Admiral Nicholas Horthy: Memoirs

Admiral Nicholas Horthy: MEMOIRS

Annotated by Andrew L. Simon

Copyright © 2000 Andrew L. Simon Original manuscript copyright © 1957, Ilona Bowden Library of Congress Card Number: 00-101186 Copyright under International Copyright Union All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval devices or systems, without prior written permission from the publisher. ISBN 0-9665734-9

Printed by Lightning Print, Inc. La Vergne, TN 37086 Published by Simon Publications, P.O. Box 321, Safety Harbor, FL 34695

Admiral Horthy at age 75.

Publication record of Horthy’s memoirs:

• • • • • • • • •

First Hungarian Edition: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1953. German Edition: Munich, Germany, 1953. Spanish Edition: AHR - Barcelona, Spain, 1955. Finnish Edition: Otava, Helsinki, Finland, 1955. Italian Edition, Corso, Rome, Italy, 1956. U. S. Edition: Robert Speller & Sons, Publishers, New York, NY, 1957. British Edition: Hutchinson, London, 1957. Second Hungarian Edition: Toronto, Canada: Vörösváry Publ., 1974. Third Hungarian Edition: Budapest, Hungary:Europa Historia, 1993.

Table of Contents FOREWORD 1 INTRODUCTION PREFACE

5 9

1. Out into the World

11

2. New Appointments

33

3. Aide-de-Camp to Emperor Francis Joseph I at the Court of Vienna 1909-1914 49 4. Archduke Francis Ferdinand

69

5. Naval Warfare in the Adriatic. The Coronation of King Charles IV 6. The Naval Battle of Otranto

93

7. Appointment as Commander of the Fleet. The End

101

8. Revolution in Hungary: from Michael Károlyi to Béla Kun

109

9. Counter-Revolution. I am Appointed Minister of War And Commander-in-Chief 117 10. Regent of Hungary 127 11. Attempts at the Restoration of King Charles in 1921 12. The Road to Freedom

79

139

153

13. The Rome Protocols and the Rome-Berlin Axis

163

14. Travels and Visitors 173 15. Friction with Hitler 189 16. The Second World War; Hungary’s Non-Belligerence 205 17. Hungary Enters the Second World War 18. Appointment of a Deputy Regent

225 237

19. The Search for the Way Out 245 20. The Occupation of Hungary 257 21. Appealing for Armistice. My Imprisonment 22. The Arrival of the Americans 301

281

23. A Last Glance in Retrospect and Outlook on the Future

315

APPENDICES 321 1. Horthy’s October 15, 1944 Proclamation 321 2. Recollections by Mrs. Ilona Bowden, widow of Stephen Horthy 323 3. Letters to the Editor on Horthy’s re-burial 328 4. New data on Julius Gömbös 335 5. On Horthy and the Hungarian Jews 337 6. The Forgotten Rescue 344

FOREWORD by Andrew L. Simon, Professor Emeritus, The University of Akron It is a sure sign of respectability if one is routinely vilified for 80 years by the Communists and for 60 years by the Nazis. Without the opportunity for rebuttal, a fiction repeated often enough, will become ‘self evident truth’. Goebbels knew this, so did Beneš, two of the 20th century’s master propagandists. When Admiral Nicholas Horthy, Regent of Hungary for a quarter of a century, was re-buried in his family’s cript in September of 1993, there was an international uproar in the media. The Economist wrote about ‘Hungary’s shameful past’. The New York Times served up a dire warning about the return of Fascism, the Frankfurter Allgemeine ‘would rather forget it’, the Brazilian Veja commented that ‘Hungary honors a Nazi’. There is no end to the list. One sane opinion appeared in The Financial Times: ‘western historiography was interested exclusively in his alliance with Hitler, and the Communists characterized the anti-Bolshevik as a monster’. Admiral Horthy, privy to the domestic policies of the Habsburg empire at the highest level, naval hero, last commandant of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Regent of a destroyed country that he led into relative prosperity against great odds, an anti-Bolshevik, a prisoner of the Nazis, was indisputably a statesman. Under his rule, to quote Columbia University history professor Istv