The Contested Memory of Paramilitary Violence

The first narratives on the White Terror came from the exiled politicians of the defunct democratic and Communist regimes in Vienna in the early 1920s. In their newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books, emigré politicians and politically committed intellectuals sought to defend the records of, and justify their roles in, the two revolutions, explain the defeat of the democratic and radical leftist experiments, and undermine the legitimacy of the slowly consolidating counterrevolutionary regime. The moderate Socialist Oszkár Jászi, minister of nationalities in the first democratic government in the fall of 1918, described the White Terror as a rebellion against modernity.Footnote ¹⁸ In his book written in exile in 1920, Jászi argued that in the fall of 1919, Hungary's “wild Asian soul raised its head again.”Footnote ¹⁹ The civilized West looked the other way, as the militias “amputated the country's brain” by destroying the small and predominantly non-Magyar (Jewish, German, and Slavic) progressive intelligentsia and by undoing the social and cultural advances of the prewar era. Having eliminated their competitors, the “scum of the counterrevolution,” such as sadistic and half-educated army officers, backward-looking county administrators, alcoholic and degenerate noblemen, narrow-minded artisans, anti-Semitic shopkeepers and white-collar workers, and other segments of the ethnically mainly German (Sváb) urban petty bourgeoisie, occupied the most important positions of the state. Politically inexperienced, however, the “scum of the counterrevolution” could not remain on top for long. Already in early 1920, Jászi argued, the old elite, the landed and financial aristocracy, backed by the Catholic Church, began to reassert its former influence over the state and the economy. Once the paramilitary groups, the agents of the “Christian” middle class, eliminated the leftist threat, the time had come for them to leave the political scene and hand power back to where it belonged: to the traditional social elite and the educated members of the heavily gentry political class. The White Terror in Hungary only cleared the way for the restoration of the prewar social and political order.Footnote ²⁰

As a high-level functionary of the Council Republic, the talented journalist and unscrupulous political adventurer, József Pogány was well advised to leave the country in August 1919.Footnote ²¹ Writing in exile in Vienna, Pogány described militia violence in Hungary as a product of a long historical development. Capitalist society, he argued, had always been violent. In the early phase of capitalism, undisciplined workers destroyed machines and staged strikes in protest against exploitation. However, by the late nineteenth century, workers' militancy had significantly declined, thanks to the influence of conservative institutions, such as the churches, the school, and the army. World War I reversed this trend. While their impact could be felt everywhere, the war and the postwar social crisis reached a new dimension in Italy and in the defeated states of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Frightened by workers' militancy and worried about the progressive disintegration of the state, the bourgeoisie and the old elite turned to mercenaries and founded private armies, which recruited their members from the groups of discharged military officers, university students, shopkeepers, noble landowners, and rich peasants, as well as déclassé elements and soldiers of fortune, to fend off the revolutionary threat and protect their privileges. In the final stage of its existence, Pogány continued, capitalism once again revealed its true nature. No longer able to control the masses through ideology, the bourgeoisie in Central Europe and Italy decided to hire professional killers, fanatics, and criminals to defeat and exterminate the workers and establish a system based on violence. “The Hungarian White Terror,” Pogány argued, “is nothing more than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Its [specific] form is determined by the fact that the leaders of the dictatorship are professional soldiers.”Footnote ²² Already in 1923, Pogány's comrade and the future minister of culture, József Révai, called this new type of regime Fascist.Footnote ²³

The main components of the leftist narrative of paramilitary and mob violence had already emerged in the 1920s; both Jászi and Pogány, the moderate and the extreme Left, described the paramilitary groups as the agents of larger forces. Jászi thought that the militias and patriotic associations received their orders from the Magyar aristocracy and “refeudalized” Jewish financial oligarchy. Pogány, on the other hand, believed that the bourgeoisie pulled all the strings. Both were convinced that the Western powers, particularly the leading capitalist country, Great Britain, bore at least partial responsibility for the atrocities. Moderate Socialist and Communist commentators alike perceived the White Terror as an expression of class, rather than ethnic and religious, antagonism. Even though the majority of emigrés, including Jászi, Pogány, and Révai, had come from Jewish backgrounds, they underestimated anti-Semitism as the cause of paramilitary violence. Instead of the suffering of, and discrimination against, Jews, the emigrés focused their attention on the plight of workers, peasants, and labor activists. All three commentators perceived the counterrevolution as an intermediary stage: for Jászi, it represented a prelude to the restoration of the prewar regime; Pogány and Révai, on the other hand, believed that the militias were in the process of creating a new political system to save capitalism.

Finally, the issue of the White Terror, the question over the causes, nature, and consequences of paramilitary violence, became entangled early on with the dispute over Admiral Miklós Horthy's role in the counterrevolution. As might be expected, the emigrés formed a low opinion of Horthy both as a man and political leader. Both moderate and radical Socialists were convinced that Horthy knew about and encouraged the assault on Jews and labor activists.Footnote ²⁴ The Socialist daily in Hungary, Népszava (People's Voice), described him as a cruel, bloodthirsty, and legitimist officer in the fall of 1919.Footnote ²⁵ Exiled intellectuals and politicians expressed a harsher judgment: left-wing Social Democrats and Communists in Vienna saw only a murderer in the commander of the National Army.Footnote ²⁶ In his series of lithographs, entitled the Horthy Portfolio, the talented graphic artist and radical political activist Mihály Biró went so far as to portray Horthy as a direct participant in the White Terror.Footnote ²⁷

Conservative and Right Radical newspapers, such as Új Nemzedék (New Generation) and Szózat (Proclamation), on the other hand, remembered the democratic and Communist interludes as one of the most shameful periods in history: as the terror regime of “Judeo-Bolsheviks” bent on destroying both human civilization and independent Hungary. Right Radical newspapers praised the members of the militias as heroes, and either denied or tried to justify the atrocities as an understandable reaction to the Red Terror.Footnote ²⁸ Whereas Socialist and emigré publications placed responsibility for the militias' actions squarely on Horthy's shoulders, the conservative and Right radical newspaper and political commentators sought to separate the admiral from his radical officers. They portrayed Admiral Horthy as a talented, courageous, and charismatic commander: a “hard but fair” leader who exercised a restraining influence on his men. Horthy, his supporters in the press were convinced, did not order or support extralegal violence. He had not been privy to the plans of militia leaders and learned about the majority of pogroms and executions of political opponents too late; however, whenever it was still possible, he directly intervened to save the innocent and punish the guilty.Footnote ²⁹

These three topoi—paramilitary and mob violence as a justifiable reaction to the much more serious Red crimes, Horthy as the savior of Hungary from Communism, and the commander of the National Army as a moderate man who defended innocent Jews and workers and punished their tormentors and killers—became the pillars of the developing Horthy cult in the interwar period. Horthy's conservative biographers, such as Viktor Técsy, Gusztáv Grantz, Baroness Lily Doblhoff, and the English Owen Rutter, emphasized the regent's moderation and humanity and celebrated him as the restorer of law and order.Footnote ³⁰ Some of Horthy's Right radical biographers, such as Jenő Pilch, followed the same path. Pilch, a professional soldier and military historian and one of the leaders of the proto-Fascist veterans' organization, the Hungarian National Defense Association (Magyar Országos Véderő Egyesület or MOVE), attributed the crimes committed by the officers' detachment under Horthy's command to agent provocateurs and common criminals dressed in stolen army uniforms. Extralegal violence in the fall of 1919, he argued, was almost exclusively the work of peasants, who had suffered tremendously under Communist rule. The majority of those killed or otherwise mistreated in the fall of 1919 deserved their fate. Horthy played no role in the atrocities; on the contrary, Horthy ordered the leaders of the paramilitary groups several times to put an end to the illegal execution of political opponents. Pilch heaped praises on Horthy, emphasizing his wisdom and moderation; on the other hand, he failed to mention any of the military leaders by name, or to discuss the role of the officers' detachments in the counterrevolution.Footnote ³¹

In 1938, as a sign of political changes and the shifting perceptions of the past, the National Socialist academic János Makkai paid only lip service to Horthy's accomplishments during the counterrevolution. Footnote ³² Unlike Pilch and Horthy's conservative biographers, Makkai's heroes were the common men: the members of the officers' detachments and civic militias, whom he celebrated as the vanguard of a glorious, albeit first failed, middle-class and Fascist revolution.Footnote ³³ The leaders and rank and file of the long disbanded paramilitary groups, several of whom had published their memoirs in the late 1930s and early 1940s, echoed Makkai's opinion. Like Makkai's book, these memoirs are mainly concerned with the exploits of peasants, reserve officers, and rural administrators in uniform; their fight against Romanians and Communists; the militia men's commitment to social, especially land, reform; and their pledge to restore Hungary's historical borders. They portray the militia men as staunch opponents of both the pre-1914 liberal system and “alien” political forms, such as Western democracy and Soviet Communism. Some of the writers expressed their dislike of conservative politicians, such as István Bethlen, and complained about the setbacks suffered as a result of discrimination in their private and professional lives in the 1920s.Footnote ³⁴

