The Allies, Secret Peace Talks, and the German Invasion of Hungary, 1943–1944

On March 19, 1944, Wehrmacht and SS divisions brought an end to the relative peace that had prevailed in Hungary while much of the continent experienced devastating warfare. A report prepared by American intelligence in October 1944, shortly after Regent Miklós Horthy was forced to resign, asserted that, “At the time of the German occupation of Hungary . . . [Hungary had] the largest [number of] and best-treated Jews in Axis Europe . . . The Hungarian Government did not always follow suggestions from Berlin and maintained a higher degree of political independence than other Nazi satellites. The Horthy regime hesitated following the Nazi policy to its ultimate goal of deportation, starvation and extermination.” Prior to the German occupation, “persecuted Jews of neighboring Axis lands looked upon Hungary as a place of refuge.”1 The Mapai secretariat in Jerusalem made the following note: “German invasion: The process began of turning Hungary from a ‘paradise for Jews’ into a land in which the Final Solution was put into action.” David Ben Gurion was concerned that the “invasion [was] a sign of new calamity.”2 “Paradise” was relative, of course. Hungary was only a “paradise” in comparison with other parts of German-occupied Europe, where the Jews were murdered on the spot en masse or were deported to German-run death camps. Nevertheless, young Jewish Zionist leader Rafi Benshalom, who arrived in Budapest from Slovakia in January 1944, was shocked: “For me, in Europe of 1944, this seemed like a fantasy . . . Jews seeking entertainment could still visit coffee houses, cinemas and theaters. While in Poland, hundreds of thousands of Europe’s Jews were being annihilated and the whole world lived in fear.”3All this changed after the moderate Kállay cabinet resigned in the wake of occupation, and Horthy appointed a new pro-German administration under Döme Sztójay. Gestapo units arrived with lists of opposition and anti-German elements, who were arrested in droves. Many of them were sent to concentration camps, including the prime minister. Unintentionally, the Germans helped pave the way for the Communist takeover in Hungary by deporting political figures who could have resisted the Communists. With the active assistance of the new Hungarian administration and the Hungarian gendarmerie, Hitler’s men, including Adolf Eichmann and his cohort, deported the majority of the last intact Jewish community in Europe to Auschwitz where most of them were gassed.When I began researching the Holocaust in Hungary many years ago as an undergraduate, I was interested in the imprint of the secret talks in the Hungarian, international, and mainly British press. I was shocked to find that TheTimes (UK) published verbatim quotes of top-secret Hungarian communications addressed to the British Foreign Office. The secret talks were hardly secret. Later I was interested in finding out why these talks occurred, as, at the time, I thought the argument that the Hungarians had not acted in good faith was unconvincing, on the basis of documentary sources beginning to come to light. Yet I had no inkling that seemingly disparate events—the secret peace initiatives, the Allied strategy to defeat Hitler, the German invasion of Hungary, and, indirectly, the Hungarian Holocaust—would all intersect.The German invasion of Hungary did not have to happen, or at least not as early as it did, on March 19, 1944. Despite some reluctance to satisfy all the Führer’s military and economic needs in the early phase of the war, Horthy’s Hungary was a reliable ally. The question remains: why was Hungary invaded mere months before the Red Army reached the Hungarian borders and penetrated the Carpathians? Hitler’s order to implement Operation Margarethe offered two main reasons for the move: Hungary’s impending “treason,” and the fact that Hitler would not tolerate having “a million” Jews withheld from Germany’s grasp. The meaning of his remarks on the Jews was clear. Hitler had already chastised Horthy for not having dealt with the Jewish Question radically enough when Horthy visited the German leader in Schloss Klessheim in 1943. When Horthy was summoned for another visit with Hitler on March 16, 1944, he and his entourage were berated for their ongoing negotiations with the “Anglo-Saxons.” Hitler declared that he did not want a repetition of the Badoglio affair (Italy’s 1943 surrender to the Allies), and he insisted that Germany would not tolerate one million Jews in the rear of its armies.4 What did Hitler mean by “impending treason,” a motive that seems to have been extremely important for understanding his decision to invade?In order to understand this, we must go back to an all but forgotten, but all the more fateful, episode of the Second World War: Hungary’s (and the other minor Axis states’) efforts to break with Hitler, which began in the summer of 1942.5 