Hungarian-British Diplomacy 1938-1941: The Attempt to Maintain Relations

HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941 HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941 The Attempt to Maintain Relations András...

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HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941

HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941 The Attempt to Maintain Relations

András Bán Translation by Tim Wilkinson Foreword by John Lukacs

FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First Published in 2004 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, London, IG2 7HH This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Website http://www.frankcass.com Copyright 2004 András Bán Copyright English translation © 2004 Tim Wilkinson British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Bán, András Hungarian-British Diplomacy, 1938–1941: the attempt to maintain relations 1. World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history 2. Hungary—Foreign relations— Great Britain 3. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Hungary 4. Hungary— Foreign relations—1918–1945 5. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1936–1945 6. Hungary—Relations—Great Britain 7. Great Britain—Relations—Hungary I. Title 327.4′39041′09043 ISBN 0-203-64641-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67828-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7146-5660-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8565-8 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Bán, András [Illúziók és csalódások. English.] Hungarian-British Diplomacy, 1938–1941: the attempt to maintain relations/ András Bán; translated by Tim Wilkinson. p. cm. Originally published under title: Illúziók és csalódások. 1998. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-7146-5660-7 (cloth)—ISBN 0-7146-8565-8 (pbk.) 1. Hungary—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Hungary. I. Title. DB 926.3.G7B3613 2004 327.439041′09′044–dc22 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, machinical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Contents

Introduction by John Lukacs

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History of the English Edition

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Chronology

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Acknowledgements

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PART I Diplomatic Relations 1.

Historical Antecedents

3

2.

From the Peace Treaty of Versailles to the Anschluss

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3.

From the Anschluss to the First Vienna Award

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4.

From Count Pál Teleki’s Government to the Outbreak of the Second World War

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5.

From 1 September 1939 to Hungary’s Accession to the Tripartite Pact

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6.

From 20 November 1940 to the Breaking Off of Anglo -Hungarian Diplomatic Relations

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7.

Three Hungarian Prime Ministers as Viewed from the Hungarian Record

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PART II International Relations 8.

The Structure of British Public Opinion

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9.

Anglo-Hungarian Economic Links

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10.

Anglophilia in Hungary and AngloHungarian Intellectual Exchanges

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11.

Hungarian Émigrés in Britain During the 1930s

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PART III Illusions and Disappointments Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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‘an Englishman has no ulterior motives, does not exploit his friends, and does not stab his enemies in the back. He has no word for Schadenfreude, machismo or flânerie; he is obliging, straight dealing, courteous. No one of us can make him out, however. He is impermeable to the continental way of thinking.’ (László Cs. Szabó, Crossing to Dover)

Introduction John Lukacs

The purpose of this Introduction is to advise readers of this book about three of its important features: of the general, and then of the specific, importance of its topic, and of the unusual scope and quality of its author’s accomplishment. The three years from 1938 to 1941 were the most critical ones in the long, though fragmentary, history of British-Hungarian relations. But they were also the most critical years in the history of Europe, indeed of Western civilization, during the twentieth century. Few people recognized then, and not very many recognize even now, how close Hitler and his Great German Reich had come to winning the Second World War—with incalculable consequences, perhaps needless to say. Or perhaps not so needless at all: because the consequences of Hitler’s victory then would have been immeasurably greater, more profound, more disastrous and more enduring than a German victory in the West in 1914 or 1918, or than a (necessarily ephemeral) Russian victory during the so-called Cold War. And during the three years 1938–1941 there was only one power that stood athwart Hitler’s astonishing march. This was Britain; and within Britain Winston Churchill. Eventually Ghurchill and Britain would not be the winners of the Second World War: but he was the man who did not lose it. It is remarkable how few people saw this at that time (and not many people do even now). In his original Introduction, written in Hungarian for Hungarians, András Bán quoted Johan Huizinga: ‘A historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, it must be as if the Persians might still win.’ Bán added: ‘lf a historian wishes to avoid the many slips and traps that will arise in the course of his

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study, he cannot take the “end result” as his point of departure. He must attempt to adhere to Huizinga’s dictum.’ Remarkable is this young (and, alas, prematurely deceased) Hungarian historian’s knowledge and understanding of British people and of the Britain of that period. In 1938 and thereafter Britain no longer had human and material and military resources comparable to those of the British Empire half a century before. Yet the confidence and steadiness of the English public and of the men of the Foreign Office astonish us in retrospect. They appear in the language of their communications to the representatives of a small faraway country, in the middle of a German-ruled Europe. Their statements illustrate many things: their understanding of that country’s geographical situation and of its contraints (an understanding that amounts to careful consideration rather than to outright sympathy) and their admonitions, of course always subordinated to what these officials saw as Britain’s principal interests. Their confidence is noteworthy. While for us the prospect of a British victory and British considerations for a restoration of a European order in 1940–41 seem exaggerated, if not altogether shortsighted, this was not how it seemed to these British officials, indeed to the British public by and large then. In sum, the material reflecting British policy in 1938–41 alone makes this book worth reading for specialists in British diplomatic history. And now to its specific topic: Hungarian-British relations during those, so very critical, years. From 1920 to 1938 the principal aim of Hungarian foreign policy was ‘revisionist’: to regain (at least some of) the lands that Hungary lost to its surrounding neighbours in 1919–20, specifically though the Treaty of Trianon, lands that for many centuries had belonged to Hungary, and where millions of Hungarians still lived. Hungary could count on no serious support for this from foreign powers, except here and there from Mussolini’s Italy. British opinion was relatively well disposed towards Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s but this had no practical or political weight or significance at that time. Then, in 1938, Hitler’s Germany occupied annexed Austria—and soon after that, Czechoslovakia. The might and the repute and the influence of the German Reich were now enormous; and that Reich had become a close neighbour, leaning on Hungary. There were Hungarian patriots who recognized that this was a situation entirely new. The main problem was no longer how to reclaim and regain this or that from Hungary’s smaller neighbour states; it was to preserve the

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very independence of Hungary. It is necessary to record that these men were a minority. The majority of Hungarians, and of their governing class, did not quite see things in that way. It was not only that the prospect of overturning the Treaty of Trianon, of recovering at least some of the territories lost in 1918–20, remained their main preoccupation. There was also their inclination to follow, or even to admire, the new Germany, including its ideology of National Socialism. An example of this was the result of the May 1939 election in Hungary (the first with an uninhibited and secret ballot) when outright National Socialist parties gained nearly one-fourth of all votes, and even more in the formerly Socialist working-class districts of Budapest. Against them stood diverse elements of the Hungarian people and society, ranging from Jews, Liberals, the remnants of Social Democrats, to committed conservatives, men close to the Regent Horthy, the remaining aristocracy, other men here and there within the top layers of the government, very much so in the case of the Foreign Ministry, and also the (since February 1939) Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki. These men knew that their main duty from now on was to preserve the—relative—independence and sovereignty of Hungary. They knew, too, that they had to struggle not only against German power but also against waves of domestic public opinion and popular sentiment. They also recognized, surely at the latest by 1939, that the only counterweight against Hitler’s domination of Europe was Great Britain. It is for this reason that the history of the relationship of Hungary with Great Britain, until December 1941, is especially telling and interesting. Much, though not all, of this existed on the level of governmental, that is, diplomatic, relations. Their record, precisely and carefully presented in this book, is significant enough. We must keep in mind that this functioned on a high, and in many ways confidential, level. The staff of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry was conservative, oldfashioned, semi-aristocratic—not typical of the majority of the Hungarian official bureaucracy. A newer, populist, nationalist (as distinct from patriotic) and, by and large, Germanophile presence in the Foreign Ministry existed only here and there. Contemplating this years later we have the sense and the climate of a vanished world— which should deserve at least some of our respect. Of course it was not quite as simple as that. The minister of Hungary in Britain, György Barcza, was a committed Anglophile and Germanophobe; his Prime Minister Teleki shared many, though by no means all, of Barcza’s

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convictions and views. Teleki understood, even more profoundly than Barcza, the constraints of Hungary’s situation; and also the condition that, even in the best of instances, Hungary could not expect much from Britain or, indeed, from the English-speaking powers. On the night of 2–3 April 1941 Teleki shot himself. This was a desperate act to demonstrate his and his nation’s honour, a silent protest against accepting Hitler’s demand that Hungary join in his invasion of Yugoslavia (a state with which Hungary had signed an accord of ‘eternal friendship’ but a few months before). Churchill understood this. He had a sympathy for Hungary and an extraordinary knowledge of its history, going back many years. In April 1941, despite Hungary joining with Germany by invading what was left of Yugoslavia, Churchill chose not to declare war on Hungary but only to terminate diplomatic relations. (The British declaration of war, summarily requested by Stalin, came only in December 1941.) From May 1938 to February 1942 the course of the Hungarian ship of state was largely set by three prime ministers: Imrédy, Teleki and Bárdossy. One of the most valuable portions of this book is Bán’s special description and analysis of these three prime ministers, including their inclinations but also the dualities of their characters. This alone amounts to a departure from the habitual practices of mundane diplomatic history. To another unique feature of this book I must now turn. There is a difference between the history of diplomatic and the history of international relations. The former, largely restricted to the relations and communications of courts to courts, of governments to other governments, had its origins in the city-states of fifteenth-century Italy, when the rulers of Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Rome, etc., established, for the first time, permanent missions (legations, embassies) in each other’s courts. Such permanent representations then spread across Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. The primary sources of diplomatic history were, accordingly, ambassadorial reports. This remained largely so as late as the early twentieth century. Yet international, as distinct from diplomatic, history is something else. It involves more than relations through the instruments and institutions of governmental foreign policy. (The very word ‘international’ first appeared in English as late as around 1800; in Hungarian not before 1854.) At that time international relations, including travel, trade and finance, affected only a tiny fraction of peoples. A Hungarian working

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man or peasant was not likely to have ever seen an Englishman, while Englishmen had but very few notions or images of Hungarians. But then came a change. With the spread of literacy, with newspapers, photography, travel, still and moving pictures, etc., nations began to build up images of other nations. These images were often superficial, they could be manipulated, but their existence was real, and they affected the very policies of respective governments. The French historian Pierre Renouvin was one of the first to comprehend and represent the difference between diplomatic history and the broader (and sometimes deeper) scope of a history of international relations. One generation later another French historian, René Rémond, exemplified this in two volumes of his Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française 1815–1852 (1962), including research on and description of matters such as emigration, travel, foreign trade, translation and reception of literary works, the evolution of the press, of the reading public, etc., etc. Thus the breadth (and sometimes the depth) of matters involving international relations renders the historian’s work more difficult: his main problem is no longer that of the relative rarity but that of a veritable profusion of sources. This is what this excellent young Hungarian historian, András Bán (1962–2001) achieved in this book. In addition to the diplomatic and governmental records, his studies and reconstruction of relations of trade, of travel, of the press, of literary and artistic pro ductions, of translations and of the influences of émigrés, etc.—all of these more or less reciprocal—are included in this work. This is unusual and, in one sense, novel and path-breaking. It illustrates the great maxim of Jacob Burckhardt, who said that history really has no ‘method’ of its own, save for the overall condition: Bisogna saper leggere—one must know how to read. We might add: how to write. These are absolute conditions of a craft that Bán has observed and fulfilled. (Independent from the merits of this English translation, the style of Bán’s writing alone demonstrates a wide literary culture—alas, not too frequent among professional historians.) And then, added to his mastery of a very wide and large extent of many kinds of sources there is his understanding that the relations of entire nations—especially before and during the Second World War—are not only influenced but at times even governed by images of each other that involve more than superficial impressions or political preferences; they involve sympathies and antipathies that are even more cultural than political. Such were, for

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instance, Anglophilia or Anglophobia, or Germanophilia and Germanophobia, and not only in Hungary but in very many instances throughout Europe and across the world. It is my opinion that this is but one element of the outstanding qualities of Bán’s accomplishment. It may merit the designation of this book as a minor classic.

History of the English Edition

This English edition of Bán’s work came about through unusual circumstances. I met Bán in 1998 shortly before the original Hungarian edition of the book appeared in Budapest. Upon first reading, it became apparent to me that its subject, scholarship and impartiality (not always the hallmark of Hungarian historians), and its quite extraordinary account of previously little-known details of British history, warranted its publication in English. I drafted a letter to the author encouraging him to pursue this, but somehow never sent it (I was too busy with my architectural practice). Then came news that Bán was terminally ill; he died tragically young in September 2001. Still believing in the considerable value of this work, I decided to undertake the publication in England without having had any experience. Seeking advice eventually overcame lack of experience. It was also evident that a work in such a specialized area could only be published with the help of private funding. The first breakthrough came in the reply from Professor John Lukacs, who not only encouraged the enterprise but also promised to write a substantial introduction as well as editing the English. Without his continuous and generous support, the book would not have reached the printers. The most difficult part of aiding the translation was locating the original English (and German) sources, which Bán had translated for the Hungarian text. There were well over one hundred quotes from widely differing sources. My wife, Ildikó Vaci, undertook the task. Bán’s archive material provided a few sources. The rest she found at the Public Record Office, the British Library, BL Newspapers, the German Historical Institute, Westminster Reference Library, the Guildhall Library, University College Library and the BBC Written

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Archives. Maciej Siekierski at the Hoover Institution was particularly helpful. My wife’s other important contribution was the line-by-line check of the draft translation against the Hungarian original. Professor George Schöpflin (University College London), Dr István Hont (Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge), Professor Robert Evans (Modern History, Oxford), and Dr Peter Sherwood (University College London) all gave valuable advice. Mátyás Sárközi continued his role of spiritus movens. Bán’s parents took a sensitive interest and lent his archive material. Part of the funding came from several private donations. Steven Molnar kindly designed the evocative cover illustration of the Chain Bridge across the River Danube, designed and built by Scottish engineers and blown up by the Germans in 1945. Sian Mills was a very sympathetic and professional editor at Frank Cass Publishers. Bán was ideally suited to research and write this work. His knowledge of Hungarian, English, Russian and Slovak helped him greatly. In 1994 he edited, introduced and annotated György Barcza’s (the Hungarian minister in London during the critical period) Diplomatic Memoirs; in 1996 he compiled Pax Britannica, the British Foreign Office Papers on Central Europe 1942–43. His own acknowledgements mention the valuable periods of research time he spent at the Public Record Office (London) and the Hoover Institution. It is sad to reflect that his premature death deprives us of other, very valuable, works from his pen. Sándor Vaci July 2003, London

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Acknowledgements

When the idea of writing this book occurred to me, a few years ago, I knew that I would be attempting a formidable task. The project both fascinated and excited me. As the fruit of my researches in London, I had assembled a large body of documentation about Anglo-Hungarian relations between 1938 and 1941. I wanted to write a work on the history of diplomacy, but not one in the ‘traditional’ manner. I was concerned to put what I had to say in a way that would make it enjoyable not just for historians but also for a wider public, to lay before the reader a good deal more than just a pile of diplomatic reports. I tried to interpret, to ‘unravel’, what was left unsaid behind and between the lines of diplomats’ documents, what a given adjective—or perhaps its absence—might cover. Besides that, I took special care to write about not just what the main players of that era had thought and written, and when, but also how and why. And not just them, for I also attempted to trace what the English and Hungarians thought about each other. I strove to ascertain sympathies and antipathies. This can sometimes reveal more about an era than any amount of diplomatic reports. It was for the same reason that I ventured to sketch—only in outline, of course—the character of several political figures. I was not left to myself while engaged on my work. My first debt of thanks is owed to the Soros Foundation for the grant that enabled me to spend several months on my researches at Britain’s Public Record Office during 1994 and 1996.1 am also grateful to the US-Hungarian Fulbright Committee for making it possible for me to spend almost five months in the archives of the Hoover Institution, California. It was Professor John Lukacs who first drew my attention to the great importance of Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic and international relations between 1938 and 1941, and he was also the one who gave

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me the greatest encouragement to tackle the subject. He supported me and helped me out with expert advice even at times when I all but despaired of being able to finish the book as it now stands. I had multiple opportunities to consult him, whether in Budapest or London or even Dover. I cannot thank him enough for that fatherly support, for without it this book would never have seen the light of day. I am also grateful to Professor Ignác Romsics, who has kept a close eye on my professional career since 1985. He supervised my research work, motivating me with fine words and arguments to complete the study. Whatever he said was inspired by the broader knowledge of a senior, more experienced colleague and, I may say, the benign intentions of a friend. I could always depend on him. I should also record my great affection for Mátyás Sárközi, with whom I spent many hours conversing about my work both in the canteen at the BBC World Service in Bush House and at his Hampstead home. Few of my acquaintances are so familiar as he with the English way of thinking and with the history of the Hungarian community in Britain, both of old and of the present day, and even fewer can talk as entertainingly. His sparkling humour and kindness were often of direct assistance to me in negotiating the difficulties of writing. Nor can I omit mention of the help given by Professor Lóránt Czigány. He contributed much to polishing my manuscript by scrupulously reading through a draft and tactfully guiding me towards more elegant and precise formulations of what I was attempting to say. Finally, I would like to thank all those friends, colleagues and acquaintances in London and Budapest who assisted me, however indirectly, in bringing this work to completion. Not least among them are my parents and, above all, my sister, who awaited this with such eager anticipation. The book is also dedicated to them. András D.Bán Budapest, 1 March 1998

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PART I Diplomatic Relations

2

1 Historical Antecedents

‘From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, England was fashionable in Hungary. That was not just a matter of the English becoming the most welcome of all foreigners here, but of Hungarian gentlemen getting into the habit of adding a detour to England onto their trips to Paris.’1 Anglo-Hungarian relations in the dynastic, cultural and personal sphere of course go back a good deal further than the eighteenth century. Britain exerted a growing cultural influence on Hungarians with the passage of time. In Transylvania, through Prince Gabriel Bethlen (1613–29), Prince George Rákóczi I (1630–48) and, later on, members of the Teleki family and Miklós Wesselényi, then in Hungary as a whole through István Széchenyi, English influences on political, economic and cultural life grew ever stronger. The adoption of English fashions in dress was already demonstrable during the time of Prince Mihály Apafi (1661–90): ‘[he] goes about in a jacket and britches tailored from English broadcloth, and even has his horse equipped with an English saddle’.2 A significant role in this spread of English tastes was played by English travellers who happened to pass through Hungary during the late Renaissance era. John Dee, mathematician, astrologer and ‘intelligencer’, or spy, for Queen Elizabeth I,3 visited Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava) in 1564; the poet Sir Philip Sidney was in Hungary in 1573, while physician Edward Browne was sent by the Royal Society of London to tour the mining towns of Upper Hungary in 1668–69. From the early nineteenth century, English teachers set off for the Upper Hungarian towns of Pozsony, Losonc (Lučenec, Slo.) and Késmárk (Kežmarok, Slo.), leaving an abiding stamp that was

4 HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941

more than just cultural. Through their presence, English customs, diverse forms of English social life and English manners were ever more widely adopted, the first English-style fox hunt in Hungary being organized at Nyitra (Nitra, Slo.), the first horse race at Ürmény (Mojmírovce, Slo.). By the time of Hungary’s reform era, English travellers themselves were in a position to observe the inroads being made by their country’s way of life. Edgar Quin (in 1834), John Paget (in 1835) and Joseph Andrew Blackwell (in 1836) successively toured much of Hungary, each recording diaries, travel books or impressions through which the country’s prestige was boosted considerably, not just in Britain but elsewhere as well. While a whole series of English travellers paid visits to Hungary, more and more Hungarians became curious about England, and in particular about London. Most of them came originally from Upper Hungary. Count Ferenc Széchenyi, whose tour of England in 1787 was spurred by industrial, commercial and economic issues, visited factories as much as fashionable drawing-rooms, and met Adam Smith himself. However, the spread of British industrial and technological innovations and accomplishments to Hungary owes more to his son, Count István Széchenyi, who arrived in London from Paris on 1 October 1815. A good part of his time was spent at Holland House in Kensington, then a favoured meeting-place for leaders of the Whig (Liberal) opposition party. Lady Holland accompanied him when he inspected the model farm on the estate of John Russell, sixth Duke of Bedford. Széchenyi was so taken with horse racing that he was a prime mover in introducing it to Hungary. Seeking to make acquaintances with factoryowners and engineers, it is little wonder that he devoted long entries in his diary to such technological wonders as gas lighting, the swing door and the water closet—the rapid introduction of all of which he advocated on his return to Hungary. When he left the port of Dover, smuggled away in his baggage was a model of a gas machine that he intended to use in bringing gas lighting to the family mansion at Nagycenk in western Hungary, near the Austrian border: I had my model of the gas machine that had cost me greatly in expenditure and energy, and only my strong will and persistence was able to procure. Now my chief concern and, I must confess, worry was bringing it across, exporting of machines in this

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS 5

manner being punishable by death…Of course, it is also odd if a Hussar captain has theoretical and practical lessons three times a day, not just from engineers but also from their assistants, and sprinkles himself with wood oil in the morning and Razumovsky toilet water in the evening. In Britain, none the less, there are three things that, in my opinion, one has to study, and all the rest is naught: the constitution, machines, and horse breeding. [original emphasis]4 His attention was engaged not merely by technological innovations, since he also made regular visits to Drury Lane Theatre and diligently learned English. He returned there a year later, then came on a later trip with his friend Miklós Wesselényi, in 1822, to purchase bloodstock. He noted on the latter occasion: ‘I decided that it is as if England were on another planet—one in which God bestowed on his creatures less sun and more mental power (intelligence)! ‘5 He made increasingly frequent trips to England during the 1830s. In 1832 he was studying the country’s bridges, meeting various bridge-builders, including William Tierney Clark, who was to design the first permanent Danube crossing, the so-called Chain Bridge, at Budapest. Two years later he was again in London to consult politicians, financiers and technical experts on projects for regulation of the flow of the Lower Danube and steam navigation on the Danube. According to Zsigmond Kemény, he made a total of 16 visits to England. Széchenyi’s political opponent, Lajos Kossuth, who spoke excellent English, spent only a brief time in the island nation. The by then exiled former governing president of Hungary, who had been a prime author of its Declaration of Independence from Austria in 1848 and led it in the ensuing war, disembarked at Southampton dock on 23 October 1851, on his way to the United States, but first spent a month in the country.6 In response to the flood of invitations and requests, he decided to undertake a lecture tour, making appearances not only in Southampton and London but also in Winchester, Birmingham and Manchester. He had already propounded, in the address he gave at Southampton Town Hall on his arrival, that were the Hungarian War of Independence to restart, then Britain should act to block either Russia or any other great power from intervening on the side of the Habsburgs. In London on 1 November he met the leaders of the local Hungarian émigré community. He also sat down with Guiseppe


Mazzini to draft a manifesto that called upon Hungarian troops serving with the Habsburg imperial army in Italy and Italian troops who were likewise serving the army in Hungary to make common cause against Austria. (Charles Dickens reported on Kossuth's reception in England in his own weekly periodical, Household Words.)7 Hungarian efforts to gain sovereignty continued to have a certain resonance in Great Britain, with Irish parliamentary leaders during the 1880s seeing a model for their own country in the 1867 Ausgleich, or settlement, between Austria and Hungary. Even from the sketchy summary outlined above, it is evident that Hungary won a measure of respect for itself in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. This is encapsulated in the following passage: In reviewing Britain’s policy and sentiments towards Hungary in the nineteenth century, it would be fair to say that the general climate of public opinion was largely well-disposed by the 1890s but, in the absence of any direct interest and sensational events, that favourable view was neither deeply felt nor widespread. A modest but definite prestige had indeed been established for Hungary by the War of Independence and the Kossuthist émigré community in England, but it was only the Ausgleich and its apparently successful functioning over three decades that gave it wider currency in circles that included political leaders.8 That prestige was shaken around 1904–06 and over the ensuing few years evaporated altogether, with a decisive hand in that being played by R.W.Seton-Watson (who also wrote under the name Scotus Viator, or the ‘Scottish Wanderer’). As an academic historian and journal editor Robert William Seton-Watson (1879–1951) was one of the bestknown experts on international relations in Central and Eastern Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. While an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, his interest in German history had been aroused and was heightened by his further studies at the universities of Berlin, Paris and Vienna between 1903 and 1905. In the Austrian capital he came face to face with the problems that were being experienced by Austro-Hungary of the day, and he decided to write a book about the history of the Habsburg monarchy since 1815. The young, liberalminded Seton-Watson was attracted by Kossuth’s ideas and Hungarian aspirations for independence. Being basically


sympathetic towards Hungary, he resolved to gather first-hand experience. Already fluent in German, French and Italian, he plunged into studies of Hungarian before arriving in Hungary in May 1906 for a six-week stay. In Budapest he met Count Albert Apponyi, then one of the key figures in Hungarian politics, Jenő Rákosi, editor-in-chief of the daily Budapesti Hírlap, and Lajos Láng, a former minister of trade. He even managed to make a trip to Transylvania, and it was there that he truly first came to grips with the problems of the ethnic minorities. After exchanges of views with leaders of the Romanian minority community, he made visits to the Voivodina and Zagreb on his way back to Vienna. The summer of 1906 was a critical period in the formation of British views on Hungary. This was when Seton-Watson’s sympathy towards the Hungarians began to wane. He published two articles in the weekly periodical the Spectator, in the second of which, dated 20 October 1906, he pithily summed up the components of his ebbing warmth: In this country Hungary is too often regarded as a national state like France and Germany. In reality it is one of the most polyglot states in existence…Out of a population of nineteen million, only forty-five per cent are Magyars, and even that proportion includes a large Jewish element and converts of all the other races…But while in numbers Magyars and non-Magyars are almost equally balanced Magyar is, of course, the State language, the language of the Central Parliament and the County Assemblies…state education is exclusively Magyar, though this is not in accordance with the Fundamental Laws of 1868, and even the subsidies granted to the non-Magyar confessional schools have control and Magyarisation as ulterior aims.9 If the summer of 1906 can be called a critical period for the alteration of the picture Seton-Watson had formed of Hungary, then May 1907 can be regarded as an outright turning-point. This was when he spent five weeks in Upper Hungary, where he met Slovak intellectuals before travelling on to Budapest. Anton Štefanek, the editor of Slovensky denník, introduced him there to Milan Hodža, a Slovak representative in the Hungarian Parliament and later prime minister of Czechoslovakia. As an outcome of those discussions, Seton-Watson penned further articles for the Spectator that were now sharply critical of the Hungarian


government. He saw those disparaging views of the Hungarian political as being vindicated by what was called ‘the massacre of Černova’, on 27 October 1907, when a squad of gendarmes opened fire on a peasant demonstration against the consecration of a new church in that Upper Hungarian village by a Hungarian priest. This incident may well have stiffened his resolve to write a book on Hungary’s ethnic minority problems. That controversial work, Racial Problems in Hungary, published in 1908, created a stir not just in Great Britain but more widely in other European countries too. This was the work that ‘dispatched’ its author ‘from the role of a polemicising publicist into a universally recognised political expert on the Hungarian question’.10 Seton-Watson thought in a European perspective; Hungary’s ethnic minority issue was of importance to him only in so far as the preservation of the monarchy, and thus the maintenance of the balance of powers in Europe, depended on it. During the First World War Seton-Watson became an adviser to the British Foreign Office. By the time The War and Democracy had appeared in 1914, with him a co-author, he had radically altered his opinion about the reformability of the Dual Monarchy, as no one would believe in it after the assassination of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In the new Europe that Seton-Watson sketched out Transylvania was assigned to Romania; he was also ahead of his time in foreseeing a unitary Yugoslav state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The New Europe was the title of the weekly paper that Seton-Watson co-founded, together with Tomaš Garrigue Masaryk, at his own expense and under his own editorship, and launched in 1916. In its columns he continued to proclaim the inevitable end of the monarchy and to concern himself with the fate of the nation-states that were to be established in its place. (The extent to which the successor states became nation-states posed a further set of problems for SetonWatson.) From November 1918 to March 1919 he stayed in Paris, and although he was not a member of the British delegation to the Peace Conference, he can be said to have been in continuous contact with the representatives of his own country, the United States and the other Western Allies. Coming from a recognized expert on the nationalities issue in Central and Eastern Europe, his advice and recommendations were listened to, indeed often taken into account. The New Europe ceased to exist in 1920, primarily because of financial difficulties, but by then


it had fulfilled its ‘mission’. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was no more, and its place had been taken by the new states. Conditions in Hungary during 1918–19 were chaotic. In September 1919, primarily at the instigation of the British and Americans, the Paris Peace Conference decided to deliver an ultimatum to Bucharest by personal emissary, ordering it to halt its requisitions in Hungary. The task was given to the diplomat Sir George Russell Clerk, Britain’s new envoy to Prague. Clerk stayed for three weeks in the Romanian capital, where he entered prolonged and fruitless negotiations. From there he travelled to Budapest, arriving on 1 October in order to gain a firsthand impression of the situation. Initially he presented himself as being extremely pro-Romanian. That is confirmed in the diary of American General Harry Bandholtz, a member of the Entente Powers’ military mission. In one telegram that Bandholtz dispatched to the Peace Conference he sums up his impressions of Clerk’s assignment as follows: My personal opinion is that Clerk is under the spell of the Roumanian environment and a cooing dove would make a better ultimatum bearer…Clerk arrived Wednesday morning and, except for an hour with the Mission, he spent the balance of the day with, and being banqueted by, the Roumanians.11 It is likely that Clerk was influenced by Seton-Watson’s works on Hungary and its pre-war nationality policies, coming as they did from a former adviser to the Foreign Office’s Central European desk. This mission did eventually bring about the desired outcome, since Romanian troops were withdrawn from Budapest on 14 November 1919. On 25 November Clerk, on behalf of Peace Conference, recognized the newly formed government led by Károly Huszár. The view that Seton-Watson had formed about Hungary carried weight with more than a few of his countrymen. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation in Paris, likewise gratuitously abused the Hungarians in his book Peacemaking 1919: I confess that I regarded, and still regard, that Turanian tribe, with acute distaste. Like their cousins, the Turks, they have destroyed much and created nothing. Budapest was a false city devoid of any autochthonous reality. For centuries the Magyars


oppressed their subject nationalities. The hour of liberation and of retribution was at hand.12 In a letter that he wrote to Miksa Fenyő in 1934, Nicolson admitted that at the time he wrote the book he allowed himself to be unduly swayed both by his own unhappy childhood recollections of Budapest and by Seton-Watson. On 4 June 1920, the ‘hour of retribution’ was nevertheless at hand. At the time, however, neither Nicolson, nor Clerk, nor Seton-Watson could have foreseen the consequences of the peace treaties that were concluded in the suburbs of Paris.

2 From the Treaty of Versailles to the Anschluss

After the establishment of the peace arrangements in and around Paris during 1919 and 1920, Great Britain and British foreign policy were not much exercised by the countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, ceding the initiative in this region to France. The sole exception, through its geographical position, was Greece, which had always occupied an important place in British foreign policy on account of its importance for imperial strategic interests. The 1925 Treaties of Locarno confirmed the inviolability of the Franco-German and BelgoGerman frontiers, but gave no guarantees for Germany’s eastern borders. The British indifference can be attributed to a number of factors. For a start, Great Britain by then no longer counted as the world’s top-ranking power; it was slipping lower below the pinnacle that it had occupied among nations through its authority alone, even before the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Its economic strength had likewise been blunted, and the United States was displaying much more rapid and dynamic development. The British preference for peace also played a part. A distinct sense of guilt had arisen among a segment of British public opinion that Germany had been punished too severely and unjustly at Versailles. The countries of Eastern Europe were not worth another conflict with the defeated enemy, if only for that reason; moreover, the region was not really important from an economic or strategic standpoint, notwithstanding the fact that during the 1920s Great Britain backed the Bethlen government’s endeavours to stabilize the Hungarian economy by offering substantial loans under favourable conditions. The significance of the loans lay not only in their stabilizing impact on the country’s finances but also in their value in sending out a powerful message that British financial circles were confident about the consolidation of Hungary’s political régime and economic outlook


and about the efforts being made by the Bethlen government to overcome the country’s international isolation. A measure of sympathy towards Hungary existed not only in the British business world but in higher social circles, often dependent on personal contacts. It was typical of the British cast of mind that more weight was often placed on personal friendship, respect and fair play than on political considerations. This was manifested in the course of international reactions to the so-called French Franc Forgery scandal, which came to light in 1926, when Great Britain intended to exert a moderating influence on the angry demands for tough reprisals pushed by France and its allies in the Little Entente. One further British consideration was that although Eastern Europe had been assigned to the French sphere of interest, there was no wish to see an exclusively French preponderance in the region. In an essay on British policy towards Hungary from the start of the First to the end of the Second World War, Ignác Romsics divides the groups that had an influence on policy in Central and Eastern Europe between 1920 and 1938 into three main camps: 1. The New Europe circle, whose typically anti-German and antiMagyar representatives were strong advocates at the Paris Peace Conference for the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to receive the most favourable possible frontier settlement. Although the periodical itself had ceased publication, its authors continued to make common cause, and whilst their significance dwindled as time passed, it did not vanish entirely (though did not have a decisive influence on the Foreign Office). 2. The liberal imperialists (Lloyd George, Leopold Amery, Jan Smuts), who, unlike the previous group, argued for a more equitable treatment of the defeated powers. 3. Representatives of the financial world, the City of London, who subordinated everything to economic considerations, and for whom the region was not seen one of particularly important prospects.13

As far as the Trianon settlement is concerned, the British politicians who were of decisive influence were well aware that the peace treaty’s territorial provisions were far from adequate in taking ethnic


considerations into account. They also knew that disputes between countries in the Danube basin represented a threat to the political stabilization of Europe. Between 1920 and 1938, British foreign policy rarely, if ever, adopted a firm position on the matter of territorial revision for Hungary. The official line taken by political circles was summed up by the view that Hungary should seek to settle its differences with its neighbours on territorial and other matters by peaceful means. Neither did Britain seek a role as mediator. A distinction must be made, however, between the foreign policy of the time and British public opinion, or at least one strand of thought within the latter. Until 1938, those in charge of foreign policy concerned themselves only tangentially with Hungary; on the other hand, there were a few British voices that agreed at least morally with Hungarian revisionist aspirations. Lord Rothermere’s campaign in support of changing the frontiers stipulated by Trianon was more an intriguing, at times amusing, episode than any reflection of the views of government circles, yet there are reasons for examining it in more detail, given the ‘oddity’ of its origin14 and the lasting impact that it exerted on Hungary and the successor states. On 21 June 1927 Lord Rothermere, a British press magnate, published a lengthy article of his own on the front page under the headline ‘Hungary’s Place in the Sun’ in one of his daily newspapers, the London Daily Mail The opening paragraph roundly declared: Eastern Europe is strewn with Alsace-Lorraines. By severing from France twin provinces of that name the Treaty of Frankfurt, in 1871 made another European war inevitable. The same blunder has been committed on a larger scale in the Peace Treaties which divided up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. They have created dissatisfied racial minorities in a half a dozen parts of Central Europe, any one of which may be the startingpoint of another conflagration.15 Rothermere called the Trianon frontiers arbitrary, econoinic nonsense, and unjust. He thought that the outbreak of a new war might be prevented by a peaceful revision of the Trianon frontiers, for which he sought to take advantage of political and diplomatic support from Western Europe, Britain and France first and foremost. Under his recommendation, close to two million ethnic Magyars should have


been returned to the motherland: one million from Czechoslovakia, 600,000 from Romania, and 400,000 from Yugoslavia, while he proposed plebiscites in the disputed territories. He asked his countrymen to have faith in Hungary, which had only a minor part in provoking the Great War. And while Hungarians fought courageously for the cause with which they were associated, they treated British residents in their country with indulgence throughout the war, allowing them to lead their ordinary lives without internment.16 Rothermere’s article elicited immediate reactions both in Hungary and elsewhere. Hungarian newspapers served up the translated text with great relish and, in places, in a highly embellished form. The press baron received congratulatory telegrams and letters by the hundreds, as well as numerous gifts—the winegrowers of Tokay, for instance, sprang a surprise with a Balthazar (some ten litres) of hundred-year-old aszú wine. Predictably, the press in the successor states, particularly Czechoslovakia, furiously attacked the lord, editorializing about the acute dangers of Hungarian revisionism. The Národni denník clamed to have been informed that the Hungarian government had concluded a secret pact with Rothermere under which, in return for at least partial restoration of the pre-Trianon frontiers, the lord’s son would be invited to assume the Hungarian throne. There was slight basis in fact for such speculations. By and large, this journalistic zeal was taken seriously only by certain sections of the public; the betterinformed Hungarians who spoke foreign languages were aware that Rothermere had no great influence on British foreign policy. The Daily Mail was a masscirculation paper, its readership interested in scandal and sensation above all else. Those informed about thinking on British foreign policy would read The Times. The Hungarian government and its diplomatic corps did see the campaign for what it was. In a speech to a conference of the Unitary Party on 19 October 1927, Count István Bethlen succinctly noted that ‘this campaign has no connection and nothing to do with the Hungarian government’, although he added, as a Hungarian, however, I am of the opinion that we and the whole nation are greatly indebted to Lord Rothermere for taking the trouble, entirely disinterestedly, like a judge standing above


a matter that is, moreover, far removed from him, to acquaint the world with the justness of the Hungarian case.17 Bethlen subsequently communicated as much to the British foreign secretary, Austin Chamberlain, at their meeting in Geneva on 5 December 1927. Chamberlain was quoted as having summed up the British government’s view in the following terms: [Rothermere] always writes in his paper what he considers is popular, but he is often mistaken in that…But Lord Rothermere is the sort of person who will embrace something today, only to drop it tomorrow just as easily…He was delighted to hear that the Hungarian government had distanced itself from the campaign, and advised that it should continue to hold itself aloof hereafter.18 Yet the Hungarian government could not stand entirely apart from the Rothermere campaign. On 16 May 1928, Rothermere’s son, Edmund Harmsworth, a member of parliament, arrived in Budapest, along with an entourage, as a guest of the city and various organizations, the Revisionist League among others, thus fanning renewed speculations about the ‘throne issue’. Although the Foreign Office had advised Baron Iván Rubidó-Zichy, the Hungarian minister to London, in advance that Harmsworth would do well to forgo the visit, and that he was not a guest of the Hungarian government, there was little the minister could do about it. Arriving by road from Vienna, the guests were already welcomed at Sopron by crowds and beflagged streets, Harmsworth’s Rolls-Royce drove in a veritable triumphal procession all the way to the Gellért Hotel in Buda, where Pál Teleki, Jenő Rákosi of the Budapesti Hírlap, and the popular writer Ferenc Herczeg attended the banquet that was thrown in his honour by the mayor of Budapest, Jenő Sipőcz. The following day Harmsworth was the guest at lunch with the regent, Horthy himself, and at dinner with Premier Bethlen, so the visit took on some semblance of having been instigated by the regent or the government. Travelling on to Szeged and then Debcrecen, the retinue was greeted everywhere by cheering crowds. Streets were named after Rothermere. The young Harmsworth, for his part, was not unresponsive, bestowing donations from his father’s fortune on hospitals in Budapest as well as on the University of Szeged. Rubido-