By 1942, Baron Pál Prónay, the commander of the most important officers' detachment, had reedited his two-volume diary, which did not appear in print during his lifetime. Even more than Héjjas and his men, Prónay believed in and practiced “a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism,” both as a form of self-expression and a means to ensure the revival of the nation after the lost war and the failed revolutions.Footnote ³⁵ A paranoid and cruel man, Prónay did not seek to deny or trivialize the atrocities; on the contrary, alone among the counterrevolutionaries, the militia leader detailed the tortures, robberies, and executions committed by his men, and took full responsibility for their actions. The willful Prónay did not hide his contempt for Horthy. In his diary, he described the regent as a man full of bravado, big on words but short on actions, a weak and indecisive leader who early on fell under the influence of freemasons and philosemitic politicians, such as István Bethlen. Prónay portrayed himself as a victim wronged by Horthy and liberal advisors, a misunderstood and unappreciated genius, the first National Socialist in Europe, and a forerunner to Mussolini and Hitler.Footnote ³⁶

After 1938, the conservative authoritarian regime in Hungary, despite its frequent disagreements with the Third Reich, increasingly took on National Socialist features.Footnote ³⁷ As a reflection of the further shift to the Right, the adoration of Horthy came to resemble the Hitler cult during the war. His biographers hailed him as the chief hero of World War I, the rescuer of Hungary from Communism in 1919, the father of the interwar economic miracle, the protector of the nation's independence and honor, an accomplished diplomat, the wisest statesman in Europe, a military genius, and the restorer of Hungary's historical borders.Footnote ³⁸ In the opinion of László Szabó, one of the proponents of the new Horthy cult in 1919 and beyond, the admiral was “tough when it came to calling the guilty to account, but also fair, wise and moderate.” The regent behaved like a worker or a soldier rather than a king. He was the first statesman in Europe to place race at the center of his domestic and foreign policy; the Gallant Order (Vitézi Rend) established during the counterrevolution allegedly provided the model for the Nazi SS. Horthy was the first politician in Europe to break with the liberal economic policies of his predecessors, champion autarchy and planned economy, and promote productive labor at the expense of exploitative, Western and Jewish financial capitalism. The regent's power supposedly rested on the “leadership principle”; his word was law and his power was not limited by any legal or bureaucratic considerations. Finally, Szabó described Horthy as the educator of the nation (nemzetnevelő), a major source and promoter of family values, a great artist, a painter, and musician, who cleansed Hungarian culture of alien influences.Footnote ³⁹

Although in the 1930s, Horthy's most well-known foreign biographer was a conservative Englishman, in the 1940s, as a sign of the regime's shift to the Right, the regent found his most articulate admirer in the Third Reich. In his biography of Horthy, Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli, the celebrated writer of the German Freikorps in the 1930s, described the regent as a strong man, never hesitant to use force to settle disputes and obtain power. Schmidt-Pauli credited Horthy with the formation of the National Army, the destruction of the Communist regime, and the early withdrawal of Romanian troops in 1920. The White Terror, the German writer argued, was a fabrication by Jewish journalists and emigré politicians; the admiral neither ordered nor participated in any of the atrocities. However, as a realist and a student of Machiavelli, the commander of the National Army realized that he could not afford to appear weak or alienate his overzealous officers. Successful counterrevolutionaries, Schmidt-Pauli contended, had never been saints. The admiral and his men did what every wise and responsible patriot would have done in their place: they were right to use violence to cleanse Hungary of “alien” (wesensfremdlich) and Bolshevik elements, restore law and order, and lay the foundation of a political system based on discipline, masculinity, loyalty, and complete obedience to authority.Footnote ⁴⁰

Unlike the conservative biographers in the 1920s and 1930s, who had either denied or tried to trivialize the atrocities, political commentators during the war remembered and described the use of extralegal violence in the fall and winter of 1919 as a principled act: the realization of an ideological imperative. Between 1939 and 1942, the supporters of the war and the German alliance evoked the memory of the civil war after 1919 to defend the anti-Jewish laws and justify Hungary's participation, on the side of the Axis, in World War II. On the other hand, after the summer of 1942, the government of Miklós Kállay periodically reminded Hitler and the Nazi administrators of Hungary's anti-Communist and anti-Semitic credentials in order to increase the country's independence, leave the war, and resist Nazi pressure to deport Jews.Footnote ⁴¹ If the goal of the government had been to dispel Nazi suspicion about Hungarian intentions, it failed miserably. By the spring of 1943, Hitler and his colleagues had come to view the current Hungarian government as an unreliable ally.

Still, the rhetoric about the counterrevolution and the White Terror did leave an impact on Nazi politicians. In December 1943, less than four months before the Nazi invasion, the Hungarian expert, SS Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer, published a long memorandum about the alleged treachery of the Kállay government. The Third Reich had tolerated the existence of an independent Hungary as a center of sabotage too long, the “Hungarian expert” argued. In the next few months, Veesenmayer suggested, the German press, by focusing on the regime's weak handling of the so-called Jewish question, should increase pressure on the Kállay government, and Berlin should give “the national opposition” more support. The regent should be kept in line by threatening to restore the Habsburg family to the throne, skillfully manipulating the Communist threat, and promising that the conservative Jews in his entourage would not be harmed. In the case of a popular uprising and the collapse of the state, the German government should set up officers' detachments and civic militias, organizations that had proven their effectiveness in 1919, to deal with the Jewish threat and help to restore law and order. Footnote ⁴²

The Arrow Cross government, a Nazi puppet state that came to power in October 1944, had established several militias, including the infamous Prónay-Vannay Detachment, to destroy the political opposition and complete the Jewish genocide. It was the Soviet troops, rather than any indigenous resistance movement, that put an end to the Arrow Cross tyranny and the Nazi occupation. The new political elite, which owed its power to the Soviet victory, remembered the Hungarian past, including the history of the civil war and the White Terror, differently from the interwar conservative and National Socialist commentators. The building of Socialism in Hungary thus began with the destruction of the myths and idols of the Horthy regime. Between 1945 and 1948, municipal governments, often at the order of the occupying Soviet armed forces and revolutionary crowds, made up mainly the members of youth organizations of the Communist Party and its allies, demolished monuments, and removed plaques erected to commemorate the sacrifices of the victims of the Red Terror.Footnote ⁴³ The political elite celebrated the Council Republic as a predecessor of the one-party state and condemned the counterrevolution and the White Terror as one of the darkest periods in European history. By the 1970s, every major town, and dozens of smaller communities, possessed one monument dedicated to the memory of Hungary's first Communist experiment. The oversized statues of workers and Red soldiers built between 1956 and 1971 had a clear political function: they were meant to intimidate the population and send Hungarian society, slowly recovering from the defeat of the 1956 Revolution, a message about the futility of armed resistance and the limits of dissent.Footnote ⁴⁴

Shortly after her return from a lengthy exile in the Soviet Union in 1945, Erzsébet Andics, a Stalinist apparatchik, published a booklet on the origins of the Horthy regime.Footnote ⁴⁵ In her propagandistic work, Andics repeated Pogány's and Révai's contentions about the White Terror. With the benefit of hindsight, Andics argued that militia and state violence during the counterrevolution paved the way to Hungary's alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as its participation in the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and the Jewish genocide in 1944.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the next fifteen years, Andics's colleague and fellow apparatchik, Dezső Nemes, and his students Ervin Pamlényi and Elek Karsai unearthed and published hundreds of documents about paramilitary and mob violence.Footnote ⁴⁷ The publication of primary documents, including diaries and memoirs, about the White Terror continued in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Horthy's biographies published in the same period portrayed the admiral as an unsophisticated naval officer, a foreigner, a reactionary nobleman who despised workers and peasants, and a collaborator and careerist who negotiated with the Romanians in 1919 and subjugated the country's interests to those of the Western powers. Like Andics and Nemes, Horthy's biographers were convinced that the admiral had ordered many of the atrocities; for the rest, he either approved them retroactively or tried to justify them in the face of public scrutiny. In either case, as the supreme commander of the National Army, he bore full responsibility for his men's actions.Footnote ⁴⁹

