The following letter was originally published in the Op/Ed pages of The New York Times and was reprinted in the January 22, 1994 issue of the Kanadai Magyarság.

"Hungary Was the First European Fascist State?

There were two letters published in the January 1^st (1994) issue of The New York Times, "Horthy and Hitler" and "Hungary and the Serbs", which are potentially misleading.

The first letter states that "Hungary was the first European Fascist State whatever that word means". I suggest that if the writer does not know what Fascism means then he should not use the term in such an accusatory sense!

His statement that Horthy in 1938 took part in "dismembering" Czechoslovakia is highly misleading without pointing out that Czechoslovakia (which recently dismembered itself) was an artificial creation which did not exist until the end of the First World War. Slovakia was a part of Hungary for a thousand years and Horthy re-occupied only that part which had an overwhelming (86.5 %) Hungarian majority population.

The second letter refers to the Hungarian occupation of the Vojvodina section of Yugoslavia as "one of the most shameful episodes of Hungarian history". Indeed, there were atrocities committed by some Hungarian troops in January 1942 but it was not Horthy's doing. The outraged Minister of Defence, Vilmos Nagybaczoni-Nagy initiated an investigation and court-martial proceedings commenced against the ringleaders of the pogrom. The officers responsible for the killings, however, with German help, managed to escape to Germany where they joined the SS and thus were beyond the reach of Hungarian justice.

Horthy was no Nazi and Hungary was not a Fascist State except during the last months of the war after Horthy's futile attempt at an armistice on October 15^th, 1944. By that time the Germans occupied the country and their fanatic henchmen, Szálasi and members of his Arrow-Cross Party let all hell loose. Horthy was placed under house arrest guarded by the SS in Hirschberg Castle in Bavaria and his son was kidnapped and deported to Mauthausen.

The tragedy of Horthy and that of Hungary itself was that it was clearly impossible to regain any of the territories lost in the disastrous 1920 treaty of Trianon, without German help. Border revision was the top agenda supported by the whole nation and no leader could survive without advocating it. Horthy's reluctant alliance with Germany did result in recovering the bulk of the Hungarian inhabited lands from surrounding countries, which were of course, lost again at the end of the war.

The Allies recognized this reality and while the Hungarian nation paid a heavy price for its role during the war, Horthy himself was not tried nor was he ever treated as a war criminal.

Dr. Thomas Nonn
Professor and Chairman of the Art Department
Kingsborough College, New York

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