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May 21st, 2012

Horthy plaque unveiled amid protest in Debrecen

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A memorial plaque to Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s regent during the interwar period, was unveiled in the Reformed College of Debrecen, eastern Hungary, on Saturday amidst protest by the opposition Socialists.

The plaque, erected first around 1940, was reinstated by Reformed Bishop Gusztav Bolcskei, member of the college’s friendship group, and Janos Gyori, head of the group, under the inner arcades of the college in the presence of 200 people.

Gyori noted that Horthy (1868-1957) had been a pupil of the college in the third and fourth grades and returned several times to his alma mater during his regency from 1920 to 1944.

Horthy’s historical role and political decisions will be assessed and disputed by historians for a long time to come, but it is beyond doubt that “he profoundly despised the two biggest contagions of the 20th century: Bolshevism and Nazism,” he said.

Outside the building, dozens of Socialist supporters demonstrated against what they called the reincarnation of the Horthy regime.

They held up banners with the inscription “Never Again Horthy”, “No to Horthy, No to Horthyism” and “Greetings from the Don Bend”, referring to a WWII battle in which the Hungarian army suffered terrible losses. Some demonstrators waved Hungarian and Israeli flags.

Shortly afterwards another group of similar size arrived to demonstrate for Horthy. Some of them wore what resembled military uniforms. Words were exchanged between the two groups.

Socialist spokeswoman Kata Kormos accused Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democratic alliance of aiming to restore an odious bygone era.

Reincarnating the Horthy regime is not the public will but a sign of the government tolerating the demands of the extreme right, she said.

Kormos qualified Horthy’s rule “the most shameful quarter in Hungary’s 20th-century history”, one characterised by anti-Jewish laws and social misery.

The demonstration ended after half an hour without incident.

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  • Géza

    “Kormos qualified Horthy’s rule “the most shameful quarter in Hungary’s 20th-century history”, one characterised by anti-Jewish laws and social misery.”

    And what about the socialist erea? Kormos is a hypocrite and a liar nothing else!

    • Leto

      Actually the most shameful chapter, hands down, in Hungary’s 20th-century history was the Communist dictatorship.

      Ms. Kormos’ party is a successor (in legal and other terms) to the state party of that most shameful part of Hungary’s 20th-century history.

      • GW

        Leto,

        The murder of at least 600,000 Hungarian citizens from within the borders of 1941-44 because of their ethnic or religious origins is, without a doubt, the most shameful chapter and in sheer numbers dwarfs other tragedies in a hard Hungarian century. And the fact that millions of their fellow citizens acquiesced, if not actively participated, in this murder is a continuing shame for Hungary.

        • Leto

          Stuff it. That’s the shame of the German history.
          And I’m not interested in this topic because it’s dead boring now.

          -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikl%C3%B3s_Horthy

          It is often argued that Hungary’s “relatively mild” anti-Je*w.ish Laws, which were passed under German pressure, appeased the Nazis enough to create a relatively safe environment for the J*ews before the 1944 German invasion. It seems certain that the survival of 124,000[37] Hungarian Je*ws in Budapest until the arrival of the Soviets would have been impossible without Horthy’s years of foot-dragging reluctance to implement German orders.[38] On 15 July 1944 Anne McCormick, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times wrote in defense of Hungary as the last refuge of J*e*ws in Europe, declaring that “as long as they exercised any authority in their own house, the Hungarians tried to protect the J*w*s.

          • Bowen

            It’s German and Hungarian history, Leto. Whether you’re interested in it or not, is irrelevant.

          • Leto

            It’s German and Hungarian history indeed. But Horthy’s rule is definitely NOT the most shameful quarter in Hungary’s 20th-century history. See also above.

          • Leto

            “Between the autumn of 1944 and 1948, some 800,000 Hungarians were deported to the Soviet Union. Only about a fifth of them returned between 1953-55″ says another article on this site.

            You never ever wail about these 600,000 Hungarian victims.

  • Big Fish

    Sounds like Kormus would prefer a plaque/statute for Hungarian heros Bela Kun, Matyas Rakosi. Larger question would be whether to engrave their alias or real surnames. Don’t understand why important hungarian leaders such as these two had to alter their name.

  • GW

    For all the faults of the socialist era, it must be acknowledged that it happened due to forces beyond the control of the Hungarian people and due to these world-political conditions, the Hungarian people had no alternative. The brutality of the initial socialist era was real and should be condemned without excuses, but the Kadar era must be evaluated in somewhat different terms, those of the unwritten contracts between Hungary and the Soviet Union as well as between the Hungarian state and its citizens. Did many Hungarians collaborate too willingly with the Soviets and behave unethically or criminally? Yes, and those who still live are to be found in all parts of the present political spectrum. Did the state achieve the maximum amount of freedom possible within the Soviet restrictions? We simply do not know, but many Hungarians believed this to be the case and there is a nostalgia for many aspects of the Kadar system today, including many on all sides of the present political spectrum. The greater part of Horthy regime, on the other hand, was strictly a Hungarian invention and its own brutalities cannot be judged against the background of potential external compulsion or invasion, the anti-Jewish laws of the Horthy era were voluntary after all; finding common cause with the Germans in WWII and under the German occupation, with the willingness of some large portion of the population to assist in the deportation and murder of 600000 Hungarian citizens, must be taken as shameful on their own terms.

    • Cogito

      @ GW

      This is the most ridiculous and shamelessly outrageous attempt at white washing the communist regime, and at rewriting history, I have seen in a long time. While you are zealously invoking all, even faintly applicable, ‘mitigating historical circumstances’ when evaluating the communist rule, the bloodiest regime and period – outside a war situation – in Hungarian history, you are doing exactly the opposite, when speaking about the Horthy era.

      Some things just don’t change. I have yet to see one comment from you that is not riddled with spinelessness and lies.

      • GW

        You are the spineless one for not being able to simply acknowledge the fact that more than 600,000 Hungarian citizens were gathered up and murdered simply because of their ethnic and/or religious background, as well as the fact that the sheer number dwarfs the horrors of every other regime Hungary has suffered.

        Hungary could have aspired to moral greatness, like Denmark, a country of fewer strategic resources than Hungary, for example, where the King showed a bravery and respect for his minority subjects that Horthy never did, the police refused to cooperate with the occupying German army, the Danish diplomatic service looked after their citizens who had been taken by Germans into concentration camps, demanding good treatment and communications, allowing most of them to survive, and a resistance movement of ordinary Danes stepped up to insure that the majority of Jews found safe passage to a neutral country. Instead, in Hungary, the country allowed at least 600,000 citizens of no known connection to the war, other than the cost of the extermination effort, to perish.

        Why do you hate Hungary so much that you do not wish it to be better, a star among nations?

  • Istvan

    He was a great man who stabalized Hungary after the Jews (Bela Kun) tried to make the country communist after World War I. He should have been made a King, or at least his surviving son. He walked quite a tight rope between the Soviets and the Western Powers but always kept the best interests of the Hungarian people his first priority.

  • abácsi

    “always kept the best interests of the Hungarian people his first priority.” The death of 300 000 troops was part of that plan?

  • Janos

    Horthy was a great criminal.

    • seinean

      @Janos: “great” wording :)

    • Cogito

      @ Janos (Kẚdẚr)

      “Horthy was a great criminal”

      Says Janos Kẚdẚr.

  • DoubleH63

    @GW

    “deportation and murder of 600000 Hungarian citizens”

    Where is the forensic evidence of this?
    Maybe we should look in the Soviet Union? [That’s where Aloof think they are.]

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