By the early 1970s, violence against workers and working-class organizations during the counterrevolution had become one of the best-researched topics in modern Hungarian history; the monographs and articles published in the next two decades contributed little to the deeper understanding of this important event. The last comprehensive work on the White Terror in the Socialist era was published in 1985. The authors, Ervin Hollós and his wife Vera Lajtai, also had an apparatchik and Stalinist past.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hollós and Lajtai added little new to the study of right-wing paramilitary and mob violence. Like Nemes in the early 1960s, Hollós and Lajtai focused their attention on the working-class victims of violence and either denied or downplayed the sacrifices of middle-class Jews, commercial farmers, merchants, right-wing Social Democrats, progressive liberals, and freemasons. They blamed the atrocities on aristocrats (the mainly Jewish), financial and entrepreneurial elites, priests, civil servants, professional officers, rich peasants, university students, and the members of the Lumpenproletariat—groups and individuals defined as the archenemies of the Socialist state. Hollós and Lajtai thought that the leaders and the rank and file of the paramilitary groups had enjoyed a privileged position and played a major role in the social and political life of the Horthy regime. Unlike earlier writers, such as Andics and Nemes, who thought militia and state violence gave birth to the interwar Fascist regime, Hollós and Lajtai described the Horthy regime as only “half-fascist.” As an ex-intelligence officer, Hollós was intent on proving that those who had committed the atrocities in 1919 joined the Fascist parties in the 1930s and 1940s, committed war crimes in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia during World War II, participated in the Jewish genocide, supported the bourgeois parties after 1945, and, most importantly, helped to organize the armed uprising against the working-class state in 1956.Footnote ⁵¹

Until the late 1960s, the official narrative of the White Terror served to undermine the legitimacy of the defunct Horthy regime, destroy lingering respect for Regent Horthy and the old political elite, increase sympathy for the Communist Party and its allies, legitimize wholesale nationalization and radical social reforms, and excuse political oppression. In the 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, with declining effectiveness, the political elite used the memory of the Council Republic and the counterrevolution to display its historical credentials and reinforce party cohesion and unity. Repeated ad nauseam in textbooks, training manuals for party functionaries, and public speeches given at annual celebrations, by the late 1980s the narrative about the White Terror seems to have lost its mobilizing appeal even to the party faithful. On 29 November 1988, at the conference of party activists in the Budapest Sport Arena, Károly Grósz, who had just resigned from his post as prime minister but continued to act as the general secretary of the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, warned his comrades that with their ambitious demands, oppositional politicians would plunge the country into a civil war. The outcome of present “class struggle,” the hardliner Grósz argued, “depends on us alone,” whether, “if needed, we can oppose the hostile counterrevolution with determination and force,” “preserve our values,” and guarantee “the emergence of a new and reformed socialism.” Lack of determination, he continued, would lead to chaos and anarchy, witch hunts against Communists, and a new “White Terror.” A few months earlier, while still in office as prime minister, Grósz planned to impose martial law and use the infamous Workers' Militia, created after 1956, to restore the ancient regime. However, he failed to obtain the support of the Ministry of the Interior and Army.Footnote ⁵²

Grósz's infamous “White Terror Speech” created a national outrage and turned him into a persona non grata even among moderate Socialists. His debacle showed that, by the late 1980s, the collective memory of the White Terror had lost its function as a force of legitimization, mobilization, and defense. Paradoxically, however, the collapse of the one-party state two years later did not put an end to the controversy over the actions of right-wing paramilitary groups during the civil war. During the rehabilitation trial of the militia leader and infamous anti-Semite, Mihály Francia Kiss, between 1992 and 1994, the radical Right made a valiant attempt to revise the collective memory of the recent past. The main purpose of the ultimately unsuccessful trial was to forge a connection between the counterrevolution of 1919 and the Revolution of 1956 by convincing the public that the militias who had executed labor activists and robbed Jews in 1919 and the young men and women who battled Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest in the fall of 1956 were fighting for the same cause and against the same enemies.Footnote ⁵³

The reevaluation of the White Terror and the role of the right-wing paramilitary groups in Hungarian history after 1990 took place in the context of important political events and cultural developments, such as the victory of the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum or MDF) in the national election of 1990; the splitting of the MDF and the rise of an openly extremist and anti-Semitic organization called the Party of the Hungarian Truth and Life (Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja or MIÉP) under the leadership of the charismatic novelist, István Csurka, in 1993; and the emergence of right-wing tabloid journalism and the formation of a right-wing subculture with an insatiable appetite for pseudoscientific history. Already in 1992, the amateur military historian Endre Kajetán described the democratic republic, the short-lived radical leftist experiment in 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon as the worst tragedies in modern Hungarian history. Like many of the interwar commentators, he explained the atrocities committed by the officers' detachment as a mild reaction to the more heinous Red crimes.Footnote ⁵⁴ A decade later, the rise of the Jobbik (The Right Party), an openly xenophobic, anti-Roma, anti-Semitic, revisionist, and Euro-skeptic political party, and the formation in 2007 of the Hungarian Guards (Magyar Gárda), a paramilitary organization that terrorized the Roma minority in the impoverished eastern and northern parts of the country for over a year, further increased the relevance of the post-World War I militias, both as a point of reference and a model.Footnote ⁵⁵

The radical Right has always considered the Treaty of Trianon as the greatest tragedy in twentieth-century European history; its followers have never failed to express contempt for the “politics of repentance,” as practiced by many professional historians, and have rejected the use of the Holocaust rather than the history of Communism, and Auschwitz rather than the Gulag, as the shared point of reference and “the mark of orientation” in the modern world.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a sign of the widening gap between mainstream history and the culture of remembrance as practiced by the radical Right, the nationalist publishing houses have reprinted the memoirs of several militia leaders since 1999.Footnote ⁵⁷ In this subculture, the militias that helped to keep part of Burgenland Hungarian in 1921 have been celebrated as patriots; that the paramilitary groups also organized the armed robberies and harassed and killed Jews, as well as ethnic Germans, is not mentioned in any of the nationalist publications.Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the best-known writers of popular history texts in Hungary, Pál Földi, has recently published a highly favorable account of the history of Iván Héjjas's militia, the Rongyos Gárda (the Ragged Guard). The short study, which has been sold in the thousands at kiosks countrywide, significantly does not dwell on any of the murders committed and any of the pogroms organized by Iván Héjjas and his men, both in Hungary in 1919 and 1920 or in Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the early 1990s, the representatives of the victorious political parties and their local supporters removed hundreds of Communist statues, busts, and plaques from public squares and buildings.Footnote ⁶⁰ The oversized monuments of soldiers and workers erected to commemorate the Council Republic became the favored targets of would-be revolutionaries. However, in many cases, overly eager local administrators and political zealots also tore down mourning memorials erected to honor the memory of innocent peasants, workers, and Jews killed during the White Terror.Footnote ⁶¹ Although support for the destruction of “Communist” memorials in the early 1990s cut through political and ideological lines, the unveiling of Horthy statues and busts and the restoration of interwar monuments dedicated to the victims of the Red Terror have been, especially in the last ten years, a predominantly Right radical affair.Footnote ⁶² The flood of publications, especially online, demanding the political rehabilitation of paramilitary leaders and their public recognition as national heroes testifies to the continued existence and increasing vitality of a Right radical subculture in Hungary.Footnote ⁶³ It also attests to the ability of right-wing intellectuals to rediscover and revive old narratives, as well as fashion new interpretations of the past, which serve their interests. According to this old/new understanding of Hungarian history, Communists, Jews, and liberals bore full responsibility for the defeat in World War I, the two failed revolutions, the unjust peace treaty, and the loss of national territory. Horthy and the militias saved Hungary from Communism in 1919 and avenged the Red Terror. Militia and mob violence in 1919 allegedly represented the first anti-Bolshevik revolution in Hungarian history, followed by the resistance to the Communist takeover of power between 1945 and 1948 and what the radical Right believed was an anti-left uprising in 1956. Right-wing ideologues continue to evoke the memory of the counterrevolution to highlight the supposedly incomplete nature of “regime change” after 1989, rally public support, and vent their frustration at, and channel aggression toward, the political elites.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Private Lives and Political Careers of Militia Leaders in the Interwar Period

The tenacity of the Marxist, conservative, and Right radical narratives on the White Terror do not necessarily conform to historical reality; however, based on truth fragments, their function was to provide orientation in political life, reinforce group cohesiveness and solidarity, and harm political adversaries. Even though contemporary commentators and later historians remembered the White Terror differently, they were all concerned with the same issues: What were the causes of paramilitary and mob violence? Who bore the greatest responsibility for the atrocities? What motivated the agents of violence? What were the short- and long-term consequences of the White Terror? Was justice served? What happened to the perpetrators in the interwar period and beyond?