By then it was becoming apparent in the capitals of the Axis satellite states that the Germans might lose the war. Hungary was the first state to explore the possibility of a separate arrangement with the Western Allies, and Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria rapidly followed suit. As early as March 1942, Horthy dismissed László Bárdossy, the prime minister who had dragged the country into war with the Soviet Union. The Regent replaced him with Miklós Kállay, a little-known figure in Hungarian politics, and charged him with the recovery of the country’s sovereignty. This, of course, was more easily said than done: first, because of the sizable pro-German political forces in the country; second, because of the difficulty of making contact with Allied officials in neutral capitals; third, because of the fear that if the leadership in Berlin discovered the secret dealings, the country could be occupied by the German army; and, finally, because the Allies themselves were not sold on the importance of the peace initiatives emanating from Axis Europe.Even though Franklin Roosevelt’s confidant Adolph Berle saw these initiatives as a chance to break the Germans’ southeastern flank and thereby advance the prospect of victory, he found few followers in Allied capitals.6 Stalin expressed disinterest in the Finnish proposal to conclude a separate peace in January 1943, and Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill accepted the formula of unconditional surrender, which, as they were aware, was inimical to the surrender of Hitler’s allies.7 The chief motivation behind unconditional surrender may have been to reassure Stalin that there would be no deal at the Soviet Union’s expense. In addition, Axis efforts may have been seen as a German ploy to split the Allies.Nevertheless, a steady flow of individuals, diplomats, and various other officials and private personalities travelled to neutral capitals to find contacts among mainly, although not exclusively, Western representatives. The first Hungarian to be taken seriously was Albert Szent-Györgyi, the winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who, like a sizeable segment of the Hungarian middle class, had a pro-British outlook. His putatively secret mission did not go unnoticed in Berlin. In fact, the Germans, including Hitler himself, received accurate updates on the secret talks concerning a separate peace a separate peace, including the ones American and Hungarian representatives conducted in Turkey in late 1943 and early 1944.In fact, the Hungarian peace attempts were initially driven by a desire to avoid a second Trianon, that is, having to return to the pre-1938 borders.8 At the same time, even well-informed diplomats harbored illusions regarding British and American policies, and were convinced, at least through much of 1943, that Anglo-American troops would occupy the Danubian basin. These were not entirely unfounded: it seemed logical that after their victory in North Africa, the Allied landing would take place in Italy or the Balkans, which would then lead them to Budapest and Vienna. It was also hoped, with no basis whatsoever, that the West would view Hungary as a bastion against Bolshevism and perhaps even a potential participant in a post-war anti-Soviet crusade. National myth played a role here: Hungarians (like Slovaks and Poles) recalled their role as defenders of Christianity against the Ottoman Turks, and now, it seemed, a similar role against godless Bolsheviks awaited them.Evidence suggests that by March 1943, the British discovered that the Hungarian initiative could be exploited to aid the Allied war effort. In a memorandum to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was actively involved in the implementation of US policy in Axis Europe, the Special Operations Executive explained that “His Majesty’s Government” no longer feared Hungary’s occupation by the Germans, which would be a “positive” outcome because it would increase the burden on the German army. The advantage could be even greater if the turmoil could be timed to coincide with an Allied landing in Europe.9 Eventually, this position would guide Allied policies regarding the Axis satellites. Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Switzerland at the forefront of talks to extract the satellites from the war when the time was ripe, was well aware of the Kállay administration’s dilemma: if it acted too early, before the Allies were in a position to help, the Germans would invade; but if it acted too late, it would face another devastating peace agreement. The State Department urged caution: a precipitate turn of events in Hungary could lead to “the destruction of those elements,” which might be of more use to the “United Nations” when there was hope that a political volte-face could be successfully executed.10 Negotiations were conducted in this spirit. An experienced Hungarian diplomat, György Barcza, held secret talks with a British intelligence representative in Geneva, Frederick Vanden Heuvel. Vanden Heuvel told him that his government did not expect the Hungarian government to do anything that would lead to German occupation, and in light of the serious consequences, he could not imagine Hungary breaking with the Axis.11Due to these talks, Hungary’s image in London changed for the better. The Foreign Office, recognizing that Germany would lose the war, noted that the Hungarians had reduced their contributions to the Axis war effort to a “suicidal” level.12 Hans Bernard Gisevius, an OSS agent working in the German Foreign Office, reported that Hitler was mad at the Hungarians for trying to deceive him, and hoped to get rid of the prime minister and the “traitors.” In September, László Veress concluded a preliminary armistice agreement on behalf of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry with the British consul-general in Istanbul Knatchbull-Hugessen, which, as the British agreed, would not be published until the British invaded Hungary (in which case the Hungarians agreed to surrender). An Anglo-American invasion of the Danubian basin would never materialize, and the British were aware that they could provide no assistance to the Hungarians.13 During the Quebec meeting of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, it was agreed that the second front would be opened in Normandy, and there would be no operations in the Balkans, nor would the offensive on the Italian peninsula reach Central Europe. As plans to defeat Germany crystallized, the message to would-be Hungarian peace makers began to change. Allen Dulles told Barcza that Hungary had to follow the Italian example and shoulder the consequences. If the Hungarians failed to recognize the consequences of the situation created as a result of Italy’s capitulation, it would mean they had renewed their alliance with Germany and would therefore be subject to the same treatment as the Germans. Thus, Hungary had to make the necessary moves to distance itself, “even at the risk of a German invasion.”14In the same spirit, the deputy chief of the British staff was interested in the intensification of the crisis created by the Italian defection. A memorandum to Chief of Staff Alan Brooke stated that a Hungarian capitulation would cause great political and military turmoil in Germany, and if Romania followed suit, Germany would face a critical situation that could be resolved only by the occupation of Hungary. If the Germans took the risk of moving troops from other theaters to Hungary, Germany’s weakening in other theaters would be to “our advantage.” The sooner the Hungarians acted, the better.15 Apparently the plan was put into effect. In September, the Political Warfare Executive reported that, at present, the Secret Intelligence Service assets in Bern were working to extract Hungary from the war. The aim was “to discredit the Hungarian government in the eyes of the Germans,” which would lead to Hungary’s occupation by the Germans.16 Lewis Namier expressed the Jewish Agency’s grave concerns to the Foreign Office regarding this policy. A break with the Germans, he argued, would jeopardize the lives of 800,000 Jews who lived in relative safety in Hungary. Germany would not tolerate Hungary’s defection, and would respond to such a move with invasion and the extermination of the last surviving Jewish community in Europe. The only hope for Hungary’s Jews, he opined, was that the Hungarians did nothing until it was probable that the Germans would not be able to react.Hungary, while still actively contributing to the German war effort—particularly in Ukraine, where the Hungarian army was tasked with carrying out the duties associated with military occupation—stepped up its efforts to find a way out of the war while getting something in return, although the prize was getting increasingly smaller. Hungary’s ambassador in Stockholm, Antal Ullein-Reviczky, told R. Taylor Cole, the OSS representative in Sweden, that his government was well aware that Hungary had to do whatever the Allies demanded. This would greatly accelerate events leading to surrender without the term unconditional surrender ever being mentioned in Budapest.17 Internal correspondence reveals that the terms had yet to be decided, but the Hungarians were left in the dark about this fact. On December 18, the regent’s son Miklós Horthy Jr.’s message was delivered to Allen Dulles: to wit, if the Allies expected Hungary to capitulate, he would ensure that it happened.18Facing military complications in Italy, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt calling attention to the potential “landslide” (i.e., defection) of Hungary and Romania and the need to take advantage of it.19 Sometime in the next few weeks, the decision was made to “detach the satellites.” According to a memorandum signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Admiral