. This excluded well-known journalists and writers from the most conspicuous literary magazine of the diaspora, the Új Latóhatár, which was published in Munich, and Hungarian exiled labor leaders, like Károly Boda, a member of the SPD. Those “reds,” they thought, could not represent the Hungarian nation.

Instead, the leading members of the “Congress” were mostly representatives of the Horthy regime who claimed, like Mindszenty, to continue the “Christian national tradition.” The president of the organization was the 82-year-old retired Hungarian General Lajos Dálnoki Veress (1889–1976).Footnote ⁷⁰ During World War II, Dálnoki Veress had served as the commander of the 2nd Hungarian Division until he was imprisoned by the Fascist Arrow Cross government in 1944. During the Stalinist period, he was incarcerated again by the communists. Freed during the revolution of 1956, he had headed the World Congress of Hungarians since 1958. Some émigrés regarded Dálnoki Veress as a legitimate national leader because Horthy had appointed him his successor (Homo regius). Dálnoki Veress was now an old man and not very active in the organization, but his presidency clearly signaled the political commitments of the organization he headed.

Others led the “European Congress.” One of the most influential émigré activists was the journalist, writer, and poet Tibor Kecskési Tollas (1920–1997), the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Nemzetőr.Footnote ⁷¹ Like other émigré activists, Tollas, who was fifty-one years old in 1972, had a turbulent past. Born into a family of military officers, he served in the Hungarian army during the war, and as a gendarmerie officer in the Jewish Ghetto in Beregszász (today Berehove, Ukraine) during the Holocaust. In 1947, he was sentenced for war crimes and served nine years in prison and in a labor camp until July 1956. He then probably participated in the revolution, though it is not clear in what capacity. After Tollas had fled to Vienna, he founded various publications and became a voice of the 1956 freedom fighter movement. During the 1960s, the Kádár regime organized campaigns against him, and parts of the Hungarian emigration kept their distance from him.

In 1975, Tollas complained that the Austrian Minister of the Interior prohibited a public lecture by him because of a protest by Simon Wiesenthal, and he alleged that a US Hungarian émigré journal, Magyar Hiradó, had participated in the “dirty campaign” against him.Footnote ⁷² Tollas was afraid that the “friend of the communists,” Willy Brandt, and the social democrats in West Germany, would one day also go after him. Throughout his life, Tollas denied that he was responsible for war crimes. But there was a stark difference between what he said in public and what he said in private.Footnote ⁷³ In one meeting of the Hungarian “Political Prisoners” association, Tollas expressed his admiration for Ferenc Fiala (1904–1988), one of the major propagandists of the fascist Hungarian Arrow-Cross movement, who remained active as an editor and author of numerous neo-Nazi writings and periodicals after his flight to West Germany in 1956.Footnote ⁷⁴ Tollas said—according to the Hungarian state security informant who reported on the meeting—“that he [Tollas] honored Fiala's work and his journal” and that Fiala could write things that he “could not write.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Tollas, in other words, tried to keep extreme right-wing ideas out of the Nemzetőr, even while he shared them.Footnote ⁷⁶ After all, the journal depended increasingly on donations from Hungarians in Canada and the United States who did not all agree with extreme right-wing views.

A close collaborator of Tollas was the former secretary to the Hungarian minister of Defense, Dr. Zoltán Makra. Makra left Hungary in 1949 and was very active in the network of former Hungarian officers. He was also supported by the West German secret service (Organisation Gehlen) that was built up in part by former Nazis.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like Tollas, Makra was critical of Radio Free Europe and the United States.Footnote ⁷⁸ He mostly worked as a journalist and writer, warning of the dangers of communism.Footnote ⁷⁹ Together with Tollas, he edited the Nemzetőr, and they regularly published articles about Mindszenty, even in the years before the cardinal had left the US embassy, a time when most other media ignored him.Footnote ⁸⁰ The monthly also published articles written by Mindszenty himself.Footnote ⁸¹

When Mindszenty arrived in Vienna, Tollas and other émigré activists immediately contacted the cardinal.Footnote ⁸² They were hoping that the international prominence and reputation of the octogenarian would give their movement a strong and much needed boost. In a meeting of the “European Congress,” whose members considered themselves to be a sort of “exile government,” the proposal to elect Mindszenty as “an honorary presidential member” found much if not unanimous approval.Footnote ⁸³ “If we could win Mindszenty,” one member said, “we can hope that his authority can help to improve the international recognition of the ECFH,” which was necessary because “the attempts to gain acknowledgement of the European Congress in Strasbourg have not yet brought any results.” During the meeting in Munich, the cardinal encouraged Dálnoki Veress and the delegation of the ECFH “to continue their self-sacrificing, important work” and announced that “he would acknowledge the members of the Congress with great pleasure.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In the end, however, the delegation did not offer an official membership to the cardinal. They invited him to their next plenary session in fall, which Mindszenty accepted, but in the end he did not attend. We can only speculate why this cooperation did not materialize. Probably both sides were cautious, and the Vatican would surely not have approved of this. Mindszenty continued to financially support the right-wing émigré organization, and although Tollas and Makra continued to publish articles about him they never met in public again.Footnote ⁸⁵