As we have seen, Marxist writers were convinced that the conservative regime had treated the perpetrators of paramilitary and mob violence leniently after 1921. The cultural elite celebrated them as heroes, whereas the political class allegedly showered the right-wing veterans of the civil war with decorations, awarded them with land grants, and provided them with well-paying jobs in the army, rural police, and state bureaucracy. The opinion of Communist historians contrasted sharply with that of paramilitary leaders and their supporters among journalists and academics in the interwar period. In his diary, Baron Pál Prónay, the leader of the most important paramilitary group, complained bitterly about the ingratitude of Horthy and his conservative advisors.Footnote ⁶⁵ Members of the Héjjas militia, too, claimed that the “reactionary” interwar regime had failed to appreciate their sacrifices and that the veterans of the counterrevolution experienced persecution, discrimination, and material deprivation, both in their private and professional lives, in the interwar period.Footnote ⁶⁶

Both parties overstated their cases, however. The careers of both militia leaders and their henchmen reveal a complex historical reality, particularly as regards the relationship between the White Terror and the Hungarian Holocaust. In the autumn of 1919, in the aftermath of the Red Terror, loyalty to the king and to the Habsburg House was still a minor concern; by early 1921, however, it had become the most critical issue, a veritable Achilles heel, of Hungarian politics.Footnote ⁶⁷ The failed legitimist coup in October 1921 destroyed the careers of legitimist paramilitary leaders. In the fall of 1919, Colonel Lehár, the brother of the famous composer Franz Lehár, had commanded the largest military force (after the Romanian Army) in Hungary; for a few months, he competed with Admiral Horthy and his National Army for power. In 1921, he sided with the king and was forced to leave the political stage and the country for good. The man who could have become Hungary's regent became a publisher of light music in Berlin. In the 1970s, the editor of his memoirs claimed that Lehár had remained a liberal conservative, legitimist, and Nazi opponent until the end of his life.

More likely, Anton Lehár, like his brother, Franz, changed his political views over time. In 1919, his officers staged several pogroms in Transdanubia. In Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, however, the ex-paramilitary leader and his brother (who had a Jewish wife and worked only with Jewish librettists) moved almost entirely in Jewish circles. Nazi fanatics, such as Alfred Rosenberg, saw the Lehár family as a group of traitors to the “Aryan” race and as destroyers of German culture. Unlike the conservative Rosenberg, the culturally more progressive Goebbels and even the rigid Hitler liked Franz Lehar's music. The Nazi dictator was not only more prepared to forget about the family's past, but also showered favors on the aging composer after the Anschluss of March 1938. The regime even awarded his wife the title of an “honorary Aryan”—a gesture that saved her from deportation and certain death. In the next few years, Franz Lehár built excellent relations with Nazi dignitaries and went a long way to return their favors. As a testimony to his weak character, he also failed to use his Nazi connections to save the lives of his Jewish colleagues, with many of whom he had collaborated for decades.Footnote ⁶⁸ In his memoirs, Anton Lehár claimed that the Gestapo kept an eye on him during the war, which, given his brother's newfound fame, may not have been true. On the other hand, there is no evidence to suggest that he had ever become a Nazi or had anything to do with the Holocaust. After the death of his brother in 1948, Anton Lehár devoted the rest of his life to the musical legacy of this brother. He died on 12 November 1962.Footnote ⁶⁹

Unfortunately, we know much less about the life and career of the second most important legitimist paramilitary leader, Colonel Gyula Ostenburg. He and his men left the Red Army and joined the counterrevolution in Szeged in the summer of 1919. As the second most important paramilitary unit in Horthy's National Army, the Ostenburg Battalion arrested and summarily executed hundreds of political prisoners and organized dozens of pogroms and robberies during the counterrevolution. Ostenburg's officers were, among others, responsible for the assassination of Béla Somogyi, the editor-in-chief of the Socialist daily, Népszava (People's Voice), and his young colleague Béla Bacsó in mid February 1920. The unit abandoned Horthy and supported the legitimist coup in October 1921. Ostenburg was captured, interrogated, and jailed after the failed attempt to restore the king to the throne. Released from prison on the basis of Horthy's amnesty order in November 1921, he retired from active service and played no active role in politics in the 1920s. In 1932, with his friend and fellow militia leader Pál Prónay, he founded the Hungarian National Fascist Party (Magyar Országos Fascist Párt), which functioned as the right-wing opposition to the conservative authoritarian regime. The party had an ephemeral existence, however; unable to obtain mass support, it soon disappeared from the political stage, and its members entered other Fascist groups. According to Prónay's memoirs, Ostenburg remained a legitimist in the interwar period; had he posed a serious threat to the Horthy regime, or entered or played an important role in the Arrow Cross or any other National Socialist organization, the Hungarian secret police would have kept a file on him. The veteran of the Hungarian civil war died of natural causes in Budapest in January 1944.Footnote ⁷⁰

While the leaders of the slowly consolidating Horthy regime had every reason to distrust legitimist politicians and militia leaders, their treatment of the pro-Horthy paramilitary groups and their commanders requires further explanation. Deputy Colonel Pál Prónay was different from his fellow militia leaders: he was older, better connected socially (he was the descendant of a highly respected aristocratic family), and politically more ambitious than any of his competitors. Having been one of Horthy's most important allies and his strong man for two years, he “went rogue” in the fall of 1921. Like the Italian Gabriel D'Annuncio in Fiume in 1919, Prónay appointed himself as the Bán of an independent state (called the Lajta Bánság) in Burgenland in October 1921. The militia uprising did keep part of Burgenland Hungarian. His megalomania, blind hatred for Prime Minister Bethlen, his ignorance of political realities, and equivocal behavior during the legitimist coup at the end of the month drove a wedge between him and Horthy. In the end, the Bán did give in to Horthy's demand and evacuated the disputed region.

The political elite continued to treat Prónay with kid gloves; Horthy and his advisors were prepared to restore his former position in the army. However, Prónay also wanted his battalion back, a request that the shrewd Bethlen refused out of fear of a right-wing coup. In early 1922, the frustrated Prónay offered his services to Russian White Army leader General Wrangel. He missed his chance because the civil war was over; the idea of fighting the Red Army, however, remained with the militia leader for the next two decades. In 1922, Prónay became active in the militia wing of the patriotic organization, the Association of Awakened Hungarians (Ébredő Magyarok Szövetsége or ÉME), which had become a veritable haven for militia men and war veterans in 1920. He was privy to, and may have helped to organize, the terrorist attacks on Jewish events and on foreign embassies in the next three years. Politically marginalized and increasingly antisocial, Prónay challenged at least a dozen people to duels, including Police Chief Imre Nádossy, Gyula Gömbös, leader of the right-wing veterans' organization, the Hungarian National Defense Association (Magyar Országos Véderő Egyesület or MOVE), Prime Minister István Bethlen, Horthy's aide-de-camp, Major László Magasházy, as well as several of his formal lieutenants in the late 1920s.

In 1930, on the recommendation of his one-time friend and rival, Gyula Gömbös, who had been state secretary in the Ministry of Defense since 1928, the ex-militia leader and the Bán of Western Hungary was readmitted into the army. By then, however, the fifty-seven-year-old paramilitary leader had lost interest in a military career. He spent his waking hours at horse races and gambling tables in the officers' casinos, restaurants, and the clubs of Right radical organizations. In 1932, with Ostenburg, he founded the short-lived Hungarian National Fascist Party. In the same year, his name came up in connection with the failed right-wing coup organized by his former officer, László Vannay; in the end, however, he was not charged with any wrongdoing.Footnote ⁷¹ During one of his trials in 1932, he lost his temper and insulted the judge and the defendant. To teach him a lesson, the judge gave him a six-month sentence and forced him to pay a fine. Prónay's name continued to be mentioned periodically in the tabloids and the domestic news sections of the newspapers throughout the 1930s, but always in connection with scandals, usually involving his screaming anti-Semitic obscenities in public. The police continued to keep an eye on him and his wife, who was rumored to have had an affair with the Italian foreign minister and Mussolini's son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian ambassador (in that order) in the late 1930s. The Center of National Security (Államvédelmi Központ or ÁVK) may have even used Mrs. Prónay to feed the Italian Embassy false information.Footnote ⁷²