Zichy reported on British reactions to the trip to Baron Gábor Apor, head of the political department in the Hungarian ministry of foreign affairs: I am truly sorry that, my private letters and telegrams notwithstanding, you are making such a huge fuss over the young man. As a result, Hungary has been made to look ridiculous here in England, at least for a while. That may be experienced in the press and in society, but unfortunately I am also experiencing it at the Foreign Office, where they refer with commiserative smiles and shrugs of the shoulder…to ‘King Edmund’…It is now futile for us to explain that the Hungarian government has nothing to do with Lord Rothermere’s personal activities. The stereotypical response to such an assertion is always that the Regent cannot give private lunches any more than the capital’s political leadership can be regarded as a private person.19 The waves whipped up by the ‘Justice for Hungary!’ campaign died down by the end of the decade, however. Although Rothermere celebrated along with Hungarians, even giving a speech, in Kassa (Košice, Slo.) when that city, along with other parts of what had been Upper Hungary, was reassigned to the country under the First Vienna Award (2 November 1938), his enthusiasm for the ‘Hungarian cause’ had declined. More serious problems were occupying him by then as he was attempting to mediate between the British government and Hitler in order to head off a new world war.20 His endeavours were ineffective, and he had become ill. He died on the island of Bermuda in November 1940. The Hungarian Revisionist League was formed on 27 July 1927, shortly after publication of Lord Rothermere’s article. The organization’s main purpose was to draw the attention of leading politicians and public opinion of the European great powers to the injustices of the Trianon Peace Treaty, to acquaint them with Hungary’s history and to gain as much support as possible for revision of the treaty. In 1928 Ferenc Herczeg was appointed chairman, with Endre Fall as managing director and Tibor Eckhardt as deputy chairman. The League’s relations with the Hungarian government were not smooth. Hungarian ministers to the capitals of Western Europe were often required to intervene to redress the blunders


committed by the organization’s propagandists as within a few years the League set up offices in London, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Amsterdam and Berlin, and even had representation in the United States. The London bureau was directed up until 1934 by Iván Hordósy, and thereafter by Béla Póka-Pivny.21 In 1933, Count István Bethlen visited London in a private capacity to give lectures that Iván Hordósy had helped to set up both there and in Cambridge. Of the four lectures given by the former prime minister, one at the University of Cambridge was on how multinational Hungary came into being, one at the Near and Middle East Society in London on the Trianon Peace Treaty, one at the Royal Institute of International Affairs on the history of Transylvania and possible solutions to its disputed status, and one at the Balkan Commission on potential threats posed to Central Europe by outside powers. Bethlen was no longer premier, but he carried weight in London, and influential politicians paid attention to what he said. Allen Leeper, who headed the League of Nations and Western Europe desk at the Foreign Office, offered an opinion on the lectures. In line with the earlier British position, he conceded that the frontiers laid down at Trianon did not take proper account of the ethnic make-up of the population, but he also declared that revision was a closed issue in order to avoid further complications (Leeper himself had been a member of the British peace delegation to Paris in 1919–20). Another who spoke out was SetonWatson, who in a stream of articles attacked every manifestation of Hungarian revisionist propaganda. He had come to formulate his views a shade more subtly than in 1919–20, conceding that certain areas where Magyars formed a majority of the inhabitants might belong to Hungary, but in keeping with his cautious nature he almost immediately backed down: [That] the economic troubles of which Hungary complains could not be solved by mere rectification. They could only be removed by a reversion to the frontiers of 1914…That it follows that some solution other than revision must be sought through the enforcement and extension of minority treaties and through abandonment of the policy of assimilation for all races alike.22 Hordósy strove to counterbalance Seton-Watson’s influence and find supporters for the revisionist cause. He skilfully intro duced himself


into the circles of relatives and acquaintances of British politicians. Géza Szüllő, a leader of the émigré Czechoslovak Magyar minority who himself had influence in some political circles in London, noted in his report on a trip there in 1933: On the matter of propaganda, I wish to make special mention that Hordósy in London is clever, having particularly big sway with the ladies, and the reason women have a particularly big influence in England is because husbands only gain rest by the domestic hearth if they satisfy either the vanity or the heartfelt sentiments of their wives. The Englishman is cool-headed and thus from the standpoint of his own comfort prefers the former method.23 Hordósy managed to win over to the Revisionist League’s goals Ethel Snowden, who was the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in several post-war cabinets up to 1931 and herself made several visits to Hungary in 1932–33, being granted audiences both by the regent and by Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös. Following those trips, Lady Snowden had several articles pushing for reconsideration of the Trianon treaty printed in the Daily Mail, though she abandoned her support by the end of 1934. All the efforts that Hordósy had gone to, guiding her around Budapest and escorting her to the opera and to various dinners, counted for nothing when Count László Széchényi, then Hungarian minister to London, insulted this enthusiastic backer of the ‘Hungarian cause’ by ignoring her. Lady Snowden complained bitterly in letters to Lord Rothermere that at a reception given at the Hungarian legation in London the host ‘said not a word for a whole fifteen minutes’, and that she had heard from more than one source that Széchenyi had declared: ‘Lord Rothermere has done more harm than good to Hungary.’24 Lady Snowden’s political influence was overrated not just by Hordósy but also by the politically far more astute Szüllő, who noted: ‘Lady Snowden’s opinion is valuable because she is said to have considerable influence at court; someone said that Lady Snowden plays the same role at Buckingham Palace as Rasputin did at Tsarskoye Selo.’25 But British foreign policy was not made in Buckingham Palace. In late 1934, Hordósy was removed from his post at the demand of the Hungarian minister to London. Before Hordósy travelled back to


Budapest, he featured in a further entertaining episode. On his own initiative, he asked Sir Robert Gower MP, another warm supporter of Hungarian revisionist ambitions, to put together a list of British politicians and public figures whom he considered worthy of being honoured by the Hungarian government. Gower did this, although, as László Bárdossy, chargé d’affaires ad interim at the Hungarian Embassy, commented in a letter to his minister, ‘such people were itching for a Hungarian state decoration’.26 In the end, by adroit diplomatic manoeuvring, Bárdossy managed to ensure that nothing came of this canvassing for prospective recipients of honours something that would probably have been of no service to the cause of revision. British government circles were, for some time, sympathetic to Hungary’s revisionist endeavours, but for a brief period and to a limited degree. In early 1933 Mussolini, who since 1927 had played a major part in ending Hungary's international isolation, pro posed that the European great powers should sort out certain territorial disputes while they were still in a position to do so by peaceful means (Mussolini was thinking specifically of the unification of East and West Prussia, that is to say, the abrogation of the Danzig corridor, and of the re-annexation of the predominantly Magyar-inhabited territories that had been ceded to successor states under the Trianon Treaty). The draft protocol of a ‘Four-Power Pact’, to be signed by Italy, France, Germany and Great Britain, was worked out in Rome in March 1933. Article 2 stated: The Four Powers re-assert, in accordance with the articles of Covenant itself, the principle of the revision of the treaties of peace whenever conditions arise calculated to lead to a conflict between states, but declare that such principles of revision can only be applied within the framework of the League of Nations and through a general recognition of common interest.27

Mussolini’s idea, which was accepted by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, would have entailed a radical shift in the European security system, dependent on France and supported by the Little Entente countries allied to it. The British foreign secretary commented with regard to the territorial dispositions of the peace treaties that ‘every nation has two obligations within the League of Nations: one is to respect treaties, the other is to


recognise that these are not immutable’.28 Although, as a result of the general election of October 1931, the Conservatives held the dominant position in the ‘National Government’ coalition led by the Labour Party’s MacDonald, there was criticism from that wing of the Conservative Party to which Winston Churchill belonged. Churchill had proposed, in a speech to the House of Commons on 23 November 1932, that a number of territorial disputes—he specifically mentioned Transylvania along with the Danzig Corridor—ought to be settled while it was still possible to discuss these peacefully (thereby anticipating Mussolini on this score). By early the following year a political seachange had taken place in Germany. The attainment of power by the National Socialist Party portended the onset of an aggressive German foreign policy. Largely in reaction to that, Churchill and his supporters refused to countenance any attempt to change the status quo. The Four-Power Pact signed in Rome on 15 July 1933, the wording of which was in itself considerably vaguer and more toned down than the original Italian draft had been, was ratified by neither the British nor the French Parliaments. In that year Germany abandoned the League of Nations and withdrew from the Disarmament Conference that had been held under the League’s auspices in Geneva. Indecisiveness, uncertainty and passivity continued to mark Britain’s line in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1938. Maintenance of a balance of powers was, as a general rule, a salient element of British foreign policy striving for this objective even after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Accomplishing it became increasingly difficult. One reason for that lay in the fact that at times the views of the prime minister and of the Foreign Office might diverge on given issues, and foreign policy was not the exclusive preserve of the Foreign Office. Some prime ministers would regard the Foreign Office with suspicion, and prefered to rely on the people in their own Cabinet Office. During this period heads of govemment succeeded one another in short order, MacDonald being followed by Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain. None of these had the stature possessed by their predecessor, Lloyd George, or their successor, Winston Churchill. On 7 June 1935 MacDonald resigned from office to be replaced by Baldwin. Therefore at the Stresa Conference in April of that year, as a response to Germany’s unilateral repudiation on 16 March of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, Great Britain, France and Italy


formed an apparently—but only apparently—united front against German expansionism; but then, on 18 June, Great Britain and Germany signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which was supported by the advocates of appeasement in Britain. The parties to this agreed on a 35:100 ratio of German to British Commonwealth naval surface fleets, while on submarines Britain accepted parity, although Germany undertook not to exceed 45 per cent of the British navy’s force. This bilateral agreement in itself countermanded some of the Versailles Treaty’s provisions on armaments. When the ‘Stresa Front’ was formed the prime minister was MacDonald, whereas by the time the Naval Agreement was signed it was Baldwin. In shaping British policy on Central and Eastern Europe, especially from 1933, German interests that were taken into account, albeit occasionally in conflicting ways. This is not to suggest that no attempt was made to hinder the growth of German political dominance in Central and Eastern Europe: certain London circles fostered plans for an anti-German bloc. Nevertheless, for the eastern states of Europe their links to Germany were the decisive ones. Appropriate allowance was made for that in British foreign policy. By 1937 the advocates of appeasement had gained the upper hand, and on 28 May Neville Chamberlain became prime minister. From then on, Hungarian revisionist aspirations were accorded somewhat greater attention by Great Britain. At the end of that month the historian Arnold Toynbee, director of studies at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, travelled to Budapest. The lectures that he gave there relayed, in essence, the view that Churchill had advanced in 1932: change to the frontiers laid down by the treaties could be envisaged as long as it could be achieved peacefully. By the end of 1937, another historian who was increasingly being recognized as an expert on Hungarian affairs, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, then a Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, wrote about modification of the Trianon frontiers.29 In this book Macartney considered that under a revision, in the north, Great Schütt Island (Ž itny Ostrova or the Csallóköz) and the areas to its north, and likewise, in the south, the ‘Drava triangle’ between the Dráva and Danube rivers, northern Bačka and northwestern Bánát should be returned to Hungary while TransCarpathian Ruthenia could be reassigned to Hungary as an autonomous territory. The most intriguing element in this conception was that of the Transylvanian Question’. Like Bethlen in his 1933


London lecture, Macartney felt that the ideal solution would be the restoration of an independent state with a confederate constitution. Since there seemed little chance of that being realized, he proposed its division between Hungary and Romania as an alternative. Under this plan, Hungary would regain its lost land—most of it historical Transylvania, along with the area around Máramaros in the north, which would have gone to form part of the autonomous region of Ruthenia. He rejected the possibility of restoring the Székely districts, with a corridor to connect them to the main body of Hungary.30 While Macartney exerted some influence in the British Foreign Office, he never acquired an importance comparable to that of SetonWatson. But by then, events were overtaking one another in rapid succession. From 1933 onwards, the uppermost concern was no longer the break-up of a centuries-old multilingual great power, enfeebled at the end of the Great War, and the formation of new states, but the growth of ever more aggressive German political, military and economic influence in Europe.

3 From the Anschluss to the First Vienna Award

In the spring of 1938 Germany swallowed up Austria, thereby becoming a next-door neighbour to Hungary. The Anschluss had been preceded by other successful moves by the German side. The unhindered occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland two years earlier had reinforced Hitler in the conviction that he need fear no military response on the part of the French. German foreign policy was therefore designed, first and foremost, to ascertain what reaction could be expected from Great Britain. In November 1937 Lord Halifax, then Lord Privy Seal but holding special responsibilities in foreign affairs, travelled to Berlin—a visit that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden agreed to only reluctantly and was later to regret having agreed to. The nominal pretext for the trip was the opening of a big hunting exhibition in the German capital (Göring used the occasion to organize a fox hunt in the guest’s honour). On 21 November Halifax met Hitler at Berchtesgaden and intimated that Britain would recognize the necessity of the changes in Central Europe that Germany was demanding, provided these were accomplished by peaceful means. At this stage the British politician was still an advocate of the policy of appeasement, but not only did he underestimate Hitler’s political abilities, he failed even to size up the latter’s character.31 Not much later, in February 1938, Eden resigned from his post in protest at precisely this non-intervention policy. British historians are divided in their readings of the reasons for the resignation. According to some, the supposition that Eden opposed the appeasement policy is doubtful. He did not contest the basic tenet of both Baldwin’s and subsequently Chamberlain’s policy, which was that the European great powers should solve the problems of Europe. During his first term as foreign secretary he secured his greatest political triumph in September


1937 at the Nyon Conference, where he succeeded in pushing through a ban on Italy’s tactic of submarine piracy in the Mediterranean. In January 1938, Eden came into sharp conflict with Chamberlain over an important message from the American president that the latter had rejected, without consulting Eden and possibly without even correctly interpreting it, in which Roosevelt proposed to summon a conference of democratic countries to draw up a code regulating international relationships for purposes of preserving peace (he was clearly thinking primarily of cooperation between Great Britain and the United States). A decisive factor in Eden’s resignation was the inclination the prime minister was showing for Mussolini. Often the reason for the foreign secretary’s pique was Chamberlain’s continual trespassing on what he saw as his own prerogatives, being unwilling by temperament to play second fiddle to anyone (not even to Churchill later on). The final straw may have been that Eden’s telephone was being tapped on the orders of Sir Joseph Ball, Chamberlain’s private secretary. Churchill and his supporters attempted to exploit the new spat between the prime minister and his foreign secretary, by portraying Chamberlain as antiAmerican and Eden as the opposite. Eden’s reputation was in the ascendant not so much due to his abilities as to the circumstance that in the eyes of Churchill and his associates he symbolized youth and hope as a survivor of the Great War’s ‘lost generation’. Churchill needed a hero to set up against Chamberlain, and Eden at least partly filled that role.32 With Halifax becoming his successor at the Foreign Office, Eden’s resignation was greeted with general relief by the Hungarian press, as well as by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.33 Edward Wood (the later Lord Halifax) was born without a left hand, but he became so adroit at manipulating his false hand that even some diplomats who regularly met him failed to notice the birth defect (including Barcza, who makes no mention of it even in his own diary entries). Among British politicians and officials, Halifax came to be known as ‘The Holy Fox’—a nickname coined by the Churchill family both as a play on his fondness for foxhunting and also on his piety. The high Anglican upbringing he received left its mark on him for life, making him a devout churchgoer throughout his adult years. That did not get in the way of his being an extremely shrewd, sharp and guileful operator whom political opponents had difficulty in trying to oppose. He was a hard worker and demanded the same from his subordinates.


At the Foreign Office he would meet with his permanent undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, virtually every hour. As foreign secretary he was also prone to change his decisions fairly often, at least during the early months in the post. R.A. Butler, who was Halifax’s parliamentary under-secretary, has recorded how: One night, at about eight o’clock, when we hoped that we had finished, the Foreign Secretary was going down the broad staircase with a man in a loud check suit. Alec [Sir Alex Cadogan] and I followed. Alec moaned to me, ‘Oh God, that means a new foreign policy tomorrow.’ However, it turned out that the check suit was not as dangerous as we had thought.34 Halifax, who spoke immaculate French, was not much given to cultivating personal relationships. He took a particularly dim view of Maisky, the Soviet, and Shigemitsu, the Japanese ambassador to London, foisting them off on his under-secretaries whenever he could. If a foreign diplomat put to him a particularly awkward question, he would make his excuses and withdraw on the grounds that he had ‘stomach trouble’, thereby signalling that for his part the discussion was over. The foreign secretary’s stinginess was legendary. It is again Butler who recounts that ‘one day a messenger brought in four biscuits and two cups of tea. Halifax pushed away two biscuits and said, “Mr Butler does not want these. Nor do I. Do not charge me.”’35 Halifax definitely looked up to Chamberlain. Until September 1938, he did his utmost to find an accommodation with Nazi Germany. On 25 September 1938, however, just a few days before Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler in Munich, the foreign secretary openly spoke out against acceptance of the terms that Hitler had laid down at Godesberg and for the necessity to oppose Nazi Germany. From then on, right up until March 1939 (when Hitler broke the promise he had given at Munich not to make any further territorial demands in Europe), he was the only member of the Cabinet to argue the inevitability of war with Germany. He overtly opposed the policy of appeasement, but he respected Chamberlain too highly to do this behind the latter’s back.36 Sir Alexander Cadogan, Halifax’s permanent under-secretary, came from an old-established aristocratic family. Highly perceptive, he was a resourceful and straight-dealing person in diplomatic negotiations. He loathed verbosity; his judgement was, as a rule, extraordinarily


acute, like the clarity and directness of his choice of words. His memoranda were distinguished by their impartiality of their tone and their sober conclusions; they never showed any sign of haste. For all the occasional touches of irony, his work seldom smacked of malice or, above all, prejudice. It is just that the modesty evidenced by the documents he prepared is deceptive: reading them one has no sense that their author was a true master of foreign policy. It is sober restraint that can be regarded as Cadogan’s most striking feature, although with Halifax that was no obstacle to Cadogan being trenchant when that was called for.37 These two were the highest-ranking leaders in the Foreign Office when a decisive change was taking place in European power relations. In March 1938 Germany’s eastern limits were extended. Austria’s incorporation into the German Reich forced the shapers of British foreign policy to devote more attention to the countries of Central and Southeastern Europe than they had done previously. Thanks in part to this, Czechoslovakia and Poland, as potential victims of German expansionism, grew in significance for the Foreign Office. On 24 March, just a few days after the Anschluss, Chamberlain made a statement in the Lower House in which, with reference to the Nazi threat to Czechoslovakia, he announced that if armed hostilities were to break out Britain could offer no guarantees over and beyond its obligations as a member of the League of Nations; that is to say, it would not unconditionally stand by its ally, France, which was still bound to Czechoslovakia through the treaty of friendship it had signed during the 1920s.38 Hitler was thus able to interpret the announcement as a carte blanche for him. That was not quite what the relevant political authorities in London had intended. Hungary’s foreign policy by and large accorded with the British appeasement line. Shortly after his discussions with Halifax in Berlin, Hitler also received Hungarian Premier Kálmán Darányi and Foreign Minister Kálmán Kánya. During the discussions on 25 November 1937, Hitler advised the two leaders to concentrate on Czechoslovakia because Germany was interested in settling the ‘Sudetenland Question’.39 Aladár Szegedy-Maszák, who was recalled to Budapest before the end of the year because of clashes with his superior, Döme Sztójay, the Hungarian minister to Berlin, recollected the meeting in the following terms:


Hitler spoke in the first place very specifically about taking action against Czechoslovakia and about Hungarian cooperation— specifically, but without going into any detail on either the military or the territorial aspects, as a result of which a fair number of complications arose subsequently, both before and after Munich. Kánya kept on trying to avoid making a unilateral commitment and to uphold the policy of retaining a free hand, which I would call the least risky line.40 Making provision for every eventuality, however, on 3 March 1938 Darányi announced the Győr Programme of strategic investments, over half of it in armaments, and on the same day proposed the ‘First Jewish Law’, which Béla Imrédy had drafted when he was still minister of economic coordination and was to be passed by Parliament within two weeks of Imrédy’s assumption of the premiership on 13 May 1938. Hungary’s reputation in Great Britain was still rather favourable in 1938. It is hard to agree to the conclusion reached in a memorandum that the English expert István Gál submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office in January 1940, according to which: ‘Hungary’s position in Britain has been growing steadily worse since 1938’41 Two very clearcut notions about the situation in continental Europe had crystallized in British political life and public opinion: one school urged the creation of a system of collective security, the other a countervailing school of ‘realpolitik’. Those labels were misleading. In the spring of 1938, Ferenc Marosy, the chargé d’affaires temporarily heading the Hungarian Embassy in London, was still listing advocates of the policy of appeasement among the supporters of realpolitik, while he labelled those who favoured the collective security approach ‘anti-Fascists animated by doctrinaire idealism’.42 That these designations would ultimately acquire the opposite connotations was something Marosy could not have foreseen at the time, although he did accurately list the representatives of both schools of thought. Amongst the adherents of ‘realpolitik’ were, first and foremost, Prime Minister Chamberlain and a segment of the Conservative Party, Lord Londonderry, who had been secretary of state for air up till 1935, Geoffrey Dawson, who was editor-in-chief of The Times from 1912 to 1919 and then from 1923 to 1940, and Lady Nancy Astor, a public figure who had been the first woman to sit as a member of the House of Commons and was married to john Jacob Astor, proprietor and chairman of the Times newspaper


group. Besides them, Chamberlain could count on a fair number of other powerful supporters of his policy, above all the two big press barons, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, as well as J.L.Garvin, editor of the Observer, and there were even certain Labour Party peers in the Upper Chamber who fell into that category. The most prominent figure of the opposing school of thought was undoubtedly Winston Churchill. In Britain this grouping was referred as the ‘3L’, as apart from several leading Conservatives (such as Duff Cooper, in addition to Churchill), it embraced a faction of the Liberals, most parliamentarians of the Labour Party, and those lobbying on behalf of the rationale for using the League of Nations. To these one may add Eden, Minister of War Leslie HoreBelisha, and Minister of Agriculture William S.Morrison (later Viscount Dunrossil). Of the two bodies of opinion, that associated with Chamberlain’s name became the dominant one, and not just because he happened to be in office. There is no particular reason to doubt that British foreign policy genuinely did seek to mollify Germany, and that to that end it would have been willing to make far-reaching concessions. It is equally the case, however, that Great Britain at that point could not compete militarily with Germany. The huge natural resources of the empire and Britain’s respectable naval power were of little account now, with the primacy of naval warfare a thing of the past. London had not yet fully grasped that air power was going to be the decisive factor in any future war; and aircraft manufacture in the British Isles was far below that in Germany. There were also other factors that explain why British foreign policy strove for peaceful accommodation with Germany at all costs. In the wake of the Anschluss, Hungarian revisionist aspirations received fresh momentum and it became obvious to the Foreign Office’s decision-makers that in the long run it was not possible to base British foreign policy on, or tailor it to, the previously sought conciliation between Hungary and the Little Entente. One Foreign Office note from 29 March 1938 states: The organisation of an anti-German block has never been the expressed aim of His Majesty’s Government in encouraging negotiations between Hungary and the Little Entente. It can hardly have been the aim of the states concerned either. Since Yugoslavia has been tending for the past two years towards the position of neutrality in which she is now firmly established, and


Roumanian help for Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack has long been a forlorn hope.43 In the meantime, London was receiving with ever growing frequency proposals from Hungary that Great Britain open its markets to Hungarian goods and offer various financial instruments to help head off German economic penetration. The British minister in Budapest reported that he did not support these proposals because: Hungary’s population and government are slipping inevitably into the role of obedient servant and scavenger to Germany. I can not blame them: they are utterly incapable of offering material resistance to German penetration, while, as for moral, they have had an example in Austria which should convince even the most romantic to its futility. Thus I think we should be wise to resist any blandishments of this sort [viz. that Great Britain provide economic support to Hungary] and to keep our economic concessions for regions where they may be of use to us.44 Concurring with the ambassador, Sir Orme Sargent, the deputy undersecretary of state, on 6 April summed up the British position as follows: Economic concessions on the part of H.M. Government to Hungary and other Danubian countries to achieve political objectives have never been practical politics, and I am afraid they are still less so in the circumstances with which we are faced today…Roughly speaking, it may be said that even if it were not too late now to organise the Danubian countries into an antiGerman bloc, I am quite certain that we can only do so by giving to each of them serious and definite undertakings to come to their assistance if attacked by Germany. As this is out of the question, it seems hardly worthwhile considering the question any further, and on another paper I have suggested that we should discourage the French from doing so either.45 The deputy under-secretary of state suggested that Britain should concentrate its foreign policy efforts on Greece and Turkey for preference in order to intensify its economic and political influence in those countries.


To return to March 1938: almost a week after the Anschluss Halifax circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee (this body had been formed in 1936, following the German occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland). The document was made up of proposals from three different foreignaffairs experts, with its final form reflecting the prudent line of William Strang. (At this time, Hungary was still assigned to the Southern Europe Department, whose work was ultimately supervised by Sargent.) Strang recommended that British foreign policy utilize every possible means to settle the Sudetenland crisis between the Czechoslovak and German governments. Were any agreement with Germany to be forthcoming, then both Great Britain and France would give guarantees to Czechoslovakia for its security.46 London reached agreement on this with France. On 22 March the Cabinet discussed the proposal that should besent to the French, which was based on the 18 March memorandum. At Chamberlain’s request, the British Chiefs of Staff produced a separate report dealing with the military implications of German aggression against Czechoslovakia, which offered the following alternatives:1) Great Britain could confront Germany militarily in the knowledge that it had the backing of France, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Turkey and Greece, or some of these (exactly which was not specified); or 2) Britain would merely enter into alliance with France insofar as the latter were fulfilling its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia. This option reckoned on neutrality of the other countries listed under the first alternative, and both options assumed neutrality on the part of Poland and the Soviet Union. The Chiefs of Staff’s report closed with the statement: The alliance with Yugoslavia, Roumania, Hungary, Turkey, Greece would be of limited assistance to Great Britain and France, and they might ultimately constitute and additional embarrassing commitment by virtue of our moral obligation to assist them against German invasion…The main advantage would be an economic one, but only so long as their frontiers remained closed to Germany…We have reached the conclusion that no pressure that we and our possible allies can bring to bear, either by sea, on land or in the air, could prevent Germany from


invading and overrunning Bohemia [sic], and from inflicting a decisive defeat on the Czechoslovakian Army.47 It was primarily on this basis that Halifax commented to the Cabinet that ‘the report is an extremely melancholy document, but no Government could afford to overlook it’.48 It is a point of interest that on 15 March Szilárd Masirevich, the Hungarian minister to London, paid a visit to Sargent at which he expressed his personal opinion that after the Anschluss Hitler would aim to absorb Hungary rather than Czechoslovakia.49 On 17 March Sargent wrote two notes following this meeting, the second of which is undoubtedly the more significant. In this the deputy under-secretary of state pointed out that Hungary had been placed in a highly invidious position by the termination of Austria’s existence since it now found itself isolated in Central Europe. The sole option might be some form of German-Hungarian common state on the lines of the AustroHungarian monarchy, with a common foreign policy, common army and common economic system. What lay behind the note’s remarks was that some in the Foreign Office at that time were voicing the opinion that the establishment of a German-Hungarian customs union was now a possibility. According to Sargent, who was in no way proHungarian, Hungary would be far from being an equal partner within the framework of such a German-Hungarian common state, but with German help, in return for its subordinate position, it would regain the territories it had lost in 1920. The British official thereby, as it were, ‘anticipated’ the two Vienna Awards and, indeed, the re-annexation of the Banat. There was just one point, albeit the most crucial one, on which his analysis proved wrong: not only did a German-Hungarian common state or customs union not come into existence, but Hungary regained most of the territories it had ceded under the Trianon Treaty without having to surrender most of its independence and sovereignty. During this period Hungary was the subject of relatively ample attention in the British press. The Times of 17 March had a few lines reporting that the Hungarian government was de facto the first to recognize the Anschluss by reclassifying its legation in Vienna to a consulate. More importantly, as the weeks went by, in late spring and early summer of 1938, a growing number of articles about the development of German-Hungarian and Italian-Hungarian relations appeared in influential dailies, The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the


Morning Post in particular. Almost without exception, these speculated on whether the ever closer economic links between Hungary and Germany would have political consequences, and if so, what. In May 1938, two memoranda were prepared in London with the same title: ‘British Influence in Central and South-eastern Europe’. The first of these originated in the Foreign Office and attempted, possibly somewhat nonplussed in light of the opinions recorded in March, to ascertain what means might be used to check German expansion in the region. The authors of the memorandum continued to hold that the creation of a political bloc was unrealizable, but considered that some British influence might be brought to bear through economic means. They therefore recommended that a committee representing the Foreign Office and various ministry departments be set up with the remit of promoting ‘Great Britain’s political influence by economic means’.50 This was to lead to the formation of an Interdepartmental Committee on Economic Assistance to Central and South Eastern Europe. That very month, the committee itself prepared a memorandum that appraised the place and significance that the countries of the region filled in British politics. Czechoslovakia was written off from the outset, and they did not concern themselves with Turkey as it was considered that British interests there were not under threat. Romania was highlighted on account of its oil reserves, since the question of who would have control over the country’s oil fields could not be ignored in the event of a coming war. Yugoslavia was not accorded such major importance, whereas on Hungary it was concluded: The situation in Hungary looks almost hopeless, and it is inadvisable to put greater efforts into assisting the country.’51 The committee thus saw its priorities as being first Greece (no surprise there, given that British foreign policy had always given the country prominence); second Romania and Yugoslavia and third Hungary. Sir Geoffrey Knox’s ambassadorial reports mirrored that view, one of those written to London in May stating, ‘Hungary is lost to us.’52 A note by Sargent on 29 May, moreover, contained the following: I am sure that there are lots of unhappy Hungarians who would like Great Britain to protect them from being ‘absorbed’ by Germany, and who hope that this may be effected by Great Britain’s economic intervention. But all our past experience and all our present evidence goes to show that Hungary can not be


rendered independent of Germany by any economic action that we can take. Even if we could buy the whole of the Hungarian wheat crop, we would have no guarantee that German political pressure and power of attraction would not continue as before. There are other countries where British interests are definitely and where moreover we have got the means of reinforcing our position, such as Greece in the first place and possibly Roumania. Don’t therefore let us be tempted to waste our energy or our money in trying to salvage countries like Hungary, where the game is already up [emphasis added].53 Where the game has already been decided? Do the words of the British minister to Budapest and especially those of Sargent truly reflect the British attitude to Hungary? Knox, for one, was widely known not to have much liking for Hungarians, whereas Sargent, to quote the words of György Barcza, Hungary’s ambassador to London at this point, ‘veritably raved about the Little Entente, even though it no longer existed, was unviable, and had also proved ad oculos [in full view] innately a danger to the peace of Europe’.54 The mechanism by which decision-making on British foreign policy operated was a good deal more complicated than simply letting the utterances of a handful of diplomats or high officials, even a deputy under-secretary of state, carry decisive or even exclusive weight On certain issues there were divergences of opinion between different generations within the Foreign Office. Older officials, such as Cadogan, Sargent and Lawrence Collier, head of the Eastern Europe Department, viewed Great Britain’s foreign political interests from the standpoint of maintaining the balance of powers; William Strang, the under-secretary of state for European affairs from 1939 and himself of middle-class background, along with others of like mind, identified British interests with upholding the country’s democratically elected governments and was not prepared to fit dictatorial regimes, whether of the left or the right, into a balance of powers equation. As far as the Soviet Union goes, Strang must have had ample first-hand experience as he had been chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in Moscow for four years in the early 1930s; in 1938–39 a British delegation led by Strang went to Moscow to negotiate a possible Anglo-Soviet military alliance. In the end, that pact did not come to fruition; instead Molotov


and Ribbentrop signed a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty in August 1939. A line and concept that differed in some respects from both the above was taken by Sir Robert Vansittart, who was permanent deputy undersecretary at the Foreign Office between 1930 and 1938. In view of his consistent hostility to all things Hungarian—a matter we shall return to —it is worth going into a bit more detail to sketch his character and the motives that fed his approach to foreign policy. Vansittart, or ‘Van’ as he was called by his closest colleagues and friends, disposed of a substantial fortune and so was more wealthy than the ministers whom he served. He was known among his colleagues for his pugnacity, which may have been a legacy of his younger days, when he been a respectable boxer. During the early and mid-1930s he was looked on by many as the de facto head of the Foreign Office, a status that he bolstered with information, having built up an extensive network of his own throughout Europe—a source of no small vexation to MI6, the official intelligence agency. Beside his career in foreign politics, he also had a minor role in literary life, his plays being performed with more or less success not just in London but also in Paris, which possibly went some way to explaining his Francophile sympathies. Together with actor-manager Sir Seymour Hicks, he co-wrote a play in honour of a state visit to London by President Lebrun in March 1939. Vansittart also tried his hand at poetry writing, his poems likewise manifesting a love of France that bordered on sentimentality. He had been contracted by the Hungarian-born film producer and director Alexander Korda to write a screenplay. Whether his cordial loathing of Hungarians was ascribable to events in his private life, or perhaps to the fact that Korda had not found his script good enough, we shall never know for sure. Vansittart had remarried in 1931, taking the charming, intelligent and very rich widow of Sir Colville Barclay, a former ambassador to Budapest, as his second wife.55 The couple’s London house was frequented by many politicians and figures in public life, including the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII) and his consort, Mrs Simpson, and Churchill. It may have been Vansittart’s literary bent that made him tend to prolixity in his diplomatic writing: he circulated lengthy minutes to the Cabinet, and his verbosity often worked against his effectiveness. Within the Foreign Office it was he who was required at times to provide the, for him, not particularly rewarding balancing role. One contemporary cartoon in the Evening Standard depicts him


straddling the pivot of a see-saw labelled ‘Foreign Affairs’, striving to maintain continuity between his old and new superiors, Sir Samuel Hoare and Anthony Eden. Not long after his close friend and ally, Stanley Baldwin, had resigned as prime minister, but during Eden’s time in office as foreign secretary, a previously nonexistent post as the secretary’s chief diplomatic adviser was created expressly for him, and he filled this until 1941. (Thus the rumours that circulated in Foreign Office corridors, that Halifax and Butler were behind Cadogan’s appointment to Vansittart’s post as permanent deputy under-secretary, were not completely justified. According to John Colville, who later became Churchill’s private secretary, it was actually Eden and Chamberlain, acting in concert, who removed Vansittart from his position. Colville acknowledged Vansittart’s striking intellectual ability and profound literary knowledge but felt he was a man of ‘poor judgement’.)56 Although Vansittart ranked directly below the foreign secretary in the hierarchy, in practice he had little influence on what went on. Incoming and outgoing telegrams and reports would be made available to him, but only after decisions had already been taken or responses differed. Nevertheless he could not be completely ‘written off after 1938, since a long line of officials in the Foreign Office had him to thank for their previous promotions. The extent to which Vansittart was able to exert an influence on British policy through them is a matter of conjecture.57 In the late 1930s an increasing number of memoranda about Hungary were produced in the Foreign Office. Not all of these came from British experts. On 10 May 1938, the American Royall Tyler, an adviser to the League of Nations’ Financial Committee at the Hungarian National Bank, edited a lengthy memorandum with the title Prospects for Hungary’, a copy of which also reached London. Tyler was a Hungarophile in whom Teleki and Horthy had implicit trust, even to the extent of letting him in on certain confidential decisions and secret plans. (He knew, for instance, about the provisions that were being mooted in the spring of 1940 for setting up a possible Hungarian government in exile; he himself indeed even figured in the scheme in a specific role.) The starting point for Tyler’s memorandum was that Hungary’s economic difficulties had grown since the Anschluss. The only way that these would be surmounted would be for the government of the day to remain in place, because the only alternative would be a right-wing extremist regime, which would pin the country’s fate entirely


on Germany. For that reason there was no option but to support Darányi’s government, bearing in mind that no Hungarian government would survive were it to pass up the chance of the regaining the Magyar-inhabited territories of former Upper Hungary. After a searching analysis, Tyler reached the conclusion that: If the difficulties outstanding between Germany and Czechoslovakia are solved, there need be no fear that Hungary’s claims on Czechoslovakia will cause any damage to European peace. Hungary is too small, too weak, and too much isolated… it would still be worthwhile to try to help her to preserve her economic independence and to continue to fulfil the foreign debt agreements, which she has negotiated with her creditors and has so far carried out in a manner that has earned the recognition of the competent international authorities.58 Far from writing Hungary off in the Foreign Office in 1938, it was then that some people started to devote closer attention to Hungarian foreign-political endeavours and show more understanding of Hungarian interests. This is not the place to go into the curcumstamces that brought this about, but certain Hungarian leaders were able to hold out hopes that they could seek backing from Great Britain against German expansion. Signs of that were already apparen t in 1938, but in reality it was only after Churchill’s entry into the office of prime minister, on 10 May 1940, that it became unmistakeable that the British were going to stand their ground, even alone, and were not going to contemplate any compromise with Hitler. On 14 May 1938, a new government was formed in Hungary by Béla Imrédy, who thus moved to the prime ministership within just a few months from his post as president of the Hungarian National Bank. Speaking excellent English, Imrédy had made frequent visits to the London in his capacity as bank president, cultivating close contacts with the City, the Bank of England (he was an intimate of the Bank’s governor, Sir Montagu Norman), and the Treasury, so his appointment was greeted with high expectations in London and amongst conservative circles in Budapest alike. On attaining office he sharply rebuked the far-right Arrow Cross Party, calling its supporters ‘unimaginative fantasizers’ and ‘un-Hungarian Hungarians’. He had pro-English sympathies, and all the statements he made on becoming


prime minister suggested that advocates of a pro-German orientation had met a serious and worthy opponent. In July 1938 several respectable British newspapers, including such weeklies as The Economist and the Catholic The Tablet, attributed great significance to the fact that Imrédy’s first official foreign visit had taken him to Rome, not Berlin. We shall never know exactly what turned Imrédy into an advocate of political and military alliance with Germany and then, later on, into the leading figure in a movement that strove to serve the Germans at almost any price. Even his own contemporaries were not agreed on when this volte-face took place.59 At all events, two significant events in the early months of his government almost certainly contributed to the change. At a meeting between representatives of Hungary and the states of the Little Entente at Bled in Slovenia, on 21–22 August, an agreement was hatched out under which the parties mutually renounced the recourse to all means of force against one another, while the Little Entente recognized Hungary’s equal right to armaments. The front pages of the London evening newspapers saw the fact that Hungary had reached ‘agreement’ with the Little Entente as the most important of that day’s international events. On 23 August, Horthy, Imrédy and Kánya had been invited by Hitler to attend a naval review at Kiel. (The rumour went round political and intellectual circles in Budapest that Imrédy had such a reputation as an Anglophile and liberal politician that the Führer did not offer his hand to the Hungarian prime minister on his arrival at Kiel.)60 Simultaneously with the Hungarian leaders’ arrival in Kiel, a communiqué about the Bled Agreement was published—a deal over which Ribbentrop rebuked them repeatedly. The German foreign minister saw Bled as amounting to a repudiation by Hungary of its revisionist demands and consequently as putting an obstacle in the way of German foreign-policy goals. ‘Those who do not help will go away empty-handed,’ Ribbentrop is reported to have said.61 Losing his patience, Kánya eventually remarked sarcastically, ‘Ich erkläre es nich einmal, ganz langsam…Vielleicht hat es jetzt sogar der Herr Ribbentrop verstanden’ [I shall explain it once more, very slowly… Perhaps even Herr Ribbentrop can now understand it.’]62 As Aladár Szegedy-Maszák recollects it, Kánya later also remarked, ‘So gescheit wie Sie, junger Mann, bin auch ich’ [Young fellow, I am just as clever as you are].63 After this little interlude, Ribbentrop eventually enquired what steps Hungary might be expected to take in the event of an armed


German response to Czech ‘provocations’. Kánya refused to give an unequivocal answer, but reminded his opposite number that guarantees of Yugoslav neutrality were a precondition for any active Hungarian participation against Czechoslovakia, and that in any case Hungarian rearmament would take another couple of years to complete. Later that day Hitler said on Imrédy: ‘lf you want to sit at the table, you must at least help in the kitchen.’64 At a further interview on 25 August, by now in Berlin, Kánya finally relented and threw out the suggestion that it might be possible to invalidate the Bled agreement were Hungary, for instance, to make excessive demands on the matter of the Magyar minorities in the Little Entente states. With regard to the Hungarian army, he now told Ribbentrop that it would have improved its military strength sufficiently to participate in an attack on Czechoslovakia by 1 October, but he remained unwilling to make any specific commitment. It is an intriguing coincidence that, at the time of the visit by the Hungarian leaders to Kiel and then Berlin, the regent’s son, István Horthy, was also staying in the German capital on business, not as a member of the official delegation. He used the opportunity, on 25 August, to dine with Frank MacFarlane, the British military attaché to Berlin. They conversed mainly about the how the Arrow Cross Party was organizing in Hungary, with the regent’s son reassuring the attaché that the Hungarian government ‘had the matter well in hand, as the movement was not united and lacked effective leaders’.65 On 30 August, Ivone Kirkpatrick, first secretary at the British embassy in Berlin, sent Halifax a detailed report on the course of the German-Hungarian talks, even appending the toasts that had been made by Hitler and Horthy.66 On 3 September, the Hungarian chargé d’affaires informed Sargent that no agreement of any kind had been reached between the parties at Kiel. The British were well aware of that. In its September edition the Daily Telegraph carried a lengthy report from its diplomatic correspondent, then touring Central Europe, on an interview he had been given the previous day by Imrédy. This was much more than a standard newspaper article, and it was to prove decisive in altering the political course that Imrédy had been taking up until then. Thus is crucial to understanding why he turned away from Great Britain to become, over time, the determining figure among Hungary’s pro-German politicians. We shall consider the article at an appropriate point later on.


