In mid-1919, a wave of brutal paramilitary violence broke across Hungary. The ensuing White Terror involved the killing, internment, torture, expulsion, and robbery of tens of thousands of Hungarian citizens, many of them Jews. The perpetrators included military officers, university students, aristocrats, and other recruits organized into several mobile, ultraviolent battalions. They enjoyed the support of—or at least received little discouragement from—the counterrevolutionary forces led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, who were in the midst of tightening their hold on Hungary in the wake of defeat in World War I and two failed left-wing revolutions. Starting with Oscar Jászi's Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary (London, 1924), scholars have attempted to make sense of this postwar violence. Now, a century later, we have an important new study by Béla Bodó, a professor of East European history at the University of Bonn. It offers a deeply researched, original, intelligent, and unsparing analysis of the White Terror.
The book opens with a triple murder committed in plain sight. In August 1919, in a small resort town on the shores of Lake Balaton, three men were hanged in front of the local police station. The victims had little in common except that they were Jewish, powerless, and could be tarred with the brush of communism (falsely, not that it mattered). The hangmen were three local peasants, egged on by military officers who had arrived that day to organize the executions and whip up the gathered crowd. None of the perpetrators received more than a slap on the wrist when they were later prosecuted; erasing any doubt, Horthy pardoned the hangmen and in November 1921 issued a blanket amnesty for all of Hungary's paramilitaries and their helpers. By carefully reconstructing this grim episode and its aftermath in the preface and first chapter, Bodó establishes the centrality to this study of what he terms “microhistories of violence.” The book thus seeks to understand violent acts as they played out in village squares, city markets, lecture halls, and prison cells; it explores the role played by rumors, posters, initiation rites, and militant masculinity. The focus throughout is more on the perpetrators and bystanders than on the victims, although their voices are heard as well.
Running through the book's eight chapters is the argument that scholars have defined the White Terror too narrowly. Bodó expands our understanding of its violence in at least three ways. First, he demonstrates that counterrevolutionary violence continued long after March 1920, the conventional endpoint of the White Terror. Although the public executions, prison massacres, and book burnings largely ceased by mid-1920, it would take much longer for the internment camps to close and armed robberies and kidnappings to end; indeed, Bodó detects continuities between the events of 1919 and the “terrorist attacks on Jewish events and organizations, foreign embassies and diplomats” that lasted through 1924 (70–71). Second, Bodó stresses that paramilitary violence unfolded in far more sites than is commonly recognized. The book documents the lawless and inhuman conditions of the many military prisons and internment camps, which together held up to 15,000 people and may have killed 1,500 (153). But paramilitaries also turned hotels, barracks, and railway stations into sites of torture and extrajudicial killing, and they attacked shops, flea markets, cabarets, and newspaper offices. Last, the book underscores how many different forms the White Terror's violence took. Bodó shows that it was pervasive, personal, and public; that it comprised murder, torture, robbery, rape, and sexual violence; and that it ranged in scale from pogroms in western Hungarian villages to small acts of cruelty, such as the guards in the Hajmáskér internment camp who delighted in plucking out the beard of a rabbi (153).
In reconstructing and analyzing these violent episodes, Bodó draws on a rich theoretical and historical literature. This yields many good insights, particularly into the perpetrators and their social origins, motives, rituals, leaders, and photographs. It also allows Bodó to situate the White Terror in a wider transnational context and make useful comparisons with lynchings in the United States, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and death squads in Colombia, to give just a few examples. The book's most pointed comparison is between the Red Terror of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the White Terror that followed. While acknowledging similarities between the two, Bodó forcefully argues against the view that these episodes were largely equivalent. The White Terror, he shows, lasted longer, was more brutal, and was less selective in its victims. It also claimed more lives than the Red Terror, and although he is reluctant to engage in the “numbers war,” he accepts that as many as five thousand people may have died as a result of the White Terror, a figure several times higher than numbers that usually appear in Hungarian historiography. Bodó justifies this higher estimate by pointing to the many deaths by malnutrition, disease, and other causes in the camps and prisons (95, 122). He estimates that one quarter to one half of those who died were Jews.
The book concludes with a brief sketch of the White Terror's troubled afterlife. Far from being punished, ex-militiamen entered politics and joined patriotic societies; some later played prominent roles in the persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II. Today they have found new admirers among the radical right in Hungary. Their victims have received much less attention, and there is still work to be done to tell their stories and to try to see this violent episode through their eyes. Future researchers on paramilitary violence in Hungary and elsewhere will greatly benefit from Bodó's outstanding book on the White Terror.