Prónay was acquainted, and sympathized, with Ferenc Szálasi and the Arrow Cross; however, he did not enter his party. The ex-militia leader had supported the German alliance from the start and became irritated by what he saw as the double dealings of the Hungarian government during the war. He was among the first to congratulate Szálasi on the occasion of his appointment as prime minister and to offer him his services, in October 1944. In late 1944, he helped to put together a new militia that fought against the Red Army in the winter. It was long believed that Prónay had died on 12 February 1945, during the attempt of Nazi and Hungarian forces to break out of Buda Castle.Footnote ⁷³ Prónay's friends, on the other hand, spread the rumor that he had been murdered by the Arrow Cross.Footnote ⁷⁴ Information found in the recently opened Soviet archives shows, however, that he was captured by Soviet troops in 20 March 1945. Sentenced by the Soviet authorities on 10 June 1946 to twenty years of forced labor on the charges of espionage and sabotage, Prónay died in the Gulag in the Soviet Union sometime in 1947 or 1948. He was officially rehabilitated on 27 June 2001 on the basis of a law passed by the parliament of the Russian Federation in 1991.Footnote ⁷⁵

The life and career path of Kálmán Rátz closely resembled that of his friend, patron, and fellow militia leader, Pál Prónay. A graduate of the Ludovika Military Academy in Budapest, Rátz, like Prónay, became a professional officer and an officer in an elite hussar regiment before 1914. His unit was sent to the Russian Front soon after the outbreak of war. It is unclear when Rátz fell into captivity; a photograph, however, places him in a POW camp in the Siberian town of Tomsk in 1916. At the end of 1917, he and a small group of Hungarian soldiers escaped from Tomsk and tried to return to Hungary from Siberia, through Finland and Sweden. The group was captured and brought back to Saint Petersburg, however. Following the example of more than thirty thousand Hungarian POWs, Rátz allegedly entered the Red Army and fought against the Czech Legion in Siberia in the spring and summer of 1918. No archival evidence has been found to support these assertions. In 1930, however, Rátz published a book on the history of the Czech Legion, in which he described the battles between the Red Army and the Czech Legion in detail and with the passion of a participant.Footnote ⁷⁶ Unlike Béla Kun, Tibor Szamuely, and thousands of other Hungarian POWS, Rátz did not become a Bolshevik. He and many of his fellow officers most likely joined the Red Army to fight against the Czech Legion for patriotic reasons. In the spring of 1918, with Western support or connivance, the small army of Czech and Slovak nationalists massacred thousands of unarmed Hungarian and German POWS to prevent their return home to rejoin the conflict. Rátz did not remain in Siberia and the Red Army for long, however. Sometime in the summer of 1918, he had escaped again; this time, he was able reach Hungary safely. In Budapest, he became one of the early opponents of the October Revolution and the first democratic government. Rátz helped to found the right-wing veterans' organization MOVE in the fall. The MOVE, the ÉME, and dozens of smaller conspiratorial groups and patriotic associations planned to overthrow the democratic regime in a coup. In mid February 1919, the government finally cracked down on the supporters of both the radical Left and the extreme Right. As part of this initiative, the police arrested Rátz and kept him in jail for the next six months.

Captain Rátz was released from captivity only after the collapse of the Council Republic in early August 1919. At the end of that year, with the help of his friend and patron, Pál Prónay, he set up a “mobile detachment” in the eastern part of the country. Prónay was able to convince Horthy and the Ministry of Defense to recognize Rátz's militia as a part of the National Army and put it on the government's payroll. Horthy and his advisors planned to use the group, which had recruited its members from Máramaros, a region that had recently come under foreign occupation, to invade Czechoslovakia. They were also afraid that the jobless war veterans in the region, many of whom were of Ukrainian background, would join the Czech Army. It did not take long for the military leaders to recognize that they had made a mistake, however. The Rátz Detachment, like the majority of paramilitary groups, became a source of disorder in the region: its members pillaged Jewish businesses and homes, attacked civilians on the streets and other public spaces, and even stole pigs from the large estates of local aristocrats. To end the chaos, the Ministry of Defense incorporated the battalion into the Infantry Regiment of Mátészalka in March 1920. The attempt of Colonel Rubin, the commander of the regiment, to impose discipline on Rátz and his soldiers, however, met with a determined resistance.Footnote ⁷⁷ Meanwhile, Rátz's friend, Prónay, was busy collecting incriminating information on Colonel Rubin to prove to Horthy and the Ministry of Defense that the regiment commander was incompetent, cowardly, unpatriotic, and completely unworthy of their trust.Footnote ⁷⁸ At end of November 1920, news leaked out that Prónay and his men planned to use the surviving militias, including Rátz's unit, to invade Czechoslovakia on Christmas Eve. Horthy ordered Prónay to stop the preparation for the invasion immediately. The debacle widened the gap between the regent and the political elite, on the one hand, and the militias and irredentist organizations, on the other. As a sign of growing alienation, despite Prónay's protest, the Ministry of Defense dissolved the Rátz Battalion in early 1921.Footnote ⁷⁹

In the 1920s, Rátz remained active in various Right radical and irredentist organizations. In the early 1930s, however, he also forged close ties with several Socialist and Communist intellectuals and artists, such as Attila József, Ferenc Agárdi, and József Madzsar. Rátz was one of the few non-Communist politicians who recognized the historical significance of the Bolshevik Revolution and acknowledged the economic and social achievements, and respected the military might, of the Soviet state. He had already learned Russian in captivity; in the interwar period, he deepened his knowledge of Russian history and culture to become one of the few “Russian experts” in Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁰ After 1939, Rátz, as the parliamentary representative of the Arrow Cross Party, advocated the establishment of closer ties with the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. In the spring of 1941, during his trip to the Soviet Union as a semiofficial representative of the government, he tried to convince his Russian colleagues that improved economic relations and deepened political cooperation would benefit both countries. The trip proved to be a failure, but Rátz never lost his admiration for the Soviet Union.

Like many members of the war generations, Rátz saw himself as a revolutionary and a Socialist; however, it was not Marx but the utopian Socialists, such as Proudhon, who attracted his attention.Footnote ⁸¹ In the early 1930s, with the radical poet Attila József, Rátz dreamed of the creation of a “national communist” state. His commitment to radical social reform went hand-in-hand with deep hatred for Jews, whom he saw both as aliens and the defenders of the liberal state and the unjust social order. His anti-Semitism, inspired in part by social resentment, drove Rátz into the arms of the Hungarian Nazis in the second half of the 1930s. In 1935, Rátz entered the parliament as the representative of the governing National Unity Party (Nemzeti Egység Pártja or NEP) of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, Rátz's old comrade and the founder of the MOVE. In the second half of the 1930s, however, he sought his allies again on the extreme Right. In 1939, he ran for and won parliamentary election as the candidate of the largest of the Hungarian National Socialist parties, the Arrow Cross. However, in 1941, because of a conflict with the highly unstable Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi, he left the party.

With the unofficial support of the government, he founded a Nazi splinter party called the Independent Hungarian Socialist Party (Független Magyar Szocialista Párt or FMSZP) in the same year. Unlike the majority of Hungarian Nazis and the representatives of the radical Right in the national parliament, Rátz supported the war and the German alliance with reservation; after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942, he became openly critical of his colleagues who placed all their hopes in Hitler and the dwindling strength of the German Army. The Gestapo arrested him after the German occupation of the country in March 1944. Rátz was sent to the concentration camp in Mauthausen. In September 1944, he was released and returned to Hungary. After 1945, he tried to ingratiate himself with the new elite, pointing to his record as a Russian expert and the friend of the Soviet Union. The Communists and their allies, however, did not forget or forgive his Nazi past. For fear of prosecution, he left Hungary and settled in Switzerland in 1948. He died in his adopted land three years later, in 1951.Footnote ⁸²

Iván Héjjas, the leader of the most important civic militia during the counterrevolution, differed from the above-mentioned paramilitary leaders in many respects: unlike Prónay, Lehár, Ostenburg, and Rátz, he came from a peasant family, and he had not been a professional soldier before the war. The Héjjas militia operated locally (until the summer of 1920, when it robbed an arms depot in Austria), was poorly armed, and had few contacts with the political and social elite. In December 1919, to escape prosecution, Héjjas and his lieutenants, who had killed at least a hundred people and had organized dozens of pogroms and armed robberies in the vicinity of Kecskemét between August and November, entered the Prónay Battalion. In the next eighteen months, he and his men stood under the protection and followed the orders of Prónay. After Prónay's departure from the political scene in November 1921, Héjjas joined forces with Gyula Gömbös, the president of the powerful veterans' organization, the MOVE. In 1923, he even entered Gömbös's new Hungarian National Independence Party, better known as the Party of Racial Defense (Magyar Nemzeti Függetlenségi Párt—Fajvédő Párt). The police suspected the involvement of Héjjas, his men, and the militia wing of the ÉME, in a number of terrorist attacks on Jewish organizations between 1921 and 1924. Afraid of a right-wing coup, the Bethlen government used the mainstream press, the police, and the justice system to discredit and intimidate the militia leader and destroy his political base. The regime put several of his close associates, including Francia Kiss, on trial between 1922 and 1925. Héjjas, too, was repeatedly questioned by the police about the bombings, the existence of secret societies, and his plan to attack Austria. However, thanks in part to Gömbös's support, he did not face prosecution in the interwar period.