One month after the talks in Germany, Imrédy and Kánya were invited by Hitler to visit him at Berchtesgaden on 20 September, in the wake of which two strongly worded Hungarian notes were transmitted to Prague on 22 and 28 September. The notes demanded the reincorporation into Hungary of the Magyarinhabited territories of the present Czechoslovakia and guarantees of the right of selfdetermination for the Ruthenes and Slovaks. On 22 September, however, Kánya had himself received a wired message that summarized the British government’s position on the tense diplomatic situation that had arisen around Czechoslovakia: His Majesty’s Government can not agree that there is any justification for such a policy of intimidation, and they sincerely hope that the Hungarian Government will not persist in it and, above all, that they will not carry it to the point where it would involve them in an actual act of aggression against the Czechoslovak state…If the Hungarian Government prefer to proceed to direct action, His Majesty’s Government cannot be responsible for the consequences.67 A tougher line was taken by the Sunday Times, which in August 1938 had printed a series of three articles by Richard Keane under the title ‘Hungary at the Crossroads’ (The Background of the Nazi Movement’ on 7 August; ‘Mr Imrédy’s Programme’ on 14 August; and ‘Dependence on Germany’ on 21 August). It is worth noting that these articles were published before the Kiel talks. The author provided a detailed analysis of Horthy and Imrédy’s characters, coming to the conclusion that Horthy was a sailor through and through, Imrédy an intellectual, but neither was a professional politician. The regent was widely respected as a just and fairminded man, while the prime minister was characterized as a financial brain of the first rank, with ‘a boundless capacity for work and a calm, reserved, English bearing and manner’. It was no accident, noted the journalist, who had been given an opportunity to speak with Imrédy in person, that the head of government’s abilities were routinely compared with those of Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reichsbank. The journalist admittedly found that the premier lacked a sense of humour, though adding, with typical English fairness, ‘maybe he has that too’. He praised Imrédy for his role in legislation, and willingness to defend his own bills in


Parliament, and emphasized that he had thrown an obstacle in the way of National Socialism by having the Arrow Cross leader, Ferenc Szálasi, imprisoned. The regent had been dubbed Hungary’s Hindenburg, the prime minister its Brüning—a simile that hinted that there was no escaping a National Socialist victory. Horthy, however, was very far from the dotage of Hindenburg in age, the reporter pronounced. That did not stop him from finally concluding that Hungary had aligned itself with Germany, and not just because it had no other choice but because for an overwhelming majority of Hungarians—the aristocracy and Jews excepted—alliance with a great power under any circumstances seemed to hold more appeal than the distressing isolation that had come with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Even more noteworthy, though, was the suggestion that in the war to come Hungary, whether it were to side with Germany or remain neutral, would become the bread-basket for the German economy. If only due to its geographical position, Hungary, with no sea port and having Germany and the member states of the Little Entente for neighbours, was dependent on Germany. Germany, moreover, was the biggest purchaser of Hungarian produce, while Hungary’s own National Socialism was always a strong help for Berlin. Imrédy therefore could do little else but resign himself to German dominance in Southeast Europe, particularly since it must have become clear to him in Rome that Italian friendship towards his country could not provide a counterpoise to the Germans’ power. The article ended by saying that everything now rested on what would happen with Czechoslovakia. Revision was a common article of faith for all political parties in Hungary. In the war to come it was unlikely that Hungary would remain neutral, if only on account of Hungarian antipathy towards Czechoslovakia. It was possible that Hitler was not seeking to incorporate Hungary into the Reich, but he certainly wished to develop very close relations, including a customs union, a definitive renunciation of a Habsburg restoration, and a joint policy against Czechoslovakia. That was the background to the Kiel visit by the Hungarian leaders, the newspaper rounded off. Imrédy was rattled by this article. He was familiar with England and with British internal politics, so he was well aware that what appeared in the Sunday Times carried weight. He asked his friend Hamilton Bruce, an unofficial adviser to the Hungarian National Bank and the Hungarian government, to use whatever influence he had in British


foreign affairs and financial circles to prevent publication of any more similarly pointed articles about Hungary in the future. That was no easy matter, of course, since the stock official response to such requests, or to Hungarian complaints about the British press, was that Britain had a free press. Gascoigne, the first secretary at the British legation in Budapest (and later the first minister in 1945), added, ‘The article certainly contains some exaggerations, and I think I am correct in saying that our Press is, generally speaking, fairly fertile in the matter of the influence of Hungarian National Socialism.’ He recommended that the Foreign Office’s News Department give journalists ‘a mild sedative’ when they wrote about Magyar National Socialists.68 The British press was free, so newspapers would sometimes hit very discrepant tones in writing about Hungary. The New Statesman in July 1938 spoke in the most laudatory terms of Imrédy, who has stopped the rot of panicky subservience to Nazi Germany that set in after the annexation of Austria by the Reich. This week he has boldly grasped the nettle of the Arrow Cross or National Socialist Party led by Francis Szálasy. That weekly took as a reassuring sign not only the arrest of Szálasi but also the resignation of the pro-German Bálint Hóman from his post as minister for culture and education. At the end of that month, the Evening Standard reported on István Horthy’s two-day visit to London, then in August the Financial News, in considering the chances of economic backing being given to the Danubian states, opined that although Germany would move heaven and earth to set up a German-Hungarian customs union, that step would represent an end to Hungary’s independence, and thus Imrédy was standing up to the German pressure. By September 1938 German plans to attack Czechoslovakia were on the verge of being implemented. Simultaneously with this, Hungarian diplomacy moved into action. On 14 September, Sztójay, the Hungarian minister in Berlin, appeared at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to inform them that the Hungarian government was seeking for Czechoslovakia to treat its Magyar minority in the same way as they did the Germans of the Sudetenland. Three days later, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, gave Barcza an interview. The Hungarian minister in London


set out exactly the same request as Sztójay had in Berlin, and requested Great Britain’s backing. The British official commented that beyond any doubt, morally speaking, all minorities were entitled to the same rights, but he found it hard to see how that might be carried out in practice. Diverting Barcza from discussion of the merits of the case in principle, Cadogan declared that the Hungarian government, by making the demand, was at the same time raising an issue for all of the world’s minorities, which would likewise look to England to redress their positions. In a somewhat doctrinaire manner, he also posed the question of what would remain of Czechoslovakia if all its minorities were to secede. The Hungarian ambassador, diplomat to the core, replied, after secession of the minority territories Czechoslovakia will be able to carry on in the form and size in which the state ought to have been constituted from the beginning, that is to say, from 1919, in order that it accorded with the principle of selfdetermination that was proclaimed, but unfortunately not applied, by the victorious powers themselves. If the powers had proceeded so, and not patched together, against all political prudence and historical, economic and moral points of view, that artificial and, as the present instance sadly illustrated all too vividly, unviable state, then world peace would not lie under threat today.69 Cadogan also prepared a note on the interview.70 The statements in the permanent under-secretary’s own summary essentially concurs with the statements in Barcza’s report, though not surprisingly with different emphases. Cadogan gave prominence to the Hungarian minister’s communication that inasmuch as Britain was not to handle the Magyar minority in Czechoslovakia in the same manner as the German minority then Hungary would feel obliged to alter the policy it had followed hitherto. According to Barcza, who wished above all to gain an interview with Halifax, while Cadogan strove to dissuade him, all the Magyars of Czechoslovakia wanted was peace and justice. The next day Barcza forwarded to Chamberlain himself a memorandum from the Hungarian government setting out everything the minister had communicated to Cadogan—the demand that the Czechoslovak Magyar minority and the Sudeten Germans be treated on an equal


footing. The intermediary was Sir Thomas Moore MP, a former official at the British legation in Budapest. Chamberlain replied on the same day, the essence of his message being that he ‘whole-heartedly’ sympathized with Hungary, which had no need to be conceraed, because was keeping the issue of the Magyars in mind. He exhorted the Hungarians to have confidence, remain composed and be patient.71 A noteworthy incident also occurred around the same time, which is instructive to summarize in brief, not least because it casts light on the naïvety of Hungary’s regent and his inexperience in handling political issueis. Horthy wrote a letter to Chamberlain, entrusting its delivery to the Princess Hohenlohe, who had played a prominent role in inspiring the Rothermere campaign (as a matter of fact the princess herself had drafted the letter, albeit in line with instructions from the regent, since her English was better than his). The regent had been prompted to write by the fact that in 1935, when Austen Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain’s elder half-brother and then British foreign secretary, had been his guest in Budapest, the British politician had assured his host that Hungary had many friends in the West, particularly in England, who would come to its aid if the situation came to that. Although Austen Chamberlain was no longer alive by 1938, Horthy though fit to remind the prime minister of that promise. Among other things, the regent had the following committed to paper: The last three years are proof that I have accepted Sir Austen’s advice. I have waited for the ‘appropriate moment’ to arrive. I believe I would be right in saying, however, that that it has now come, which is why I turn to you, a man who has displayed so much wisdom and courage of late, to ask you to keep your brother’s promise and help us. Do all that lies in the power of yourself and your mighty country at this grave hour.72 The princess flew the same day to London, where she passed the letter on to Sir Thomas Moore and thereby—if it ever reached him -to Chamberlain, who can hardly have responded any differently than he did to the Hungarian government memorandum. When Barcza, against Cadogan’s advice, requested an interview with Halifax on 20 September, the foreign secretary communicated to him exactly the same line as the prime minister previously and handed over the British government’s official reply:


H.M. Government appreciated the interest felt by the Hungarian Government in this question [the future of the Magyar minority in Czechoslovakia] but expressed the hope that that the latter would be ‘careful’ in the present delicate situation to do nothing to extend the scope of the present crisis and would be content that their point of view has been placed on record and will receive consideration at the appropriate moment.73 In the meantime the Foreign Office had received a telegram from Knox, who, after a conversation ‘between a senior official in the [Hungarian] Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a French minister’, was told that, ‘if German troops marched into the Sudeten area, Hungary and Poland would also march into their minority areas’.74 His document examined the arguments for and against re-annexation of the former Hungarian territories. The author accepted that ‘certain frontier changes’ in Hungary’s favour were justified both historically and on ethnic grounds, and referred to Macartney’s Hungary and Her Successors, the most up-to-date and authoritative work on the subject, judging its contents to be worthy of consideration. All that he pointed out in connection with reannexation was that any border change would only whet Hungarian appetites, which they would seek to satisfy at Romania’s expense, on top of which the minorities issue would also surface in an acute form to the southeast of Czechoslovakia, in countries such as Bulgaria (clearly a reference to the dispute between Bulgaria and Romania over the Dobrudga district). A day after that memorandum was sent, on 29 September 1938, the heads of British, French, German and Italian governments met in conference at Munich. In the light of repeated prior discussions between Hitler and Chamberlain on the issue, the decision was taken that the Sudetenland frontier region would be transferred to Germany. In an appendix to the Agreement provision was made for the Czechoslovak-Hungarian and Czechoslovak-Polish territorial disputes to be settled within three months by direct negotiation between the parties concerned. If those negotiations failed to be productive, then the matters would be referred to representatives of the four great powers. While the conference was in progress, Hungarian diplomats were extremely active. Sztójay pressed Göring to discover whether the issue of the Magyar minorities of Czechoslovakia was under active discussion, and on gaining a positive response saw to it that Kánya’s


chef de cabinet, István Csáky, immediately set off for Munich with a map displaying the Hungarian demands. Csáky, before leaving Budapest, instructed Barcza by telephone to prepare a brief memorandum for the next day’s conference and ‘forward it, by way of our mutual friend, to the place best placed to use it, before the gentleman in question travels to Munich’.75 ‘Our mutual friend’ was evidently Sir Thomas Moore, while ‘the gentleman in question’ was Neville Chamberlain. The chef de cabinet set the minister the following guidelines in drawing up the document: 1) it was not Hungary that had raised the Czechoslovak issue; 2) if they wished to resolve the problem, this would be impossible without taking Hungarian demands into account; 3) the Hungarian stance on the Czechoslovak question needed to be itemized, with particular emphasis on Hungary’s rights under the Trianon Treaty to self-determination of the Magyar-inhabited territories in Slovakia; 4) the British government should be thanked for their support hitherto and requested to provide their active endorsement at Munich.76 These diplomatic efforts were crowned with a measure of success, since London informed the government in Prague that ‘some cession of territory on the Hungarian frontier will, in present circumstances, prove necessary, and…this fact should be at once frankly recognised by the Czech Government’.77 On the same day, Mussolini received Csáky in the Bavarian capital and promised that as soon as they have finished with the Sudetenland issue he would raise the Hungarian and Polish issue.78 At Munich, however, it was most decidedly Hitler’s will, not Mussolini’s, that was to prevail. The Munich Agreement met with different responses in London and Budapest. On Chamberlain’s return to London, a huge crowd was waiting at Heston Air Field, on the western edge of the city, close to the Heathrow airport of today. On emerging from his plane, the prime minister raised the agreement aloft then read from the text and announced that this meant ‘peace in our time’ because Hitler had promised that he now had ‘no further territorial demands in Europe’. Barcza was amongst those present at this reception and in his memoirs recollects the events as follows: Everyone warmly congratulated Chamberlain. I too stepped over; Lord Halifax identified me, and old Chamberlain accepted my good wishes with a beaming face. ‘The preservation of peace is exceedingly important from Hungary’s point of view too,’ I


said to Chamberlain, ‘because all that we seek, at all times, is peace, peaceful work and international concord.’ Many thousands of cars and the throng of hundreds of thousands then hurried back to London along the Great Western Road, and that evening all London celebrated in happy relief, with every public house crammed to bursting and the champagne flowing like water; people really did believe that peace had been secured for the foreseeable future.79 An entirely different note was struck by Winston Churchill. As a consistent and obdurate opponent of Chamberlain’s policy, he wrote to a friend even before the Munich conference: ‘We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.’80 On the day of the Munich conference a group of Chamberlain’s political enemies talked things over at the Savoy Hotel in London. Churchill, Lord Robert Cecil, Clement Attlee, Eden, Archibald Sinclair, Lord Lloyd and Lady Asquith (Emma Tennant) decided to send the prime minister a telegram in which they would ask him to make no further concessions to Hitler, otherwise he would have to reckon on an acrimonious debate in the Lower House. The telegram was not sent in the end because both Eden and Attlee refused to sign it. Eden made the rather narrowminded remark that such an action might spur Chamberlain to do the opposite. Winston remained, seating in his chair immobile, frozen, like a man of stone. I saw the tears in his eyes…then he spoke: ‘What are they made of? The day is not far off when it won’t be our signatures we’ll have to give but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive?81 Of a piece with Churchill’s pronouncements was his performance in the House of Commons on 5 October. In a powerful speech, Churchill pointed out that what had happened after Munich affected not merely the interests of Czechoslovakia but the security and, indeed, independence of Great Britain and France. It was not just a matter of the loss of British influence in Europe but of Great Britain not wishing to become part of a Europe under German Nazi rule: ‘We are in the


presence of a disaster of the first magnitude…Do not let us blind ourselves to that…And do not suppose that this is the end. It is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us.’82 Of course many of Britain’s leading politicians looked on the Munich Agreement as being an unavoidable necessity, basing that view on the unpreparedness of the British army, disagreements among the member states of the British Commonwealth, and the pacifism of much of British public opinion. Barcza rightly perceived that assessments of the Munich Agreement, for all that it met with approval from a majority of British public opinion, were not uniform. In a report to his Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 4 October, he gave voice to a strand of opinion that the agreement was ‘nothing less than a defeat concealed in the attractive wrapping of peace’.83 Barcza correctly deduced from Duff Cooper’s resignation from his office as First Lord of the Admiralty that the government, no more than the governing Conservative Party, was not united in its avowal of the prime minister’s views. Referring to the Francophilia of the Foreign Office’s top officials (he specifically mentioned Cadogan, without grounds, and Sargent, with good reason), he concluded that many of them still shared the view of former Foreign Secretary Eden, who, as has already been noted, had resigned from the post precisely as a protest against the policy of appeasement. The minister to London even made an attempt to weigh up Hungarian irredentist demands from the British viewpoint and advise Kánya accordingly. One cannot criticize the accuracy of Barcza’s appraisal of the political situation: I believe I am not mistaken in saying that the British government considers that it has, for the time being, fulfilled its role towards ourselves by signing the declaration attached to the Munich Agreement…Britain will observe our negotiations [the forthcoming Czechoslovak-Hungarian negotiations] with interest, and it will also do its best to ensure that the two negotiating parties reach agreement, but we would be deluding ourselves to expect any more from Britain, that is to say forceful intervention and pressure on anything like the scale that was exerted in the interests of easing Czech-German tensions.84


Barcza’s analysis is not contradicted by the note London sent to Prague regarding territorial concessions that would have to be made to Hungary, which should be seen as no more than a fairly mild form of the sort of arm-twisting that customarily goes on in diplomacy. Those who were in charge of British foreign policy in the autumn of 1938 were not greatly worried about resolving Czechoslovak-Hungarian antagonisms; the disputes between the two countries were of next to no interest in the ranking of British political priorities. While in London government and public opinion, for the most part, took cognizance of the events in Munich with relief and, perhaps, a measure of resignation, in Budapest the prevailing mood was one of disappointment. After all, Hitler’s demands may have been met to the letter, but Hungarian claims had been deferred as subject to bipartite talks to be conducted with Czechoslovakia. Those talks opened at Komárom on 9 October, with Kánya and the Slovak Józef Tiso leading the respective nego tiating teams. The Czechoslovak delegation initially offered no more than autonomy for the Magyar-inhabited areas that were being claimed back, and offered minimal concessions when that was flatly rejected by the Hungarians. The talks were broken off on 13 October. Hungarian diplomacy pursued an active course that had immediately preceded Munich. On 14 October, ex-premier Darányi, now speaker of the House of Parliament, travelled to Berlin, where he spoke with Hitler and tried to gain his backing for Hungary’s demands. Meanwhile Csáky paid a visit on Mussolini in Rome. On 17 October, Barcza obtained a meeting with Cadogan and explained in detail, with the aid of a map, the ethnic basis of the Hungarian claims in an attempt to persuade the permanent under-secretary that the British government should exert constant pressure on the Czechoslovak side to return to the talks and conclude an agreement at the earliest opportunity: Sir Alexander’s reply to this was that he hoped and believed that the Czechs would shortly come up with a fresh proposal, because in his view the four Great Powers would far rather see quick agreement between the two parties than have to assemble again somewhere as the ‘Big Four’ in order to settle the issue.85


That same day, a Foreign Office official discussed the situation in Hungary with Hamilton Bruce. Bruce dismissed out of hand the idea that Hungary had fallen into the Nazi camp, asserting this not just as his own opinion but as a matter of plain fact. He based this on the following arguments: 1) Hungary had not walked out of the League of Nations; 2) Hungary had not entered the AntiComintern Pact; 3) the Hungarians had published the outcome of the Bled Conference during Horthy and Imrédy’s visit to Kiel; 4) the sentence handed down to Szálasi. He added later, The alternative to the present god-fearing and civilised Government in Hungary was an even more vicious form of Nazism than at present existed in Germany.’86 A.N.Noble, head of the Southern Europe Department to which Hungary was assigned in 1938– 39, commented on the cover sheet of the document that Bruce’s reasoning was cogent, and that if Hungary did not speedily get from Czechoslovakia what it believed it was entitled to, the moderate Imrédy would be succeeded as head of government by the far right. The British had therefore not yet written Imrédy off, despite the fact that their minister to Budapest had repeatedly painted the Hungarian government in his reports as though Budapest had already absolutely committed itself to close collaboration with Berlin. The first Vienna Award was proclaimed at the Belvedere Palace on 2 November 1938. Under the terms of the German-Italian arbitration judgment, 12,400 square kilometres of land were restored to Hungary, along with approximately 1.1 million inhabitants, the majority of them Magyar. From an official British standpoint, the award was consistent with what had been agreed at Munich. Both Chamberlain and Halifax declared as much to Parliament, with the prime minister’s statement to the House of Commons on 14 November including the following comments: The Munich Agreement did not make any stipulation in regard to the settlement of the problems of the Polish and Magyar minorities in Czechoslovakia, and it was only in the event of these problems not being settled in agreement with the respective Governments within three months that they would have formed the subject of another meeting of the Munich powers. Agreement was, in fact, reached between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian Governments when they agreed to accept as final the arbitral award of the German and Italian Governments, and in


consequence no question of action by His Majesty’s Government arises.87 In a further communication, on 19 December, Chamberlain firmly closed the book on the subject: The new frontiers of Czechoslovakia have already been laid down by agreement between the Czechoslovak Government and each of the other three interested Governments, and so as far as the Agreement between Germany and Czechoslovakia is conceraed, this was confirmed by a Protocol signed by the members of the International Commission on the 21st of November last. In these circumstances, the question of the conclusion of a further international instrument regarding these frontiers does not appear to arise.88 Barcza promptly reported all this back to Budapest, warning Csáky, who had in the meantime replaced Kánya at the head of the ministry of foreign affairs, to consider making a request for a written record of that ‘quasi-acknowledgement’. Without any instruction, the minister took it upon himself to ask Cadogan whether Chamberlain’s statement to the Commons was the British official view, to which the permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office responded emphatically in the affirmative. Csáky, however, was not well informed about Britain or the English, making his decisions almost entirely with a view to Germany’s military and economic might. Britain’s domestic political conditions—the differences of opinion that existed between Chamberlain and his foreign secretary and between top officials within the Foreign Office and the diplomatic corps, behind which generational conflicts were also at play—were clearly reflected in a report by the British minister in Budapest to Halifax on 5 November. Knox pointed out that Hungary, through the first Vienna Award, had recovered the greatest part of the Magyar inhabitants of Slovakia that could have been hoped for, together with several towns in which Magyars did not form a majority. Knox foresaw a major problem in the fact that the one million inhabitants who had been restored to Hungary had for 20 years been living in better material circumstances and under a more liberal political regime than their fellow countrymen in Hungary itself. He discerned that there had been little change in Hungary’s attitude


towards the Axis powers: Hungarian politicians and press were extolling Italy as the great liberator, while the gratitude being expressed towards Germany seemed a trifle superficial. He judged the latter, however, to be just a slight and passing change. It was in a lengthy concluding section that Knox showed a glimpse of his feelings towards the Hungarians. Hungary’s attitude towards Britain, he wrote, was shaped by events. Its affection had been genuine, and its respect profound, as long as Britain had dominated Europe as a strong, unselfish and benevolent power. The Hungarians had begun to look more critically at Great Britain, and their respect to diminish, at the time of the crisis with Italy over Abyssinia, when the British had been advocating a sanctions policy at the League of Nations. That respect had declined even more precipitately when Germany occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, and vanished altogether following the Anschluss. According to the minister, the only role that Great Britain now filled in Hungarian foreign policy was that of a ‘financial milchcow’, and in Knox’s view that was unlikely to change in the near future. He brought out his old argument that it was a delusion to suppose that offering Hungary economic concessions would keep the country out of the German sphere of interest. As far as a fall of the Imrédy administration and its replacement by a National Socialist cabinet was concerned, he thought that possible but unlikely. He voiced the opinion that Britain’s trade with Hungary should be promoted solely on the basis of mutual economic advantage, independent from any political considerations. As one sign of his rather scant goodwill towards Hungarians, Knox even voiced his resentment that Hungary’s politicians should have taken the step of asking Italy and Germany to arbitrate at Vienna, not Britain—which had made the biggest effort for the Munich Conference to be staged. But then Halifax himself had declared that Great Britain was delighted the Czechoslovak— Hungarian differences had been smoothed over without Britain’s involvement.89 Andrew Noble, at the head of the Foreign Office’s Southern Europe desk, was a good deal more subtle in his comments than the British minister to Budapest On 24 November he noted: The basis of all Sir G. Knox’s argument is that Hungary is, must be, and always will be in any foreseeable future, utterly and entirely dependent on Nazi Germany and that we should


therefore be foolish to waste on Hungary any effort that can be usefully employed elsewhere. We can not say that Sir G.Knox is wrong; to the contrary, events may very well prove him to be right; but it is not the view taken in this department. Noble assessed Hungarian foreign policy as having rather limited room for manoeuvre but, as he added: ‘lt seems to me too much to say that Hungary is yet completely Germany’s vassal.’ Keeping Knox’s argumentation in mind, Noble summarized his own view that while it was not worth expending too much energy on Hungary, everything possible should be done for it since Imrédy’s government, for all its shortcomings, suited Great Britain better than a Nazi régime. History demonstrates, he finished his note, that part of the reason why extremist governments accede to power is that foreign powers do not give moderate ones sufficient encouragement and backing.90 Similar sentiments were expressed by P. B. B. Nichols, a subordinate in the Southern Europe Department, on 25 November: Without wishing to be impertinent, one might say that a kind of superficial logic seems to have a fatal attraction for Sir G.Knox. This species of logic has the same attraction for the French, and we know where it has landed them—their carefully planned edifice in Europe has collapsed.91 The line taken by the officials at the Foreign Office’s Southern Europe desk was obviously influenced by developments in Hungary’s internal politics. A split occurred within the ruling National Unity Party. In midNovember 62 of its parliamentary representatives resigned from the organization, which was thereby left with a minority in Parliament. On 23 November, the government lost the vote on a procedural motion, and Imrédy tendered his resignation the same day. In the end—perhaps the British Foreign Office’s line played some part, if only very indirecdy, in the decision—Horthy did not accept this. On the other hand, Kánya departed from his position on 28 November. Regarding the circumstances surrounding this, Count György Pallavicini, one of the leaders of the Legitimist faction in parliament, told Knox that when the frontier negotiations at Komárom had broken down, Darányi had been dispatched to Hitler. The ex-premier had returned to Budapest with the message that the German chancellor considered that Kánya


was pushing too independent a course and so had sought his removal. Imrédy then asked Count János Esterházy, a Hungarian National Party representative in the Czechoslovak Parliament, to inform Hitler that he was prepared to get rid of Kánya. Since Esterházy refused to undertake the mission, Imrédy resorted to other semi-official channels to pass on the message. Kánya got to hear of this but tendered his own resignation only after Horthy had refused to accept Imrédy’s. (Pallavicini himself had happened to learn about the circumstances of Kánya’s departure from a conversation with Count István Bethlen.)92 At the close of 1938, Britain’s foreign policy towards Hungary could be said to be informed by a well-disposed understanding and a cautious approach. That was due to several factors. To begin with, Great Britain had graver problems to deal with in Europe and elsewhere around the world than the worries of Hungary, with its small territory and lack of significance. The existence of the Commonwealth, Britain’s own economic difficulties, the pace of rearmament, and the viability of the policy of appeasement were all of far greater weight than any territorial disputes between various small nations in Central and Eastern Europe. In London’s dominant political and social circles Imrédy and his government were still regarded as the counterpoise to a Nazi régime— and by virtue of that, fit to have contacts with. The officials in the Foreign Office who dealt with Hungarian affairs were well aware that by the autumn and winter of 1938 Imrédy, whatever the appearances, still counted England as a great power, and they advised their superiors to that effect. To the outside observer, Great Britain genuinely still seemed to be a great power. If Hitler had launched his onslaught on Europe in 1938, in line with his original plans, it is quite possible that any Hungarian hopes that were pinned to Britain’s prestige may have evaporated. Perhaps Hitler himself did not truly believe that he could overcome Britain once and for all by means of force, as he tried to achieve German control over Europe with British assent. Imrédy knew the English and their way of thinking, so it is unlikely that he simply blanched at the sight of Germany’s military potential and caved in over his foreign policy. Until his resignation, the Hungarian premier in fact banked on London’s understanding and acceptance of his policy. It was one of those curious quirks of fate that the official reason for which Imrédy had to relinquish his post was because one of his greatgrandmothers had been of Jewish extraction. In truth, though, Horthy


had for quite some time found him increasingly difficult on a personal level, and more particularly on account of the dictatorial traits that frequently came to the fore in the final phase of his premiership. However, the fears that Imrédy’s government would be supplanted by a cabinet of a National Socialist stamp proved unfounded.

4 From Count Pál Teleki’s Government to the Outbreak of the Second World War

A new Hungarian government was formed by Count Pál Teleki on 16 February 1939. Within conservative, pro-British circles in Budapest and within the Foreign Office the appointment was attended by much the same expectations as had been the case with Imrédy almost a year earlier. Count István Bethlen, the grand old man of Hungarian politics, thought highly of Teleki ‘for his wisdom, his culture, his wide intellectual horizon and his conscientiousness’, but ‘he did not have a particularly favourable opinion of him as a politician, looking on his scholarly idealism and infantile romanticism as unfortunate’.93 The British press also wrote about Teleki in similarly flattering terms. Gascoigne, the British chargé d’affaires in Budapest, thought it important enough to expatiate on in his report to London: Although Count Teleki only assumed office ten days ago, he has already shown his determination to abide by constitutional methods of government…It is worth recording, I think, that while Signor Mussolini and President Moscicki replied immediately, Herr Hitler’s answer was not forthcoming until 25th February…The information which is available to me here is that the present leaders of Germany do not trust him, and from what I have been able to learn so far the German press have been somewhat lukewarm. That Count Teleki may not be particularly acceptable to the Third Reich may render the situation difficult for him in the future.94

The new prime minister’s position was delicate from the very start. More than a few, not least Bethlen, expected him to reshape the

56 DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS

governing party totally, instead of which he merely renamed it the Hungarian Life Party whilst reducing the ranks of Imrédy’s Hungarian Life Movement. On 24 February, Hungary acceded to the AntiComintern Pact. The following day, the minister of the interior banned the Hungarian National Socialist Party-Hungarist Movement and the Hungarist Party. Teleki’s foreign policy goals, at bottom, did not differ from Imrédy’s. Like his predecessor, he sensed the military weakness of the Western powers and their lack of interest in Hungarian territorial revision. Likewise, that German influence was becoming increasingly decisive in Central Europe. He accordingly kept Csáky, who was acceptable to the Germans, as his minister of foreign affairs, despite advice from various quarters that it would be better to part with him. In order to counterbalance the often excessively one-sided German orientation of foreign policy under Csáky and his like, Teleki made it an ever more common practice to receive Hungarian ministers in person and ask them to report on their work, building up his own ‘private ministry of foreign affairs’. On more than a few occasions he exchanged correspondence with Barcza, an old friend, by way of the British diplomatic bag, thus bypassing Csáky. He also took care always to be present beside Csáky at major negotiations. On taking over the government, he instructed the minister in London to make it known to the Foreign Office that: Given its geographical and political situation, the Hungarian government to a certain extent is obliged to cooperate loyally with the German government, but it is very seriously determined that this cooperation shall not run to the point that it leads to any impairment or, for that matter, surrender of the country’s sovereignty, independence and respect. The government places great weight on the British government’s understanding and support, and it will never do anything that might harm the interests of the British Empire.95 A new British ambassador, Irish-born Sir Owen St Clair O’Malley, took up his posting to Budapest in May 1939. Long well-disposed towards Hungary96 and, incidentally, also a close colleague of Churchill’s during the 1920s, he was later to provide in-depth and finely nuanced characterizations of the leading Hungarian politicians. He saw

HUNGARIAN-BRITISH DIPLOMACY 1938–1941 57

Teleki as an upright, resolute, highly intelligent, unselfish, scholarly man whose thinking was strongly imbued by his religious convictions. His assessment of Csáky was not so clear-cut, and he described him as a curious mélange of personal ambition, genuine patriotism, talent, flexibility, courage, guile and charm: I find it easy to understand why the Prime Minister should keep Count Csáky at his side. Ingratiating behaviour towards Germany comes very easily to Count Csáky. He is therefore retained to do much that the Prime Minister and the Regent would consider dirty work—and he does it well. Though by temperament a liar, he is neither stupid nor uncommunicative.97 O’Malley was also on cordial terms with the regent. Admittedly, Horthy first received him at his official residence in Buda Castle only on 4 November, and even then he was led in through a sidedoor, but the minister ascribed that to the caution that Hungarian politicians with pro-British sympathies often displayed in order not to attract the attention of the Germans. (O’Malley’s explanation is a little lame, for however cautious Horthy may have been, it is, odd that he kept a minister of His Majesty’s Government waiting for half a year, which amounted to a disregard of diplomatic protocol, given that newly appointed ministers were usually presented within two or three months. Besides, Horthy at that juncture had no particular reason to be cautious. It is likely that Horthy was not in good health during the period in question, and that is why O’Malley was kept waiting.) Thereafter, O’Malley and his wife, who wrote books under the pen name Ann Bridge, were dinner guests of the Horthys on a number of occasions (Ann Bridge gave an account of the visits in her book The Portuguese Escape). Besides the host, other Hungarian supporters of a foreign policy more oriented towards Britain would join these evenings as time went by. British indulgence and understanding of the Teleki government’s foreign policy were also in evidence during March 1939, when Hungary occupied Ruthenia. The immediate antecedent to this reacquisition was that on 12 March Hitler had summoned Sztójay to inform him that the break-up of Czechoslovakia was imminent. Germany was going to recognise Slovakia’s independence but as far as Ruthenia was concerned he was prepared to wait another day before


deciding whether to grant it similar recognition. That, in effect, meant that Hungary was given 24 hours in which to ‘solve the Ruthene problem’. During the morning of 14 March, the Slovak Diet declared the independence of the ‘Free Slovak State’. In the afternoon of the same day Csáky handed over to Miloš Kobr, the Czechoslovak minister in Budapest, an ultimatum that made the following demands: 1) free all Magyar internees in Ruthenia; 2) stop the persecution of Hungarians in Ruthenia, and allow them to organize freely; 3) arm the Hungarian Home Guard in Ruthenia; 4) arrange that Czech-Moravian troops should evacuate Ruthenia within 24 hours; and 5) guarantee complete protection of life and liberty to Hungarians in Ruthenia.98 By late evening Prague signalled its acceptance of these demands except point 3, whereupon Csáky declared the response to be ‘insufficient’. By then it was also too late for Vološin, prime minister of the CarpathoUkraine, which had gained autonomy in October 1938, to offer a union between Ruthenia and Hungary: Csáky rejected the idea as ‘technically impossible’. From 15 March, Hungarian troops moved in to occupy the territory, meeting virtually no resistance. This Hungarian action stirred up no particular reaction in London. That same day, Teleki informed Admirai Usborne, who happened to be in Hungary on a lecture tour under the auspices of the British Council, that the move into Ruthenia had gone ahead with German approval.99 Although Cadogan condemned it in principle as a highhanded solution, he lodged no protest with the Hungarian minister. Barcza recorded: Leisurely English minds on this occasion grasped the true situation fairly quickly, and Sir Alexander Cadogan later told me with open satisfaction that whatever the ins and outs of the matter, it was in any event better that we, the Hungarians, are in Ruthenia than the Germans, for whom it would only have represented a further boost in territory and prestige. On the same occasion, Bonnet, the French foreign minister, went so far as to congratulate my Paris colleague, and he said that as far as the French government was concerned we could march into Prague if that stopped the Germans doing so!100


At the same time as the Hungarian occupation of Ruthenia, Romania too increased its diplomatic activity. Nor can one ignore the fact that British oil industry interests were involved in Romania. On 15 March Romanian diplomats made representations in Budapest that Hungarian troops should not move into the northeastern area of Ruthenia. Csáky, however, consistently refused to entertain all Romanian proposals, showing a willingness to enter into negotiations only after the occupation was completed, Both Romania and Hungary ordered a partial mobilization along their common frontiers. In the British capital rumours appeared about an impending Hungarian attack on Romanian territories. There was an interlude in which Virgil Tilea, the Romanian minister in London, played a leading role. On 17 March, he told influential officials at the Foreign Office that Romania had ‘confidential information’ that within the next few months Germany was going to reduce Hungary to vassaldom.101 Much more significantly, Tilea imparted to Halifax himself that a German economic mission then in Romania had presented Bucharest with what amounted to an ultimatum demanding a German monopoly on Romanian exports, in return for which Germany would guarantee Romania’s frontiers. That same information was also passed on to British newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Telegraph. Tilea’s ‘information’ was false, as Gafencu, the Romanian foreign minister, said a few days later to Hoare, the British minister to Bucharest. Tilea’s timing, however, was perfect and had the desired effect, for the British government was considering that day how Chamberlain should handle foreign policy questions— above all, of course, Hitler’s breach of the undertakings he had given at Munich—in a speech he was to give in his home city of Birmingham. Tilea, via Halifax, may have had an effect on what the prime minister said. There were various people, including Halifax himself, who were trying to make Chamberlain adopt a stiffer stance towards Germany, especially since he had not given a sufficiently sharp reaction in the House of Commons on 15 March, only commenting that the invasion of rump Czechoslovakia contravened the spirit of the Munich Agreement. The tactic worked. In his Birmingham speech, the prime minister effectively announced the end of the appeasement policy, declaring that Great Britain was not indifferent to what was happening in Southeastern Europe. Among other things, he said, ‘Public opinion in the world has received a sharper shock than has ever yet been delivered to it, even by the present régime in Germany.’102


Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech marked a sea-change in British foreign policy and public opinion alike. The British were genuinely shocked by Hitler’s naked breach of promise; and would no longer give any credence to his words. As for Tilea, he was obliged to endure a few uncomfortable minutes of an interview with Cadogan, who noted in connection with their 18 March encounter: ‘On the whole I do not think that my interview with M.Tilea increased my confidence in him.’103 In 1971, John Lukacs had a private conversation with Tilea, whose recollection was that a high official of the Foreign Office had asked him to ‘bing up’ (i.e. stiffen) Chamberlain through Halifax. Was this truly the case, one wonders, or was Tilea merely seeking to excuse the role he had played 33 years earlier?104 One sign of the decisive change in foreign policy on which it had embarked was the guarantee that Great Britain gave, for the first time in its history, in the event of an infringement of the sovereignty of three Central and Southeastern European countries: first Poland, then Romania and Greece. The British guarantees were followed up by France. Greece—always ranking a good deal higher than the other two countries from the standpoint of Britain’s strategic concerns—received the pledge after Italy had swallowed up Albania in April. The occupation of Ruthenia, then, did little to disturb Anglo Hungarian diplomatic relations: ‘at that juncture, it could be said that the Anglo-Hungarian relationship was still politically correct, and even fairly good, despite the reacquisition of the Felvidék [i.e. the Hungarianinhabited areas of Slovakia] and Ruthenia,’ Barcza recorded.105 Ingram, head of the Foreign Office’s Southern Europe desk, whom Barcza had first met during the time he was posted to the Vatican, showed himself to be positively sensible of Hungary’s tricky position: We know…that the Hungarians are having to tack about right now. Everyone here understands that, but we are equally convinced that if the situation were to evolve to the point where we are forced to declare our true colours, we are not going to sell you out to the Germans.106

On 7 April Teleki asked Hamilton Bruce, who happened to be visiting Budapest, to pay a visit on him in his office. Bruce sent a copy of his report of their conversation to the Foreign Office as well.107 Teleki


declared that as long as he was at the helm Hungary would not accept any territory from foreign hands, and that applied just as much to Transylvania as it had to Ruthenia. (One may add, however, that the prime minister did not even attempt to deny that the occupation of Ruthenia had occurred with Germany’s agreement.) The Hungarian government had rejected the military assistance offered by Germany and Poland, although admittedly it had undertaken consultations with both governments before making any decision. Teleki also brought up the matter of Slovakia and the course that Slovak-Hungarian relations could be expected to take. He merely commented that Hungary had a need of the territories that had been reannexed under the terms of the first Vienna Award, because the frontier line laid down at Trianon ‘was geographically incorrect.’ Growth in the volume of exports to Germany was by force of necessity, although the prime minister stated that Hungary was prepared to increase its trade with other countries too and was not worried about possible German protests on that score. In his closing remarks, Teleki reminded Bruce that in February he had suspended the Arrow Cross Party without seeking to clear the action in advance with the German leadership. He also rejected the accusation, circulated in ‘certain circles’, that he had created schools for Hungary’s ethnic German minority (it is not clear from the minute what this assertion amounted to in British diplomatic circles). At this time, Romania was the subject of quite considerable attention in the Foreign Office. The way in which Romanian-Hungarian relations were evolving and Germany’s policy in Southeastern Europe were to form central topics of discussions with Foreign Minister Gafencu when he visited London in late April. Before, this Romanian statesman had met Hitler in Berlin. There can be little doubt that the Führer wanted the subject of their conversation to be made known to the British government. Hitler declared that he had no intention of supporting Hungary against Romania, and he had no claims of any kind vis-à-vis Romania. He spoke somewhat disparagingly of the Hungarians: Germany had given them active support in 1914 but had received nothing in exchange. He categorized the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia as a foolish move; he himself would have pro posed instead a partition of the dual monarchy on an ethnic basis. As for Britain, in his view, it was seeking to thwart German political and economic progress when Germany sought only friendship with the British Empire, although that had to be on a footing of equality, being


a precondition for the survival of white civilization. Hitler gave his word of honour to Gafencu that Germany would not invade Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. (The background to that statement was that one month earlier, on 23 March, Britain and France had put out a joint communiqué that held out the prospect of armed intervention should Germany commit an act of aggression against any of the three countries in question.)108 Those in charge of British foreign policy could hardly have believed Hitler a month after German troops had marched into Prague. It is likewise questionable if anything said by Gafencu, and Tilea who accompanied him, held any credence for Cadogan, who was present during the talks. While those talks were in progress, several events with a bearing on Hungarian foreign policy had a favourable impression in London. British interest was piqued by the fact that Hitler invited Imrédy and Darányi, but not Teleki, to attend his birthday celebrations in Berlin. It was intimated to Darányi that if Hungary were to permit German troops to pass through its territory in their campaign against Poland, then the remainder of Slovakia could be surrendered in return. Teleki and Csáky, in the meantime, were with Mussolini in Rome. On their return, the news that Darányi had to impart threw the Hungarian government into a considerable flurry as Teleki and Csáky were scheduled to go to Berlin on 30 April. After much deliberation, on 27 April the foreign minister wired to Baron Villani, the Hungarian minister in Rome, that he was to convey to Ribbentrop the message that in the event of an armed attack being launched against Poland Hungary would side with the German Reich; however: we shall not consent to participate, either directly or indirectly, in an attack on Poland. By ‘indirect participation’ I mean that any demand for German troops to cross Hungarian territory on foot, by road transport or rail will be rejected. If the Germans suggest using force, I shall declare categorically that we shall meet arms with arms. Anyone who sets foot on Hungarian territory without permission we regard as an enemy.109 The reason why Villani, of all people, should have been instructed to pass on the message was most likely to give the Germans the impression that Rome had already approved the Hungarian position, which, if true, would attest to a degree of naïvety on the part of the Hungarians.