William Leahy, the strategic objectives of the Allies would be promoted by the defection of Hungary and Romania from the war, even if such a move resulted in the German occupation of these countries.20 Strategic decisions during the war were made by the president, but in all other matters, the JCS’s directives determined policy; in other words, both the OSS and the State Department were subordinated to military policy. Only a day after the Leahy memorandum was signed, William Donovan informed Dulles of the now-official policy. Regarding the ambivalent directions to the Hungarians, he wrote, “for your personal information” the have the of Hungary and the other Axis satellites. and his were and the directives were to guide The of this policy was in a memorandum found in the to which an invasion of the satellite states would the Germans in the of war at the time the second front was A from the Soviet reveals that was aware of this policy. that German its only made the German position more as the of troops to the satellites made their already position in the even This would make it to a at the Germans from the the secret talks a representative of the Hungarian government and the OSS were place in These on two main the terms of Hungary’s and a American military mission to be sent to Hungary, by a as Dulles put to an OSS by early 1943, Hungary had all and and was to the Allies with intelligence to German In return, the Hungarians to be as a country and for the Hungarian to Allied The Hungarians that they were to conclude an armistice and this was to the American military mission in the An OSS memorandum stated that the of the talks was to Hungary an to distance from the Axis by with the with the Germans. of military of course, were to be In the the that Germany was aware of the secret negotiations conducted with the Hungarians through a US agent in the German Foreign Nevertheless, the talks Allied offensive to get the Hungarians to and break with the On December 1943, after the of the US of State a to the German satellites that because of their in the war, they would the consequences of Germany’s On March 16, 1944, the day Horthy received Hitler’s for a declared that in order to their independence and the satellites had to break with The longer they the more serious the consequences would who to be on behalf of the told the Hungarian in that unconditional surrender was a but if the Hungarians acted too late, his would not be in a position to On the one in the Hungarians were told that expected the Hungarians to unconditional surrender, the talks would be and would On the other the Hungarians made it that surrender would in the country to but at the same time, they that US troops would no and for an American to the terms of surrender to Operation into Hungary on March 16, 1944, the day the of Hungary a meeting with Hitler where he was told that Hungary would be occupied to its impending the of Hungarian that who the US military him the American terms of asserted that his mission had no political and was to Hungary’s to the Allied war effort. yet to be be that as it the German invasion of March 19, may have been at least in by the Führer’s that he was about to lose a In this the Allied ploy to the Germans a expected the Germans to to and they sent When the of the Hungarian National who had also acted as a for peace Allen Dulles of the potential consequences of a German occupation, he up to in a few lives or there not was perhaps the most important in the to the war. it the consequences would have been had to be Lewis dark on March 1944, noted in his the Führer’s that after the he would go after the Hungarian The country’s political forces were into and the and them a to Hungary’s Jewish in with the SS and Gestapo that on the of the Wehrmacht to the The Gestapo also helped Stalin by and deporting many political that could have in the way of the country’s which was already in a a after the March The of the Jews few in the of the of Prime Minister the for the of Hungary’s defection policy on his and György Barcza, for noted in his that Kállay to as as but failed to that he could out of This up being both a personal and Barcza thought about strategy during the secret talks in 1943. In 1943, he wrote that those who Hungary to make the move to break with Hitler no of the consequences of such a The Germans would and they would and perhaps the opposition and would perhaps even hundreds of thousands of was on one The Germans the of Hungarian who could hardly for the of the regime under Miklós Kállay, the they of the that the in good and was to unconditional the Allies, the secret peace talks were important only as they the Germans to Hungary and thereby them in the of war. As noted in a prepared by the OSS in the wake of the of the Hungarian Jews, “the of these of Jews German-occupied had from the which was more interested in the of the

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.