In 1926, Héjjas was elected into the parliament on the ticket of Gömbös's party. Héjjas sat as a member representing the Kunszentmiklós parliamentary district in the lower chamber of the national parliament between 1927 and 1931. The reentry of Gömbös into the party and government in 1928 brought his rehabilitation even closer. On 16 June 1929, Regent Horthy awarded Iván Héjjas, Aurél Héjjas, Gyula Gömbös, and dozens of others the vitéz (Gallant) title at the end of an elaborate ceremony held on Margaret Island in Budapest. The man who had directed the execution of university professors, doctors, and lawyers during the White Terror went back to school and received a doctorate in economics from the University of Budapest in 1933. Thanks to Gömbös's patronage, he was also able to land a well-paying job as aviation supervisor (légügyi felügyelő) in the Ministry of Transportation and Trade soon after graduation. Had his patron and friend, Gömbös, not died in October 1936, Héjjas might have even become a minister in the second half of the 1930s.

On 28 April 1938, he founded the National Association of Hungarian Race Defenders (Magyar Fajvédők Országos Szövetsége or MFVOSZ). The party was clearly on the right; however, the MFOSZ, unlike the Arrow Cross and other Fascist organizations, stood on the basis of the constitution and rejected revolutionary change as immoral and unpatriotic. Lacking Gömbös's organizational talent and social connections, Héjjas failed to turn the party into a serious political force. His and his party's moderation, however, seems to have paid off. As a sign of the regime's increased trust in him, the general staff involved Héjjas in the planning and execution of the military invasion of Czechoslovakia. His militia, the Ragged Guard, which had only a few hundred men, participated both in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in late 1938 and the occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine in the spring of 1939. Having suffered serious losses during both invasions, the poorly trained militia men vented their frustration on the local population, especially on Jews.Footnote ⁸³

The debacle underscored Héjjas's limited talent as a military leader. At the end of May 1939, he and his brother ran as the representatives of the Hungarian Party of Racial Defense (Magyar Fajvédő Párt or MFVP) on the infamous “Héjjas list,” in the town of Debrecen. His men's strong-armed techniques (they harassed, assaulted, and otherwise terrorized their political opponents) backfired; local administrators simply expelled the Héjjas brothers and their entourage from the town before the election.Footnote ⁸⁴ The regime, however, was determined to pay for the services they had rendered the last two years. In 1940, with Horthy's support, Héjjas was promoted to the position of chief inspector of civilian aviation within the Ministry of Trade and Transport, and he remained in this position until 1944. Footnote ⁸⁵

During the war, Héjjas threw himself into the battle on the side of the conservatives against the challengers from the Fascist Right. Héjjas played a major role as an organizer in the election of Horthy's son, István, as deputy regent in early 1942. Ironically, the anti-Horthy campaign was also led by an ex-militia member, the Arrow Cross stalwart, Emil Kovarcz. In the end, the Bethlen conservatives and the anti-German radical Right were able to gather enough votes in the parliament, which duly elected István Horthy as deputy regent in the spring.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the summer of 1943, Regent Horthy put Iván Héjjas in charge of the organization of a five-thousand-man militia. Significantly, the training of the new paramilitary unit took place in the old gendarme base in the village of Orgovány, the theater of one of the most infamous atrocities during the White Terror. The militia attracted a few peasants; the majority of its members, however, came from the same Right radical organizations that had supported István Horthy's candidacy. Poorly armed and motivated, the unit played no role in the defense of the country and was officially disbanded in the fall of 1944; its more fanatical members then entered the Arrow Cross's auxiliary force, the Lensers (the Kopjások), which continued the fight against Soviet troops until the bitter end.Footnote ⁸⁷

Fearing arrest and assassination, Héjjas left Budapest after the German occupation of the country in March 1944 and hid in his hometown for the next few months. He and his men retreated from the advancing Russian armies, first into Transdanubia and then to Graz in Austria. If we can believe the account of one of his close friends and the private attorney of Regent Miklós Horthy, Béla (Böllér) Somogyi, Héjjas tried to make contact with Tito and his partisans, and his troops were fighting against the Germans in Vas province at the end of 1944.Footnote ⁸⁸ The end of the war found him in the western part of Germany. On 13 May 1947, the People's Court sentenced Héjjas to death for the Orgovány murders in Hungary in absentia.Footnote ⁸⁹ Fearing extradition, he moved to authoritarian Spain, where he died, apparently of natural causes, in the town of Vigo in December 1950.Footnote ⁹⁰

All five militia leaders had reason to complain about discrimination in the 1920s: Lehár was forced to leave the country; Ostenburg was discharged from the army; Prónay was first deprived of his battalion and then honorably discharged; and Rátz and Héjjas were pushed to the political margins. In the 1930s, two of the five men, Héjjas and Rátz, were able to regain some of their former influence. All five counterrevolutionaries remained members of the Right, but a world continued to separate the conservative legitimist Lehár from the reactionary Prónay, the Right radical Héjjas, and the National Socialist Rátz. All five leaders examined in this essay rejected the prewar social and political order, but only Rátz supported drastic social reforms. With the exception of Lehár, all five leaders backed the war; however, Rátz and Héjjas became the enemies of the Third Reich in the final phase of the conflict. Only Rátz became a National Socialist; Prónay sympathized with the Arrow Cross but never entered the party. Two of the five militia men (Héjjas and Rátz) also supported the Horthy regime and even ran for election as the candidates of the ruling government party in the 1930s. With the possible exception of Lehár, they were all convinced anti-Semites and supported the deportation of Hungarian Jews. None of them, however, played a major role in the genocide.

The Rank and File in the Horthy Regime

It is difficult to reconstruct the interwar experience and political leanings of the more than eight thousand people who had served in the officers' detachment and the civic militias between 1919 and 1921. Some were simply unable to cope with their past. The story of Mihály Danics, one of Héjjas's, henchmen who had suffered a nervous breakdown, spent seven months in a mental asylum in the early 1920s, and later became a convicted criminal, most likely represented the tip of the iceberg.Footnote ⁹¹ Another member of the Héjjas Detachment responsible for the murder of a Jewish merchant in the town of Kiskunhalas during the counterrevolution committed suicide in 1923.Footnote ⁹² Prónay's subcommander, First Lieutenant József Szentmiklóssy, killed himself soon after he had been discharged from the army in 1921. The ever-malicious Prónay claimed that the homosexual Szentmiklóssy shot himself in the apartment of his comrade, friend, and lover, Count Hermann Salm, because he could not get out of debt. Count Salm told the court in 1930 that his friend committed suicide out of desperation and because of the mistreatment and humiliation that he had suffered at Prónay's hand.Footnote ⁹³ Two other members of Prónay's officers' company, Second Lieutenant László Okolicsányi and First Lieutenant Gusztáv Léderer, were put on trial for robbery and murder a few years after the dissolution of the paramilitary group. Léderer's wife had an affair with a butcher. The ex-militia man murdered her seducer, and then he and his wife dissected the butcher's remains and pillaged his house. Having been found guilty by the court, Léderer was executed for his crime in 1925.Footnote ⁹⁴

Suggestive as these cases might be, the number of militia men who collapsed under the psychological burden of their past, committed suicide, or became criminals remained small. The majority easily found their place in civilian society, as the example of Mihály Francia Kiss, Iván Héjjas's right-hand man, shows. Kiss and hundreds of other executioners became loving husbands, caring fathers, respected and respectable neighbors, colleagues, and citizens. Like other civilians, they paid their taxes, obeyed the law, and followed social conventions in the interwar period. The son of a wealthy peasant in Kecskemét, Francia Kiss served with distinction in the war and had become a noncommissioned officer by 1918. A counterrevolutionary of the first hour, he became Iván Héjjas's most trusted lieutenant after the summer of 1919. In that capacity, he helped organize the successful raid on an arms depot in the Austrian town of Fürstenfeld in the summer of 1920. Appointed as a squad leader, he also fought courageously during the militia uprising in Western Hungary in the fall of 1921.Footnote ⁹⁵ Kiss achieved national fame, or rather notoriety, as a brutal executioner of Jews and the organizer of dozens of pogroms and armed robberies.Footnote ⁹⁶ By the fall of 1921, Crown Attorney Albert Váry had gathered enough evidence to put him and a dozen of his accomplices on trial. However, thanks to Horthy's amnesty order issued on 3 November 1921, Váry was forced to stop the investigation. After 1923, the victims' families brought Kiss to court twice; in both cases, however, the trial ended with an acquittal.Footnote ⁹⁷