Nevertheless, when Teleki and Csáky met Ribbentrop on 30 April, the German foreign minister made no request to make use of Hungary’s railways, merely offering general expressions of Germany’s friendship towards Hungary. Teleki responded in similar fashion, but there can be little doubt that he let his own conduct during the talks be guided by his own rule of thumb, as divulged to Macartney: ‘to say everything the dictators wanted, and do nothing’.110 Those correct relations between Great Britain and Hungary were something that the Hungarian government, naturally enough, also tried to maintain in areas less official than the diplo matic sphere. One proof was the visit that Miklós Horthy Junior paid to London in midMay 1939. The regent’s younger son made the trip, after it had been approved by his father, Teleki, Csáky, and also Kunder, the minister of trade, with the aim of exploring the possibilities of expanding AngloHungarian commercial links (it may be remarked that the Hungarian minister in London received no notification of his arrival). The younger Horthy informed officials at the British Board of Trade and the Industrial Intelligence Centre that: 1) the volume of Anglo-Hungarian trade should, and could, be doubled without difficulty, given the will, which certainly existed on the Hungarian side; 2) Hungary would have no difficulty in faithfully carrying out its obligations under the Anglo Hungarian Payments Agreement and was ready to purchase more raw materials and manufactures from Britain; and 3) those sections of the Hungarian people who had any say in the direction of affairs and the population, if the peasantry (who were indifferent on the matter) were excluded, were mainly anti-German. ‘But Hungary had to live, and Germany was willing to take almost as much of Hungary’s produce as she could offer, and to pay high prices.’ Despite that, Horthy Jr. told his hosts he was convinced that Germany’s economic ascendancy in Central Europe had passed its zenith, which was why it was now Great Britain’s turn to give an added impulse by purchasing more in the region.111 General elections were held in Hungary on 28–29 May 1939. The results of the voting, naturally, were the subject of much closer attention from London than the younger Horthy’s London visit. The ruling party retained its absolute majority, gaining 183 of the 260 seats, but much more striking was the fact that various parties and factions of the far right returned 46 deputies to parliament—the largest bloc of votes ever won by an opposition party since 1920. The Smallholder and


Social Democratic Party representations were correspondingly weakened. Sargent, the Foreign Office assistant secretary of state, already was asking Barcza about the results on 30 May. The minister, of course, said nothing about the big advances made by the Arrow Cross, putting the emphasis on ‘the Hungarian nation’s sober political attitude’ by voting for the government. He also mentioned that the elections were the first to be held under the provisions for secret balloting and universal franchise of the new electoral law of 1938 (which makes the outcome all the more ‘interesting’, given that the law had been urged most strongly by the parties, which suffered the big losses). Reading into Sargent’s choice of wording, he was already well aware of the preliminary result, since at the end of his interview with Barcza he made the seemingly throw-away comment that if it were to come to war in Europe, he was ready to believe the small states intended to be neutral, but he found it hard to imagine that could be maintained over the longer run. Sooner or later those states would be forced to choose, and it would be how they chose that they would be judged in England.112 This may have been an oblique hint that the sweeping advance of the Hungarian far right was a serious threat to Teleki’s foreign policy and that after the elections Teleki would have to take even greater care than before. When Teleki presented his programme to Parliament on 14 June, in his speech he emphasized that ‘The guiding principle of this Parliament must be unity, work, consolidation at home, freedom and independence abroad.’113 That same day, on Csáky’s instructions, Barcza paid a call on Cadogan to point out that, as a legacy of the Trianon Treaty, a territorial dispute had been left between Romania and Hungary and, unless it were to be resolved, peace could not be maintained in the Danube basin. Barcza delivered a note on the Transylvanian problem, adding a verbal comment that the position of the Magyar minority in Transylvania had deteriorated since the Anglo-French guarantees were given to Romania. The motive for Csáky’s instruction can be traced back to a statement made by Halifax on 8 June in which the British foreign secretary had made, at the very least, ambiguous statements in affirming, on the one hand, Great Britain’s determination to obstruct further German expansion, while on the other hand emphasizing his country’s readiness to negotiate and compromise.114 Csáky thus had some grounds for supposing that keeping the Hungarian—Romanian border dispute and the grievances of Transylvania’s Magyar minority


before London’s eyes would prompt the Foreign Office to form much the same view as it had over the first Vienna Award. But between the autumn of 1938 and the summer of 1939 there had occurred events that upset the Hungarian foreign minister’s calculations: Hitler’s breach of the pledges given at Munich in March and the Hungarian seizure of Ruthenia. When Barcza spoke to Cadogan about the ‘intolerable situation’ of the Hungarian population in Transylvania, the British official asked him to support his assertions with factual evidence. Any illusions that Csáky may have entertained about the British were soon to be dispelled, since Cadogan advised Barcza that raising the territorial dispute between Hungary and Romania in the present international situation was ‘not expedient’. He added that he found it hard to see any possibility of a just settlement between the two countries.115 Once again, British priorities were made plain. Although London kept abreast of the ups and downs of Romanian—Hungarian relations, the attention of the Foreign Office was preoccupied primarily by the course of Anglo-German negotiations. Anglo-Soviet talks were likewise of greater import than what, to British eyes, were no more than petty territorial and other squabbles between two Central European states. What, then, could have fuelled Csáky’s illusions about England, if that is indeed what they were? First and foremost was the intricacy of Britain’s domestic politics at this juncture. Not negligible was the favourable assessment of Hungary formed by the new British minister, as compared with his predecessor. O’Malley did everything within his power to impress on London the difficult position in which Hungary found itself. In his report of 3 July, he commented approvingly on the change in the tone that the Hungarian press (the Pester Lloyd in particular) was displaying towards Britain. He also noted that although Hungarian politicians, as before, were trying to keep on the right side of the Germans in their public statements, the volume of news about Britain had grown appreciably. In illustrating this, he went so far as to draw significant, if not far-reaching, inferences from the size of the audiences attending gala performances at the Opera that were given in honour of two visiting German politicians, Wilhelm Frick, Reich minister of the interior, and Otto Dietrich, press chief and state secretary to the Propaganda Ministry. In the case of the former, the performance had drawn a house of barely three hundred, in that of the latter, seven hundred:


Without attaching too much weight to it, evidence of this kind can not be ignored and one asks oneself why Hungarian sentiment should be apparently hardening against Germany during a period when no striking changes in international affairs have taken place.116 In accord with the Minister’s appraisal of the situation is that of Macartney, who met with Teleki on a number of occasions during this period: the Hungarian ‘political nation’ itself was passing through an acute attack of anti-Hitlerism. For what counts in untutored opinion is not the memory of the past but the expectation of the future, and Hitler’s returns.117 appeal in Hungary was now suffering under the law of diminishing ‘An acute attack of anti-Hitlerism’ was putting it much too strongly. Rather, again using O’Malley’s words, ‘In a general way, the change, such as it is, may well be attributed to the progressive realisation here of the growing strength of Great Britain and of her determination.’118 The minister then went on to make his position even more clear. He declared that he did not share the view that Hungary had more or less sold itself out to Germany. Even were that true, the situation in Eastern and Southeastern Europe was so finely balanced that Hungary was worth British interest He reminded Halifax that Great Britain had at least twice given the Hungarian government cause to wait in vain for British help or understanding in accomplishing its goals for frontier revisionfirst on 20 September 1938, when Barcza had drawn the Foreign Office’s attention to the fact that roughly one million Hungarians were living in Czechoslovakia and were looking to be treated on the same footing as the country’s German minority; second on 14 June 1939, when Barcza had raised the matter of how the Romanians had been treating the Hungarian minority population of Transylvania since the British guarantee. Halifax had responded at the former instance that the Hungarian point of view ‘has been placed on record and will receive consideration at the appropriate moment’, and at the latter Cadogan’s response had not been very encouraging from the Hungarian viewpoint. Sargent reacted to O’Malley’s report in a cover note dated 13 July. His stance more accurately reflected British


policy than how O’Malley saw Hungary. Among other things, Sargent wrote that: I have talked with Mr O’Malley and still hesitate to advise that he should be giving latitude to the Hungarians in such a way as to give them to suppose that we are sympathetically disposed to their territorial claims, as distinct from their minority rights. What I fear is once we depart from a non-posthumous attitude on the territorial issue, the Hungarians, who are persistent and not overscrupulous propagandists, will at once distort anything we say to submit to a policy of revision. The Bulgarians will therefore expect similar treatment from us, which we shall find all the harder to refuse inasmuch as strategically Bulgaria is of considerably more value to us than Hungary. I feel therefore, however unsatisfactory the present position may be, in the circumstances it is the only the only safe one for us to occupy at the moment This need not mean that Mr O’Malley should adopt the completely negative policy of his predecessor, who took the line that the Hungarians were already lost heart and soul to Germany, and therefore not worth bothering about. On the contrary, he ought to do all he can to flatter the Hungarians, and the more he can show that we are intensely interested in their independence, the better it will be…[and also to foster] the conviction that in a war we shall be the stronger party and that they had better therefore adhere to out cause.119

On 25 July, Barcza handed over to Sargent a memorandum on Romania’s Magyar minority and went on with a lengthy discussion. The under-secretary of state conceded that the Trianon Peace Treaty had contained some grave mistakes, but he considered the oft-voiced Hungarian complaint that the situation of the Magyar community in Transylvania had deteriorated since the British guarantee to be the work of German propaganda. Towards the end of the interview, Sargent asked what was the Hungarian government’s idea of a territorial settlement with Romania. Barcza had received no instructions as to how that question should be answered, and was subsequently to draw Csáky’s attention to this big and embarrassing problem:


It is unnecessary for me to point out what a poor impression it makes, when we are constantly complaining about the gravity of the Hungarian-Romanian situation, and we harp on about the need for a settlement of the territorial issue as a problem and aspiration that we have not relinquished; and yet, if asked what are the territories to which we actually lay claim, I, as the government’s official functionary, am not in a position to give an official answer to this eminently logical and foreseeable question.120 Two other encounters that were later to gain significance for AngloHungarian diplomatic relations also took place that July, with Winston Churchill as the main figure in both instances. Churchill was, in general, well-disposed towards Hungary. He was alive to the problems over national minorities, including those of Hungarian descent, that had arisen in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. As mentioned earlier, he had declared in a parliamentary speech as far back as late 1932 that Europe had two important unresolved territorial disputes: the matters of the Danzig Corridor and Transylvania. On 6 July 1939, Churchill received a visit at his London residence from Tibor Eckhardt, a leader of the Hungarian Smallholder Party, and Pál Auer, a well-known jurist and diplomat, who was the legal adviser to the French legation in Budapest. Churchill’s son, Randolph, was also present during the approximately one-hour conversation— indeed, it was he, according to Auer, who had set it up.121 The main topic of conversation was the impending world war and the stand that Great Britain could be expected to take. Eckhardt did not share Churchill’s optimism that the Poles would be able to withstand a possible German onslaught for two or three months, or long enough for British and French assistance to arrive. The notes that the Smallholder leader made of the meeting indicate that Churchill displayed an understanding of Hungary’s difficult position.122 Among other comments, the future prime minister had this to say: I know I have already spoken about it more than once, and it pains me deeply that the peace treaty concluded with you laid down extremely inequitable conditions…The Trianon treaty was a bad pact, because it placed a people qualified to rule,


perhaps the only one in that part of Europe that, for centuries on end, proved capable of displaying superior political skills, under the rule of dispersed servant peoples. Your pain and indignation are justified. What can you expect in the event of a German victory, should you side with the Germans as an ally? Look at how they behaved in Slovakia, which placed itself under German protectorate! They fell on their own friends like a ravening pack of wolves, and carried off whatever they could lay their hands on…If they were to win, they will pillage you and obliterate the independent Hungarian state. But what fate will await Hungary if you again fight on the German side and again it is we who dictate the peace?…I am no beggar, but I beseech you not to yield to the German temptation! I know you are not able to come over to our side, but stay neutral and then you will achieve everything. After the war is ended a new, sound order will have to be created in the Danube basin and Balkans in place of today’s anarchy, if only so that the region should be able, unaided, permanently to withstand the pressure of a German nation of eighty million souls. A solution to the situation there is not even conceivable without a strong Hungary. All of Hungary’s territorial claims will then receive satisfaction, and generously at that. I ask you to remind me of this declaration of mine, should the time come.123 There is no way of knowing whether Eckhardt’s notes are a faithful reflection of what was said, but in any event Pál Auer’s account of Churchill’s statements essentially corresponds with them (though Auer, incidentally, places the date of the conversation a day later, on 7 July).124 In assessing those statements, and particularly Churchill’s remarks about Hungarian revision, it must be borne in mind that Churchill, though not yet prime minister, had long been a dominant presence in British politics. He was implacably opposed to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy since he knew that a victorious Germany under Hitler would mean an end not just to the British empire but to European civilization as a whole (as indeed he hinted during his conversation with Eckhardt). Churchill was also sensible to what sort of statements he could permit himself to utter, and in what form. Of course a private conversation could have no binding force, except perhaps in a moral sense. Although we do not know when the document came to light and when it was prepared, there is no reason


to doubt its authenticity. Certain turns of phrase—the characterization of the Germans as ‘a ravening pack of wolves’, for example would reappear in other statements of his. Randolph Churchill gave an account of the summer 1939 discussion in the London Evening Standard, ridiculing German propaganda efforts, which provoked Otto von Erdmannsdorf, the German minister in Budapest, to register his displeasure with the Hungarian foreign minister. Around this time, the two Hungarians also paid a call on Leopold Amery, another former First Lord of the Admiralty, who still had significant influence in British government circles, with a view to persuading him that the government should intercede with Romania to renew Hungarian-Romanian negotiations, particularly with regard to the Magyar minority in Transylvania.125 Churchill also had an encounter with Barcza in July 1939, in this case at the house of the Marquess of Londonderry, who was widely known to be a friend of Ribbentrop. The minister reported on this in a 14 July note to Foreign minister Csáky: He [Churchill] understands our foreign policy, but he fears—and says so openly—that, unless he is greatly mistaken, the international situation will before long reach a point where the smaller states are going to have to choose which great-power group they side with, and then, any sympathy he might feel towards the Hungarians notwithstanding, how we are judged and our future fate will depend entirely on which grouping we join. Those who side with the warmongers, the aggressors, ‘political gangsters’…double-dealers will share a similar fate to them, whilst those who side with the upholders of peace and legality, whatever role they may have played before, will be supported, protected and rewarded.126 The assertion by the Hungarian minister in his memoirs that he again met Churchill, by now prime minister, a year later, in the summer of 1940 (let alone in Londonderry’s residence),127 seems highly implausible. (Most probably the conversation attributed to the summer of 1940 was actually the one that took place in 1939. Setting down his memoirs in Switzerland in 1944, Barcza erred in many details.) During the spring and summer of 1939 the Hungarian government’s foreign policy was under mistrustful scrutiny in Rome and, above all,


Berlin. War seemed ever more imminent. Hitler had already given orders, on 3 April 1939, for work to start on planning a campaign against Poland, notwithstanding the fact that Britain had given its guarantee to the Poles three days earlier. And although the British had accepted the Italian invasion of Albania without making much fuss, the guarantees they extended to Greece and Romania were a signal that the words of Chamberlain’s Birmingham speech were to be taken seriously: Great Britain was not indifferent to what happened in Southeastern Europe. Mussolini, unlike Hitler, did not see it as timely for Italy to enter a war before 1943 or later. However, it was not Rome but Berlin that had the upper hand in shaping the political and military climate in Europe (long gone were the days, back in March 1938, when Hitler had looked anxiously to Mussolini’s reactions to the Anschluss). On 1 May 1939, the Hungarian military attaché in Rome (who was close to Mussolini) said to the Duce that a German-Polish conflict might lead to a European war, and in the event that the Germans were to request passage for their troops across Hungarian territory, that request would have to be complied with.128 In Berlin, on 22 May, Germany and Italy signed the ‘Pact of Steel’, in which they mutually promised military support in the event that the other should become involved in a war. In mid-July, Mussolini sent a message to Teleki and Csáky in which he essentially repeated what he had said on 1 May, namely, that Hungary could not remain neutral in a general conflict.129 Csáky thereupon persuaded the prime minister to write a letter to Hitler and Mussolini affirming the Hungarian government’s intentions with respect to cooperation with the Axis powers. On 22 July, Teleki duly sent out two identical pairs of letters, dated for the 24th, that were to be handed over by the ministers in Rome and Berlin to the respective foreign ministers. The first of each pair of letters stated that: in the case of a general conflict the Hungarian Government will align its policy to that of the Axis Powers, as our endeavours heretofore have given proof. It should admit of no doubt, however, that our alignment to this policy shall under no circumstances entail any impairment of our sovereignty or prevent us from realising our national objectives. In the second letter Teleki firmly declared:


In order to preempt any misinterpretation of my letter of 24 July, I respectfully inform Your Excellency that out of moral considerations Hungary, in so far as no serious change occurs in the present circumstances, is not in a position to undertake military operations against Poland.130 Ciano noted in his diary, not unjustifiably: ‘I vaguely suspect that the first letter was written in order to deliver the second.’131 The letters, the second in particular, provoked sharp reactions, especially in Berlin. Ernst von Weizsäcker, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, asked Sztójay a number of questions, notably in regard to how the contents of the two letters could be reconciled. Sztójay was unable to answer.132 Barcza reported from London, also on 24 July, that Robert Hudson, British overseas trade minister, and Wohltat, a German economics representative, were conducting negotiations, in all likelihood with Chamberlain’s knowledge but behind the back of the Foreign Office, concerning Great Britain’s willingness to grant Germany a loan facility of £1 million if talks on ‘pending questions’ were to commence between the two countries. Even as late as July 1939, then, there was a notion within certain political circles in Britain that a last-minute agreement might still be reached with Germany. (Through an indiscretion, Hudson’s proposal was leaked to British newspapers, whereupon both the Germans and the British simply denied that there had been any kind of agreement between the two parties.) Hungary’s leaders nevertheless had to proceed with great circumspection, since at this time every political gesture or manifestation carried extraordinary significance. Thus, while he was on holiday in the Obersalzburg on 8 August, Csáky was summoned to receive rebukes from the German leaders, first speaking with Ribbentrop, who later took him to see Hitler. Also present at the latter encounter were Erdmannsdorf, the German minister to Budapest, Hewel, the counsellor of legation, and Újpétery, the secretary of legation.133 The Führer expressed his shock at Teleki’s letter, declaring that he would never have expected Hungary’s participation if it came to a German-Polish conflict, since Poland ‘presents no military problem’ for Germany. He reminded Csáky that Hungary had regained part of its lost territories solely through Germany’s assistance. To push the point home, he added:


At this moment in time, with due regard to the military capabilities, further continuing support for Hungarian revisionist claims was not possible, any more than it would occur to Hungary to go to war on behalf of possible German demands relating to Alsace-Lorraine.134 Csáky could not apologise enough. He ended up by promising Ribbentrop that he would have the letters withdrawn, because they had been subject to such a regrettable misunderstanding. He even went so far as to suggest he would resign if the Hungarian government did not approve such a cancellation. (The next day Sztójay received instructions to that effect from the Hungarian consulate-general in Vienna, and on 10 August he reported back that this had been accomplished.) Csáky’s step did not signify any real change in course for Hungarian foreign policy. Teleki nevertheless felt it necessary to make a further statement to London of what Hungary could be expected to do in the event of a German-Polish conflict. In late August, through an unofficial channel, he therefore sent a message to London that the Hungarian government would not cooperate with Germany against Poland, and that although he was not in a position where he could make a declaration of neutrality, his aim was to remain neutral. Teleki had this communication transmitted by Judit Márffy-Mantuano, a distant relative who had been resident in London since 1926 and, through her husband, the Earl of Listowel, had access to many British politicians. It was no accident that the prime minister chose not to instruct Barcza to deliver the message, as Teleki was obliged to proceed with due caution, particularly since the ominous ‘letter affair’ had not been the first conflict with his foreign minister. The British press reported that Barcza had paid a visit to Halifax in the Foreign Office and handed over a message of some kind. O’Malley advised Teleki of this by letter, the upshot being that the head of the political department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Budapest asked Barcza for immediate clarification.135 Barcza cleared up the matter in his reply: As far as the suggestion that I handed over to Halifax some kind of message is concerned, that is a misinterpretation…Listowel’s wife, whom I approached inconspicuously, told me that ‘on Teleki’s authority’, through a friend who is a high-ranking official


at the For.[eign] Office, she had brought certain statements of his to Halifax’s urgent attention, and he, it seems, after comparing these with what I had passed on to Sargent, in the setting of a private conversation, as news that I had picked up both in general and from strictly confidential sources, may have perceived the whole thing as some kind of message from Prime Minister Teleki.136 (Lady Listowel was also acquainted with Vansittart, then chief diplomatic adviser to the foreign secretary, raising the question of whether he might have been the ‘high-ranking official’ involved.) In any events, Teleki’s message was received with satisfaction by the Foreign Office. During this period, both British diplomacy and the press were paying close attention to even minor events. One example was a publication from the pen of Dr Iván Lajos, a lecturer at the University of Pécs, which appeared under the title Germany War Chances, as Reflected in the German Technical Literature, and was referred to simply as the ‘Grey Book’ in contemporary official documents and in the Hungarian press. Using quotations from German sources, the author pointed to the weaknesses in Germany’s armed preparedness. The pamphlet was translated not just into German but also into French, Polish and English, in which form even The Times mentioned it, while it came to the notice of Gascoigne, the British chargé d’affaires in Budapest.137 This intelligence that Teleki had not merely given his blessing to publication of the work but had actually instigated its writing was without foundation.138 He still considered it necessary to report his conclusions to the Foreign Office, which indicates that there were others, besides O’Malley, in Budapest who not only understood but also had hopes (albeit often unduly) in Teleki’s foreign policy. Despite diplomatic protests from the Germans, Lajos’s work was not banned, or confiscated, until two months after its appearance (by which time it had gone into a fifth impression). No proceedings were taken against Lajos, although according to one assertion the Hungarian government helped him slip away from the country for a few months.139 Lajos seemed to have gone to Paris but returned to Hungary in 1940, after the German invasion of France. What even this minor episode showed, however, was that some (at least) of the ministers in the Hungarian


government were, despite the growing German pressure being exerted on Hungary, to demonstrate the country’s independence. In August 1939, not only Britain but the whole of Europe was astonished by the news that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a treaty of non-aggression. London could only register this as a crushing diplomatic reverse, as it had been conducting its own negotiations with Moscow for several months, working on the formation of a SovietAnglo-French alliance. Not even the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, however, could stop Great Britain from fulfilling its commitments in the event of a German attack on Poland.

76

5 From 1 September 1939 to Hungary’s Accession to the Tripartite Pact

With the outbreak of the Second World War, what had previously been palpable in Anglo-Hungarian diplomacy now became crystal clear: Britain’s interests did not include territorial and other disputes between various countries of Eastern Europe. In this period, London was interested in the course of Romanian—Hungarian relations no more than it had been in the Magyars of Czechoslovakia a year earlier. It judged these countries principally on the basis of the closeness of their alliance to Germany. Little change occurred in this domain even after 1 September 1939. Ribbentrop instructed the German minister in Budapest to advise Csáky that while Germany was not asking for Hungary’s military assistance, it was expecting the Hungarian government not to make a declaration of neutrality.140 The line taken by Hungary met with a favourable response in London. On 21 September, a lengthy memorandum was prepared in the Foreign Office on the policy that Britain was to adopt towards Hungary.141 The author of the document (a low-ranking Foreign Office official, not to be confused with his namesake, Sir Walford Selby, a former ambassador to Vienna and later Lisbon) dismissed both the Knox thesis (‘the Anschluss necessarily involved the loss of Hungary to the benefit of the Axis Powers’) and O’Malley’s starting-point (‘unless can give some satisfaction over the reversion of the Roumanian frontiers, which it is clear we can not give, Hungary is lost’). The memorandum stated that Hungary had not been ‘lost’, since the Hungarians had not permitted German troops mobilizing against Poland to pass through their territory. Selby also drew attention to a significant consideration, namely that there were reliable indications that Hungarian resistance was not tied to revisionism—a view that may well have been confirmed by the fact that on 10 September the


Hungarian government had rejected a German proposal under which Hungary would be able to exploit oil-fields in Polish territory in return for allowing German troop transports to pass along the railway line through the town of Kassa (Košice, Slo.) en route to Poland.142 All the Hungarian government was prepared to envisage passing through Hungarian territory was matériel carried in sealed wagons, without military escort. Ciano noted in his diary: ‘I believe that this refusal will not be forgotten by Germany, and that at some time or other the Hungarians will have to pay for it.’143 In the memorandum, then, Selby was putting his finger on a radical change in Hungarian foreign policy—that from 1938 the primary aim was maintaining the country’s independence, and not territorial revision. Between 1938 and 1941, moreover, Great Britain’s help was needed against an ever more expansionistminded Germany. Hitler and Ribbentrop warned the Hungarians against any ideas of attacking or winning territory from Romania, because they needed both countries in order to accomplish their own goals. The memorandum also made reference to the visit paid by Tibor Eckhardt to London during the summer. He had made a very favourable impression with his declaration that he considered revision to be now a matter of lesser importance than putting up immediate resistance to possible German aggression. On that issue, there was not much difference between the Hungarian government and what Eckhardt said. Selby then went on to outline the three options that were open to Hungary: active cooperation with Germany, passive assistance, or resistance. The British aim was to encourage resistance. For that eventuality two proposals were formulated: first, commercial assistance, or in other words, compensating Hungary for losing its German market; second, military assistance, which could perhaps be supplied indirectly as part of the defence of Poland. Selby gave a reminder of the 13 July conversation in which the Hungarian foreign minister had stated to the British chargé d’affaires in Budapest, ‘we are perfectly well aware that no one is going to come rushing to Hungary’s assistance’. This was seen—in all likelihood correctly—as sounding out what line the British could be expected to take. The author of the memorandum amplified Csáky’s remark merely with the comment: Mr Gascoigne’s reaction must have been highly, and we can only trust not fatally, disappointing…If Mr O’Malley seeks an


interview with Count Teleki, Count Csáky or the Regent, he should take with him a concrete offer. Otherwise his approach will do more harm than good.144 British understanding and goodwill towards Hungary remained unbroken in the months following the outbreak of war. Teleki’s government encountered mounting difficulties in keeping it that way, however. The prime minister’s room for manoeuvre was limited not just by collaboration with the Germans but also by the euphoric mood that had taken root in a substantial portion of the Hungarian public in the wake of the first Vienna Award and the re-annexation of Ruthenia. Teleki’s political course reflected—and his diplomatic moves were largely dictated by—the determination that although the government could not abandon the policy of seeking to regain the other territories (above all, Transylvania) that had been lost from Hungary at Trianon, preserving the country’s independence took precedence over all else. Thus the conduct of Anglo-Hungarian diplomacy assumed greater significance than before. From 1940 onwards, courtesy of the British diplomatic bag, the correspondence between Teleki and Barcza shuttled to and fro with growing frequency. In January of that year, the prime minister had face-to-face meetings on two occasions with Barcza, who was then taking his home leave in Budapest. Barcza gives a lengthy account of this in his memoirs: He [Teleki] expounded his views and intentions anew. We had to go along with the Germans, because there was no other choice, only to a certain point. That point, that borderline, was participation in the war…Revision, and I am telling this to you alone, is the biggest danger that threatens us, but I can do nothing about that, because it would be my downfall…I shall fight as long as I am able against all madness, I shall defend our honour, I will not betray the nation and the country, but if I cannot manage it, I shall put a bullet in my own head…We are going to be destroyed by reviswn; that is what is going to carry us into the war [emphasis added].145 Teleki sent Barcza off with a promise that he would soon dispatch a set of specific written instructions to him in London. Accordingly, at the end of January, when Barcza paid a call on Halifax in person, he communicated the following: the Hungarian government:


1. Had no aggressive intentions towards anyone. 2. Was ready to defend, if need be by force of arms, the independence and honour of the country against any foreign aggression. 3. Would never, in any circumstance whatever, make common cause or undertake common action with the Government of the USSR.146 Halifax expressed his appreciation for the communication and also for the fact that in September 1939 the Hungarian government had refused Germany’s request that the German troops sent against Poland be allowed to pass through Hungarian territory. When the foreign secretary learned, during Barcza’s visit on 9 February 1940, that the German leadership had unsuccessfully offered Hungary oil-fields on Polish territory to that end, he burst out ‘with very English fervour’: ‘That was really an honest and also a very clever thing you have done.’147 On the same day, Count Antal Sigray, a leader of the Hungarian Legitimist Party, which sought a restoration of Habsburg rule, and also a prominent representative of the Anglophile political grouping, had a non-official conversation with Cadogan in London about the general situation in Hungary. The next day, 10 February, he was talking to Royall Tyler, who also knew Teleki, about his recent experiences in Hungary.148 Tyler, who was full of praise for the Hungarian government and for Hungarians in general, laid particular emphasis, as before, on their anti-German position. In Budapest, Teleki had informed him that the Soviet government was willing to support Hungary’s revisionist demands in Transylvania. The prime minister’s reaction to that was entirely consistent with the instructions he had sent to London (and, indeed, to Paris) that ‘Hungary would never… undertake common action with the Government of the USSR.’ Furthermore, he made it clear to the leaders of the Magyar minority in Transylvania that he would regard it as treasonable if they were to take up contacts of any kind with representatives of the Soviet government. Fear of Bolshevism was manifested in a wide variety of forms in Hungary’s political elite. This was a real and largely heartfelt fear, even if Teleki’s moves were also guided by a measure of political calculation. Barcza’s diary also abounds in entries that speak about the ‘Red peril’. There was a pressing need for the Hungarian government to clarify and take an unequivocal position on its attitude to territo rial revision.


