Budapest in Wartime: Adam LeBor Interviewed
Congratulations on the publication of your new book, The Last Days of Budapest. It’s an extremely powerful book that tells the story of Budapest’s descent into catastrophe during World War II, could you start by telling us what led you to write the book?
What I wanted to do was try and illustrate the complexity of the story, there are books about the siege and there are many books about the Hungarian Holocaust. I wanted to try and tell the story of the city itself from the beginning of the war to the horrific end. I was especially interested in the period 1939 to 1941 when Britain had an embassy in Budapest which was pretty strange, because Hungary joined the Axis in November 1940, but we still had a functioning embassy; which had very good access to Admiral Miklos Horthy the Hungarian leader, and Pál Teleki the Prime Minister. So, they were sort of saying even though we’re in the Axis we’re still waving at London. To say secretly perhaps we’d rather be with you, but circumstances and geography mean we have to be with these horrible Nazis. So, having said that, in April 1941 Horthy let the German army transit through Hungary to invade Yugoslavia with horrific consequences, at which point Britain broke off diplomatic relations and closed the embassy.
Admiral Horthy the Regent of Hungary walked a tightrope of contradictions, caught between the Allies and Nazi Germany, but he became increasingly drawn into an alliance with Germany. What other course of action do you think he could have taken to keep Hungary neutral?
The first course of action he could have taken was not to join the war, that was the key choice. In the summer of 1941 Hungary joined Operation Barbarossa to invade Russia, which was just an absolute catastrophe for Hungary, because 18 months later, in January 1943, the whole of the second Army was wiped out. Half of the 200,000 soldiers were killed and the rest of them captured or badly injured. In a country of 10 million people that’s 2% of the population gone.
It’s easy to be clever with hindsight but I think they could have had a policy of more robust neutrality. To say yes, we’re next door to you, but we’re not going to join you. They didn’t let German soldiers transit through Hungary to invade Poland, so they did demonstrate some independence.
However, the prime driver of all Hungarian policy was to reverse the losses of the Treaty of Trianon [after WWI], when Hungary lost 2/3 of its territory in a very savage and a very unjust treaty. Germany lost 15% of its territory, Hungary lost something like 63%. A lot of those areas were historically Hungarian areas, so suddenly several million Hungarians were stranded outside the motherland. The overwhelming aim of Horthy’s government was to reverse the Treaty of Trianon. That was the prime driver of every policy decision.
Another key point was in the Autumn of 1943, terms were actually agreed with the British for Hungary to change sides. Even though Hungary was fighting with the Germans in Russia, Allied bombers didn’t bomb Hungary and Hungarian anti-aircraft guns didn’t fire on Allied bombers when they overflew Hungary. So, there was still that kind of ambiguity there. Hungary never wanted to go to war with the Western powers, but somehow thought they could do this juggling act and get back its lost territories in an alliance with the Nazis and still keep the Allies happy. If Admiral Horthy had changed sides, then it might have made a difference. The reason he didn’t was because he was scared the Germans would invade, but the Germans were going to invade anyway. Almost certainly, because there was a last Jewish community which they wanted to kill and also Hungary had a lot of resources, it controlled access to the Danube and was the gateway to the Balkans, so the Germans were coming. The only question was when.
Budapest was a major centre of espionage and intrigue in this period, perhaps the most extraordinary example is LT Colonel Howie. An escaped South African POW who ended up negotiating with Admiral Horthy and almost succeeded in persuading him to swap sides, why do you think he failed?
Charles Howie was an officer in the South African Army. He was captured at Tobruk in 1942, then he escaped one of the Stalags in Poland with a Hungarian Jewish POW. They made their way to Budapest, which until the Germans invaded in 1944 was one of the best places to be an Allied POW, because as part of this ambiguity in Hungarian policy they were treated quite laxly.
By the summer of 1944 he had become the representative of the Special Operations Executive in Budapest and was charged with trying to get Admiral Horthy to change sides. Eventually he managed to get some kind of terms out of Horthy in September 1944. He flew to Italy on this slightly madcap mission in a Hungarian plane, which landed at an Allied airfield. He was incredibly lucky not to be shot out of the sky, because it was an enemy plane. When he landed he said I’m a former POW, I’ve been living in Hungary negotiating with Horthy these are his terms. Not surprisingly he didn’t really get taken very seriously. At this stage Horthy was sending emissaries all over the place, but it was very late by then. The Germans were really embedded in Hungary. The time to try and change sides or to take a stand would have been before March 19 when the Germans moved in.
The holocaust in Hungary and Budapest had many aspects that were unique and made even more appalling as they happened in the middle of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, could you talk us through that?
The first unique aspect of it was the speed and ferocity of it in the countryside. The Germans invaded on 19th March and the Ghettoisation was well underway by April. Then the deportations started in mid-May and ended in early July. In those few weeks 430,000 people were sent to Auschwitz where most were killed immediately. It was thoroughly organised and highly efficient, because by then the Nazis really knew how to do this and most of the people were killed on arrival because a lot of them were women and children and old people. The adult men were on labour service which meant that they had been recruited for the Hungarian army. The Hungarian state was vital for this – the police, the gendarmes, the civil servants, everyone was mobilised to make the deportations as swift and efficient as possible. Even the Nazis were impressed.
That went on until early July, by which time Eichman and the others had everything prepared to deport the Jews of Budapest. Then Horthy was told by Roosevelt not to do this or you will be prosecuted as a war criminal. Also the Pope started to say you have to stop this and save the Jews of Budapest. There were still around 200,000 Jews still alive, more if you include the converts to Christianity. Horthy deployed the Hungarian army to take over the city and stop the Hungarian Gendarmerie from deporting the Jews. Most of the Budapest Jews were still alive and in the city, although they were forced to move to what they called Yellow Star Houses. There were several thousand apartment buildings which were designated as Yellow Star Houses. The Jews were forced to relocate with their belongings and to live in terrible conditions. Over 6-7 people in a room, but they were still alive, just, and that carried on until the winter of 1944.