Cleared of all charges, Francia Kiss returned to civilian life in 1924. He married the daughter of a wealthy farmer the same year. In the interwar period, Kiss worked on his land. He bought an extra twenty-five hectares of land and built a large house in his hometown. In the late 1920s, Regent Horthy, who had known him since the Szeged days, invited the ex-militia man and ten of his fellow peasants to discuss the issue of land reform. He allegedly told the regent, “the land reform should have been carried out one hundred years ago; however, the Church, as the largest landowner, prevented it” (a statement that may have sounded like music to the ears of Protestant Horthy). For his service in the counterrevolution, Kiss was even awarded the prestigious National Defense Cross (Nemzetvédelmi Kereszt) on the eve of World War II. In politics, the poorly educated Kiss followed the lead of his friend and commanding officer, Iván Héjjas: like him, Kiss remained a “race defender” who had long made his peace with the conservative authoritarian regime. He entered Héjjas's Ragged Guard in 1938 and participated in the occupation of Upper Hungary and Ruthenia in 1938 and 1939. In 1941, he rejoined the army to fight in the Yugoslav campaign. In the same year, he returned home and worked as a gentleman farmer for the next three years. Kiss escaped from the approaching Russian troops into Western Hungary. He hid in a small village close to the town of Pápa for the eleven years that followed, using various aliases to escape recognition and arrest. In 1948, he was sentenced to death in absentia, for the murder of forty-seven individuals and for acting as an accomplice in nineteen other cases. But the law caught up with him in March 1957.Footnote ⁹⁸ The then seventy-year-old Francia Kiss showed courage during the police interrogation and his trial. He told the judge and those who cared to listen to him in the courtroom, for example, that he hated the Catholic Church and the Communist Party equally and that the postwar regime alienated peasants by taking everything away from them.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Budapest Court sentenced him to death on 13 June 1957; he was executed on 17 August 1957.

As the trajectory of Mihály Francia Kiss's life shows, Regent Horthy and the political elite treated militia men who had accepted the counterrevolutionary regime with consideration. The officer corps of the National Army, dominated by professional soldiers who had made their careers in the Common Army before 1914, admitted relatively few militia members. Army leaders used the restrictions imposed on the size of the Hungarian armed forces imposed by the Treaty of Trianon to cleanse the army of unsavory and politically unreliable elements and of reserve officers, who had been promoted during the war.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet the government did not completely forget about the veterans of the civil war. After 1921, thousands of officers found jobs as physical education instructors, teachers, horse trainers, fire fighters, and employees in military cemeteries. They all continued to draw salaries from the government and spent much of their free time in casinos, cafés, and taverns discussing politics. In the early 1930s, with the expansion of the army, many returned to active duty.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Some, by now middle-aged veterans of the civil war, reentered the armed forces in this manner, such as the forty-two-year-old lieutenant and a member of the Prónay Battalion, Árpád Kiss, who requested his readmission into the officer corps in 1941, after Hungary's entry into the war.Footnote ¹⁰²

The political and social elite clearly did not want to alienate the veterans of the civil war. On the contrary, for their continued support against the enemies of the conservative social and political order, they were prepared to make significant concessions. The officers and the rank and file of the paramilitary groups were discouraged from entering the National Army in the 1920s; on the other hand, the reorganized rural police and the gendarmerie received them with open arms. The Ministry of Interior set the admission requirements low and the salaries and benefits high to attract the veterans of the counterrevolution.Footnote ¹⁰³ The author of a recent study on the history of the gendarmerie takes it for granted that a significant percentage, perhaps the majority, of the recruits had served in the right-wing militias during the counterrevolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The reconstituted gendarmerie preserved the spirit of the counterrevolution and the White Terror in the purest form. Their loyalty and obedience reinforced by military discipline, the gendarmes never hesitated to come to the regime's aid during contested elections, strikes, and political demonstrations in the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The reconstituted gendarmerie was not the only institution that received the right-wing veterans of the civil war with open arms: the Gallant Order (Vitézi Rend) fulfilled the same functions.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Prónay, as we have seen, had been pushed aside in the fall of 1921. However, his subordinates had no reason to complain about maltreatment and discrimination. Prónay's deputy, Captain Victor (Győző) Ranzenberger, became one of the commanding officers of Horthy's bodyguards after 1922. A recipient of the vitéz title, he retired from active service in the rank of a colonel in the early 1930s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Ranzenberger was not alone: eighteen out of the original seventy officers (25.7 percent) who had entered the Prónay Battalion had been accepted into the Gallant Order by 1936.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Membership in the Gallant Order both promoted careers and marked success in interwar Hungarian society. In 1947, the Communist-controlled police in Hungary were able to locate forty-six members of the original Prónay Officers' Detachment, which had such a high percentage of vitézek. The report that the detectives sent to their superiors listed the occupation of twenty-four individuals, all of whom had been solidly middle-class and occupied important positions in the economy and the state bureaucracy in the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The vitézek were forbidden to enter the Arrow Cross and other National Socialist parties in the late 1930s. Yet, this did not prevent the majority from openly sympathizing with the radical and Fascist Right. The Gallant Order did not resist the German occupation of the country in March 1944; with a few exceptions, its leaders, and most likely the majority of its rank and file, welcomed the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the spring and early summer, and they sided with the Arrow Cross government in October 1944.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Although only a minority of vitézek had served in the paramilitary groups in 1919, the National Defense Cross (Nemzetvédelmi Kereszt), established at the start of World War II, was awarded exclusively to militia members and politicians who had played an active role in the counterrevolution. The curator of the National Defense Cross was László Magasházy, who had served as Horthy's aide-de-camp in 1919. Tivadar Kovács, who had kidnapped and murdered a Jewish piano manufacturer during the White Terror, sat on the curatorial board. His brother and accomplice, Árpád Kovács, commanded in 1944 a Jewish labor battalion in the Dréher Beer Factory, where he made a name for himself as a sadist. Between 1920 and 1921, the two Kovács brothers were members of the Prónay Battalion.Footnote ¹¹¹ The majority of the recipients of the National Defense Cross, as the following data show, were solidly middle- and upper-middle class. Even though we do not have information on their social status before 1919, there can be no doubt that, as the examples of Francia Kiss, the Kovács brothers, and Magasházy demonstrate, the recipients fared well in their professional and private lives in the interwar period.Footnote ¹¹²

Collaboration and Genocide

As we have seen, none of the major militia leaders participated in the decision-making process that pulled Hungary into World War II, committed war crimes after 1939, or played any significant role in the Holocaust. However, if one looks at the militia leaders' closest supporters in the political and military elite, the picture becomes more complex. At least three, Miklós Kozma,Footnote ¹¹³ Colonel Jenő Ranzenberger (Ruszkay),Footnote ¹¹⁴ and Prime Minister Döme Stojakovics (Sztójay), all of whom played important roles in the Jewish genocide and the Nazi occupation in the country, had started their political careers as general staff officers in Horthy's entourage in Szeged in 1919.Footnote ¹¹⁵ On the other hand, Marxist scholarship grossly exaggerated the presence of counterrevolutionaries in the National Socialist movements in the late 1930s and early 1940s. About half (25 out of 49) of the National Socialist parliamentary representatives mentioned wartime service in their biography in 1939; one third (16 out of 49) had been awarded decorations during the war. There were about a dozen people in the lower chamber of the parliament in 1939 who had joined the right-wing militias during the counterrevolution; however, only three represented the Nazis, while the rest stood for the party of the government. Only one Arrow Cross member claimed to possess the vitéz title (while 37 out of the 263 parliamentarians were members of the Gallant Order). The majority of Race Defenders, the group that provided a political home for ex-militia men (like Iván Héjjas, after 1923), supported the ruling Party of Hungarian Life (Magyar Élet Pártja or MÉP) in 1939; a small minority (2 out of 22, people like Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinsky and Tibor Eckhardt) entered the peasant Smallholders' Party; a substantive minority (8 out of 22 individuals, more than one third) became National Socialists. The Arrow Cross and other National Socialist parties, in brief, appealed mainly to a younger generation of radicals, who reached adulthood in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The men who joined the extreme Right in the 1930s had been too young in 1919 to play a leading role, either as politicians or military commanders, in the counterrevolution; at best, they acted as its foot-soldiers.Footnote ¹¹⁶