This was not just on account of the ever more assertive requests that were coming from Berlin or the of suggestions made by the Soviet Union. Certain misapprehensions had arisen over the role of the historian C.A.Macartney, who at the time was staying in Budapest and giving a few public lectures, in part with financial support from the British Ministry of Information. Since he, like Tyler, was on familiar terms with Teleki, his utterances were subject to keen scrutiny by the German legation in Budapest. On 15 February, an item in the German diplomatic representation’s daily bulletin noted that in one of his lectures Macartney had made statements in support of Hungary’s revisionist policy.149 This was clearly a case of the Germans making an attempt to muddy Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations. Macartney composed a lengthy memorandum on Hungary.150 Although this is undated, it is possible to deduce when it was completed since O’Malley, at Macartney’s request, forwarded the manuscript to the Foreign Office on 21 March 1940. It comprised the following sections: Hungary’s internal situation; the international situation; Hungary’s revisionist demands; the German minority in Hungary. Macartney used the opening sentence to make a fundamental point, assessing the Hungarian government’s position as stable ‘due to a happy reinforcement of internal factors by those foreign politics’. He praised Teleki and Horthy, who enjoyed great popularity in the country and worked together in a spirit of mutual confidence. He dealt at length with the Arrow Cross movement which, by dint of the prime minister’s forceful intervention, had lost momentum. The most noteworthy section, from the viewpoint of Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations, was the one concerning the international situation. Macartney underlined the fact that many pro-German individuals were to be found, especially in the army (presumably implying the general staff and officer corps) and among minor functionaries. Besides that, more than a few people held the view that Hungary, in seeking to avoid the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland, was in no position to set itself against the will of Germany’s leaders. More to the point, however: ‘But the majority of the nation is beyond doubt deeply and sincerely antiGerman in sentiment. Some circles, particularly intellectuals (even disregarding Jews), violently, almost fanatically so.’151 To this Macartney added that were Germany to mount a direct assault on Hungary’s independence, it would run up against resistance across the entire nation, under Horthy and Teleki’s leadership. (O’Malley would


seem to have provided a more realistic appraisal of Hungary’s internal conditions a month and a half later. His reaction to intelligence, from an unverifiable Polish source, that German forces might be poised to cross the Hungarian border in May was that Hungary could not be expected to offer resistance to that.)152 While Macartney was writing this document, Teleki and his colleagues were putting together a résumé of Hungary’s territorial demands on its neighbours in a memorandum that included maps and other reference materials. This contained a set of the Hungarian government’s maximal and minimal demands about Transylvania. Hungary would regain from Romania 78,000 square kilometres (30, 000 square miles), with approximately 4.2 million inhabitants (of whom 50 per cent would have been of Romanian descent, 37 per cent Hungarian, and 10 per cent German). The minimal demand was for Hungary to receive 50,000 square kilo metres (17,300 square miles), of which half of the population would have been Romanian, half Hungarian.153 Barcza prepared a brief synopsis of the memorandum, which he handed over to Cadogan on 6 March,154 stressing that durable peace in the Danube basin would be achieved only through a settlement of the ‘Magyar question’: ‘Mr Cadogan heard out with interest the comments in which I set out the basic principles of the study that I handed over to him.’ Application of a purely ethnographic principle as the sole criterion for resolving territorial disputes had failed; it was impossible to resolve such questions in any other way than by taking into account all complicating factors—that is to say, over and above the ethnographic, the historical, economic, geopolitical and, in respect of Transylvania, important strategic points of view. ‘Sir Alexander acknowledged this all the more readily as I took the line that the ethnographic principle was a typically German tactic, which had utterly failed to work out in the Czech issue, for example.’155 When Teleki— or, on his instructions, Barcza -argued on strategic lines, he resorted to the long-established ploy of depicting the Carpathian basin as Europe’s bulwark against the East (in this case, the Soviet Union, which he regarded the same thing), drawing the attention of British politicians to the Soviet threat to Hungary, the Balkans and Europe as a whole. (A detailed and precise formulation of the demands was marked or set down on the maps and in other appendices that were attached to the memorandum—among them, an English-language essay by András Rónai analysing the ethnic make-up of Transylvania.) In the case of


Slovakia the document was less specific, its compilers being content to point out that the main weight should be given to economic rather than ethnic issues. The Foreign Office made a careful study of Teleki’s memorandum. In a fairly lengthy set of notes on it, Frank K. Roberts started off from the premise that the Hungarian prime minister’s argument for the restoration of the country’s historical frontiers was based on common sense. (That Roberts should have interpreted it in these terms was interesting.) He nevertheless dismissed the Hungarian claims relating to Transylvania as ‘untimely’. He was thus expressing the same British attitude as in September 1938, before the Munich Conference. Then too London had advised Budapest to be patient. Roberts devoted more space to Slovakia and to the HungarianSlovakian disputes. The immediate reason for this was that Csáky, on 6 March, had spoken out sharply in the Hungarian Parliament against British suggestions of a restoration of Czechoslovakia. On 6 January 1940, the British government had given recognition to the Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris as a provisional government, which had caused consternation in the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Then in a speech to the House of Commons on 24 February, Chamberlain had declared that His Majesty’s Government was striving to restore Czech independence. Csáky’s disappointment was understandable. He said, among other things: The ‘Czechoslovak Committee’ as it calls itself, aims to represent as a European interest the renewed establishment of a ‘Czechoslovakia’ within some sort of frontiers. I make so bold as to assert, on the basis of experience, that if there is a European interest it is that this mess of a state should never be resurrected. Turning therefore to the exchange of letters which occurred on December 22nd of last year between Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, and Mr Beneš, the British government needed a certain space of time before deciding to conduct this exchange of letters; this runs within the same compass as the exchange of letters between Osuský and Daladier was conducted, that is to say, it concerns solely military issues and avoided making any political promises in respect of either the present or the future, most probably having learnt from past experiences.156


Roberts characterized the remarks as ‘ill-mannered’ and ‘uncalled for’, since O’Malley had made it clear to Csáky in January that the recognition entailed no commitment of any kind in regard to the future status and borders of the former Czechoslovak state.157 The inference that the official at the Central European desk drew was that it was actually a warning to Mr Beneš and the Poles with whom he was negotiating, in that he wished to impress on them that it would be expedient for Slovakia to form a bridge between Budapest and Warsaw, not Budapest and Prague. Roger Makins, the departmental head, agreed with his subordinate’s comments. The only remark he made about the Teleki memorandum was that it was a reprise, ‘in 1940s garb’, of the Hungarian wishes voiced in the ‘Justice for Hungary!’ campaign.158 The correspondent for the Pester Lloyd who reported on the recognition was requested to emphasize that Britain’s move was aimed solely at re-establishing independence for the Czechs and Slovaks, not at restoration of the Czechoslovak Republic. Though admittedly taking a different starting point, Bruce Lockhart, head of the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department, who was on friendly terms with the Czech émigré community in London, came to essentially the same conclusion as Roberts. While he recognized the legitimacy of the Hungarian revisionist policy, he discerned the roots of the problem in the romanticized notions of the ‘average Hungarian’, by which he meant that most Hungarians believed the Slovaks would rather return to Hungary than form a common state with the Czechs: ‘Strange things may happen in Central Europe after the war,’ he wrote, ‘but that is most unlikely.’159 He drew the following conclusions from Teleki’s memorandum: 1. The Hungarians were prepared to recognize Czech demands for the restoration of Czech-Moravia’s historical boundaries. 2. For all its scholarly apparatus, Teleki’s treatment of history lacked impartiality. He even gave an example of this: Through marriage and other ways, individuals, families, even entire villages easily changed their language,’ Teleki had written. Lockhart tartly remarked that, ‘To this day the Slovaks have not forgotten those “other ways”.’ 3. That notwithstanding, Teleki was a respectable geographer. This was underlined by the fact that one of the leading Romanian newspapers had a map room in its Bucharest office among whose


holdings one could come across maps showing Romania’s own territorial demands, and these had been prepared by Teleki. 4. Like many other Hungarians, Teleki based the argument for Hungary’s revisionist demands on the supposition that they were a Western European nation, superior to other nations around them. That assumption was mistaken. 5. Even if, through a quirk of fate, Slovakia and Transylvania were to be returned to Hungary, enormous changes would have to occur in the country’s local government for those provinces [sic] to be assimilated. On this point, Lockhart made reference to Macartney, whom no one could accuse of being anti-Hungarian but who had drawn attention to the disappointment felt by peasants among the Magyar minority whose lands had been re-annexed to Hungary after the first Vienna Award. Before November 1938 those people had experienced the benefit of the liberal administration of the Czechoslovak Republic. That argument had sounded like Beneš (they were not friends for nothing), for like the Czech politician Lockhart too acknowledged that it was not the great powers that had drawn up the new map of Central Europe: the rearrangement had come into being largely spontaneously, and the peace process in Paris had merely put its stamp on the resultant states of affairs. He commented that any discussion of Teleki’s memorandum was purely academic, and that the document should be placed in the files ‘until the appropriate moment’. On 23 March, Teleki travelled to see Mussolini in Rome. On this occasion he was not accompanied by Csáky. Macartney conjectured that the Duce used the occasion to announce to his guest his decision that Italy would enter the war.160 At the beginning of April, all state ministers of H.M. Government stationed in Southeastern Europe were ordered to London to confer at the Foreign Office. Over two lengthy meetings, on 8 and 11 April, they analysed the situation that had arisen in the wake of the talks held by Hitler and Mussolini at Brenner on 18 March, and the next foreign political moves that were to be anticipated from Italy.161 The man in the limelight in London was Sir Percy Loraine, the British ambassador to Rome. Among others present at the deliberations, in addition to Halifax, were Cadogan, Butler, Sargent, Strang, and Collier— essentially all the top officials at the Foreign Office, with the exception


of Vansittart, who no longer had any actual influence on decisionmaking. The diplomats—contrary to Macartney—concurred with the doubts of their colleague in Rome whether Mussolini had revealed his intentions even to his own people, let alone to Teleki or to any Western countries. Loraine’s other assertion, that it was the ‘main desire of the Balkan and Danubian countries to keep out of the war’, was shared by the minister to Budapest. O’Malley added that Mussolini may well have given some kind of answer to the questions Teleki put to him in an attempt to sound out what decisions were to be expected from Italy, but the response was likely to have been vague and noncommittal. At the meeting, O’Malley also pronounced that the position of the Hungarian government was ‘fairly satisfactory’. Reports to the Foreign Office from Budapest were similar in tone. The first secretary of the legation sent an account of a speech that Teleki had given to his own party on 17 April. This emphasized the prime minister’s determination to stay at his post, even if he were obliged, in certain circumstances, to do everything to that end, by which he meant dissolving Parliament, should events force him to do that. The diplomat’s impression, in short, was that Teleki and Horthy were more steadfast than ever, and were prepared to oppose any German attempts to interfere in their foreign policy—at least until they had Italy’s support.162 On 17 April a confidential note was sent from Budapest to the British government in which mention was made of a possible joint military action by Germany and Hungary against Romania and the British responses to it that might be anticipated. More specifically, it asked whether the government would be willing to give an undertaking that at the end of the war, or on some other suitable occasion: ‘1) It would show itself as disinterested as the German Government towards an occupation by Hungarian troops. 2) It would not further question the justification of the occupation.’163 The Hungarian government, said the note, did not wish to conceal the fact that the government’s answer would decisively influence its decision. In the meantime, at Teleki’s request, Lipót Baranyai, president of the Hungarian National Bank, had been dispatched to Rome, on 8 April, with the ostensible aim of carrying on discussions with Italian financial circles. The real purpose was to attempt to discover how Mussolini and Ciano would react if the Hungarian government were to refuse a German request for transit of its troops through the


country.164 Mussolini imparted the following thoughts to Baranyai: Germany and Russia would never quarrel; Britain would collapse under German bombing; France would be defeated after putting up a tough resistance; and the United States would never intervene in the war165—none too accurate a set of prophecies, as events proved. True to habit, he did not give Baranyai any definite answers. When the latter raised the question of whether Hungary, in the event that it offered armed resistance to the German passage, could count on support from Italy, the Duce responded laconically: ‘“How could that ever be,” he said, “since I am Hitler’s ally, and intend to remain so.”’166 Baranyai’s trip to Rome was fruitless. Teleki was obliged to recognize that Italy would not act as an effective counterweight against Germany’s aggressive ambitions. Against that background, General Henrik Werth, chief of the Hungarian General Staff, and some of his officers were urging not just military cooperation with the Germans against Romania but, as a precondition to that, the establishment of a political alliance to be between Germany and Hungary. At a meeting of the ministerial council on 1 April, Teleki had drawn attention to the continuing validity of the declaration of British and French guarantees to Romania, commenting that he had no wish to surrender Hungarian independence over Transylvania. Csáky, opposing that, considered that what would bring an end to the country’s independence was precisely a Hungarian refusal of a German request for passage. A majority of the Cabinet took Csáky’s side in the debate. At a meeting between Teleki, Csáky, Werth and Bartha, the minister of defence, held on 6 April, it was decided that Werth should work up a plan for a joint German-Hungarian action against Romania should it come to that eventuality. The chief of the General Staff’s resulting memorandum ended: To sum up, it is my conviction that with Germany’s appeal to us for military cooperation the time has come for us to abandon neutrality, take up our stand by Germany’s side, and with her help to realise our great national aim, the recovery of Transylvania.167 Teleki was averse to that. In a letter to Horthy, he complained bitterly,


I understand the reasoning adopted by Werth, who, like a nonHungarian was of German ascent, fails to see the great task of preserving the country. Use your influence to stop soldiers playing politics. In my view it not at all certain that Germany will win, and precisely on that account it is not opportune for us to side with her unconditionally and enthusiastically. If we have weathered the storm well thus far, let us not possibly ruin things. I think that the political line we have been following has been good, and it would be dangerous to abandon it at the last moment.168 Faced with this situation, Teleki gave the appearance of being inclined to trim his foreign policy more closely to the Axis powers. On 17 April he wrote Hitler a letter in which he suggested holding a tripartite meeting between Germany, Italy and Hungary on economic and military matters. ‘The talks should also embrace possibilities which lie beyond the normal means of diplomacy,’ he wrote.169 (Coincidental and inconsequential as it may have been, it is nevertheless interesting that on 17 April the British Daily Express newspaper ran an article under the headline ‘Nazi Fifth Column Arrives in Budapest’. Their reporter, Sidney Morrell, had seen six German officers, lugging heavy suitcases, enter a Budapest hotel, from which he immediately extrapolated that there were another three hundred of them in the city, some of them Wehrmacht officers, others Gestapo agents, all kitted out with ‘grey suitcases’—obviously, preparing the way for a German invasion. The Hungarian prime minister’s letter did not elicit a response from Hitler. More noteworthy is an entry that his Wehrmacht chief of General Staff, General Halder, made in his diary in this connection on 24 April: The Führer is concerned that Hungary will have recourse to force against Romania. That does not fit in with our idea of preserving peace in the Balkans. Apart from which, Hungary cannot do it out of her own resources. Her first step will therefore be to make inordinate demands on us.170 Also interesting is a comment later in the same entry: ‘lt cannot be excluded that Britain is stirring Hungary up. Only the British have an interest in seeing the Romanian oil-wells go up in flames. It is all the


same to them who sets fire to them.’171 Ribbentrop informed Sztójay on 9 May that the tripartite conversations pro posed by Teleki were not desirable. In his official reply to Teleki five days later, Hitler reiterated that view, adding that such talks would attract a lot of international attention. That reaction at all events suited Teleki’s aims. At least according to Macartney’s sources, he meanwhile allowed discussions with the British about sales of munitions.172 Even if such discussions did actually take place, it is unlikely that Teleki was directly involved in them. What we learn is that on the British side there was some consideration of such purchases from Hungary. In July 1940, Sir Hugh KnatchbullHugessen, the British ambassador to Ankara, reported to the Foreign Office that he was in contact with a Turkish gentleman by the name of Tozan, who was a director of the Manfréd Weiss Works—a large Hungarian industrial conglomerate that was, among other things, a major arms manufacturer—with many English friends and acquaintances.173 From a telegram that London sent to O’Malley it emerges that the tank components that had figured in the Turkish ambassador’s report were indeed required for armoured cars manufactured by the British company Alvis Ltd.174 We do not know if Weiss did, in the end, deliver the components via a Turkish intermediary, but a British order was certainly placed. Over the summer of 1940 there was an exchange of letters and telegrams on such a transaction between the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Ministry of Information, and the British Embassies in Ankara and Budapest. The British minister in Budapest had been visited by growing numbers of British citizens seeking advice on whether they should leave Hungary forthwith. That was also connected with expectations that Italy was about to enter the war, since having to avoid Italy and the Mediterranean would make a return to Great Britain a good deal more difficult with the most direct routes blocked. O’Malley telegraphed a request for instructions from the Foreign Office.175 The answer he received was that it was, as yet, premature to spread alarm among British subjects resident in Budapest, but it was up to each person to make his or her own plan.176 An example of just how Hungarian territorial demands were not the primary issue on Teleki’s mind at this time is provided by his secret plans to set up a government in exile in Western Europe or the United States should that become necessary. In March 1940, shortly before


the spectacular successes of the German campaign in the West, the prime minister had a fund of $5 million transferred to János Pelényi, the Hungarian minister in Washington, DC. The idea had actually come from Pelényi, who had brought it up as early as September 1938177 in discussions with Teleki, Horthy and, in all probability, their most immediate entourage. It is interesting that in September 1938 Pelényi should also have spoken about the plan with Csáky, who was not even foreign minister at the time. In his memorandum of 17 April 1939, sent to Csáky as well as Teleki, the Hungarian minister to Washington set out his thoughts on Hungarian émigré ‘representatives’.178 When Pelényi was on leave in Budapest, in August of the same year, he met Teleki. The prime minister approved the plan and promised that it would be activated when the right moment came. On 17 March 1940 Teleki requested Pelényi, by official letter, to place the $5 million in a safe that was to be rented in the name of the Hungarian National Bank. Persons who were permitted to draw on the money were: in the first place, alone and on their own individual authority, Miklós Horthy, Pál Teleki and Count Gyula Károlyi; in the second place, jointiy with Pelényi, any two of György Barcza, Sándor Khuen-Héderváry, the minister to Paris, Lipót Baranyai, president of the Hungarian National Bank, István Bethlen, and Ferenc KeresztesFischer, minister of the interior, or, should only one be present besides Pelényi, then Royall Tyler was to act as the third one authorized.179 The occasion did not arise, and at the end of May, on Teleki’s instructions, Pelényi remitted the sum back to Budapest. At this stage the prime minister and his advisers may have been assuming that the war would soon be brought to an end with a German victory, or a negotiated peace. The Foreign Office was cognizant of the plan for a Hungarian émigré government and gave encouragement to its eventual establishment. Cadogan, on 17 May 1940, declared, as Barcza recorded it: in that event [viz. the formation of a government in exile] Hungary would fall under the same category internationally as Denmark, and in his opinion the British government would continue to regard His Serene Highness the Regent and the existing government, or another nominated by him, as the legitimate government of Hungary.180


Cadogan did also inform Barcza, however, that London expected Budapest to make at least a formal protest if the Germans were to request Hungary to let German troops through the country. Barcza himself gave serious thought to relocating to the United States, prompted both by the Pelényi-Teleki scheme and by Cadogan’s views, but first, of course, by the victories of the German army. On 7 June 1940, he transmitted $10,000 and other valuables to Pelényi, asking his fellow diplomat to look after them.181 He kept this plan to himself, and even in his diary recorded only: Even if the Germans were now to triumph over the French, if they were even to succeed in invading England…nonetheless in 1–2 years’ time, America and the British Empire, maybe out of Canada, will win in the end. That will be the New World’s fight against Europe …Admittedly, Europe will become a pile of rubble, but there is enough money over there, indeed every European state now has its money over in America, it is from there that a new life, a new order, will mark its start, and it is to be hoped that this new order and new peace will be just, as just as is humanly possible [emphasis added].182

The date of that entry, 10 June 1940, is notable for being the day Italy declared war on Britain and France. Assessments by London of the European situation and of Hungarian foreign policy were more cautious than that Hungary’s press, government papers included, was the subject of adverse comment in London for its excessively pro-German line.183 The criticism was largely well-founded. István Milotay, the editor-in-chief of Új Magyarság [New Hungarian], for example, wrote in a leading article on 21 April: A small nation may often find itself in a situation where it has little choice either of friends or the conditions of friendship. It has to offer its friendship to the more powerful side, and it has to pay the full price for it.184 Thus when Barcza objected in writing to Sargent about an article that appeared in the 14 April issue of the Sunday Chronicle, which called the almost four thousand Hungarians then residing in Great Britain ‘potentially dangerous aliens’, he could hardly have received anything


other than a polite but firm rebuff.185 We have a note from F.K.Roberts, the official most often reviewing Hungarian matters. He suggests that the Hungarian press treated Great Britain ‘so badly’ that it might not be entirely inappropriate to ‘rap the knuckles’ of the Hungarians now and again. In addition to which, the Foreign Office could not accept responsibility for articles that appeared in the newspapers, he wrote, but it would do all it could to see that the Hungarians were not regarded as ‘enemy aliens’.186 Foreign Office officials were irritated by the fact that Hungarian newspapers often wrote slightingly about the prevailing morale of the British public. When the Battle of Britain began later in the year, Budapest’s newspapers—with the Magyar Nemzet [Hungarian Nation], under its editor-in-chief Sándor Pethő, as perhaps the lone exception— hugely exaggerated the casualties and material damage. Barcza, by way of contrast, more than once wrote about the admirable conduct and discipline of Londoners. He also touched on this in his memoirs: People stood in long queues before the Underground stations that had been turned into air-raid shelters, waiting to be let in. By ten or eleven o’clock in the morning there would already be a long line of women there, carrying blankets, queuing up in the pouring rain, fog and dank London cold, without a single word of complaint or resentment, until finally, after standing around for hours on end, they were able to disappear under the earth and stay there until the next morning. The discipline, patience and patriotic fortitude of the British were admirably on display in those places.187 In May 1940 a number of minor strains appeared in Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations. Due to the German military successes and the rumours of a combined German-Hungarian campaign against Romania, O’Malley increasingly speculated about how much longer Hungary’s neutral stance would be sustainable. Although Hungary was officially a non-belligerent state, in Great Britain that was interpreted as meaning neutral, with the term ‘neutrality’ consistently being adopted in British (and also described some Hungarian) diplomatic papers. On 11 May, Teleki wrote Barcza a letter about the dilemmas besetting Hungarian neutrality:


You may say that I have told Mr O’Malley as well as M. de Vienne [the French ex-minister to Budapest, who happened to be staying in Budapest at this time and had a meeting with Teleki] that it seems comical to me when I am continually being asked whether we shall preserve our neutrality [underlined in the original] and encouraged to do so. I told them that neutrality was child’s play compared with what is now at stake here…For us the issue of invasion or transit [i.e. letting German troops pass through Hungary en route for Romania, which was then increasingly under discussion] is no game but vitally important, a matter of life and death for us…That is why in that particular conversation with O’Malley, about which, it seems, he blabbed to someone and the Associated Press brought it out in garbled form—I told him that ‘what we shall do in this respect (in the case of the Germans’ wishing to go through Hungary anywhere or especially against Roumania) is our business. I do not give whatever promise to anybody. The more you ask, the less I answer and I flatly refuse to talk more on this question’ [this quotation is in English in Teleki’s original letter].188 Teleki had barely finished dictating this letter when O’Malley paid him a visit. The minister brought a private letter, addressed to Csáky and written on instructions, which he read out to the prime minister.189 This stated that Halifax had instructed him to state to the Hungarian government that His Majesty’s Government could not remain indifferent to a report that a decision was very likely to be taken to permit the passage of German troops through or over Hungarian territory, because that would be inconsistent with Hungarian neutrality and would have consequences for Anglo-Hungarian relations. Teleki responded somewhat irritably to the letter. When O’Malley pointed out that the document was not to be regarded as an official communiqué, the prime minister answered, ‘I am no diplomat, only a plain Hungarian, and it’s my own feelings I express.’190 Teleki in any case maintained that Csáky could not have imparted anything to O’Malley referring to permitting German troops to pass through Hungarian territory. The impression prevalent among leading British politicians was the opposite. Hugh Dalton, then minister of economic warfare, even made a diary entry that he had recommended imposing


an economic blockade against Hungary, precisely on the grounds of what Csáky was alleged to have said to O’Malley.191 Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, on 10 May, had a certain influence, albeit indirect, on the course of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Hungary. A vigorous, decisive statesman, not liked by everyone but held in respect, now took over as head of government from the increasingly unpopular, ailing Chamberlain. It was not immaterial that O’Malley, who belonged to the inner circles of the Tory party, had been Churchill’s research assistant a dozen years before, in 1926–27, helping to organize his library and private papers.192 It is quite likely that this earlier close association was unknown to Erdmannsdorf, Ribbentrop and Hitler (and perhaps even to Teleki). Attempts by them to get Teleki to use this British connection to pass on messages to British politicians who would seek to reach an accord with Germany were unsuccessful. In general, Churchill was favourably inclined towards Hungary and Hungarians, and he was aware of Teleki’s sympathies. Barcza’s assertion in his memoirs that he met with Churchill shortly after May 1940 is highly implausible, but it is still worth quoting him: He [Churchill] later on remarked jocularly, ‘You people are in Hitler’s good books. Would you do me a little favour? The English are not yet fully alive to the danger they are in and the seriousness of their situation. They need to be shaken up by something. Tell Hitler to make a start on bombing London at last, because that will rouse even the most lethargic Englishman!’ I responded to Churchill that I was on no terms of any kind either with Hitler or with the Germans, nor was my government, that is to say Teleki, the recipient of much trust on their part, so it would be hard for us to undertake to pass on the message; in any case I believed that what he wanted was going to happen before long, because it was likely the Germans would eventually begin their air raids. ‘All the better,’ Churchill remarked. ‘London has too many ugly buildings as it is. At least we shall be able to build new ones.’193 It seems that Barcza was mistaken and wrote about a meeting that had taken place a year earlier. In his memoirs and diaries Barcza had a tendency to overstate his own role. There is no question that he fostered good relations with the Foreign Office, and also had wide circle of


informal contacts. However, for all his diplomatic skill and background knowledge, he was not the Foreign Office’s prime source of advice on Central Europe. Nevertheless his insight into character and critical acumen were still extant in the description he provides of Churchill: He was a rather stout, very jolly, yet at times cynical and rude man, but he formulated everything he had to say in a succinct and extremely matter-of-fact fashion, without the least pomposity or triteness. You could see that he was a practical man, looking to act and not hold forth, and that he would be ruthless with anyone who put difficulties in his way or might serve as an obstacle.194 During the early summer of 1940 Romanian-Hungarian relations were the subject of attention in London. The Foreign Office was uneasy, not only about a possible German advance through Hungary, but also over the Russian claim on Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia in June. Not surprisingly, the Soviet intentions received a good deal more attention in London than did Hungary and Romania’s dispute over Transylvania, since people needed no reminding of the disaster into which Anglo-Soviet talks had run just a year before, nor that the Soviet Union had, after all, signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany. At Halifax’s urging, on the night of 24 June, Churchill wrote a letter to Stalin, which the recently appointed British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, was directed to deliver personally. Among other things, the letter said: Last August the Soviet government decided that the interests of the Soviet Union required that they should break off negotiations with us and enter into a close relation with Germany. Thus Germany became your friend almost at the same moment as she became our enemy. But since then a new factor has arisen which I venture to think makes it desirable that both our countries should re-establish our previous contact.195 Churchill knew in the summer of 1940 that he would need the Soviet Union sooner or later: Britain would not be able to defeat Hitler on its own.


Italy and Germany advised Romania to accede to the Russian demands, prompting Hungary to renew its diplomatic efforts to regain Transylvania. On 28 June, Barcza reported that the Soviet ultimatum to Romania had not caused any particular flurry in Britain, either in foreign policy circles or in the press. The reasons for that, as he saw them, were: 1) England was focused on defending itself; 2) the British wanted to avoid any clash with the Russians; and 3) due to the duplicitous line Romania was taking, its reputation in London’s eyes was increasingly poor.196 The second of these points is especially notable. In a telegram the following day, Barcza was able to give an account of an article in The Times that stated that Romania had ruled out a peaceful settlement of its territorial disputes. On 1 July 1940, the Romanian government renounced the Anglo-French guarantee—a move that was received in London with contempt and disgust. To cap it all, the British minister in Bucharest was not informed, but he did not miss the chance to put in a stiff rebuke to the Romanian minister of foreign affairs.197 Gafencu for his part attributed the slip to the seriousness of the situation and shortness of time, pointing to the speedy collapse of France and the plight they were in of having to choose Germany as the lesser of two evil powers. The excuses left the British minister cold, and he merely asked his visitor whether he was ‘sure that that those arms would be open to receive Roumania, and what price she would have to pay’.198 Further damage was done to Anglo-Romanian relations by the fact that growing numbers of Britons were being ordered to leave the country, while a few were maltreated and others arrested. Tilea, the Anglophile Romanian minister in London, was relieved of his post. His successor was made to wait a lengthy time before being duly accredited. Barcza was probably correct in the assessment he gave in a telegram of 11 July: To my face Roumania’s policy towards England is described as disloyal, and this relieves Britain of any moral obligation towards her, whilst the renunciation of the guarantee releases her from any legal obligation. Hungary’s policy, on the other hand, is considered straightforward and sincere.199 That does not mean that Hungary’s territorial claims on Romania found any greater measure of support in London. The legitimacy of the Hungarian demands was acknowledged in London. After the


German defeat of France the British were now left alone to carry on the war, all their efforts were bent on fending off an invasion of their own country. The status and authority of Czech émigré politicians was another touchy point in Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations during this period. On 23 July 1940, the British government bestowed recognition on the Czechoslovak National Committee as a provisional government. As in the spring of that year, Barcza was informed by the Foreign Office that this step was not directed against Hungary, and it did not prejudge territorial questions.200 The same day, Csáky wired back to Barcza: In respect of the news that Churchill has announced the British government’s recognition of the Czechslovak government, I give Your Excellency advance notice that it is my intention to lodge a protest with the Foreign Office, through Your Excellency, that the Hungarian government regards this as an unfriendly act, from which it draws its own conclusions. It is then my intention to send Your Excellency on furlough.201 Perhaps the monies sent to Pelényi in Washington went at least part way to explaining why Barcza asked Csáky to be allowed to commence his leave in the United States, if he was about to go on leave. In the end, he did not have to go because, short stretches of choppy waters notwithstanding, Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations continued to run along a relatively smooth channel. On the subject of recognition, the Hungarian press was very partial to quoting the statement made to the House of Commons on 24 July by R.A.Butler, the parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs, for Butler made no definite announcement, merely noting that ‘British recognition did not imply any decision regarding the final settlement or the political boundaries of Central Europe after the war.’202 The hypersensitive Hungarian reaction to the recognition was the subject of a number of Notes within the Foreign Office. Frank K.Roberts’ comment to the effect that the Hungarians could not expect of Britain that their sensitivities be taken into consideration at the Foreign Office was not unfounded. Roberts referred back to Csáky’s above-mentioned statement of 6 March to the Hungarian Parliament, but he supposed it might help to soothe Hungarian touchiness if they were to discern the


intention that lay behind granting recognition, which was taken partly ‘with a view to preventing Czechs and Slovaks looking solely to the USSR for salvation’.203 That was an eminently reasonable explanation in the light of Beneš’ political practices. The matter of anti-British expressions in the Hungarian press came up again when Barcza complained about the tone of the BBC’s Hungarian service and the Romanian propaganda that it was sustaining. (He got about as far as did Mihály Károlyi, the exiled president of the short-lived 1918–19 Hungarian Republic, when he complained to Hugh Dalton about the BBC’s allegedly too pro-Horthy programmes. The minister recorded, not entirely unironically, ‘As if it made any difference’—namely, what opinions about Horthy were aired in the BBC’s transmissions.)204 On 29 August 1940 Sargent produced a Note about a conversation he had had with Barcza. The head of the Foreign Office’s Political Department delivered a rebuke to the Hungarian minister about the extremely pro-German tone of the Hungarian press, including the government papers. When Barcza asked him to cite specific instances he quickly got his answer—a set of quotations that an official from the Ministry of Information had just put together from the 27 June issues of Függetlenség (Independence), Magyarság, the Nemzeti Újság (National News) and the Pester Lloyd to support the allegation.205 Barcza tried to switch to a discussion about Anglo-Romanian relations, but received a politely evasive answer—no more than could be expected from Sargent, not the most pro Hungarian of Foreign Office officials at best. Romanian-Hungarian negotiations over Transylvania got under way at Turnu-Severin in mid-August but they were fruitless. As a result, a new German-Italian arbitration was arranged in Vienna on 30 August, the result of which was that northern Transylvania and part of the Székely people’s historical lands around Marosvásárhely (Tîrgu Mureş, Rom.) were returned to Hungary. This encompassed a total area of somewhat more than 43,000 square kilometres (16,600 square miles), together with about 2 million inhabitants (according to a 1941 Hungarian census, they comprised 51 per cent Hungarians and 42 per cent Romanians by descent, although a Romanian census of 1930 had put the Hungarian share much lower). The reception in London of the second Vienna Award, which Romania had initiated, was unambiguous. Speaking in the House of Commons on 5 September, Churchill declared that although he frowned on Hungary’s treatment


after the First World War, Britain was not prepared to recognize changes that were the result of a dictation.206 Specifically: The House will have observe that Roumania has undergone a severe territorial mutilation. Personally, I have always thought that the south part of Dobrudja ought to be restored to Bulgaria, and I have never been too happy about the way in which Hungary was treated after the last war. We have not at any time adopted, since this war broke out, the line that nothing could be changed in the territorial structure of various countries. On the other hand, we do not propose to recognise any territorial changes which take place during the war, unless they take place with the free consent and goodwill of the parties concerned.207 The prime minister received acclamations at both the start and end of this statement. Lord Halifax repeated this in the Lords, drawing a distinction between the Romano-Bulgarian and Hungaro-Romanian settlements, accepting the former as based on mutual consent between the parties and rejecting the latter as having been imposed under duress.208 The Foreign Office told Barcza that Great Britain would not recognize any territorial changes that took place after 1 September 1939. (In a report two months later O’Malley noted that his Hungarian interlocutors, for obvious reasons, generally preferred to cite the British prime minister’s statement rather than the one made by the foreign secretary.)209 The end of August was also marked by an insignificant event that illustrates the difficulty of considering Anglo-Hungarian relations as separate from the war. Teleki and Csáky sent a congratulatory telegram to Mussolini on the capture of British Somalia by the Italian army. This may have been merely a polite diplomatic step on the part of a Hungarian foreign policy that had traditionally sought friendship with Italy.210 The Foreign Office attributed no great importance to Teleki’s telegram, but certain sections of the British press were quick to react. There was a reference to it in the Manchester Guardian of 23 August, whereupon it was picked up by the Ministry of Information. That the Foreign Office too was forced to take up the ‘affair’, however, was due largely to Lords Londonderry and Mottistone. The former was president of the Anglo-Hungarian Society, the latter chairman of its Executive Committee (O’Malley and Barcza were vice-presidents).


Both immediately tendered their resignations from these posts in protest against the Hungarian head of government’s gesture, with Mottistone adding in the letter he wrote to the Society’s treasurer, the Hungarophile Sir William Goode: ‘lt seems to me ridiculous to maintain an Anglo-Hungarian Society.’211 All Goode’s efforts to prevail on the two politicians to keep their positions—he even wrote to Cadogan on the matter—proved to be in vain. He received a politely worded letter from Lord Londonderry, on 14 September, to say that highly as he esteemed both Halifax and Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s opinion on the matter was of no interest to him.212 Cadogan did not concern himself personally either with Teleki’s telegram or with the AngloHungarian Society, of course; he had to deal with issues more important than those. Instead, Frank Roberts assessed the whole episode. As he affirmed, it was understandable if the Hungarian government should hope to win Mussolini’s support in the face of growing German demands, but: if Lord Londonderry and Lord Mottistone choose to resign from the Society, that is their affair, and we should not, I think, wish to dissuade them from doing so…After all, the proper reply to Count Teleki’s telegram, if we had wished to make an issue of it, would have been a protest by H.M.G., not pressure upon our part to disband a private society.213 In October or November 1940, Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations can be said to have been mostly undistinguished. At the beginning of October, however, German ‘study groups’ (military technical units) passed through Hungary on the way to Romania, the Hungarian government having given permission for that on 30 September, which reinforced the earlier concerns of the Foreign Office about the limits of Hungary’s relative neutrality. On 9 October O’Malley reported that, on the basis of information received from ‘a friend,’ he had ‘no knowledge of uniformed German soldiers passing through Hungary to Roumania. They had travelled as civilians’—an assertion backed by the fact that the Hungarian legation in Berlin had issued 6,500 transit visas to Germans for Romania during the month of September, but no more since then.214 Later that day, the British minister paid a call on Csáky and asked whether it was true, as had been reported by Reuters, that armed German units had entered Romania. He received an answer


that tallied completely with the ‘friend’s’ account. When O’Malley pressed the foreign minister again on what the Hungarian government would do ‘if, later, German formations, armed and in uniform, sought passage across Hungary to Roumania’, he got the straight answer: ‘no one can expect Hungary to resist by force of arms’.215 Csáky in turn asked Barcza to explain to the Foreign Office that it was the Romanian government, not the Germans, who had requested passage, and it had been impossible to reject the Romanian request. Barcza noted the following: When I conveyed it in these terms to Mr Eden and Cadogan, their response was that since Romania was no longer Britain’s ally, the question did not immediately concern the British government, but they were surprised that Hungary should suddenly show itself to be so obliging towards Romania. They could only infer that Hungary and Romania had come even more under German influence and were either unable or did not wish to hold out against German demands in the interests of maintaining their independence. At the same time, Mr Eden conveyed to me in the most categorical terms that it would be an entirely different matter if German troops were to pass through Hungarian territory to attack a state that was allied to Great Britain. If we were to allow such a passage, Great Britain would regard that as an unfriendly act, and we would have to reckon with the consequences. In practice, this declaration meant that if Hungary were to permit German troops to pass through Hungarian territory against Yugoslavia, Britain would break off diplomatic relations, indeed might declare war on us.216 There is no reason to doubt that Barcza faithfully reflected the British attitude, although it is unlikely that he spoke with Eden. Eden did not return to the post of foreign secretary until late December of that year. Not that this has any bearing on the essential point that from this time Hungary’s standing deteriorated in Britain. Teleki may have continued to enjoy respect and esteem, but fewer hopes were pinned to his being able to sustain his earlier foreign policy.

102

6 From 20 November 1940 to the Breaking Off of Anglo-Hungarian Diplomatic Relations

The change in Great Britain’s assessment of Hungary arose in November rather than October 1940. The breaking point came with Hungary’s accession to the Tripartite Pact. The basic document of the Tripartite Pact was signed by representatives of Germany, Italy and Japan in Berlin on 27 September 1940. The signatories mutually recognized their respective leading roles in a ‘New Order’ in Europe and ‘Greater East Asia’. The accord was regarded as a precondition to ‘durable peace’, with the three parties undertaking to provide political, economic and military assistance to each other if attacked by a power not already in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict. The agreement made provision for the inclusion of other states. The principal role in preparing Hungary’s adhesion was played by Döme Sztójay in Berlin. Following the 27 September signing ceremony, Ribbentrop gave a press conference at which he announced: Any state which of its own accord approaches this bloc [der diesem Block gegenüber tritt], with the intention of contributing to the restoration of peaceful relations among the nations, will be sincerely and gratefully welcomed and will be invited to cooperate in the economic and political reorganisation.217 The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, however, incorrectly cited him as saying: Any other state which of its own accord wishes to accede to this bloc [der diesem Block beitreten will, with the intention of contributing to the restoration of peaceful relations among the nations, will be sincerely and gratefully welcomed and will cooperate [an der


Mitarbeit…teilnehmen wird] in the economic and political reorganisation [emphasis added].218 Sztójay reported to Budapest the text as it appeared in the newspaper— whether deliberately or by accident. Whatever the case, he advised Csáky to accept as quickly as possible, arguing that to pass up the opportunity would greatly harm Hungarian interests. He considered it especially important that Hungary join before Romania. Without waiting for the foreign minister’s reply, Sztójay went to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and announced Hungary’s decision to sign up as a fait accompli.219 Weizsäcker, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, pointed out to Sztójay that the text as it had appeared in the newspaper was not identical to what Ribbentrop had said. The foreign minister himself nevertheless gave Sztójay to understand on 9 October, and again on the 12th, that the Führer and the other signatory states were agreed that Hungary should be the first country to be given the favour of adhering to the pact. At the meeting on the 12th, the minister enquired about the rights and responsibilities that proceeded from adherence to the pact. Ribbentrop answered him: In so far as a third state should attack Hungary, all three of the original signatory states would hasten to her assistance. At the same time, if a state that is at present a non-belligerent should enter into a state of war with the signatory powers, then Hungary too would find herself at war.220 A Hungarian delegation led by Teleki and Csáky set off for Vienna in the evening of 12 November to sign the document of accession. Under Article 2 of the protocol that was signed on 20 November at the Belvedere Palace, scene of the two Vienna Awards: ‘In so far as the common expert Commissions foreseen under Article IV of the Tripartite Pact discuss questions that touch on Hungary’s interests, representatives of Hungary shall be included in those deliberations.’221 The signing ceremony was followed up by further talks between Hitler and Ribbentrop and Teleki and Csáky at which the German chancellor made a number of noteworthy remarks about Russia. He laid particular emphasis on the fact that Germany had its treaty arrangements with the Soviet Union (clearly alluding to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) but ‘prefers to rely on the instruments of power that lie at its disposal’.222


He then turned to expounding the might of the German army. To quote the minute prepared by Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt: In connection with the settlement of interests with Russia [Molotov’s meetings in Berlin on 12–13 November 1940], the Führer mentioned confidentially that he had to inform the Russians with regard to Finland that another war in the Baltic war would be intolerable for Germany, that from a psychological standpoint, too, Germany could not look on if Finland became involved in a war…the Baltic, as one of the few available commercial seas, together with the countries that border on it, had to be kept quiet…Russia hung like a threatening cloud on the horizon and, as he had said, assumed either an imperialist, Russian nationalist appearance or appears in Communist international guise…on the other hand, think realistically, it would perhaps be possible to divert them to the South Asiatic continent as a Russian sphere of interest.223 Hitler wanted to suggest to Teleki and his colleagues that he was at least considering a military action against the Soviet Union. What the Führer had to say was perhaps tantamount to an indirect message to London. He was well aware that Teleki had good relations with O’Malley. But Hitler was probably unaware of the earlier close relationship between his most implacable enemy, Churchill, and O’Malley. Another notable element of these encounters was that, following the signing of the pact, Csáky made a speech of thanks to Germany and Italy for the support they had given Hungary up until then, but Ribbentrop did not respond. He did reveal, however, that the adhesion of further states was expected. Much more significant was an assertion that Ribbentrop is alleged to have made to Teleki. This was to the effect that if the Axis powers were to be attacked by a state not yet at war, Hungary would be obliged to show solidarity with the power attacked, but could use its free judgement in deciding what kind of assistance that solidarity involved.224 Hungary did not gain much in return for joining the Tripartite Pact. On the other hand, neither did it lose much—at the beginning. O’Malley reported to the Foreign Office on 21 November that he had been asked by several people whether he thought Anglo-