What did these former Horthy officers and émigré activists have in common with Mindszenty? Why could they not, like most other Hungarians who had left their country after the Second World War, just settle in West Germany and leave the past behind? Why were they obsessed with an era that was, for most others, clearly gone? For one thing, they had experienced what could be called drastic downward social mobility. Sons of officers, some from aristocratic or gentry families, were raised with the idea that they represented the Hungarian nation and its traditions, going back to the royal knights of St. Stephen. They had lost their high social positions, and they felt that they had lost two wars and the old kingdom, which was, until 1918, one of the largest states in Europe stretching from the Ukrainian Carpathians in the northeast to the Adriatic Sea in the southwest and Transylvania in the east. For them, the Hungarian Republic of 1946 represented a sharp historical caesura in contrast to the state governed by Admiral Horthy that claimed to be a continuation of the realm of St. Stephen founded in the eleventh century. Therefore, the communist regime under János Kádár was not only illegitimate because it rested on Soviet tanks but also because it denied this “millennial” national tradition. Worst of all, state socialism in their eyes was also morally ruining Hungary's youth and thereby destroying Hungary's future.

Therefore, both Mindszenty and the officers celebrated the Boy and Girl Scout movement and supported the Hungarian school in the Bavarian castle of Kastl. They desperately tried to reconstruct and preserve as much as possible the older narrative of the interwar regime, the so-called “Christian nationalism” in a time of radical political, social, and cultural change. They cultivated the myth of Hungarian “victimhood” and completely rejected, as had Tollas, Makra, and others, any acknowledgment of their role in the Holocaust, an event that in their minds never happened. Even if we have to be very cautious about this point because the communist secret services organized campaigns and sometimes also made up accusations of “war crimes,” the lack of reflection and acknowledgment of the murder of Hungary's Jewish population among these former elites is evident. This group of Mindszenty supporters consisted of elderly or aging men who were anxious about the changing culture in their home country as well as in the West and were unable or unwilling to participate in the quickly growing West German economy, which might have mitigated their sense of loss, at least financially.

This anxiety was only heightened when Hungary opened its borders in the early 1960s and allowed most of its citizens to visit western Europe and other countries on the other side of the “Iron Curtain, even as, at the same time, the East German regime erected the Berlin Wall. This created opportunities for Hungarians from the communist home and the Western diaspora to meet. Both anticommunists and communists had reservations about the possible “mixing” between “friend” and “foe,” but it was ultimately the Kádár regime that felt more comfortable with this new situation. Focusing on raising living standards in Hungary, the regime was not concerned that thousands of Hungarians would travel to the West, some of whom would never return. Some Hungarian tourists were even sent with the task to gather information for the Hungarian intelligence services. Radical anticommunists in West Germany like the “freedom fighters” therefore regarded everyone who visited communist Hungary as a “traitor,” although most émigrés were eager to spend time at home or with family members of friends who had stayed behind the “Iron Curtain.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Increased transnational mobility resulted in new friendships or relations with families in Hungary, which made it more difficult to make a clean distinction between “us” and “them.”

Mindszenty and the Debate about “Saint Stephen's Country” and the Legitimacy of the Hungarian Communist Regime

During Mindszenty's visit in Bamberg, the regional Bavarian press propagated uncritically his message that he was the “true representative” of the Hungarian nation and its traditions. They also emphasized that these national traditions were closely related to Bamberg and Bavaria. The Bamberger Nachrichten, for example, explained that the occasion of the visit of the cardinal and of several thousand Hungarians was the celebration of the one thousandth birthday of St. Stephen, the founder-king of the medieval kingdom of Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁷ The king had converted the pagan Hungarians to Christianity and thus stabilized the new state by closely embedding it within medieval Europe. The long relationship between Hungary, Bavaria in general, and Bamberg specifically began when St. Stephen married Gisella, the daughter of the Bavarian Duke Henry II; moreover, relics of the king and his son Imre had been stored in the church of St. Michael until the time of the secularization under Napoleon. Furthermore, the most famous medieval equestrian statue, the Bamberg Horseman, which stood in Bamberg Cathedral, has often been identified as King St. Stephen of Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁸

Both the anti-Communist exile community around Mindszenty and the Hungarian Communist regime attempted to claim the legacy of King St. Stephan for their own goals, emphasizing the constitutional significance the founder-king still had after centuries.