After 15th October Horthy tried again to change sides. It was very poorly organised, and the Germans led by Otto Skorzeny, the man they called Hitler’s favourite Commando who broke Mussolini out of his mountain prison, organised a coup. Horthy was toppled and the Arrow Cross [Hungarian Nazis] took over, together with the SS. Then the real savagery began, that winter 1944 was a horror. The deportations renewed, there was a death march when thousands of Jewish people, many of them women and elderly women were forced to march to the Austrian border to dig fortifications. They died in their thousands, or were shot by the Arrow Cross, it was just unbelievable savagery. Even the Germans were shocked by it. By the end of the year around 100,000 Jews were still alive, 100,000 had been deported or died in the death march or died of illness or hunger. There’s about 30,000 in what they called the International Ghetto which was the houses under Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese and Red Cross protection. About 70,000 are in the ghetto proper, which was a walled off area around the Great Synagogue where conditions were absolutely terrible and maybe up to 20,000 were hiding.
Then the siege begins. By Christmas Budapest is completely surrounded, it’s a total hellscape of artillery smashing its way through. There’s nothing to eat, it’s freezing, the fighting is absolutely savage. The Russians used human wave attacks, sometimes buildings changed hands day-by-day, hour-by-hour. One minute controlled by the Germans and Hungarians, then captured by the Russians. It was savage, absolutely savage. At the same time feral gangs of Arrow Cross were wandering the city, shooting Jews into the Danube every night, or torturing them to death in their headquarters. When you read the accounts of this… I mean the sadism is just extraordinary. It’s not just shooting people, it’s torturing them to death, it’s just horror.
Admiral Horthy stopped the transport of Jews from Budapest in July 1944, do you think he did that as an act of humanity, or because Budapest Jews were assimilated, and he considered them Hungarian, or to save his skin with the Allies advancing?
This is the unanswerable question. Throughout the war Horthy had repeatedly refused to hand over the Jews. If he stopped the transports in July 1944 why didn’t he do it in May when the deportations started in the first place? He showed that he could do it, he had ruled Hungary for 24 years and he had no rivals for power. He deployed the army against the Gendarmes to save the Budapest Jews. He had authority. So, I think it was partly to save his own skin, it’s not a coincidence that he moved after the Allies said to him you will be arrested as a war criminal if you don’t stop this. Also, because he had more sympathy for Budapest Jews, he was quite friendly with some of the Budapest Jewish social and economic elite. It’s hard to know, but I don’t think there’s any overwhelming single factor.
Why do you think there was no opposition in Hungary to Horthy’s policies and to the Arrow Cross?
Horthy was widely admired in Hungary. Until the Germans invaded, Hungary existed as a unitary state. Czechoslovakia didn’t exist, Poland didn’t exist, Yugoslavia didn’t exist, but Hungary still existed, in control of its own territory, with its borders and its army and its currency. So, the opposition to him was on the Far Right and a very small Communist opposition. There was not much constituency for liberal politics. There was a small percentage of people that had those views, but it was a conservative society. A lot of it was not that modern, there was incredible poverty in the countryside. The Hungarian elite were not that interested in business and industry. They left a gap which was filled by the Germans and the Jews. So, the country’s own ruling elite weren’t that modern in their thinking. There wasn’t a lot of leadership for more progressive modern ideas, so that was the opposition to Horthy.
The interesting and strong question is why the Arrow Cross gunmen that were running wild in Hungary in the winter of 1944 were not stopped. There was only a few thousand of them, it would have been comparatively easy for the army to stop it. Everyone knew, every night where they went to shoot thousands of Jews into the Danube, it was all known. It would have been quite easy to send Army squads there and take action, but it’s very strange nothing really was done. There was a small Hungarian resistance which did occasionally do actions and there was the Jewish resistance, but overall, the slaughter kept going.
You touch on the themes of Hungary coming to terms with its difficult past and the complexities of its politics, in your Danube Blues detective trilogy, set in modern-day Budapest. Do you think Hungary is on the right path to reconciling its past?
Well, there is definitely much more of an open debate about what happened in the war. In the early 1990s everyone was saying it was the horrible Germans, we weren’t responsible. They’ve moved a long way from that. Nowadays the position is that it was a catastrophic failure of the Hungarian state to protect its Jewish citizens and so there’s an admission of that. Last year for example on Holocaust Memorial Day in Parliament they said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The same Parliament that 85 years ago was passing anti-Jewish laws has a rabbi reciting the most haunting Jewish prayers for those lost in the Holocaust. So there’s definitely a much stronger sense of coming to terms with what happened. There is still a nostalgia for Admiral Horthy among some, a reluctance to face up to his role and the Hungarian state in the Holocaust. That conversation is ongoing, sometime it’s difficult for both sides, but things are moving in the right direction I would say, definitely.
What is your next project, and could you tell us about it?
I’m thinking about writing a book about wartime Istanbul, which was a huge centre of espionage and was quite strongly connected to Budapest. I got very interested in that and the courier lines that were going between Budapest and Istanbul. The story is not as dramatic, because Turkey remained neutral, there was no Holocaust and there was no siege, but it was still an absolute den of espionage, betrayal, double dealing and intrigue. So plenty to write about.
Adam LeBor is the thriller critic of the Financial Times and a veteran former foreign correspondent who lived in Budapest for many years. The Last Days of Budapest is his latest book.