Hungarian diplomatic relations would be broken off as a result of entry. (He did not go into detail about who had asked, on behalf of what parties; one can only suppose that they were from Hungarian political circles concerned about a worsening of Anglo-Hungarian relations.) He had replied as follows to the questioners: 1. It was not entirely clear what rights and responsibilities were placed on Hungary by joining the Axis. 2. He did not believe that H.M. Government was particularly concerned about that, since it did not essentially change anything in Anglo-Hungarian relations. 3. Anglo-Hungarian relations and maintenance of British representation in Budapest were dependent not on such steps but on the actual conduct of the Hungarian authorities towards British citizens. 4. Teleki had been very restrained in making any announcement in public about entry. 5. The Hungarians would do all they could in the interests of a continuing British representation in Budapest.225 A note written by Cadogan on 30 November was fully in accord with what O’Malley had written, so that the permanent undersecretary of state in effect gave retrospective approval to the minister’s view. He too considered that the manner in which the authorities handled British citizens resident in Hungary was significant, and in that respect he had a favourable opinion of Hungary’s conduct, especially compared to the Romanians’ behaviour. He added that attitudes of the Hungarian people towards Great Britain had not changed since the pact had been signed. The maintenance of relations with Hungary was important, he wrote, if only because the country could be expected to have an important role in a more broadly based framework of cooperation in Central Europe after the war. It seems likely that this was a reference to plans for a future Polish—Czechoslovak confederation that were being sketched out in London around that time; Cadogan thought it was conceivable that Hungary, by virtue of its traditionally good relations with Poland, might also be pulled into this at a later stage. He took it as a further good sign that the Hungarian state was showing itself willing to keep on meeting its debt obligations to Great Britain. That was evidence that the Hungarian government wished to keep


relations with H.M. Government on a correct basis. However, at the end of the note the comment was made that a firmer, frostier line ought to be taken towards Hungary in British propaganda, especially radio broadcasts, than before accession to the Axis, but this was no more than a mild stricture.226 Although Cadogan expressed his regrets over Hungary’s accession during a conversation with Barcza, he allowed that the Hungarian government had very little other choice, given its tricky position. ‘Finally, he declared that present political contingencies would not have an undue influence on traditional Anglo-Hungarian sympathies, and he placed great weight on a continuation of our diplomatic relations,’ Barcza wrote to Csáky.227 It is interesting that Ciano too, like the Foreign Office, seems to have attributed little importance to Hungary’s joining the pact. Yet the Italian foreign minister, unlike Cadogan, already classed Hungary as a vassal of Germany prior to 20 November 1940.228 Reactions in the British press were much the same as Cadogan’s. As Barcza put it in a telegram on 22 November, the major newspapers in general had made no hostile comments on the country’s entry to the Axis, citing The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Daily Herald.229 The Daily Mail, it is true, had noted that Hungary had again ‘put her money on the wrong horse’, just as it had done in 1914. So much for the once so vocal Rothermere campaign! (Coincidentally, Rothermere died on 20 November, the day on which Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact.) The Times printed a purely factual report of the event, while the left-wing Daily Herald and Daily Mirror laid the blame for Hungary’s signature of the agreement mainly on the Foreign Office’s earlier policy line. Minor episode as this was, it is worth recording that the AngloHungarian Society was wound up in the aftermath of the Hungarian action. Sir Thomas Hohler, a former British minister to Budapest who had stepped into its presidency on the Marquess of Londonderry’s resignation, wrote to Barcza directly after 20 November to announce: ‘Under the circumstances, nothing remains but to dissolve the AngloHungarian Society, which I shall proceed to at once, though with the greatest reluctance and heavy heart.’230 Strang, the under-secretary of state for European affairs, endorsed opinions that were often worded identically to those of Cadogan. In a letter responding to William Goode, a Hungarophile who was leaving no stone unturned in his


efforts to oppose the Society’s disbanding, he reiterated his superior’s arguments: The position so far as we are concerned is that there is no intention at present to break off diplomatic relations with Hungary, and we should therefore have seen no strong necessity for the dissolution of the Anglo-Hungarian Society. We have not received any evidence that the sentiments of the Hungarian people have changed towards this country in last few months. If the Hungarian Government continues to make token payments on their debts to this country, this would be an indication that the Hungarian Government also, in spite of the attitude they take in public, would not wish to break down all the bridges between Hungary and this country.231 Goode was even then an unofficial adviser to the Hungarian government. Although he offered, in his 2 December letter of response to Strang, to resign from that post, should the Foreign Office’s top officials request or advise it, it did not come to this. It may be that the Foreign Office’s position played some part in the decision, taken at a meeting of the Anglo-Hungarian Society held on 10 December, to amend a motion calling for disbandment to one of ‘suspending’ the organization’s activities until ‘the international situation permits them to be resumed’. So Hungary’s accession to the Tripartite Pact did not create such a bad impression in London as might have been expected. Later on, however, British politicians increasingly referred to it as a step that had pushed Hungary on to the German side. The withdrawal of diplomatic status from the Polish mission in Budapest, and the subsequent closure of its legation, by contrast, had an adverse impact on British attitudes to Hungarian foreign policy. Although this did not practically affect the fate of Poles resident in Hungary, O’Malley deemed it an unfriendly gesture. Teleki strove to maintain independence and keep the country out of the war even after November 1940. Hungary introduced talks with Yugoslavia back in early October—well in advance of the latter’s accession to the Axis. Whether the Germans approved the idea of a Hungarian-Yugoslav rapprochement is not clear, but it is probable that they knew all about it from the beginning. They certainly did on 30


November, when Csáky summoned Erdmannsdorf to inform him that a Hungarian-Yugoslav treaty of friendship was to be concluded shortly.232 The signing of the treaty took place on 12 December in Belgrade. The first article of the document declared that ‘Constant peace and eternal friendship shall prevail between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’, and the second that the two countries agreed to consult together on all questions that affected their mutual relationship.233 This form of words was a compromise designed to hide Hungary’s maintenance of its revisionist aims, since the Yugoslavs would have preferred to see an explicit renunciation of all frontier revision while the Hungarians wanted to maintain their claims. Barcza reported to Csáky on London’s reception of the treaty in a ciphered telegram on 16 December. Apparently Cadogan had declared that: the British government can only welcome any rapprochement, arrived at out of free will, which is aimed at the preservation of genuine peace. It may be that the Germans are hoping that, having failed to drive a single one of the independent Balkan states into the Axis, they can perhaps obtain Yugoslavia’s adherence in this manner, but he believed that British victory in Greece, the Mediterranean and now Africa, on the one hand, and Russian opposition to German expansion in the Balkans, on the other, formed a counterweight that would frustrate the German governraent’s further plans.234 In his memoirs, Barcza added that Cadogan had warned that if the Hungarian government were seeking to draw Yugoslavia into the Axis by means of the treaty, then ‘the position would be quite different’.235 Barcza went on to ask Csáky how the treaty was to be stated. The answer he received was that Hungary was not promoting Axis interests and wished to prove its political independence.236 The minister went on in his memoirs: ‘I paid another call on Sir Alexander and reported to him Csáky’s explanation, but I doubt I was able to persuade him as to its truth.’237 It is conceivable that in his memoirs Barcza was not entirely accurate in his recollection of events, but it is more likely that Cadogan said nothing openly, merely intimating to the minister that he saw in the treaty nothing more than a cautious move on the part of


a Hungarian foreign policy that was being bound ever more closely to Germany. Barcza saw Cadogan again on 18 December. He showed him an article recently published in The Times that contained a statement by Beneš, according to which: The British Government had also stated that they were not bound by any frontiers in Central Europe, and these reservations held not only for us [i.e. then-defunct Czechoslovakia], but for Poland, Hungary, Roumania and the other States of Central Europe. In an official Note from the British Government dated 11th November, I was expressly assured that the British Government do not recognise the Munich frontiers, and are not bound by them.238 That gave rise to a minor contretemps between the two men. Barcza asked for guidance on how Beneš’ statement was to be interpreted. Cadogan reiterated the official British standpoint that recognition of the Czechoslovak provisional government related only to the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, not to its future frontiers. He referred to Churchill’s 5 September Commons statement, going on to note that Germany had broken the Munich Agreement, and thus the British government could not regard its arrangements as relevant. ‘Beneš did not lie, Cadogan said, but neither did he tell the exact truth in the statement that I had brought up, and he had insinuated into it things which did not entirely correspond with the facts,’ Barcza reported.239 On 28 December Cadogan sent Barcza a letter in which he quoted the supplementary declaration attached to the Munich Agreement, which referred to the question of the Polish and Magyar minorities in Czechoslovakia. Cadogan emphasized that the first Vienna Award had resulted from a departure from the agreement, and ‘H.M. Government have therefore no responsibility whatever in connection with that Award.’240 Barcza replied to this in a long letter of 6 January 1941. He quoted the speech in which Chamberlain had accepted the first Vienna Award as being fully in accord with the Munich Agreement.241 Cadogan laid out the official British line in a further letter of 30 January.242 He acknowledged that Barcza was right in so far as he had correctly quoted what Chamberlain said, but he continued to insist that the first Vienna Award had not been reached in the spirit of the Munich


Agreement and thus did not bind the British government. Cadogan referred to Csáky’s 23 March 1939 statement in the Hungarian Parliament, in which the foreign minister had not deemed it necessary to invoke either the Munich procedure or even that of the Vienna Award. He had said that when a difference arose between the governments in Prague and Bratislava sufficient to attract international attention, the Hungarian government realized that the first Vienna Award might lose its validity at any moment. That, however, would remove the only juridical basis for the existence of Ruthenia. In any case, Cadogan went on, the Hungarian army had advanced into Slovakia beyond what, prior to March 1939, had been the boundary between Slovakia and Ruthenia. The Hungarian and Slovak governments had afterwards, on 31 March, reached an agreement on the new frontiers and the territory that had been left in Slovakia under the first Vienna Award was taken over by Hungary. ‘So much for the finality of the Vienna Award’ was Cadogan’s cogent riposte. ‘I am puzzled to know which frontier it is that you suggest His Majesty’s Government have acknowledged or made themselves responsible for.’243 London’s reaction to the Yugoslav-Hungarian rapprochement should perhaps also be read into an instruction to its British minister in Budapest (or rather into its several variants) that was sent out on 10 December 1940. This made reference to the future fate of territories that had been ceded back to Hungary following the first and second Vienna Awards. Roger Makins, deputy head of the Foreign Office Central Europe Department, noted in connection with the dispute between Hungary and Romania: For your general guidance, you can, I think, assume that Hungary will, when we have won the war, be permitted to keep a fair proportion of her acquisitions in Transylvania, and it may be we shall wish to draw another line, which while leaving Hungary a good deal of Northern Transylvania, will give her further territory in Southern Transylvania which is at present Romanian.244 Makins’ superiors may have felt that this wording was too strong, because they did not permit it to be sent out. Instead they advised a more general statement resulting in a text that played down specific


promises: ‘assume that Hungary is not likely to experience much difficulty from us so far as concerns her recent acquisitions from Romania’. Some must have found even that too strong, since in the final version that O’Malley received all it said was that ‘if, for example, Hungary attempted to get back territories from Yugoslavia, our attitude might be quite different from our attitude to further Hungarian acquisitions in Transylvania’.245 This was fully in accord with the governing principles that had been dispatched earlier to O’Malley, under which His Majesty’s Government linked recognition of territorial changes to three criteria: 1) Were they legal? 2) Would they be lasting? 3) Were they based on a free determination by the parties concerned?246 One should also not lose sight of the change that took place at the head of the Foreign Office in late December 1940. On 22 December, Anthony Eden, who had been replaced by Halifax after his resignation in February 1938, was again appointed foreign secretary, while Halifax became the British ambassador in Washington.247 Eden was disliked in Hungarian government circles, as well as being impopular in Hungary’s press. Eden, in turn, had no partiality for Hungary. Changes in British foreign policy towards Hungary, however, were not linked to Eden’s reappointment. Decisions relating to Hungary were taken at a lower level, and even if the foreign secretary’s antipathy cannot be entirely ignored, it would also be wrong to ascribe undue significance to it. In a lengthy dispatch on 28 January 1941, Barcza provided an assessment of Britain’s military, domestic and foreign policy.248 After a thorough quizzing of government and press circles, though possibly oversimplifying things a little, he discerned the outlines of two main thrusts in British attitudes to Hungary. On the one hand, there were those who sought to carry on the war to a final British victory, and on securing that would impose merciless peace terms on the losers. Those who belonged to this camp had been sympathetic towards Hungary, but only until the signing of the Tripartite Pact. After 20 November 1940, however, as Barcza summed up: ‘Hungary has become Britain’s de facto enemy and will become that for America too as soon as it allies with England, which is only a matter of time.’ He later noted: Romania’s position, say those in question, is different. Romania may be totally a German vassal, but the Germans invaded it by


force of arms, removed her legal government and head of state, and the country acted, and stands to this day, under physical duress. As long as that lasts, the Romanian people are to be pitied, and in spite of it are counted as friends of Britain.249 Others, by contrast, had shown more insight into the peculiarly difficult situation in which Hungary found itself as a consequence of its geographical position: In the event of a British victory, as this group sees it, Hungary should not be regarded outright as a hostile state, because she has been placed under psychological duress and has acted with the aim of preserving her existence in a life-threatening situation, not because of hostility to England. Good will between the British and Hungarian nations, they would assert, still holds today: leaders may change, but the nations and their sympathies remain. For that reason, if there should be peace in the Danube Basin, which is in Britain’s interest, it will be necessary to see that justice is finally done between Hungary and her neighbours, who unlawfully and intemperately dismembered her in 1919.250 Which of these points of view lay closer to that of Foreign Secretary Eden, one is bound to ask? It may not be far from the truth to suggest that he took up a position somewhere between the two, although he leaned more towards the first. On 7 February 1941, Eden summoned Barcza, whose subsequent telegram back to Hungary recorded the following statement, among other things: The British Government is well aware that Hungary is being placed under extraordinarily strong external pressure, and that her position is compromised by her territorial demands. In the event of a British victory, this will be taken into account as a mitigating circumstance, but he could also state emphatically that, in addition, he would take into account the degree of willingness with which Hungary satisfies German demands…In the recent past, Hungary has permitted the transit of German troops through her territory, has openly joined the anti-English Tripartite Pact, whilst the Hungarian press and wireless have adopted a totally German tone and approach. He had no wish


to rebuke us, and he knew how extraordinarily difficult our position is, but wished to show his friendliness towards us by giving timely warning that our behaviour will be judged by the aforementioned considerations when it comes to concluding peace.251 At almost the same time as Eden entered office, there was also a change at the head of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Csáky died in January 1941, and László Bárdossy was appointed as his successor. In all essential respects, Bárdossy’s foreign policy, at the outset, concurred with Teleki’s. He regarded the preservation of Hungary’s independence and staying out of the war as being just as important as did the prime minister. Unlike Teleki, however, he thought that the war would end in either a German victory or a negotiated truce. On 12 February, Barcza sent a ciphered telegram to his foreign minister to inform him that Great Britain had broken off diplo matic relations with Romania due the presence of German troops on its soil. In the Foreign Office he had been given to understand that German military targets in Romania might expect to be bombed. Far more significant was the clear hint that other places could likewise reckon on being bombed: ‘wherever German armed forces may be stationed and set up military installations, those will be regarded as legitimate targets for British aircraft, irrespective of the behaviour of the state concerned in other respects’.252 It is interesting to note that Barzca did not name the Foreign Office official who had made this statement, despite its indubitable importance. Barcza was in contact not merely with Eden, Gadogan and Strang but also with lower-level, though still influential, officials such as Bruce Lockhart. Bárdossy responded to Barcza later the same day, asking him to point out to the Foreign Office that the Hungarian government had given permission for the passage of German troops across Hungary at the express request of the government of the Romanian state.253 Cadogan gave Barcza his reaction to Bárdossy’s argument on 19 February. In his view, the Hungarian foreign minister’s explanation could only be viewed as a pretext: that in allowing the transit of German troops the Hungarian government had facilitated ‘the installation of Britain’s enemies in Romania, which has thereby become a military base for further operations’.254 As for Barcza’s argument that refusal of the German request might have had fateful consequences, the


permanent under-secretary of state replied that he was aware of that, and Britain did in fact take account of the extreme situations in which smaller countries found themselves, and strove to display towards them an understanding and patience that departed from normal diplomatic practice.255 Cadogan’s statements thus reflected Eden’s abovecited words of 7 February. On 27 February the Yugoslav foreign minister, Aleksander ČincarMarkovic, arrived in Budapest to exchange the documents ratifying the Treaty of Friendship with the Hungarians. Teleki and Bárdossy had a lengthy conversation with him.256 By then Bulgaria’s adhesion to the Tripartite Pact was just a matter of days away (it happened on 1 March). That manifestly alarmed the Yugoslav politician. Teleki declared to his guest that he hoped Yugoslavia was not be drawn into the war, though Teleki himself had an increasingly anxious view of the international political and military situation. At the beginning of March, Teleki thought that he ought to set down in a long memorandum the line that the Anglo-Saxon powers could expect from the Hungarian government.257 He made some important assertions in the opening sentences: The chief task of the Hungarian government in this European war is to conserve Hungary’s military, material and human resources to the end of the war. She must at all costs hold back from participation in the conflict. The outcome of the war is uncertain, but whatever happened it is important to Hungary that she should stand unscathed in the period when the European conflict comes to a conclusion.258 He then proceeded to list the dangers that menaced the country: from Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Yugoslavia (despite the recently signed treaty of eternal friendship), and from communism generally. Before launching into a lengthy historical disquisition about the thousand-yearold state, he noted: The Western powers, that is to say, at the present time, England in the first place and the USA in the second place, demand that every little state oppose, by armed force if necessary, every endeavour of the Germans, especially their military demands— each little state on its own. That would mean the small states


being devoured to no purpose, if they were to seek to accomplish this. The demand is therefore unreasonable, is of service to no one, yet might mean the country in question is brought to ruin. In other words, the demand signifies a failure to understand brutality in regard to the small state.259 Besides these lines, the part of the memorandum specifically addressed to English-speaking powers was a passage in which he listed the evidence of his government’s firmness against excessive German demands: the refusal to let German troops pass through Hungarian territory to attack Poland; the rejection of an agreement with Germany on press propaganda and literature; the resolution of the Jewish question ‘in line with the German example’. He reiterated what he had expressed at various points during his premiership to Barcza and Pelényi (who had resigned from his legation post on 27 November): Were anyone to read through the statements that the prime minister has made repeatedly, in his speeches and writings, during the two years of his premiership about Hungarian sovereignty, independence, the preservation of parliamentarianism in the face of totalitarianism, the difference of the Hungarian idea of nation from the concepts of other European nations, and suchlike topics, which have been made both in parliament and elsewhere before a wider public, and which have been published extensively in Hungarian and German-language newspapers, and at the same time realises that this same government is still in place and is able to uphold this point of view, he should be fully aware that any assertions that Hungary is legally and for the most part de facto in a position of dependency on Germany—in a more dependent position than any of the small countries not yet occupied by Germany (Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Portugal [sic], Sweden)—are figments of the imagination.260

The memorandum was completed by a detailed account of the process by which northern Transylvania was regained.


On 4 March, the day after Teleki’s memorandum was finalized, Bárdossy gave a note to O’Malley.261 He again thought it necessary to state categorically that the transit of German troops through Hungary had been at the request of the Romanian government. On 12 March, Bárdossy sent Barcza a dispatch in which he reacted rather sharply to what the minister had committed to paper in his 28 January report.262 With reference to Barcza’s assertions about the English views of Hungary, he noted: The Romanian government, that is to say, the one appointed by King Carol and thus the ‘legal’ Romanian government in the view of intransigent English elements, on the very day of the arbitral decision in Vienna, requested the Reich government to dispatch German military forces to Romania. It did so because for a Romanian public that, understandably enough, was profoundly disturbed following the territorial retrocessions in favour of Russia and Hungary, it sought to create a sense of security in respect of the country not needing to fear further territorial curtailment. The Romanian government required this security also on account of the uncertain domestic political situation. The dispatch of German armed forces in that respect proceeded not only at the request of the legal Romanian government but also was clearly not directed against either England or its allies, who continue trying to unsettle Romania to the present day.263 Bárdossy had been incredulous and mystified to read Barcza’s report; he was dumbfounded by the ‘malice’ and ‘considerable ignorance’ of British circles, and may even have questioned the accuracy of the minister’s appraisal of the situation. This was probably also attributable to the fact that Bárdossy and Barcza disliked each other (we shall return to this later). On 12 March, Teleki sent Barcza a handwritten private letter via the British diplomatic bag.264 The letter said not a word about Teleki’s ‘protestations of devotion to the Axis were not to be taken seriously’, nor about having ‘in reality refused a long series of demands by for substantial help’.265 Instead, the passage in the important letter—the last, so far as we know, that Barcza was to receive from the prime minister —that relates to Great Britain runs as follows:


It would be good to explain to the English that they ought not to reproach others for non-resistance! Why did they not bring the small states of the Danube Basin and Balkan closer together? There would then have been a bloc here capable of defending itself. But sustaining discords and demanding resistance from each individually to the very last moment—that is sheer stupidity. Sadly, as I see it, their diplomacy is bad and always too late. Now the Germans will be making order here when that was in their hands.266 These bitter words reflected Teleki’s mental state several weeks before he took his own life. The letter reached the hands of the minister, he claimed, only at the end of March. He then paid a call on Eden, who told him that he did not doubt Teleki’s good faith, but he also did not doubt that the prime minister would sooner or later have to give in to the growing German pressure.267 The foreign secretary went on to say that the British government was fully aware of the difficulties of the position Hungary was in, ‘But he repeated most emphatically that Hungary will have to expect the gravest consequences if she permits German troops to pass through her territory against a country allied with Great; still more if she joins in the attack.’268 Events rapidly succeeded one another in late March and early April. On 25 March, the Yugoslav prime minister, Dragiša Cvetkovič, and his foreign minister, Čincar-Markovic, signed the protocol of adhesion to the Tripartite Pact in Vienna. In Belgrade, however, during the night of 26 to 27 March, a group of officers, mostly from the air force, staged a coup and arrested the two politicians on their return from Vienna. Thereupon, later that same day, an enraged Hitler issued orders directing the Wehrmacht to attack Yugoslavia. Hungary was envisaged to play a direct role in this plan. On 27 March, Hitler summoned Sztójay, asking him to travel to Budapest at the earliest opportunity and brief the regent on the interview. Hitler’s message can be summarized in a few brief points: 1) Germany would act to prevent any bases of operations being set up against itself; 2) if it should come to armed clashes, Germany would not stand in the way of Hungarian revisionist claims; 3) Germany supported Croatian aspirations for autonomy; and 4) Hungary might consider implementing certain military actions.269 He specifically mentioned Hungarian claims on the Bačka and Banat, and Hungary’s need for a maritime outlet. Hitler


stressed his peaceful intentions—by no means an unusual tactic for him. Later the same afternoon Sztójay flew to Budapest (courtesy of an aeroplane laid on by Ribbentrop), where he instantly went to see Bárdossy. They waited for Teleki, then all three set off to call on the regent. Horthy received Hitler’s message with enthusiasm, the prime minister and his foreign minister less so. The regent wrote Hitler a letter in which he assured the German leadership of Hungary’s loyalty and stated that he looked forward to cooperation between the Hungarian and German army commands.270 Flying back to Berlin the next day, Sztójay handed it over on the evening of 28 March. Hitler repeated what he had said the previous day about Hungarian revision, adding that Germany had two friends in the Balkans [sic]: Hungary and Bulgaria. It was his intention to ensure that the revisionist claims of his friends were satisfied.271 During a meeting of Hungary’s ministerial council the same day there was discussion of the conditions that would have to be fulfilled for the Hungarian army to move into Yugoslavian territories that had formerly belonged to Hungary. These were: 1. if Yugoslavia were to disintegrate as a state, that is, if Croatia were to proclaim its independence; 2. if the security of the Magyar minority in Yugoslavia were to be endangered; and 3. if a vacuum were created by German military action in areas inhabited by the Magyar minority.272 The next day, Barcza asked for instructions on whether ‘in the case in question’ (clearly in the event of a German attack against Yugoslavia) Hungary would not proceed in accordance with the YugoslavHungarian treaty of friendship.273 Bárdossy sent the same message to both London and Washington, stating that the change in Yugoslavia: seems likely to provoke an action on the part of the Axis powers which will bring war close to Hungary’s frontiers. Such a development, of course, cannot be indifferent to us…I would remark that there is a very real possibility of having to expect that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia will disintegrate to its constitutive elements. Secession of Croatia and Slovenia would create a situation in which it would still be our prime national


responsibility to provide for the defence of the Magyar-inhabited Voivodina even were the Germans not to act.274 At this juncture, Horthy convened a meeting of the Supreme Defence Council for 1 April. Bárdossy was the first to speak. He insisted that the Hungarian army could only start mobilizing into Magyar-inhabited territories in Yugoslavia under the conditions that had been agreed by the ministerial council on 28 March. Germany’s leaders had to be informed of this, and they should be told that any Hungarian military action would be taken independent of the Germans. A number of those present, including the minister of the interior, Keresztes-Fischer, accepted Bárdossy’s position, whereas General Werth, chief of the General Staff, and Károly Bartha, the minister of defence, urged immediate military action, since in their view, on the basis of the exchange of letters between Hitler and Horthy, that decision had already been taken. Teleki was the last to speak. He made reference to the inexhaustible forces of Britain and America, indicating that under no circumstances should Hungary pursue a policy that they would deem unacceptable. He agreed with Bárdossy that it would be permissible to enter territories that had historically belonged to Hungary only after the collapse of the Yugoslavian state. The Council accepted a set of resolutions proposed by Teleki and Bárdossy, which, in contrast to the conditions approved by the ministerial council on 28 March, were: the Hungarian army would not pass beyond the frontier line formed by the Rivers Danube and Dráva; the minister of defence and chief of the General Staff were to make preparations for mobilization, but the order for deployment rested ultimately with the regent; all Hungarian units were to be under the regent’s supreme command and not subordinate to the German supreme command.275 It may be said that, according to Macartney,276 plans for setting up an émigré Hungarian government had again resurfaced in early 1941 at O’Malley’s suggestion. Yet it is hard to imagine that foreign-policymakers in Britain would have been reviving this plan. It is true that in the last few days of January a number of people, Bethlen and Eckhardt amongst others, consulted Horthy about this, but it did not come to anything. According to O’Malley, Bethlen would have been prepared to travel to London as head of such an émigré government. In the end, the only outcome was that Tibor Eckhardt, with the regent and Teleki’s knowledge, set off for the United States in March but had to spend


weeks in Cairo waiting for the British authorities to grant him a transit visa. They advised Eckhardt to try ‘though American channels’ if he wanted to establish contact with Budapest.277 When O’Malley purportedly raised enquiries with Bárdossy over what steps had been taken to set up an émigré government, he received an evasive answer.278 It may have been to this conversation that Bárdossy was referring when he was tried on charges of committing war crimes before a people’s tribunal in post-war Hungary. There he ascribed to the British minister statements suggesting that O’Malley, on his government’s behalf, had approved Hungary’s efforts to regain Magyar-inhabited territories in Yugoslavia.279 It seems implausible that O’Malley would have made any such statements. Bárdossy was unable to recall the date on which this alleged conversation with the British minister was supposed to have taken place, even though he had an excellent memory. (The date of 1 April is mentioned in Macartney’s book.)280 The contents of a telegram sent by Barcza on 2 April more closely reflected the official British stance. This ran: 1) In so far as the Hungarian government allows, or facilitates, through the transit of the German army across her territory, that it should use her as a military base for attacking Yugoslavia, it should certainly expect diplomatic relations to be broken off by Great Britain, and all the consequences that entailed. 2) If, on the other hand, Hungary joins in the attack under any pretext whatever (e.g. defence of the Magyar minority in Voivodina), she must expect Great Britain and her allies (Turkey and perhaps eventually the USSR) to declare war. In that event, if the Allies are victorious, we shall be treated, on the basis of our conduct, as declared enemies of Great Britain and America, and indeed will stand accused of flagrant breech of the Pact of Friendship, because the interpretation applied here is that under the pact we renounced for the present any assertion of our territorial claims on Yugoslavia. The United States, whose attitude is already exactly the same as Britain’s and whose declared alliance to Britain is definitely to be expected, indeed, in view of shipping incidents, may come to pass before long, will display an analogous attitude towards us.281


In the dawn of 3 April, Count Pál Teleki put a bullet in his own head. Hungarian historiography has postulated a connection between the above telegram and his death.282 That view is not sustainable, for several reasons. The already quoted letter that Teleki wrote to Barcza on 12 March contained the following passage: if it should turn out that every British legation is withdrawn from this corner of the world, including that in Budapest, and our relation should, to our regret, be broken off, it is possible we might send one of you [an official at the Hungarian embassy in London] to Washington as a reinforcement.283 The prime minister had clearly reckoned with the possibility that diplomatic relations between the two countries might be broken off. Barcza’s telegram of 2 April could also have come as a complete surprise to Teleki, because he probably learned of the British standpoint as early as October 1940, when the issue had been the passage of German ‘study groups’ through Hungary en route to Romania. On Csáky’s instructions, Barcza had gone to the Foreign Office to enquire about the British response were passage to be granted. There are grounds for having some doubts about what was said to have occurred. Barcza recalled that he had spoken with Eden as well as Cadogan. But in October 1940 Eden was not yet foreign secretary and it is most unlikely that he would have received a Hungarian diplomat, even in a private capacity. Second, and more important, is the fact that Barcza dates the conversation in question to October 1940. If one reads his memoirs, it appears that the answer attributed to ‘Eden’ was that he would oppose Teleki’s policy of giving the Germans assistance, whether active or passive, ‘most particularly against a state such as Yugoslavia with which we had only just signed a Treaty of Friendship’.284 The YugoslavHungarian pact, however, was not signed until 12 December, so Barcza could certainly not have referred to it in October 1940. The various visits he made to the Foreign Office had become somewhat jumbled together in Barcza’s recollections. Moreover, the telegram referred to in the memoirs has not been located in the archives. This does not rule out the possibility that the October 1940 conversation did indeed take place, and Barcza may have reported the British stance. Barcza and


Teleki often exchanged letters by courtesy of the British courier, which could have happened in this particular case. There is no question that the 2 April telegram shook Teleki. He may have been hoping to the very last that the British would not break off diplomatic relations. But to claim this as the main reason for his suicide is no more than speculation. Teleki had a precise and thorough grasp of the British. At every step of his own foreign policy, he took account of the probable British reaction. The last time he and Barcza met in December 1939 (when the the latter was on leave in Budapest), Teleki told him, as already cited earlier (see Chapter 5): ‘I shall fight as long as I can against all madness, I shall defend our honour, I shall not betray the nation and the country, but if I cannot manage it, I shall put a bullet in my own head.’ And then: My nerves are good; I take lots of walks, I sleep and I am calm. But you have no idea over there what is going on here. It’s anarchy! Everyone is playing politics—especially those who should not be allowed to, because they are inept.285 It is also likely that his wife’s serious illness played a part in Teleki’s decision to commit suicide. Bárdossy was appointed his successor as prime minister. On 5 April Barcza reported that the previous day Cadogan had offered his condolences on the death of the prime minister.286 At the same time, he reiterated that if the Germans were to attack Yugoslavia, the latter would become an ally of Great Britain. If the Hungarian government were to allow passage to German troops in an attack against Yugoslavia, then Great Britain would regard Hungary as enemy-occupied territory and break off diplomatic relations.287 Later the same day Barcza sent a second telegram, this one to Bárdossy, asking him to consider the possibility of letting him transfer as minister to Ireland, in the event of a break with Britain.288 The new prime minister thought Barcza’s idea was sound. It met no opposition within the British Foreign Office either, with only Vansittart against it. Cadogan was positive when Barcza sought out his opinion.289 His plan was not carried through, because the Irish government rejected the request. On 6 April German troops launched an attack on Yugoslavia, partly from Hungarian territory. A few Yugoslav aircraft bombed German


positions, with some of the explosives supposed to have been dropped on and around the southern Hungarian cities of Pécs and Szeged. The rumour spread that British bombers had also taken part in the raids. That was not the case. This rumour was most likely propagated by those interested in manoeuvring Hungary into joining in the German campaign, and possibly leaked from circles within the General Staff. On 6 April Cadogan instructed O’Malley to take the necessary steps to evacuate the British legation from Budapest because ‘a decision is to be expected soon’ on the matter.290 Were such a raid to be mounted, the RAF machines would probably have set off for Hungary from bases in Greece, such as Crete.291 Given that German air raids on Belgrade had themselves started on 6 April, the British reaction was instantaneous, but the plan was overtaken by events. It is astonishing that Bárdossy, on 7 April, should have instructed Barcza to lodge the strongest possible protest with the Foreign Office over the alleged attack.292 The telegram from the prime minister and foreign minister stated that Hungary’s air defences had shot down six British aircraft. Barcza, however, had already telegraphed the previous day—on 6 April, in other words—that diplomatic relations had been broken off.293 That same day Macartney called on Frank Roberts at the Foreign Office to give him an account of the weekend he had spent at the Hungarian legation in London (Roberts had become deputy head of the Central Europe Department in late 1940). A few days before the breaking off of diplomatic relations, Macartney had found the legation staff very depressed. Roberts did not tell him that O’Malley had, in fact, already spoken to the regent. At the legation, Barcza informed Macartney that as long as Horthy and Bárdossy stayed in their posts he felt it was his duty, should it come to a break in diplomatic relations, to return to Hungary, because ‘he did not know better Hungarians’ than the regent and the prime minister. However, if he were to receive an instruction from Horthy to stay in England, he would do that and instantly resign from his diplomatic post. Meanwhile O’Malley had informed Bárdossy of the break in relations on 7 April. The prime minister in his turn protested strongly against the ‘British’ air raids of the previous day.294 This was the day of Pál Teleki’s funeral—a coincidence, but a symbolic one. AngloHungarian diplomatic relations went to the grave with Teleki’s death. During the evening of 10 April, Croatia proclaimed its secession from the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Before the day was over, Horthy


issued an army order in which, with reference to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, he announced: it has become our imperative duty to take in our hands anew the safeguarding of the fate and situation of the large number of Magyar people who are living on the territory that was torn away from Hungary in 1918. This is a sacred duty that we must fulfil without delay. I am therefore on this very day issuing an order to my soldiers to protect the Magyar people living in the Délvidék from the devastations of anarchy. The action of my soldiers is not directed against the Serbian people, with whom we have no quarrel and with whom we wish to live in peace in the future.295 On the following day, 11 April, units of the Hungarian army began to move into the Bačka and the Baranya Triangle. Churchill’s favourable disposition towards Hungary was evident even as Great Britain broke off diplomatic relations. Barcza records in his diary that before his interview with Eden, who officially communicated the break between the two countries (even though Cadogan had already done this), he had been in contact with Churchill, sending him a brief memorandum in which he set out the essence of the Hungarian position on Yugoslavia and its motives: I referred to the German pressure, the threats of occupation, the country’s destruction, the arrests and execution of our best people, the complete ruining of the country. I also mentioned that we wished only to regain the territory that had always been in Hungarian possession that was torn away from us, and we would not penetrate deeply into Yugoslavia. I finally asked Churchill that if it came to the point that breaking off of dipl[omatic] relations was unavoidable on grounds of principle, then would Britain at least refrain from declaring war, because there was no specific reason to do so [emphasis added].

The prime minister responded as follows: You, Hungarians, are very sympathetic people, but why, in God’s name, do you consistently take the wrong side! I saw in advance


where your policy would lead, perpetual compliance with German demands is a slippery slope on which, as I have already told you, there is not and cannot be any stopping in a long war like this…You are our friend and we are your friends. You have never lied to us, notwithstanding which you have always remained a sincere Hungarian and have been loyal to your government, and you were towards us as well. You can always count on our friendship and good will, wherever you may be. I shall comply with your wish: there will be no declaration of war, but I regret that I cannot avoid a break in relations as there are reasons of principle on which I must do so [emphasis added]. It was in large part on account of Churchill’s benign disposition towards Hungary that Great Britain did not declare war for months to come, despite being urged to take this step not only by his foreign secretary, Eden, but also by Stalin.296 On the other hand, the legend that in the wake of Teleki’s suicide the British prime minister, in some kind of an announcement or radio talk or speech to the House of Commons (all three versions have cropped up from time to time in Hungarian historiography, and hence in the daily press, perhaps under the influence of memoir writings), declared that at a peace negotiation of the future ‘at the conference table we shall place an empty chair for Count Paul Teleki’. The source is not specified, and my researches indicate that if the prime minister made any declaration along these lines, there is no knowing to whom it was made, or when, or what he said. On 9 April 1941 he spoke in the Commons about how the war was going. All that he said about Teleki was a remark that ‘Count Teleki preferred to take his own life rather than join in such a shameful deed’297 (that is to say, in the attack on Yugoslavia by German and Hungarian troops, which Hungarian officials attempted to justify on what British political circles deemed the risible pretext that Yugoslavia no longer existed). Churchill did indeed make a radio broadcast to the nation around then, on 29 April—a speech in which he quoted the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough (‘But westward, look, the land is bright’) but made no mention of Teleki’s name. In this talk he also made reference to his previous broadcast, on 9 February, but of course Teleki was still alive then. It is unlikely that the prime minister would have made any reference to a ‘vacant seat’ at any cabinet meeting, and if he did there would be some record of


this in the Public Record Office. There is not even a glimmer of a reference to such a declaration or speech in the British literature on the period, to say nothing of the fact that any such statement by then— unlike the promise made to Eckhardt and Auer in the summer of 1939 —would have had binding force. Churchill was generally very fastidious about what he said, where, when and to whom. In The Second World War he gave a fitting encomium: Shortly afterwards [Count Teleki] shot himself. His suicide was a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack against Yugoslavia. It clears his name before history. It could not stop the march of the German armies nor the consequences.298 The British press devoted considerable space to the news of Teleki’s death. There was a lengthy obituary in the 4 April edition of The Times, which included the following appraisal of his merits: Teleki never ran after the Germans as some of his Ministers have done. He acquiesced in Hungarian subservience because he thought that Hungary was helpless and that subservience was the lesser evil. But it is evident that Germany, faced with the Yugoslav uprising, has presented new and heavy demands on Hungary, possibly for more active co-operation in the German plan. As an honest patriot, Teleki could not accept them. As a servant of Germany, he could not refuse them.299 On 17 April Barcza paid a farewell visit to Foreign Secretary Eden. Eden asked him to communicate the following to his government: His Majesty’s Government has, until quite lately, tried to understand the undoubtedly difficult position your Government has found themselves in both externally and internally. We have shown more than one sign of this understanding. But now you have handed over your country to the opponent to England and have, almost simultaneously, attacked the country with which a few months ago you concluded a pact of friendship. This will remain an everlasting shame upon the reputation of Hungary. If a country is no longer master of her fate and voluntarily resigns


her independence, then at least she should not sign a pact of friendship which she then breaks. Tell it at home that England will remember that when peace will be made …Teleki was the last man in whom we had confidence. We shall have no more dealing with those who are now in power.300 Vansittart used tougher words in a note that he wrote to Eden on the same day. He now saw vindication for his virulent Hungarophobia: the Hungarians have always double-crossed us politically and militarily when occasion served, and yet people here have gone on repeating mechanically that the Hungarians were quite good fellows, because they danced with a few girls, backed a few horses, and bought some clothes in London…It is high time the Hungarian bubble was pricked …I hope you will have these people [Barcza and the Hungarian Embassy staff] cleared out of our country. A suspicious rabble.301 Vansittart had never liked Hungarians. One factor that may have contributed to his exaggerations is that around this time a certain Count Károly Lónyay had been successful in intriguing against Barcza and his colleagues. Lónyay was one of Beneš’ agents and was also in constant contact with other leaders of the Czech émigré community in London, including Ján Masaryk and Hubert Ripka. Evidently through Masaryk, he had already managed to cultivate contacts with various influential British politicians—R.A.Butler, for one—in 1940.302 His activities in England were even subject to surveillance by the British Ministry of Information. Although Vansittart may have been taken in by the lies that Lónyay spread about Barcza and his staff at the embassy, other Foreign Office officials were not. Cadogan suggested to Barcza that he might stay in London—as a private individual, it goes without saying—even after the rupture in diplomatic relations, should he think that proper. The diplomat did not avail himself of the generous offer and, by way of Lisbon, arrived back in Budapest in May 1941. He requested immediate retirement as he had no wish to serve Bárdossy further in any capacity. Following his departure, the representation of Hungarian interests in Great Britain was taken over by the Swedish legation.