These numbers highlight the differences between National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s and the first generation of radicals, the so-called Race Defenders, who had been active in the militias and the patriotic associations in the 1920s.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although significant, they do not, however, mark the most important line of divisions in political life in Hungary before 1945. Despite all their differences, the Race Defenders stood much closer, politically and ideologically, to the members of the Arrow Cross than to the followers of the peasant Smallholders' Party, and a world separated them from the Liberals, commonly identified with Budapest Jews, the Social Democrats, and the Communists. During the war, on the two most important issues—continued participation in the war on the side of the Axis powers and the fate of Hungarian Jews—the line between the two groups became particularly blurred.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Nazi penetration was particularly palpable in the traditional bulwarks of the radical Right, the officer corps, and the gendarmerie. In 1943, according to an intelligence report, Fascist and pro-German soldiers may have outnumbered pro-British and conservative officers in Horthy's entourage by three to one.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It was not an accident that the officer corps failed to support Horthy and his conservative advisors in their endeavor to leave the German alliance in the fall of 1944; the military elite also violated their oath to Regent Horthy by siding openly with the new Arrow Cross government after 15 October 1944.Footnote ¹²⁰

After 1923, the majority of early radicals found their place in the conservative authoritarian regime. Success in their careers, however, did not prevent some from casting their lot with the National Socialists, as the example of Prónay's subcommander, First Lieutenant Árpád Taby, shows. One of the highest decorated veterans of World War I and the leader of an entire “militia army” in Burgenland in 1921, Taby joined the gendarmerie after the onset of the consolidation. At the end of 1920s, Horthy even appointed him to the bodyguards as a senior officer. Despite his professional success, Taby failed to identify with the conservative social system and the authoritarian regime. At the start of the Great Depression, he and Ferenc Szálasi founded the first truly National Socialist organization in Hungary, called the Hungarian Life Alliance (Magyar Élet Szövetsége). In 1935, Taby, Szálasi, and Sándor Csia established the Party of National Will (Nemzeti Akarat Pártja), the forerunner to the Arrow Cross. Szálasi allegedly asked Taby to serve as party leader; Taby, thinking of his career, declined the request. In 1938, with the rank of a colonel, he retired from active service to run for election as a candidate of the ruling government party. He entered the parliament on the government ticket, but he continued to pass on information to, and collaborate with, the Arrow Cross in the next five years. Footnote ¹²¹

Taby kept a foot in both camps until the very end. Emil Kovarcz, the member of the Ostenburg Detachment who had organized the kidnapping and murder of Béla Somogyi and Béla Bacsó, the editor-in-chief of the Socialist Népszava and his young colleague in February 1920, on the other hand, openly became Nazi. In the 1920s, Kovarcz, too, found employment with the gendarmerie; in 1931, he reentered the army and, at the rank of a major, taught at the prestigious Ludovika Military Academy. At the end of 1938, he resigned from his teaching post over what he considered the lack of Hungarian will to play a more active role in the Czechoslovak crisis and the government's failure to annex all of Slovakia. In the same year, he joined the leadership of the Arrow Cross Party. In 1939, the government investigated Kovarcz in connection to the terrorist attacks on the Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest; his trial in 1940 was part of the second Teleki government's crackdown on the Arrow Cross, which was blamed for a recent miners' strike. In the end, Kovarcz received a five-year prison sentence and was stripped of his rank and his seat as the representative of the Arrow Cross in the Parliament. In March 1941, before the verdict was announced, Kovarcz sought refuge in Nazi Germany. He returned to Hungary after the German occupation of the country in March 1944; on 13 September, Szálasi entrusted him to prepare a military coup. Kovarcz became, as a minister without a portfolio, a member of the Szálasi government in October. His task was to organize the population for total war. Like many of his comrades, Kovarcz left the country with the retreating German Army. He fell into American captivity but was extradited back to Budapest to face trial as a war criminal. He was found guilty and executed in the spring of 1946.Footnote ¹²²

Although the connection was much weaker than Marxist historians after 1945 claimed, a direct line did exist between the White Terror and the genocide of the Hungarian Jews. The two Hungarian architects of the Jewish genocide in Hungary and Adolf Eichmann's colleagues, László Endre and László Baky, started their political careers in the militia movement. The details of their lives are important, because they show just how complex the relationship was between early radicalism and National Socialism, and between social reform and anti-Semitism. A scion of a distinguished Catholic noble family and a graduate from the Law Faculty of the University of Budapest, Endre served on the Russian front during the war. Discharged from the army by the democratic Károlyi government in November 1918, the decorated young officer joined the leadership of at least a dozen Right radical and Fascist political organizations and patriotic associations over the next nine months.Footnote ¹²³ In the fall of 1921, Endre participated in the popular uprising in Burgenland as one of the subcommanders in Árpád Taby's militia army. For his sacrifices in the war and his services in the counterrevolution, the Bethlen government awarded him the vitéz title in 1922. In November 1923, he was elected as the county commissioner (főszolgabíró) in the Gödöllő County of Pest Province. In the 1920s and 1930s, he also came to occupy important positions in the leadership of the MOVE, the ÉME, the Gallant Order, and the Levente (a militarized version of the English scout movement). In 1937, on the Italian model, Endre founded the short-lived Socialist Party of Racial Defense (Fajvédő Szocialista Párt). In the same year, he and the Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi, established the Hungarian National Socialist Party (Magyar Nemzeti Szocialista Párt). His election as minister president (alispán) in Pest Province in 1938 sent shock waves through the country; for the first time, a well-known Nazi became the leader of an entire province in Hungary.

Endre was both a racist and radical anti-Semite. As a high-ranking administrator, he used the power of his office to cleanse the state bureaucracy of Jews. On the other hand, he genuinely sympathized with the plight of the agrarian poor, especially that of peasant women. Thanks to his efforts, Pest County provided a model as how to improve the health, level of education, and living standards of poor farmers and agricultural laborers. After 1938, Endre not only supported the anti-Semitic laws; he and his fellow administrators took the initiatives (by barring Jews from public baths in 1939, for example) to drive the process of racial segregation to an early and successful conclusion. In 1942, he published a book entitled About the Jews: the Lesson of the Trial in Bern, in which he expressed admiration for Nazi methods. In early April 1944, under German pressure, Regent Horthy appointed him as the state secretary in charge of political (Jewish) affairs in the Ministry of the Interior. Even before his appointment, however, Endre began to devise plans to deport the entire Jewish population of Hungary, including converts, the wives and husbands of non-Jews, and war veterans. With László Baky and Andor Jaross, Endre bore the greatest responsibility for the Jewish genocide in Hungary. After the Arrow Cross takeover of power at the end of October 1944, the new Szálasi government put him in charge of the civilian administration in the war-torn eastern half of the country. After the war, in January 1946, the People's Court sentenced him to death; the sentence was duly carried out at the end of March 1946.Footnote ¹²⁴

Like Endre, Baky also hailed from an old, though Protestant, noble family. He became a professional officer, and like most militia men discussed in this paper, served with distinction during the war. First Lieutenant Baky entered the Prónay Detachment in the summer of 1919 in Szeged and remained with the same unit the next two years. After the dissolution of the last paramilitary groups at the end of 1921, he found employment with the gendarmerie. In 1931, acting as an agent provocateur, he helped to expose the Vannay conspiracy, betraying his one-time friends and fellow militia members, such as Vannay, Raád, the Piroska brothers, and Molnár in the process. Hard-working, ruthless, and ambitious, he progressed quickly in his career, reaching the rank of colonel by 1937. In 1939, he entered the parliament on an Arrow Cross platform but with no official party affiliation. In the early 1940s, Baky had experimented with three National Socialist parties; in the end, however, he cast his lot with the Arrow Cross. Baky, like Endre, was a murderous anti-Semite. In the first half of the war, he gained notoriety with his demand to expel from the army part-Jews and officers whose wives were of Jewish descent. On 24 March 1944, five days after the German occupation of the country, Horthy appointed him as undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior in charge of the gendarmerie. In this position, he played a leading role in the genocide of the Hungarian Jews. In September, on Horthy's advice, the government forced him to resign from his position. After the Arrow Cross takeover of power in October, Szálasi appointed him as the head of the Office of National Security. Endre fell into American captivity at the end of the war. He was extradited and put on trial as a war criminal. During his trial, he claimed to have saved the lives of many Jews, including one Professor Rusznyák, and that he had opposed the German occupation of the country. On 7 January 1946, the People's Court (Népbíróság) found him guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on 29 March 1946.Footnote ¹²⁵