Related to the tradition of St. Stephen was the narrative of the “Holy Crown of Hungary,” a diadem the king had received from the pope in Rome around the year 1000. At the end of World War II, the crown had been taken away from Budapest by the Szálasi government, Hitler's last ally, and was found by a special US Army unit searching for precious art.Footnote ⁸⁹

A quarter century later, after Nixon had improved his relations with communist Hungary, many anticommunists, including the US anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, were afraid that the US government would hand over the crown to the Hungarian communist government, thus legitimizing an illegitimate regime.Footnote ⁹⁰ But in February, the US government assured the anticommunists that they were not planning any such move.Footnote ⁹¹ For the most conservative Hungarian émigrés, Mindszenty was still the “standard bearer” of this symbol of the millennial tradition of Hungarian statehood because he was the primate of the Catholic Church, the head of the institution that had crowned the Hungarian kings in the past.Footnote ⁹² That was the reason why the Hungarian communist regime had attempted, since it took power in 1948, to incorporate the heritage of the founder-king as a “progressive” king into its own legitimation strategy and therefore demanded the return of the crown from the US administration.Footnote ⁹³ For Mindszenty, as long as the crown was stored in Fort Knox, it was still free and could be used one day as a symbol for a legitimate Hungarian government that would replace the communist regime. These questions were also hotly debated by the Hungarian émigré press, a debate closely watched by the Hungarian state security services.Footnote ⁹⁴

In West Germany, the ideas of a Christian Hungarian nation founded by the saint-King could be understood in the context of the broader discourse on the Christliche Abendland, which had been developed mostly in Catholic circles in central and eastern Europe after World War I as a reaction against the rise of liberalism, socialism, and communism, ideologies that were all seen as a deadly threat to the Catholic Church and the aristocratic and royal traditions of central Europe.Footnote ⁹⁵

In the early 1970s, the state security agency of communist Hungary concluded that Hungarian right-wing activism in the West was in crisis and the narrative of the nation of “King St. Stephen” and the “holy crown” no longer held appeal.Footnote ⁹⁶ Since 1956, according to this analysis, the émigrés were waiting more than ever for a symbolic figure who could unify all their differences and quarrels: they found that figure in Mindszenty. The state security concluded: “As long as there is a right-wing, reactionary emigration, and as long Mindszenty is alive, we can count on a handshake between the two.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This was exactly what happened when the cardinal met representatives of the European Congress of Free Hungarians shortly before his visit to Bamberg on May 20, 1972. As we have seen, however, the handshake did not lead to an official cooperation and was hidden from the broader public.

Mindszenty's condemnation differed enormously from Pope Paul VI's approach toward communist Hungary. This was obvious when he welcomed a group of bishops, priests, and lay Catholics from communist Hungary in the Vatican on the same Pentecost weekend that Mindszenty visited Bamberg. A special train from Budapest had brought eight bishops, sixty priests, and three hundred laypersons to Rome on May 19, 1972.Footnote ⁹⁸ Like the Hungarian émigrés in Bamberg, they wanted to celebrate the millennium of St. Stephen's birth. The group went to see holy sites in Rome and Assisi, but the climax of the visit was the special audience granted by the pope. The Hungarian pilgrims were headed by József Ijjas (1901–1689), archbishop of Kalocsa and president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Hungary. Ijjas reported to the Hungarian state security, but was likely a double-agent who worked for Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican state secretary, embodying the complicated relationship between church and communist state.Footnote ⁹⁹ On Pentecost Monday, May 22, the day when Mindszenty celebrated Mass and addressed German expellees and émigrés from twenty-one eastern European nations in Frankfurt, Paul VI welcomed the Hungarian bishops and priests in the Vatican. The pope told the bishops and priests in a Latin address that “the not few impediments and difficulties they encountered must not dissuade them from their pastoral task. … Clerics must live a life that can be an example to the world at large” and, he continued, “these difficulties must not lead churchmen to fail to carry out their pastoral task to expand the church of Christ.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Three days later, the pope granted a second audience, now admonishing the entire Hungarian pilgrimage group, to “pass on St. Stephen's heritage.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ During the visit of the Hungarian pilgrims, a short contretemps occurred when an émigré priest from Munich approached the bus of the Hungarian pilgrims and said: “Maguk az ávosok!” (So you are the secret police agents!).Footnote ¹⁰²