7 Three Hungarian Prime Ministers as Viewed from the Historical Record

It has been suggested earlier that Anglo-Hungarian relations were never more important for Hungarian history than between 1938 and 1941. During these three years Great Britain was the sole world power that acted first as counterweight to, then outright opponent of, Hitler’s German Reich, which was weighing on Hungary and threatening the country’s independence. From May 1938 to December 1941 Hungary’s prime ministers were successively Béla Imrédy, Count Pál Teleki and László Bárdossy. All highly talented politicians and statesmen, the three differed in their personalities and characters. While Teleki sought to keep the by then unavoidable accommodation to the Third Reich within limits Imrédy and Bárdossy, albeit for different reasons, became representatives and spokesmen for unconditional alliance with Germany. All three paid for this tragedy with their lives. BÉLA IMRÉDY The political career of Béla Imrédy has, to this day, not attracted the attention it deserves in Hungarian historiography.303 Of the three men who governed Hungary as prime minister between 1939 and 1941, he seems the most mysterious figure. His political career is the least coherent. He was not an academic, as Teleki was, nor a civil servant and later career diplomat-turned-politician who became foreign minister and subsequently prime minister, as was Bárdossy. Nor was Imrédy a particularly charismatic personality. He was a first-rate financial expert who built up a wide range of personal contacts in London financial and banking circles. His appointment was received with satisfaction in the City and also in the Foreign Office. They looked on him as a decisive politician who took vigorous steps to muzzle his


country’s right-wing movements and was consistent in implementing his political and economic programme, his very person perhaps seeming to embody an assurance against an undue German or proGerman hold on Hungary. What prompted the change in Imrédy’s policy in September 1938? What was behind his political and personal mutation? Did he succumb to megalomania? What could have induced his turn away from Great Britain and his immediate move towards Germany and right-wing extremism—so much so that he was even to become a minister in the thoroughgoing pro-Nazi government under Sztójay in 1944? What were the initial stages of that trajectory? Béla Imrédy’s change in view cannot be ascribed to Germany’s imposing military might, even less to Hitler’s personal ‘magnetism’. It was not by the Munich Agreement that his faith in Britain was shaken and he switched to the ‘German line’.304 Imrédy was well-informed, capable of finding his bearings in European politics, and not dependent on the Hungarian press and clubs for his intelligence. He regularly scanned foreign magazines and newspapers, and regularly read The Economist.305 Before becoming prime minister he negotiated in London on several occasions, first as minister of finance and later as president of the Hungarian National Bank. After Imrédy became head of government, he asked a number of Hungarians who travelled abroad as financial experts or journalists to provide him with detailed written reports when they returned to Hungary. That he would have felt intimidated by what he saw at the Kiel naval review in August 1938 is neither sufficient nor convincing. The reasons for Imrédy’s change of heart may have been as follows. He saw the governing party and Hungarian society in all their ‘neoBaroque’ mediocrity and frailty. Many things suggest that Imrédy, partly with the aim indeed of taking the wind out of the sails of the alarming advances of the Hungarian National Socialist mass movement, abruptly decided to make himself leader of a new popular nationalist reform movement. That fitted in with his perception that old-fashioned conservative and liberal forces and anti-Hitler powers and politicians, internationally as well as in Hungary, were ‘played out’, obsolete, debilitated and unreliable. Imrédy was not alone in that perception: many thoughtful people all over the world at that time had the same or similar views. What is curious about Imrédy’s conversion is that it happened so speedily, perhaps within no more than a week,


in early September 1938. There is reason to think that this was largely due to an incident that demonstrated British irresponsibility. On 1 September 1938, following his return from Kiel, the prime minister granted a one-hour interview to the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (which the year before had absorbed the Morning Post).306 The following day’s edition of the London paper carried an article on the interview under a striking headline ‘No Hungarian Accord with Germany—Imrédy on Visit by Regent—Neutral Policy of Budapest—State as Obstacle to Nazi Expansion’. The correspondent opened his article by stating that Imrédy had received him at noon after a Cabinet meeting that had lasted till four o’clock in the morning. This suggested that the prime minister must have felt it singularly important to inform the British press as soon as possible, and at first hand, about German-Hungarian relations. The journalist, who did not quote Imrédy verbatim, summarized the main points of the prime minister’s statements. He accordingly described the key words of Hungary’s foreign policy as being ‘peace and justice’, and said that Hungary would ‘remain neutral’ in any European conflict. Political circles in London needed to understand that, due to its geographical position, Hungary had grown in importance since the Anschluss, becoming a’buffer state’. As far as German—Hungarian links were concerned, ‘economic interdependence certainly did not mean any political rapprochement’. London may have overemphasized the significance of the Bled Agreement, since its full implementation depended upon the future settlement of Hungarian minority problems by the states of the Little Entente. He hoped for ‘peaceful settlement’ of the Czechoslovakian crisis, because ‘Russian aircraft might ignore Hungarian neutrality and thereby cause Germany to ignore the new frontiers’. It is unlikely that Imrédy made any such statements. He probably did make a special point of emphasizing the peaceful intentions and reasonable aims of Hungarian foreign policy, but he would have not made repeated statements of neutrality following the Kiel encounter. Imrédy was too careful a politician to have said anything like that. It is also very doubtful that he would have called Hungary a ‘buffer state’. Imrédy was well aware that the German leadership, and Hitler especially, were keeping a close eye on him. He may have made some tenuous references to neutrality, which were simply exaggerated by the Daily Telegraph correspondent. That Imrédy chose this way to send a message to the British also seems implausible. Better channels were


available for that. He had no need to demonstrate his pro-British views. It is more than likely that he made some remark about London having sufficient understanding of Hungary’s foreign policy, but not that he said anything to the effect that ‘economic interdependence certainly did not mean any political rapprochement’ between Germany and Hungary. Imrédy had already been irritated by the series of articles on Hungary that another British newspaper, the Sunday Times, had run the previous month (see Chapter 3). It is hardly credible that two weeks later he would have uttered those statements that the Daily Telegraph correspondent ascribed to him. Imrédy was greatly upset by the 2 September article. The journalist had committed an indiscretion that undermined his faith in the trustworthiness of the British. Péter Sipos deals briefly with the article in his book, but the inferences he draws are exaggerated: The Az Est [a Budapest evening paper that printed a summary of the Daily Telegraph article later the same day] incident likewise provides evidence of Imrédy’s near-pathological fear and his urge to compensate for it. Under-Secretary of State Bárczy introduced Martin, an English member of parliament, to the prime minister, who is alleged to have said that no specific agreement or accord had been reached between Horthy and Hitler; since the Anschluss, Hungary had become a buffer state in the way of further German expansion into the Danube states, and she wished to remain neutral in any European conflict. Not only did the interview appear in the Daily Telegraph, it was also taken up by Az Est, and that was when trouble erupted. The German minister in Budapest protested vigorously, whereupon that edition of Az Est was instantly confiscated, the Briton was ordered to leave the country, and an official denial was issued. On September 2nd, Sztójay received instructions to inform the press office of the German foreign ministry that Imrédy had not given an interview, he had only been ‘chatting’ with Martin, who had made public what was spoken ‘in a mendacious and distorted fashion’…One cannot rule out the possibility that the text of the interview, and not the denial, lay closer to the truth of what Imrédy said to the English politician. What is important is not so much the factual


content of the affair as the panick with which the prime minister reacted to the raising of Berlin eyebrows [original italics].307 Perhaps Imrédy spoke with an English member of parliament by the name of Martin. Az Est, on the other hand, wrote about a journalist by the name of Martini [sic], not Martin, who was a political editor of the Daily Telegraph. The official Hungarian denial merely acknowledged that Imrédy had spoken with this Martini. Another assertion made by Sipos, that an English member of parliament was ordered out of Hungary as a result of the incident, is questionable. The Foreign Office papers about the affair make no mention of a MP by the name of Martin (nor of a correspondent by the name of Martini, for that matter). Sipos’ final conclusion, that possibly the text of the interview, rather than the denial, lay closer to the truth, does not withstand scrutiny. He does not cite, nor even mention, the 4 September edition of Az Est, which reported that the Daily Telegraph on 3 September had carried a further article under the headline The Hungarian Premier—Relations with Germany’. This article, filed from Budapest under Martini’s byline, makes the following statement: The message which I sent yesterday, which included some remarks made to me by M.Imrédy, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has given rise to some excitement in political circles here [Budapest]. Some parts of my message, which were obviously not given as coming from M. Imrédy, were assumed here to have been said by him. My introductory remarks, before I attempted to indicate anything the Prime Minister had said to me, caused particular excitement An explanatory passage about Hungary’s increased importance arising out of her new frontiers with Germany, because of her geographical position in Europe, was erroneously taken to have been a statement by M.Imrédy. This caused an official denial to be issued today…It was not appreciated in political and diplomatic circles here that only those sentences actually attributed to the PM were culled from our discussion. Other parts of my message were given as the result of numerous official and unofficial talks during the last few days [original italics]. The incident can be reconstructed with considerable accuracy from documents in the British Foreign Office archives. On 16 August 1938


—days before the visit by Imrédy and company to Kiel and Berlin—the Hungarian prime minister did indeed receive a British member of parliament, Sir R.Glynn, who happened to be passing through Budapest, and had a lengthy conversation with him. They had met before on a number of occasions. Imrédy had warned the Englishman that what was said between them should be regarded as strictly confidential until the imminent talks in Berlin had been completed. He expressed his pleasure at the opportunity to talk with an old acquaintance. To begin with, he made it clear that he had no intention of concluding any kind of agreement with the Germans. Although Germany was putting great pressure on him, and National Socialist propaganda in Hungary was very intense, Hungary wished to retain full sovereignty without either military or further economic cooperation with Germany. Imrédy told his English acquaintance that he would tell Hitler frankly that Hungary would remain strictly neutral in the event of trouble with Czechoslovakia, and would not permit the Germans to make use of Hungarian territory. Hungary, though weak, nevertheless intended to stand up to Germany. Its position as a buffer state added to its importance, and the Balkan states as well as Great Britain ought to recognize this and be willing to give every assistance to Hungary, which was ‘risking a good deal right now’. As regards the minorities, Imrédy noted that Hungary had the same views in regard to the Magyar minority in Czechoslovakia as Germany had for its Sudeten Germans and would expect similar conditions. Those were the salient points of the conversation with Glynn (Imrédy’s other topics were the programme for the forthcoming autumn session of Parliament and Hungary’s economic situation).308 Following this conversation Glynn circulated a six-point memorandum about expanding Anglo-Hungarian trade. The recommendations he made were more in the nature of whimsical ideas than a solid plan. The Foreign Office official got round to making the following comments on all this only on 21 October: ‘I think it is possible that Mr Imrédy was too politely acquiescent and so misled Sir R.Glynn, and his mood may have changed a little recently. However, it looks as though these various schemes will lead to nothing.’309 The British minister in Budapest was so startled by one of Glynn’s phrases that he turned to Imrédy for clarification. Imrédy of course denied having said anything of the kind, telling Knox, ‘No one in Hungary would ever dream of going so far afield for armaments. Did


Glynn think that Hungary had a sea-board, or had he confused us with Roumania?’310 Glynn’s mentor, as it happened, was Lady Listowel. Knox reported it to London. Little wonder, then, that the official reviewing the Knox’s report at the Foreign Office wrote on it: ‘Sir Glynn is sometimes rather muddled.’311 Taking this into account, it seems likely that after the Hungarian delegation had returned from Germany Glynn spoke with the Daily Telegraph correspondent, who wrote down what was passed on to him, and moreover wrote it in such a way as to suggest that Imrédy had said the things to him after the visit to Germany. It is even possible that Imrédy did not see this journalist at all, although the disclaimer Martini printed the next day in the Daily Telegraph (and hence in Az Est) makes this doubtful. Imrédy was alarmed that what he had divulged on 16 August had appeared in print. He wished to stay in power, and to do that he had no choice but to demonstrate his pro-German sentiment. The outcome of the affair was that the prime minister felt disgusted with the British; the episode shook his faith in their earnestness. On 4 September Imrédy made a big speech to a rally of approximately 40,000 farmers in the southern Hungarian town of Kaposvár, at which he proclaimed his ‘miraculous revolution’. He announced that he was going to place curbs on conspicuous wealth and introduce limits on high salaries. Promises were held out for radical land reform and a further tightening of anti-Jewish laws. On the question of land ownership, he stressed that the government would take over one-third of entailed properties bigger than 300 hold (170 hectares or 425 acres) and one-quarter of freehold properties bigger than 500 hold (285 hectares or 710 acres) for redistribution as smallholdings to tenant farmers. He also set out a detailed social programme that ran from creating a new fund to assist large families to starting a free-time movement, and announced the introduction of compulsory labour service for those exempted from military service, along with a reorganization of Hungary’s quasi-military Levente youth movement, established in 1920, into an overtly pre-army training corps. With regard to foreign policy, he reiterated that this rested on the principles of ‘peace and Justice’; not a word was said about ‘neutrality’ or acting as ‘buffer state’. The Kiel talks were characterized as having been conducted in a spirit of mutual confidence, friendship and cordiality. Moreover, far from declaring that London had made too much of the Bled Agreement, and that compliance with it depended on


the treatment shown towards the Magyar minorities in the Little Entente states, he claimed that the Agreement had been as favourably received by Hungary’s closest friends—Italy, Germany and Poland—as by public opinion in the West. This came just two days after publication of the fateful Daily Telegraph article. The prime minister may well have panicked when Az Est printed the British newspaper story. The Kaposvár speech, incidentally, was given lengthy coverage in The Times on 5 September. One further document is at our disposal in seeking an explanation for the change in his views. When György Barcza returned to Budapest on leave in January 1939 he called on Imrédy. A detailed account of the conversation appears in his diary. By then Imrédy had committed himself totally to an extreme right-wing line. He was head of a ‘Wondrous Stag movement’, was borne up by mass support and demagoguery, and the split between himself and the more conservative elements in the governing party had already occurred in Parliament. He nevertheless listened to Barcza respectfully. Here are a few passages of particular relevance: IMRÉDY: You see, in the autumn the Germans alleged that in London you said that in the event of a German-Czech war we would be sure to remain neutral SELF: That’s not true. I am far too experienced a diplomat, having studied at the higher levels of Ballplatz schooling, to make such a major declaration without instructions. All I emphasized at the Foreign Office and elsewhere is that we have always believed in peace and striven for peaceful resolution of every international dispute, as we have given proof in innumerable instances, so we hoped that the Czech question would likewise not lead to war. That is not a declaration of neutrality, and I had instructions from Kánya to say what I did, and I think it is something that can always be said, because it does not commit us to anything. IMRÉDY: Yes, quite right, it is something one has to say.312 (…) Imrédy thanked me for my work and asked me, if it was no longer possible to achieve and do anything politically, at least to nourish the English sympathies that still exist towards us [emphasis added].313


(Barcza also spoke with Horthy, Kánya, Bethlen, Teleki and Csáky during this visit, no doubt apprising them too as he had Imrédy.) In January 1939 Imrédy’s position was shattered.314 The regent was merely waiting for a suitable pretext to ask his prime minister to resign, having discovered that he had a great-grandmother of Jewish descent (‘tracked down’ with the help of Károly Rassay) provided just that. PAL TELEKI Count Pál Teleki’s second term as prime minister was inseparable from the primary aim of Hungarian foreign policy between 1938 and 1941, which was to maintain the country’s independence and stay out of the war. Of the three prime ministers during those three years, Teleki was the one whose Anglo-Saxon (both British and American) sympathies were the most sincere. That is not to say that Teleki was entirely proBritish, as his foreign policy did not, and could not, reflect an unconditional espousal of Great Britain. Teleki himself elucidated, in the letter he wrote to Barcza in May 1940 that has already been quoted (see Chapter 5), that during his premiership much more was in question than the upholding of neutrality that the British wanted to see: You may say that I have told O’Malley as well as de Vienne that it seems comical to me when I am continually being asked whether we shall preserve our neutrality and encouraged to do so. I told them that neutrality was child’s play compared with what is now at stake here. Because the fate of a nation over decades or even longer is much more important than preserving neutrality de part et d’autre [on either side] towards foreign states, the great powers amongst which treat it with the same brutality. For us the question of occupation or passage [that is to say, of whether German troops might occupy Hungary if she did not permit transit through her territory] is one of life or death and no game —life or death from our own standpoint. We owe a debt to our historical past, to the pride of today’s generation, and to our selfesteem and the fate of the generation to come. But we owe no debt in the form of neutrality to foreigners [emphasis added].315


Teleki did not expect much out of a possible victory for the Western powers. Unlike Imrédy and Bárdossy, however, who were afraid of the possibility of a German defeat (or, to be more precise, the consequences of such a defeat) even before June 1941, he sincerely wished to see the Anglo-Saxon powers win. He knew that his country’s sole chance of preserving its independence was what mattered, compared to which ‘neutrality’ was childish. Teleki was known in London as a professional geographer as well as a politician. He had earned a degree of respect in both fields. His appointment in Hungary was indeed welcomed both within the Foreign Office and by the British press. He was still remembered for having been a member of League of Nations committee that in 1926 had ruled in Great Britain’s favour on ownership of the Mosul oil fields on the Iraq-Iran border. As Hungary’s Chief Scout, he was on good terms with the movement’s founder Robert Baden-Powell. For all that, people knew that despite being a conservative with a deep social conscience, Teleki too was, among other things, openly anti-Semitic. Only three days before his appointment as head of government, a voluminous letter from him reached the Foreign Office.316 This was a memorandum he had put together on the historical origins of the Jewish question in Hungary. Teleki expounded at length on how the ‘Jewish Question’ was not an issue in the country because of German pressure, as many in Britain supposed, but was attributable to much more deeply rooted causes. He wrote about four imminent threats that had been faced in the course of the country’s thousand-year history: those from the Mongols, from the Turks, from Jewry, and from the Germans. Teleki was not judged for his anti-Semitism in London. His general esteem there largely concurred with O’Malley’s views. In the spring of 1940, the latter wrote in one of his reports that ‘for intelligence, honesty, courage and adroitness Count Teleki has no equal here in contemporary political life’.317 The Foreign Office understood (as Barcza did not) why Teleki had not relieved Csáky of his post as foreign minister. He did not want to provoke the Germans. Instead, he strove to draw foreign affairs as fully as possible under his own control. Csáky may have struck a tone that was a shade more ‘Axis-friendly’318 than did Teleki. The documentation shows that Csáky believed unconditionally in a German victory, whereas Teleki knew that it was only a matter of time before the Anglo-Saxon nations prevailed. Csáky and Teleki were men of a different stamp. They also were not of the


same generation. Teleki was born in 1879, Csáky in 1894. The latter was thus much more part of the set of diplomats who came to the fore during the prime ministership of Gyula Gömbös in the early 1930s— men who were nationalistic, and often narrow-minded. Teleki was a conservative patriot; Csáky was a nationalist.319 Until May 1940, Teleki managed to maintain a course that was as level-headed and neutral as was feasible. During the collapse of France, however, he may have thought that the war would soon come to an end. At the very end of May, he ordered Pelényi to remit the $5 million that had been transferred to America to fund an émigré Hungarian government, because the plan was not, as yet, timely. A remark that he made to the historian Domokos Kosáry around this time is significant: ‘right now the traffic is going through the gate from West to East, but it is conceivable that it will then come from East to West’.320 Not much later, in January 1941, he would send Kosáry off with a scholarship to study in the United States, asking him to suggest to Teleki’s friends in America (among them the geographer Isaiah Bowman, a past member of various territorial commissions of the 1919 Peace Conference at Paris who had some influence in US foreign affairs as a prominent member of the Post-war Foreign Policy Advisory Committee) that the Germans were probably going to lose the war, at which point Hungary might fall within the Soviet sphere of influence. His political foresight was evident in the fact that not long before his death he regarded the maintenance of American-Hungarian diplomatic relations as of growing importance—perhaps more important by then than Anglo-Hungarian relations. But retaining neutrality, and ultimately preserving the country’s independence and keeping it out of the war, was becoming ever more difficult. Did Teleki truly become disillusioned with the British later on, in December 1940? Did the appointment of Eden as foreign secretary mark a turn in Anglo-Hungarian relations? Neither proposition can be verified. Teleki sought, first and foremost, to conduct a self-sufficient policy. He wrote in a letter to Barcza: We ask nothing of anybody! We have not and shall not ask the Germans for anything. Nor the British either, of course. We just hope for sober understanding, if possible now, or at least in the generation to come. Our nation is not ephemeral, while their thought processes are slow.321


Those few sentences again demonstrate how good a judge of the English mentality Teleki was. Teleki did feel let down by the Hungarian public, saying to Barcza during their last meeting in December 1939: People rush after slogans, and everyone makes emotional politics. They do not want to believe me when I say this is destroying the country…Should Transylvania be returned, we shall bind ourselves in perpetuity to the Germans, who will then demand we pay the price. And that price will be fighting alongside them; the country itself will be the price paid for revision.322 Teleki was convinced that many of the territories ceded to the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy under the Trianon Peace Treaty had to be re-annexed to Hungary. But to him that revision was a long-term, step-by-step process. More significantiy, and very differently from both Imrédy and Bárdossy, he envisaged a process of co-existence with the peoples of the neighbouring states on some kind of confederate basis. Admittedly, he saw Hungarians as having the dominant role in such a set-up. In 1940 talks were going on in London between the Czechs and Poles about the possible construction of a postwar confederation—a scheme that Great Britain then backed. Hungary’s willingness to accept Polish refugees and the sympathetic treatment accorded them were evidence not just of a moral sense of responsibility on the part of the Hungarian prime minister, inducing him not to sacrifice the traditionally links of friendship between Poles and Hungarians. Teleki may well have been thinking ahead to Hungary’s joining an eventual post-war Czech-Polish confederate state formation, coming to his decisions only after taking into account and thoroughly weighing up a variety of considerations (this too was different from the quick decisions made by Bárdossy). Teleki may have pursued Hungarian policies, but he thought in a European perspective. He was not disenchanted with Great Britain, but he did have apprehensions—he worried that he was not adequately understood there. Hungary’s adhesion to the Tripartite Pact was not in itself regarded as a fatal error, either by the Foreign Office or by the British press, but a fundamental change had taken place by the spring of 1941. The Hungarian incursion into Yugoslavia brought the British to the verge of declaring war. That they did not was entirely Churchill’s


doing. (When Barcza, on instructions, attempted to argue in the Foreign Office that since Yugoslavia had ceased to exist, therefore the Yugoslav-Hungarian Treaty of Eternal Friendship was no longer valid, he was all but laughed at.) Teleki saw no escape from this situation and chose suicide. Several other factors may well have played a part in that decision too, including his own depressive state and his wife’s advanced illness, as well as Barcza’s telegram of 2 April. But there was no reason to question that his act was primarily based on deeply held moral considerations. Churchill himself placed that interpretation on Teleki’s deed. Almost exactly half a year after his friend’s suicide, Barcza noted in his diary: Might it not have been not just more honorable but also wiser to maintain independence of our state à tout prix, not to tack about, not enter the Axis, and better to have had ourselves occupied overtly rather covertly, as we are at present—an occupation which may yet easily become an overt occupation anyway? These grave dilemmas were the ones that put the revolver in the hand of poor, decent Pál Teleki, who was then made out here to have been ‘unhinged’, to have killed himself because he became unbalanced. Teleki saw clearly which way we were headed, what would become of us at the end of the thing: no honour and no country. Teleki knew what he was dying for.323

Teleki did indeed know. And Churchill understood his ‘message’. The British prime minister’s goodwill towards Hungary, however, could do no more than delay the inevitable. Britain’s formal declaration of war on Hungary came on 7 December 1941. LÁSZLÓ BÁRDOSSY László Bárdossy became foreign minister at a difficult period in February 1941; he took over as prime minister at a critical moment after Teleki’s death. He came from a family of petty-noble officials in the Hungarian provinces. His above-average intelligence and facility with languages marked him out early from his contemporaries. He moved in 1922


from the Ministry of Education to Foreign Affairs to become deputy head and later head of the press office there. In the early 1930s he was posted as counsellor to the Hungarian legation in London. Despite his fluency in the language, Bárdossy did not quite understand the English. It may indeed have been London that turned him into the saturnine personality that he became (his wife, who was sister-in-law to the then prime minister Gyula Gömbös, being a divorcée, was not acceptable to court circles in England under the etiquette of those times, and Bárdossy took great exception to this). That sense of affront was coupled with a quick temper, which was at least partly due to reasons of ill health.324 Bárdossy acquired influence in politics at the very time when Hungary needed politicians with a good understanding of Britain and its foreign policy. Instead here was a prime minister who was rather contemptuous, dismissive and at times condescending towards the British. Although initially he did not deviate in any important respect from the foreign policy line laid down by Teleki, he did not fully identify with it either. After Teleki’s death, Horthy, having offered the post of head of government to Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, who refused it, turned to Bárdossy to form the government—a figure much more to the Germans’ taste than Keresztes-Fischer, who was known to be no Germanophile. Bárdossy had a very contradictory character. His distrust of England may have played a role in his dislike for his minister in London. That antipathy towards Barcza would not be important or interesting in itself, but it also meant that he placed little credence in Barcza’s reports. The dislike was mutual. What accounted for the hostility between the two men, which was political as well as personal? It may plausibly have gone back to the mid- or late 1920s, when Barcza headed the Foreign Ministry’s political department and Bárdossy the press office. Barcza’s post was higher in rank, so Bárdossy frequently had to report to him. Possibly cooperation between the two sections was not without clashes. It may also be that Barcza, coming from the landed gentry and having spent much of his adult life abroad, treated Bárdossy with some superciliousness: at times Barzca was prone to act the ‘grand seigneur’ over others. Bárdossy, for his part, suffered from a sense of inferiority due to his relatively modest origins. It also appears in one of Barcza’s diary entries that Bárdossy had once had his eye on the ministerial post in London but was sent to Bucharest instead. Finally, when Bárdossy


became foreign minister in February 1941, the idea of setting up an émigré government was again being whispered in certain quarters, the corollary of which was that Barcza may have been a possible candidate for foreign minister. That conjecture had no serious foundation, but Bárdossy may have seen a political rival in his subordinate. He reacted at times with considerable irony to Barcza’s telegrams in early 1941, pointing out their noticeable contradictions and defending his own ‘correctness’. He may have been right from a legal standpoint, but he also tended to forget that Britain and Hungary were not fully comparable in their international position and weight. There were numerous manifestations of his failure of comprehension. On one occasion when O’Malley complained to him that the Hungarian newspapers had presented a visit to Canada by Queen Mary and the royal princesses as if they were fleeing from an increasingly unsafe Great Britain, Bárdossy gave as good as he got by pulling out a cartoon by David Low of the leaders of the Axis states and their allies that had appeared in the 14 December 1940 issue of Picture Post (which had reprinted it from the London Evening Standard). The caricature depicted Horthy as a dwarf standing in front of Mussolini, head bandaged and sitting in a wheelchair, flanked by a puffed-up Hitler and Tojo, with the rest in similar style. Stalin and Franco are both absent, represented by a pair of boots and a military cap on their respective seats. The caption ran ‘Witty reply punctures the Axis boasts: but the Nazi propaganda has had its effects.’325 The prime minister had obviously given it serious consideration, and while he was within his rights in giving what was intended as a snappy riposte to the British minister, he had not fully considered that he was the leader of a small Central European state while O’Malley was the representative of a belligerent great power. Bárdossy committed a more serious political blunder when, on 7 April 1941, he instructed Barcza to lodge a complaint about the alleged British bombing of Hungarian territory. He failed to check the truth of the allegation. That same rush to decision recurred many times in the course of his political career. Often it was near impossible to persuade him to change his mind. The personal antagonism between the two men degenerated into petty wrangling in May, after Barcza had returned home. The prime minister reproached the ex-minister to London for the impact that his


telegram of 2 April had evidently had on Teleki, thereby contributing to his suicide: I categorically rejected this base insinuation on the grounds that it was my duty as minister to report the truth and everything that responsible leading British statesmen said to me. It was not those who, by discharging their duties and being concerned for the freedom, honour and future of the country, strengthening the prime minister in his policy, carried responsibility for his death, but those who, by selling the country out to the Germans, had carried it along into war and ignominy,326 Barcza wrote.327 A serious political blunder on the part of Bárdossy (and Horthy) had major repercussions. On 23 June 1943 Molotov summoned József Kristóffy the Hungarian minister to Moscow, and informed him that the Soviet Union had no aggressive intentions towards Hungary, and in future would have no objections in regard to Hungarian territorial demands on Romania.328 Bárdossy withheld the minister’s report both from the regent and from his cabinet. On 26 June, several unmarked aircraft dropped a few bombs on the town of Kassa (Košice, Slo.). Horthy and much of the cabinet took the view that Hungary had been the victim of an unprovoked Soviet attack, to which the Hungary armed forces would respond. The next day, Bárdossy made a statement to Parliament: ‘The Speaker of the House has fittingly branded the illegal and despicable attack by the USSR. The Royal Hungarian Government concludes that in consequence of these attacks a state of war has come into being between Hungary and the USSR.’329 Bárdossy infringed the constitution by merely announcing the regent’s decision instead of asking immediately for parliament’s approval.330 It was during Bárdossy’s premiership, during which he retained the portfolio for foreign affairs, that Britain made its declaration of war, on 7 December 1941. A week later, on 13 December, Hungary declared war on the United States. The new prime minister-cum-foreign minister responded on 3 April to Barcza’s 2 April telegram, which had relayed the prospect that the British might break off diplomatic relations and, under certain conditions, declare war. He ordered the diplomat to notify him immediately whether the contents of the telegram reflected his personal


view of the official British position or not.331 Bárdossy might be forgiven for doing so, as Barcza had made no comment on the source of his information in the 2 April telegram. Nevertheless, its contents seemed authentic enough. Bárdossy was not convinced of that. Barcza’s reply: My ciphered telegram No. 58 was not a personal opinion, I reported as a matter of duty how the British government and Anglo-Saxon public opinion might foreseeably react under certain eventualities. From that point of view, the conversations taken as authoritative were primarily those I have conducted at the Foreign Office with the chief secretary [Alexander Cadogan, although he was actually permanent under-secretary of state]…I received identical advice from several confidential informants from circles close to the government. I reported on the British reaction that can be expected, based on these views from several diplomat colleagues and press circles.332 When it came to the declaration of war on the United States, Bárdossy’s actions were left wanting even from the standpoint of strict protocol. Herbert Pell, the American minister in Budapest, tried to show some sympathy in taking note of the Hungarian situation. Barcza visited him on 12 December and recorded in his diary: [Pell] said that yesterday evening he had been with Bárdossy, who, visibly agitated, had informed him that Hungary was breaking off official relations with America. Pell, who is a good friend of ours, told me that he had tried to feed Bárdossy, as an explanation for the communiqué, the suggestion that under foreign (German) pressure the Hungarian government had no other option, but Bárdossy had interrupted him and replied in a raised voice that there was no question of foreign pressure. The government was breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States independently of others, of its own free will. Pell tried again to make an impression on Bárdossy, as he would have liked to contrive that when he presented himself to report, he could tell Roosevelt something in favour of Hungary along the lines that, having been placed under terrible German pressure and duress, we had been compelled to break off relations with


the USA. But Bárdossy did not want to take Mr Pell’s wellintentioned hint and stuck by his assertion that there was no question of foreign influence on us; the step had been decided on by the government, and that was all there was to it.333 On 16 January 1942 Barcza, in his diary, wrote somewhat more sympathetically of Bárdossy: There are also those who openly declare that if only the Germans would take us over completely, there would finally be order here. What they mean by this ‘order’, of course, is that they would get into leading jobs, power, positions. Bárdossy, poor devil, sees this, knows it, but what can he do? He chose this path, now he has to go down it honorably, but he knows where the path is leading, whatever the outcome of the war…Poor Laci Bárdossy shouldered a superhuman task, taking on a suicide’s legacy, a hereditas damnosa whichever way you look at it.334 When Barcza once asked Bárdossy whether he was clear about the consequences that could be expected if Germany were to lose the war, he snapped back in typical irritation, ‘Then it will be your people’s turn!’ Obviously he was thinking of Anglophile Hungarians. That exchange is a startling illustration of something that cannot be overemphasized: at the bottom of Anglo Hungarian diplomatic relations there ran a sharp rift between the ‘Germanophile’ and ‘Anglophile’ approaches within Hungary’s political élite. Towards the end of the war, due to the shifts in the balance of world power and to the military division of Europe, the fate of the country took a different course from that envisaged by either Bárdossy or Barcza. But then where were they in 1945? Where, indeed.

PART II International Relations

148

8 The Structure of British Public Opinion

Trends in public opinion, and the manner in which they were expressed, were particularly important in making British foreign policy. The issues that exercised the general public, what it thought about them, and why, constituted one factor of a democratic tradition that could not be ignored by the government of the day. That was true after Hitler rose to power, and then from September 1939 onwards. A revealing light is provided by a speech Anthony Eden gave as foreign secretary to the Commonwealth Conference in 1937. With reference to the German menace then threatening Czechoslovakia and Austria, he noted: ‘There could be no greater danger than for the Government to declare themselves in favour of a policy which did not command the general support of public opinion at home.’335 This inclusion of public opinion as a factor to be taken into account may explain instead certain British decisions that Hungary found hard to accept, if at all. One example of this happened in September 1938, when most Britons had little or no interest in the territorial disputes between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House as it is often colloquially called, was (and still is) an independent organization for the study and discussion of international problems, with many links with the British government, the Foreign Office especially, and has become one of its key advisory bodies. Chatham House owed its foundation to an initiative of the members of the British and American delegations to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Institute (which received its royal charter in 1926) was set up in 1920, and many of its staff of 756 had a background in journalism. To mention just a few: C.P.Scott (long-time editor of the Manchester Guardian), Robert M. Barrington-Ward from the Observer (he became


editor of The Times in 1941), Geoffrey Dawson from The Times (editor 1912–19 and again 1922–41), R.D.Blumenfeld from the Daily Express, E.J. Dillon from the Daily Telegraph, and Sir Roderick Jones, proprietor of the Reuters news agency. More press interests sat on the Council of Chatham House, including, besides its chairman, John Jacob Astor, joint proprietor and managing director of The Times, the likes of Geoffrey Crowther, editor-in-chief of The Economist from 1938, and Elizabeth Monroe, also from The Economist (and from 1944 diplomatic correspondent for the Observer). These, then, were people who exerted an influence on British foreign policy not just through their newspapers; several others also worked for the Ministry of Information (Roderick Jones and the Canadian newspaper magnate Sir Campbell Stuart were members of the ministry’s advisory body). Distinguished experts on each given area of interest would regularly give lectures to and hold discussions with the closed membership of Chatham House, though there were occasions when outsiders would be invited to do so. On 19 December 1940, Lady Listowel gave a talk under the title ‘Why Hungary Had to Do It’ to explain the exigencies that had led Hungary to adhere to the Tripartite Pact.336 The contents of lectures, discussions and other specialist presentations would often be published in the Institute’s yearbook, the Survey of International Affairs, and the Quarterly Journal of International Affairs. The distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee became Chatham House’s director of studies in 1925 and was to hold the post until his retirement in 1955. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Foreign Research and Press Service was set up, under his direction, with the aim of carrying out political, economic and, occasionally, other specialist analyses for British government departments, the Foreign Office above all. Housed initially at Balliol College, Oxford, on Eden’s instigation it was moved to London in the spring of 1943 to become integrated as a department into the Foreign Office. Dozens of foreign affairs experts, university dons among them, worked there (177 in all by 1943), with 80 per cent of the budget being met by the Exchequer. Usually identified on British foreign affairs documents solely by the acronym FRPS, the organization produced manuals, memoranda, press reviews, analyses and reports for departments within Chatham House, on the one hand, and the Foreign Office, on the other.337 Research within the Foreign Research and Press Service was organized on a geographical basis. C.A.Macartney was responsible for Hungary

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 151

and Hungarian affairs, but on specific issues, particularly relating to the Czechs or Slovaks, R.A.Seton-Watson’s opinion would also be canvassed, although by then he was no longer regarded as the top expert as he had in 1919–20. Staff in the FRPS prepared abstracts from world press reports. They wanted to see, first of all, what tone various newspapers struck when writing about Great Britain and its allies. It is remarkable that from the autumn of 1939 until the early summer of 1943 Hungary was classed by them as a neutral state.338 The newspapers that were most regularly scanned were Függetlenség, Magyarság, Új Magyarság, the Pester Lloyd and Magyar Nemzet. Of these, Magyar Nemzet took at times an almost outspoken pro-English line, while the others were regarded as Germanoriented. Those who scanned the press paid special attention to the war goals of Hungary and the Allied powers; the Hungarian government’s foreign policy; domestic politics; Hungary and its neighbours. The speeches of leading Hungarian politicians, particularly Teleki and Csáky, were briefly summarized and sometimes, after the full text had been acquired, analysed in detail to see what passages each newspaper chose to recite from the speech, how, and in what context. They naturally took an even closer interest in the amount of space that was given over to statements by the British prime minister and foreign secretary, and the commentary that was attached to such reports. These reviews were then sent on to the appropriate desks within the Foreign Office. It is therefore not surprising that when Barcza politely but insistently asked the top officials at the Foreign Office, on one occasion, which Hungarian newspapers were taking a hostile stance towards Great Britain, he was given a very precise answer, backed up by specific examples. The Foreign Office had a whole apparatus in London to draw on, not merely its press attaché in Budapest. With the passage of time, the main task of the FRPS was increasingly at work on plans for reconstruction and politico-economic arrangements in the post-war world. Hundreds of memoranda were put together on how Central and Eastern Europe might be organized on a federative or confederative basis.339 In this area it collaborated closely with the Post-War Foreign Policy Advisory Committee, set up by the United States in 1941. Toynbee and the economist Leo Pasvolsky, head of the American body, met on many occasions to discuss in detail ideas about the shape of a world order under AngloSaxon leadership.


In 1939 a Ministry of Information was established to oversee press censorship and propaganda, located in the Senate House building of the University of London. This served as a channel of communication between the various governmental departments and the radio and press, along with tasks such as monitoring public opinion on specific issues and general morale. The sheer range of things that the MOI was keeping an eye on even during the highly critical final days of May 1940, with France collapsing and British forces about to be evacuated from Dunkirk, is remarkable, ranging from church attendances, numbers of cinema-goers, street graffiti and, not least, how people were taking the air-raid warnings. ‘Rumours’ was one of the headings that regularly featured in the reports filed with the Office. On 27 May 1940, for instance, it was reported to Senate House that the German invasion of the Isle of Wight—a pure fabrication, of course—was a constant topic of conversation among ordinary people.340 Stories about ‘fifth columnists’ were also rife in Great Britain during the war. Following Hitler’s rise to power, many refugees from Germany and, later on, Austria had reached the British Isles. The press ran growing numbers of articles about them, warning the population to be on the look-out. Posters were produced, usually showing British soldiers accompanied by women in civilian dress, with captions like ‘Tell Nobody, Not Even Her’ or ‘Keep Mum, She Is Not So Dumb’.341 One product of this fifth column ‘hysteria’ was the Sunday Chronicle’s 14 April 1940 issue, already referred to (see Chapter 5), which referred to the Hungarian refugees in Britain as ‘potentially dangerous aliens’, placing them in the same category as German and Austrian refugees. Somerset Maugham made use of the subject in his 1942 novel The Hours Before the Dawn. The MOI’s staff made regular detailed reports on the country’s morale. At the end of May 1940 the discipline and moral standards observed in the general population were better in provincial cities than in London. Men were more optimistic than women; the upper classes more apprehensive and less sanguine than the factory workers. The sharpest tension was perceptible amongst upper- and middle-class women, one reason for which is likely to have been that they were better informed about everyday matters than were working women.342 One of those who worked for the MOI for a while was Lady Listowel. Her lecture tours in the provinces were used to popularize official propaganda to her audiences, most of them enlisted soldiers. She was


also sent for the same purposes to the United States on several occasions. After a lame start, satirized by Evelyn Waugh in his 1942 novel, Put Out More Flags, the Ministry became much more effective when Brendan Bracken, who was c-lose to Churchill, took over from Duff Cooper as minister of information.343 To put the country on a war footing in 1939, the British government was equally dependent on support from Parliament, press and public opinion. The latter was expressed in a huge diversity of forms outside the press. Its traditional focus was Parliament, the significance of which was undiminished by the fact that the establishment of a coalition government for five years, from May 1940 onwards, more or less eliminated party-politicking. In May 1940 the Chamberlain government fell, despite its seemingly impregnable majority, after a lengthy debate in the Commons. Party political spokesmen and activists as well as trades union leaders had an impact on public opinion —indeed, they can be said in part to have embodied it. The dominant role in shaping what the masses thought, though, was that played by the media of the press, radio, and film newsreels. As Philip Bell puts it: ‘What the papers said, what was broadcast on the wireless, and what appeared on the screen made up an important element in public opinion, with an ambiguous role halfway between reflecting and forming others’ opinions.’344 The circulations of some of the more important daily newspaper titles in 1939 were as follows: The Times, 213,000; Daily Telegraph, 640, 000; Daily Herald, 2 million; Daily Express, 2,486,000; Daily Mail, 1,510, 000; London Evening News, 822,000; London Evening Standard, 390,000. Of these, The Times, Daily Express, Evening News and Evening Standard were independents holding conservative views, while the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail identified closely with the Conservative Party itself.345 Actual readerships were higher than the above circulation numbers, as in many households there would be more than one person who read the newspaper. There were instances where the press could be said to have taken a direct role in forming British domestic and foreign policy, as when Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of a large newspaper empire based on the Daily Express, became a minister in Churchill’s War Cabinet. John Jacob Astor, later first Viscount of Hever, as well as being joint proprietor and chairman of Times Newspapers Ltd, the publisher of The Times, and the Conservative Party member of parliament for the Dover


constituency, was also chairman of the council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and, as such, had indirect influence on the shaping of British foreign policy. He did this on a more informal level too, since Churchill frequently stayed at Hever Castle. In 1940 there were around nine million wireless sets in British households, with somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent of the population tuning in to listen to the BBC’s main news bulletins at 6 and 9 o’clock in the evening—a proportion that rose to 60 per cent when a talk by Churchill was broadcast.346 Britain’s cinemas sold close to 21 million seat tickets in 1940—a figure significant since newsreels that were a standard part of cinema programmes in those days. Both the radio and cinemas were kept under government control, although how much that had an influence on public opinion is hard to pin down exactly. The BBC played a major part in shaping public opinion. Hungarian broadcasts within the World Service began on 5 September 1939, with Béla Iványi Grünwald, György Tarján, György Mikes and their associates as the pioneers; Tarján went on from head of the Hungarian section to become head of the whole Central European department. It was they whom Vansittart had in mind when referring to ‘a suspicious rabble’ in his 17 April 1941 note to Eden: I annex a note which I have sent to Mr Strang about the rest of them at the BBC. I don’t want to bother you with this, as I will have them investigated. I only annex it as an illustration of the type of people we have to deal with, he wrote.347 One person who occasionally contributed to those Hungarian broadcasts was the historian C.A.Macartney. Famed for the broken idiom of his Hungarian, he regularly opened his talks with the words ‘Itt Macartney Elemér beszél’—‘Here Aylmer Macartney speaking.’ On Teleki’s death, he delivered a moving eulogy of farewell to the prime minister and his friend. In the spring of 1941, the Ministry of Information appointed one of its own men, A.P.Ryan, as an adviser to the BBC. Shortly after taking up this post, he wrote the following to his superiors: The state can require the BBC to broadcast, or to abstain from broadcasting, anything it likes. What it cannot do is to require listeners in this country or abroad either to listen to or to believe the BBC.’348 The news


bulletins broadcast in Hungarian by the BBC World Service were very popular, especially among the intelligentsia. As the war ground on, they were joined by more and more people.

156

9 Anglo-Hungarian Economic links

Anglo-Hungarian economic links during the inter-war period were narrow in scope. Distant and relatively small in area, Hungary was not of much importance to Great Britain. Its geographical situation dictated that Hungary sought to trade with Italy and Germany first and foremost. That course was only reinforced after Austria and Czechoslovakia ceased their independent existence, since this brought the Third Reich to the country’s very doorstep. For all that, the AngloHungarian economic relationship, trading links included, grew impressively till 1938. Two weeks after the Second World War broke out, The Statist, a British weekly journal of world affairs, finance, industry and investment, brought out a special survey devoted to Hungary in which Hungarian financial and business experts analysed various aspects of Anglo-Hungarian economic relations. Among others, Lajos ReményiSchneller, the minister of finance, Antal Kunder, the minister of commerce, Lipót Baranyai, president of the Hungarian National Bank, Károly Lamotte, a bank director, and Baron István Splény, president of the Hungarian Board of Foreign Trade, set out their perspectives. The articles were introduced by Barcza, who wrote a few words about the traditional friendship between England and Hungary. He repeated the usual platitudes about the parallel development of British and Hungarian society, with the near-contemporaneous signing of the Magna Carta (in 1215) and the Golden Bull (a comparable document that fractious barons compelled Hungary’s King Andrew II to sign in 1222). Count Kálmán Almásy, the commercial secretary at the Hungarian Embassy in London, outlined the significance of AngloHungarian economic relations in an article that, like his minister, suggested a broadly political approach to the topic. He noted that

158 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Table 1: Hungarian balance of trade with Great Britain during the 1930s350

Hungary represented a negligible factor in the foreign trade balance of the British Empire, with its enormous material resources. Because of the war, however, he was concerned, first and foremost, about the dangers of losing foreign investments (and, implicitly, British investments in particular). In closing, he expressed the hope that the two countries would remain interested in expanding their trading relations since both Great Britain and Hungary were striving to maintain ‘freedom’ and ‘the elements of a civilised life’. Although Germany and Italy were very clearly the biggest purchasers of Hungarian agricultural produce by 1938, the British share in Hungary’s foreign trade was still considerable. Back in 1923, just 1.6 per cent of all Hungary’s imports originated from Great Britain, but that had grown to 6 per cent by 1938. The figures were much the same for the share of Hungarian exports going to Britain, rising from 2.5 per cent in 1923 to 8 per cent in 1938.349 During the first half of 1939 the balance of trade shifted in favour of Great Britain, with British imports to Hungary growing by 2.6 million pengő and Hungarian exports to Britain declining by 2.7 pengő. It was evident that Britain’s share in imports to Hungary had surged from 1927 onwards, topping 30 million pengő by 1931. In 1931 there was a steep decline, with the value of those imports dropping to 20 million pengő and then below that the following year. From 1939, due to the effect of the war, another large decline occured. Turning to Hungarian exports to the British Isles, a dramatic upturn was seen in 1929 and still more in 1930 (to 51.5 million pengő), then after the sharp


Table 2: Hungarian poultry exports 351

*1 quintal=100 kg=approx. 2 hundredweight drop in 1932 renewed growth from 1935 to near the 1930 peak, only to fall back to minimal levels in 1939. From 1936 onwards, Anglo-Hungarian trade was governed by a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that 60 per cent of the value of Hungarian exports to Britain would be used to purchase British products, primarily finished goods. In reality, there were difficulties in achieving this, due primarily to three factors: a) Britain’s protective tariffs; b) British quotas on meat imports; and c) disparities in Hungarian and British market prices. The protective tariffs had an especially adverse impact on exports of Hungarian poultry. Nevertheless, since Hungarian turkeys—the biggest export item in this category—were of smaller weight than their British equivalents, this did not impinge on British turkey farmers’ interests because they were purchased primarily by the less well-off consumers. The import duty on a Hungarian turkey was 3d. Foreign Secretary Halifax made a desultory attempt in late 1938 to have that reduced: his proposal was rejected. The meat quotas had a big (and for Hungarians unfavorable) impact on the second major export item, which was bacon, while price disparities worked against three major items of imported produce for Hungary: fat, butter and cheese.


Table 3: Main British goods imported into Hungary (in millions of pengő)352

Table 4: Main Hungarian export goods to Great Britain (in millions of pengő)353

Anglo-Hungarian trade diminished sharply from 1939, ceasing altogether from the summer of 1940 with Italy’s entrance into the war. As far as the parity of the British and Hungarian currencies is concerned, the pengő was boosted in relation to sterling over the period between 1938 and 1941. By the spring of 1941 the exchange rate had risen to £1=20 pengő from the previous year’s rate of £1=27–28 pengő —a move that was encouraged under pressure from Germany, which successfully applied the same tactic to other states. As time went on, that factor was of ever smaller significance for Anglo-Hungarian relations.

10 Anglophilia in Hungary and AngloHungarian Intellectual Exchanges

‘“Pro-English”: By 1939, at the latest by 1940, this adjective would encompass many things: liberal, democratic, humanist, proJewish, even Catholic on occasion, anti-Nazi in every case.’354 may add to these other attributes, such as respect for tradition and the repudiation of demagoguery in any shape or form. Pro English sympathies were discernible at various levels of society in Hungary between the two world wars. Traces of it were to be found amongst the aristocracy and the upper-middle class as well as in a segment of the intelligentsia, one possible explanation for which may have lain in character traits and forms of behaviour, in other words, the human qualities associated with Englishness. Features in the history of the two countries that were deemed analogous and repeated from time to time by official propaganda in Hungary during the inter-war period—that matter of the nearcontemporaneity of the English Magna Carta and Hungary’s Golden Bull, the institution of the monarchy, and the role played by the aristocracy in social development—may also have had a hand in the manifestation such sympathies. (For the English such historical parallels with distant little Hungary were hardly more than an inconsequential curiosity.) Sympathy for England and the English ran more widely and deeply. It also showed itself in the favourable reception, indeed extraordinary popularity, of works by English writers. The novels of Somerset Maugham were widely read in Hungary during the late 1930s. When Sándor Hunyady explored the reasons for this in an article, a response that he elicited from readers was that they liked Maugham because they liked the English—not the writer, nor even his works, but the English. Hunyady described this sentiment: ‘No doubt a goodly number of British passports could be issued around the world to people


who are not citizens of the Empire, and may not even speak any English, but deep down…sense a fellow-feeling with the English.’355 That sympathy was all the more remarkable in the late 1930s because of the might of Nazi Germany. By no coincidence, the Arrow Cross Party and movement was making great headway in Hungary’s political life. Great Britain, by way of contrast, embodied a state of parliamentary democracy; part of Britain’s intellectual life represented a typically liberal ideology; and the British financial world of London’s City displayed the power of capital (partly of Jewish origin). With its democratic institutions and centuries-old traditions, Great Britain stood for the past—for what was not reckoned ‘modern’. Many intellectuals and politicians, not just in Hungary but across Europe, including some who would formerly have counted themselves as Anglophiles, discerned eloquent proof of decadence in British liberal democracy, a sluggishness in responding to a new world. The French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle wrote, with reference to the English, in February 1941: ‘Why do you think that this people who are falling back before Mussolini and before the Japanese would help us stop Hitler?’356 One can also cite Pierre Laval. In August 1940, the former French prime minister and now Marshall Pétain’s minister of state and deputy prime minister met the diplomat-writer Paul Morand. Morand told him that the English would hold out and there would be no German invasion, to which Laval responded: It’s possible. But this doesn’t mean that the English haven’t missed their chance. They will not win the war. I have no ill will towards them, but England’s day has passed. No matter what happens now, she will lose her empire. Tomorrow, she will become a Holland. She will not gain a foothold in Europe again. She left it forever when she reembarked at Dunkirk. She did not want to divide the world with Germany and the world is going to get away from her. Everything that doesn’t end up by being Russian will be American…It is no longer the English who are going to win the war—the British empire will become an American empire.357

But had England’s day actually passed by 1939 or 1940? Neither Drieu la Rochelle nor Laval and other Frenchmen of like mind, such as


Admiral Darlan and General Dentz, really understood the English. That under extreme conditions, in wartime especially, a mix of national pride and self-identity and an ancestral sense of individual freedom fused to create the attributes of a unique patriotism was convincing evidence displayed in the autumn of 1940 during the bombing raids of the Battle of Britain. That failure to understand Britain was to be found not just among French politicians and thinkers. Ribbentrop entirely misread the English when he served as German ambassador to London. In 1937 he passionately expounded at great length to Churchill, then still a backbencher, Germany’s determination to achieve dominance over Europe. The future prime minister’s response to this foreshadowed what was to come: When you talk of war, which no doubt would be world war, you must not underrate England. She is a curious country, and few foreigners can understand her mind. Do not judge by the attitude of the present Administration. Once a great cause is presented to the people all kinds of unexpected actions might be taken by this very Government and by the British nation [emphasis added].358 The English mind seemed ‘unfathomable’—‘impermeable’, as the writer László Cs. Szabó characterized it—to much of Hungarian society as well. The reasons for this were not merely the obvious ones, such as the country’s German cultural traditions and the geographical proximity of Germany, with its ever growing economic and intellectual influence. Memories of the First World War and the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary were still very much alive for the different generations. The English way of thinking was a far cry from the German frame of mind. It was typical not just of Churchill and other major British politicians, such as Halifax, but of the English in general that they always strove to adjust their thinking to the particular circumstances, never the other way round. For many foreigners that was hypocrisy, and the expression ‘Albion perfide’ was never far from their tongues. Sympathy and respect for England had diverse components in Hungary of the 1920s and 1930s. In aristocratic circles, there was a cherishing of traditions, the gentlemanly code of conduct, a belief in fair play. For Hungarian aristocrats, England was often one of the favourite places to visit. Among other things, England was the


birthplace of such sports as tennis and horse racing. The majority of Hungarian aristocrats despised and spurned the brutality of National Socialism, while during the Second World War they sincerely believed that England, weak though it looked in some respects, could be an effective counterweight to German discipline, precision and military might. That conviction shines though from the letter that Legitimist Count Antal Sigray wrote to Churchill. He told the British prime minister not only that Hungarians believed in ultimate victory by Great Britain and its allies, but that only a British victory could bring peace and freedom to Europe and the world, which would in turn give the Hungarian nation the chance to shape their own future.359 Sigray wrote that letter in October 1940, when Britain was going through its darkest hour and was holding its ground alone, without allies, against a Germany that had conquered virtually the whole of Europe. Besides such affinities Hungarian aristocrats were taught to read and write not just German and French but also English. They subscribed to English newspapers and bought English books; during the war they listened to the BBC’s broadcasts. English style tended to predominate in their way of dressing. Their very conduct was modelled on gentlemanliness and fairness. When Count Kunó Klebelsberg was the Hungarian minister of education, mainly during the 1920s, English was made compulsory for the upper years in 30 of the top secondary schools in the country (most of them run by the Protestant churches). At the University of Pest British history had been taught since 1777, while English language teaching began in 1806, and a full-blown English department was established in 1886. The second English department in the country was set up at the University of Debrecen, opening in 1938 with Sándor Fest as its head. The Hungarian upper-middle classes felt much the same way as the aristocracy about the English. Amongst them were to be found luminaries of the diplomatic corps who, like Barcza, had received their training at the diplomatic academy in Vienna when the AustroHungarian Empire was still in existence. These were representatives of a high-minded conservatism that rejected the extremes of the right and left wings alike. Among those of this school were Barcza’s predecessor in London, Szilárd Masirevich, and János Pelényi, who represented Hungary in Washington between 1933 and 1940. One may also place into the same category aristocrats who chose careers as


diplomatists, the likes of Baron Iván Rubido-Zichy, Baron Gábor Apor, Baron György Bakách-Bessenyey (supposedly the model for the main character in one of Dezső Kosztolányi’s short stories, ‘Diplomat’),360 and Count Sándor Khuen-Héderváry. They became members of the group around Bethlen and Kállay who later in the war were to put out feelers for peace talks with the Allied powers; they had stood up to and opposed the dictatorial inclinations of the semiliterate, chauvinistic henchmen of the Gömbös era in the early 1930s; and they hung on to their faith in a British victory, even at a time when some British politicians were themselves divided in their belief about the chances of Britain.361 Hungarian intellectuals, writers, journalists and artists also had a significant place and role in Anglo-Hungarian relations. As a rule liberal in outlook, avowed democrats, and often, though not necessarily, Jewish by background, they were strongly inclined to what England signified and represented (viable parliamentary democracy, the assertion of minority rights to balance majority rule, and intellectual freedom). It would be wrong to draw the inference that those who fell into this ‘urbanist’ camp, as it was often called, were Anglophiles, while the rival ‘rural populist’ camp inclined towards the Germans. Hungarian Germanophilia did not always imply identification with National Socialism, while even among supporters of democracy there were those who had little or no taste for England. Still, in the eyes of liberal writers, publicists, economists and financiers it was England that embodied the example for Hungarian society to emulate. The most distinguished writers and poets around the periodical Nyugat (West) admired English values. They played an important role in transmitting and spreading English literature to Hungary. Returning from a trip to London, Dezső Kosztolányi recounted his impressions in an eight-part series of articles in 1927. One of these was devoted to Shakespeare, whom he idolized and several of whose plays—Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale—he translated into Hungarian: As I walk around these streets, I seek him everywhere. Why else would I wander about in this foreign country? Its politics, institutions and organisations are moderately interesting… Everything I see or hear I relate to him. This is the language in which he thought and wrote…The black man who walked off in front of me reminded me that Juliet’s face ‘hangs upon the cheek of


night/Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear’. His way of looking transformed the world, and me too. All his similes and figures still live. I was hoping that I might encounter him.362 He may not have met Shakespeare, but he did meet John Galsworthy, H.G.Wells, the journalist and economist Norman Angell (who received the Nobel peace prize in 1933), and Lord Haldane, the Labour Party’s first lord chancellor. Besides Shakespeare, he also rendered poems by Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Yeats into Hungarian. Kosztolányi visited London, again in late 1931, as president of the Hungarian PEN Club, getting to meet Lord Rothermere, among others. The latter offered to put up a prize of £1, 000 for the writer of the best Hungarian literary work (the first award, in early 1932, was shared between Gyula Krúdy and Zsigmond Móricz). Kosztolányi wrote about this offer in a letter to his wife: Rothermere granted me an informal and most surprising audience in his apartment. I handed over a copy of my Nero ‘with my humblest tributes’. The minute I began to speak about the sorry state of our literature, he leapt to his feet, slapped the table and put up £500 as a prize for the best work that had been published in 1931, then changed his mind and offered £1,000. Tears welled into my eyes.363 (With a foreword from Thomas Mann, a translation of Kosztolányi’s 1922 novel—from the German, not the original Hungarian—was published in New York under the title The Bloody Poet in 1927, and in London, by Gollancz, under the title Nero in 1928.) Several others amongst the distinguished poets associated with Nyugat, apart from Kosztolányi, tried their hand at setting Shakespeare into Hungarian. Mihály Babits had tackled The Tempest in 1916, Lajos Áprily did it for Pericles, whilst Lörinc Szabó translated the sonnets. As director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Sándor Hevesi did much to proselytize the Shakespeare cult, producing eight cycles of his plays during the ten years he was at the helm: there was a period when as many as 19 Shakespeare plays were in the repertoire at one time.364 He regularly wrote about Shakespeare in essays for Nyugat and the Pesti Napló newspaper. In 1920 wrote a book with the title The True Shakespeare.


Appraisals of Britain’s greatest living dramatist, G.B.Shaw, in the Hungarian press were mixed. On his seventieth birthday in 1926 he came in for as many brickbats as plaudits. While the Pesti Napló and Népszava paid compliments, Magyarság and Új Nemzedék furiously attacked not just him but also Sándor Hevesi, the assiduous promoter of his works on the Hungarian stage. A letter that Shaw wrote to Karel Čapek to mark the tenth anniversary of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1928, which was published in the Prague newspaper Lidové noviny, counted as a mark against him. In this, the playwright expounded his views about the respective merits of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak political systems, noting that he would rather be a Magyar subject in Czechoslovakia than a Czech under Hungarian rule. For two years afterwards not one of Shaw’s works was performed in a Hungarian theatre except for the National Theatre in Szeged.365 British supporters of the ‘Justice for Hungary!’ campaign sent anti-Shaw protests to the correspondence column of the Daily Mail. Ferenc Kiss, the London correspondent for Az Est, asked Shaw to clarify the remarks that had been published in the Czech paper. In his reply, Shaw made it clear that he too objected to the Trianon Peace Treaty, but he characterized the Horthy régime as Europe’s ‘most reactionary feudalism’. He closed with the following words: I am amazed and sorry that people in Hungary should instantly lose their soundness of judgement and attack me on account of the candid disclosure of this [his statements about the Horthy régime], presenting me as opposed to revision and the Hungarians. In doing so, they are unintentionally serving the interests of the real opponents of revision.366 Around 1928 and 1929, the idea of founding a Hungarian Fabian Society was mooted in ‘urbanist’ circles. Rusztem Vámbéry published an essay on the history of Fabianism in Századunk (Our Century), the journal of the Civic Radical party, making a number of references to Shaw’s activities within the Fabian Society in England.367 Such a society was established in September 1929, with Vámbéry and like-minded associates Béla Zsolt and Zoltán Szász. Századunk fulfilled of much the same role in interpreting British social scientists as Nyugat did for English writers and poets. Virtually every issue of the journal, especially from the mid-1930s onwards, proposed


the virtues of British democracy, as compared with National Socialism and Bolshevism. Those who wrote for Századunk kept a close eye not only on British political life but also on the image of Hungary that was held in Britain. When C.A. Macartney published a volume on Hungary for publisher Ernest Benn’s ‘Modern World Series’ in 1934, this was reviewed by Imre Csécsy, Századunk’s editor-in-chief. In his assessment the book presented an objective picture of the country, and ‘at long last, after all the Rothermereian prattle, serious words are again being addressed from England to European-minded Hungarians’.368 When Századunk and a number of other left-liberal magazines were closed down by a governmental order in 1938, Csécsy set up a book publisher under the same name. The next year they brought out in Csécsy’s own translation a 1926 collection of speeches and lectures that former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had originally published under the title On England. In his preface, Csécsy, a stalwart of the Civic Radical Party’s ideas, wrote: Conservatism, at least in England, stands first and foremost for tolerance and understanding for all, even for one’s opponents; wherever possible the avoidance of force, whether that should take the form of revolution or autocracy or war. And the Conservative Party that, with a brief interruption, has been in government in Britain from the early Twenties down to the present day has sought to implement that principle at any price, not only in domestic politics but also in its international relations. How successful it has been, especially in foreign policy—that, of course, is quite another matter.369 Tolerance, understanding and the eschewal of force—those were values avowed not just by Csécsy and his associates but by many educated Hungarians of other persuasions and tastes. They looked to England as the embodiment of those values with respect and a vague sense of expectancy. The works of English writers and poets gained currency more easily in Hungary than did the speeches of politicians. Among contemporary writers, besides Shaw, H.G.Wells and Aldous Huxley became best known. Wells was introduced to a Hungarian readership through the efforts of Frigyes Karinthy, Huxley through those of László Cs. Szabó and Antal Szerb. Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance, appeared in


Hungarian slightly less than two years after its publication in England in 1932. It was enthusiastically received by the reading public but not by critics. In Nyugat, Andor Németh called it ‘tawdry and rather vulgar mental gymnastics’, while in Válasz Ferenc Fejtő upbraided Huxley for its ‘emotional poverty’. In 1937 Cs. Szabó, writing in Nyugat, drew attention to the novel’s merits, and it was he who produced a spirited introduction to Huxley’s next work, Eyeless in Gaza, when it appeared in Hungarian in 1937. (Pieces by both Wells and Huxley, along with Maugham, D.H.Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, were amongst those selected by Vernon Barker for an anthology published by the Nyugat publishing house in 1935 under the title A Contemporary English Decameron.) Huxley and Wells were not well informed about Hungarian literature. Lajos Hatvany wrote from Oxford to his friend Gyula Földessy: I have just got here from London, where I attended a PEN Club dinner…At the banquet, I sat next to Wells…I didn’t know what to say to him. He had not heard of a single Hungarian author.370 László Cs. Szabó took a keen interest in English literature and British culture from early student days. He made his first trip to England when he went with Béla Padányi-Gulyás to Oxford as a delegate of the Hungarian Students’ Union (the president of which was Pál Teleki). His second visit took place in 1936, when the 3,000 pengő that he received as a Baumgarten Prize funded the journey. He related his experiences and impressions in Doveri átkelés (Crossing at Dover), published the following year. He enjoyed London, and was enchanted by the city. He made excursions out to Richmond and to Battersea, visited the BBC, and saw a ballet. He recorded a conversation in which one of the editors of The Economist, during his analysis of the 1919–20 Paris Peace Conference and its outcome as well as the weaknesses of the Western democracies and the League of Nations, suddenly came out with the remark, The time will come when Britain is not going to retreat further before Rome, Berlin and Tokyo.’371 He said farewell to England in Westminster Abbey. Several decades later, in an interview that he gave in 1968, he was rather critical of his book: In places it is dated to the point of unreadibility, at least in my opinion, because it analyses the then-current economic situation


with a cocky expertise [Cs. Szabó had qualified as an economist] that even I am unable to follow these days. It would not be worth the bother either. I would have done better to write about what I saw and heard on the Underground, at dog tracks and flea markets, down by the docks which were then still going at full blast, and around the dinner tables at communal meals in the second-class hotels of Bloomsbury. Cut-price the hotels may have been, but what a privilege! All of them just a few streets away from Virginia Woolf s house. At that time the malicious gossip about the dictatorially inclined artists and writers who resided in Bloomsbury was making the rounds, amongst their enemies, that they lived in love triangles within the squares.372 English poetry was also loved by Cs. Szabó, and by Gábor Halász, István Vas and Antal Szerb, along with Mihály Babits, whom that generation of writers revered as their master. He was among its most ardent promoters. Apart from classics and contemporary works of English literature, a long list of masterpieces of fiction for children were translated into Hungarian at this time. Kosztolányi made a rendering of Alice in Wonderland, Karinthy of A.A.Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, while Marcell Benedek translated Travers’ Mary Poppins and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. A serious work that surveyed and analysed English literature was Antal Szerb’s 1929 Outline of English Literature, a preparatory study for the comprehensive History of World Literature, which appeared twelve years later. It was the latter, along with his A History of Hungarian Literature, published in 1934, that won many Hungarian readers over to Szerb. Few other writers have been able to write with such intimate familiarity about English writers and literature, or about London and England, as he did. In his analysis of Dickens’ oeuvre, for instance, he summons up this writer’s characters and the locales in which they are set: Dickens is a writer of the metropolis: no other novelist’s city feels so much a city as Dickens’ London…Here it is always foggy, always winter and night-time, but in the dark the lights of all manner of cosy hearths and friendly lamps burn in snug little homes. London is full of curious old houses and street details, but it took Dickens’ magic to extract from them the concealed


ambience and mystery, the shiver and furtive private delight that everyone feels on hearing the word ‘London’.373 Among Szerb’s achievements was an excellent translation of one of Maugham’s works, Theatre, which first appeared in Hungarian in 1938. Szerb had the analytical skills to compare the works of Babits and Swinburne, two ‘intellectual’ poets, both masters of prosody, in his review of the Swinburne translations that Babits had produced.374 Thanks to a scholarship Szerb had been able to spend a fairly lengthy period in Britain in 1920, when he was just 19. The impact that study trip had on him left its mark on some of his own fictional works, such as The Pendragon Legend. The luminaries of Hungary’s literary world did not only translate and keep up with the English classics or the famous living writers and poets. They also chose others with little or no reputation to speak of. In 1932, Charles Morgan, drama critic for The Times, published The Fountain. Aladár Schöpflin, one of the highly respected editors and critics of Nyugat, wrote an introduction to the Hungarian translation in which he made a number of striking pronouncements about English literature, describing The Fountain as an outstanding work (Szerb did not mention it in his History of World Literature). There was no counterpart in England to all of this, primarily due to difficulties in getting adequate translations. A few outstanding Hungarian works did occasionally get into print—such as Kosztolányi’s Nero, Imre Madách’s play The Tragedy of Man, which appeared in 1933, or Karinthy’s autobiographical book A Journey Around My Skull in 1939. One attempt to introduce Hungarian literature to Britain and America was made by the periodical The Hungarian Quarterly (it still exists, under the same title, and had a French equivalent in the Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie). This was founded in 1935 by the Hungarian Quarterly Society, the president of which was Count István Bethlen, with György Festetics and Gyula Korniss as copresidents and Tibor Eckhardt and György Ottlik as deputy presidents. The necessary finances were provided by a group of wealthy industrialists and financiers with a strong Anglo-Saxon orientation—among others Ferenc Chorin, Móric Kornfeld, Róbert Szurday and Jenő Weiss, who were close to Bethlen. József Balogh acted as editor-in-chief, with Owen Rutter providing sub-editorial assistance from the English side. The autumn 1938 number contained a passage from Babits’ novel Sons of


Death, while the following issue had a short story by Countess Margit Bethlen. The HQ also published historical articles about Hungarian and occasionally American history; in addition to personal memoirs, particularly from the pens of British politicians, diplomats or admirals who had visited Hungary. Among these were former Minister Lord Davies, president of the New Commonwealth Society; Sir Thomas Hohler, a past ambassador to Budapest; the historians C.A. Macartney and G.P.Gooch; Sir Thomas Cunningham, the British military attaché in Vienna and Prague during the early 1920s; Vernon Barker; Admiral Usborne, the former head of naval intelligence; and Hungarian men of letters such as Antal Szerb, the outstanding Anglicist István Gál, and Gyula Illyés. András Frey, the foreign editor for the daily Magyarság and later Magyar Nemzet, had a regular column under the heading ‘Danube Chronicle’ in which he reviewed current political and economic issues. An English edition of the authoritative multi-volume History of Hungary by Bálint Hóman and Gyula Szekfü was one of the periodical’s (or rather the Society’s) cherished big projects (it eventually came to nothing due to developing antagonisms between the two authors, who opposed each other politically from 1938 on). What appeared instead, with a subsidy from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was a translation of the popularized Die Geschichte Ungarns by Otto Zarek, published in London in 1939 under the title The History of Hungary. Individual relations also played a role in relations between Great Britain and Hungary. During the 1920s Austria became an increasingly popular destination for Britons. Perhaps because of its geographical proximity, their interest later extended to Hungary—and to Budapest in the first place. These may well have been the sorts of people Barcza had in mind when he recorded: I can’t deny that those who know something of our history do think well of us, especially those who have been to Budapest and have been captivated by the life there, the nights on Margaret Island, the waves in the Gellért Baths, the pretty Hungarian women, the colourful Hungarian stuff—they even like us…375 In 1935 the then Prince of Wales (Edward VIII to be) paid two visits to Hungary, which sparked off much interest in the general population. One result was a sudden fashion for Hungarian au pairs in England.


Interest in Hungary was aroused by a string of English travellers. In 1933, a young Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk to Istanbul via Hungary, recording his impressions in the book Between the Woods and the Water, the second part of his travel auto biography On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the lron Gates.376 He reached Hungary in 1934, and proceeded from Budapest across the Alföld plain to Transylvania, covered by a letter of introduction given by Count Pál Teleki (his ‘alert, pointed face behind horn-rimmed spectacles’ and his ‘almost Chinese look’).377 Very distantly related to Teleki was Lady Listowel (née Judit MárffyMantuano), who, as already noted, played a minor role in AngloHungarian relations through the personal contacts she gained through marriage to her politician husband. Barcza, who knew her well, characterized her as ‘intelligent, but someone who yearns for the spotlight’. It was probably Teleki’s habit, from time to time, of entrusting his kinswoman with various errands, large and small, usually amounting to passing on informal or semiofficial messages that Barcza came to hear about only after the event, if at all. Just as Lady Listowel had close connections with the Hungarian minister in London, so too did Princess Odescalchi (née Countess Klára Andrássy)—‘Kája’—with the British minister in Budapest. ‘An elegant, clever woman’, the writer Balázs Lengyel was to recollect years later.378 Radical writers, journalists and even left-wingers among the populists— the likes of Imre Kovács, József Darvas, Ferenc Erdei, Zoltán Szabó, Dezsö Keresztury, György Káldor, Gyula Illyés, György Markos and Iván Boldizsár—used to meet regularly in the princess’s Buda apartment, overlooking the Chain Bridge. There they were introduced to O’Malley and the expatriate British community of Budapest: She brought our circle together with the British minister. She held a soirée which was attended not just by the minister but virtually the entire British colony …(This was in late 1940 or early 1941, with the Hitler-Stalin pact, the partitioning of Poland, the overrunning of Holland, Belgium and Denmark, and the collapse of France behind us, when Britain stood alone amongst the European powers in fighting the Germans.)379 Princess Odescalchi and her friend, Countess Erzsébet Szapáry, helped organize aid for Polish refugees in Hungary. She was killed during an


Italian air raid on Ragusa [Dubrovnik, Cro.] in April 1941, as she was making her way towards London in a car of the British legation in Budapest. The British officer with whom she was fleeing had letters of introduction from O’Malley to the British authorities. Sir William Goode, a staunch Hungarophile, was likewise more a ‘one-man’ institution than a defining personality in Anglo-Hungarian relations. In April 1941, he received the sum of £8,000 from the Hungarian government for services rendered as an unofficial adviser.380

11 Hungarian Emigrés in Britain During the 1930s

Perhaps even more remarkable than the impact of Hungarian literature was the impact that Hungarian émigrés themselves had on Britain. A large number of Hungarian intellectuals, notably writers and journalists, moved to London during the 1930s. Some were part of the emigration from Hungary that had taken place in 1919. Many found their way to England after having fled first to Austria and Germany. Lajos Bíró worked in Vienna and Berlin film studios between 1928 and 1932 before emigrating to Britain when Hitler attained power and working with Sándor (Alexander) Korda to set up his London Film Productions studio in 1932. Bíró wrote the screenplay for The Private Life of Henry VIII, the huge success with which Korda made his name the following year. A stage play, School for Slavery, was also well received by the critics (it opened at the Westminster Theatre on 17 March 1942). Korda, the director-pro ducer who was largely responsible for setting up a domestic British film industry, was himself a 1919 émigré and moved to England (via Austria, Germany, Hollywood and France) only in 1931, thus dividing his productions between Denham Studio and Hollywood. Of the films that he directed The Private Life of Henry VIII was epochal: it single-handedly won international respect for the British film industry, demonstrating that British productions could hold their own with Hollywood. His reputation was consolidated with subsequent films that he produced or directed, including The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1934, based on the popular novel (first published in 1895) by Baroness Emese (Emma) Orczy, herself a Hungarian who had settled in London after studying painting there as a young woman, and Rembrandt in 1936. It was at Korda’s invitation that Imre (Emeric) Pressburger came to England in 1935. He directed The Challenge (1938) and other films before going on to form with Michael Powell what


became one of the best director-screenwriter partnerships in film history, creating, among other films, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and The Red Shoes (1948). Another émigré to London in 1935 was theatre director György (Georg) Tábori, joined two years later by Pál (Paul) Tábori, a journalist, who also wrote screenplays and novels, mostly in English. During the war he was an announcer for the BBC’s Hungarian service. To Britain also that year came András Révai, who between 1938 and 1941 was the London correspondent for the Pester Lloyd. He also established the Pallas Gallery for paintings and prints. Révai had a more significant role in public life after 1941, when, following the breaking off of Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations, he and a group of other exiled compatriots formed the National Federation of Hungarians (later Free Hungarians) in England, of which he became president in 1943. From 1942, under the name ‘Candidus’, he was an occasional commentator for the BBC’s Hungarian service. Paul (Pál) Ignotus arrived in London during the winter of 1938–39. In 1940 he too gravitated to the BBC. At first the only work he had was as a translator and typist. Later he was given the job of internal reviewer of the programmes broadcast to Hungary, meanwhile also writing as a freelancer for the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian. Before that spell in England (he returned to Budapest in 1949, only to re-emigrate after the 1956 revolution), Ignotus had worked as a journalist for the Esti Kurír, the Magyar Hírlap and Századunk. As an associate editor of Szép Szó (Fine Words) he did much to encourage the appreciation of English literature in Hungary. He translated Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, which was brought out by its Hungarian publisher, the Athenaeum Press, on the same day it was published in England (which indicates the extraordinary popularity that Maugham enjoyed in Hungary). They achieved this by acquiring a manuscript of the book directly from its author. The staff in the Hungarian Section at the BBC World Service included Ferenc Körmendi, who had been working for the Pesti Napló when left Hungary in 1939 but who in 1932 had won an international competition for the best novel, jointly sponsored by the British publisher Chapman & Hall and the New York publisher William Morrow, with the novel Escape to Life, which was eventually translated into many languages. Körmendi went on to have other novels


published in England during the 1940s. Jolán Földes had a similar success in 1937 with The Street of the Fishing Cat, the original Hungarian edition of which had the previous year won the All Nations Prize Novel Contest, sponsored by the London firm of Pinker’s. Many other novels by Körmendi appeared within the next decade. The lawyer Andrew Martin (born Endre Neugröschl), an expert in international law, moved to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War. After a year studying at Oxford, he carried on his law practice in London from 1940 as well as working as a political commentator for the BBC Hungarian service. A close circle of friends was formed there by writer and journalist George Mikes; György Tarján, who had formerly been a National Theatre actor in Budapest; László Héthelyi, who had founded Nemzet (Nation)—in effect the precursor of Magyar Nemzet—and been a journalist for the Esti Kurír,381 the book publisher André Deutsch; and actor Lajos Básti. Mikes, Héthelyi and Deutsch, along with Lajos Lederer, a former secretary to Lord Rothermere, were at first interned on the Isle of Man (they did not have too hard a time in the camp—a former holiday camp —since its commander, Captain Barstow-Orchy, was the son of Baroness Orczy).382 Mikes travelled to London in 1938 as a correspondent for ‘This Morning’ and ‘8 O’Clock News’, intending to stay no more than two weeks to cover the Munich crisis but ending up staying permanently, probably because the introduction of the first socalled Jewish Law and the gathering strength of the fascist right wing in Hungary. ‘Some fortnights last longer than others,’ he remarked laconically in a book he published half a century later in Hungary.383 Like Tarján and Héthelyi, he started working casually for the BBC’s Hungarian service from 1939 onwards, helped by a chance encounter with Körmendi at Bush House on The Strand, where the BBC World Service was housed. Through Körmendi’s intervention, Mikes’ services were engaged within half an hour.384 Lajos Básti travelled via Paris in 1939, spending just a few months there before going on to the British capital. He was ambitious and had decided to make a career in England. In the autobiography that he wrote more than forty years later, Mikes recalled a whole series of amusing incidents and adventures that the two of them experienced together:


‘Have you heard of a chap called Noel Coward?’ Lala asked me. ‘Yes, I have.’ ‘Is he somebody? I mean does he matter?’ ‘Yes he is somebody.’ ‘Is it worth ringing him up? Can he help me?’ ‘lf he wants to, he can help you a lot.’ This conversation took place at Trafalgar Square Underground station…[Lala] went into a telephone box. He spoke for about twenty minutes…‘He invited me for a drink for tomorrow afternoon. It’s all your responsibility. I want to make a career and I do not want to waste my time.’385 It appears that the meeting with Coward was not a roaring success because Básti was either unable or unwilling to make a career in London. He chose to return home to Hungary in 1939. In his sole volume of short prose pieces, he looked back melancholically and somewhat bitterly on his time in London: ‘Oh, I won’t even begin to tell you about everything I left behind over there, in England.’386 (Mikes’ book broadly hints at what, or rather whom, he left behind.) André Deutsch arrived in England in July 1939 to study at the London School of Economics. One of the early titles put out by the publishing house that he founded in 1945 was Mikes’ How to Be an Alien (1946), the first volume in what now counts as a classic work of humour. The historian Béla Iványi-Grünwald (a friend of Cs. Szabó’s), who also arrived in London that year on a study scholarship and joined the BBC’s Hungarian service in 1941, joined this company, as did the wood-engraver György Buday, a former student leader in Szeged, who was to become an announcer for the ‘secret’ transmissions of Radio Petöfi from London and was employed by the BBC’s European News Service from 1940. A good number of leading scientists and scholars similarly found a home in Britain. The more prominent were those who had initially left Hungary to study and undertake research in Germany, in part due to the ‘Numerus Clausus’ that restricted the admission of Jews to Hungarian universities after the First World War. They included Karl (Károly) Mannheim, the pioneer in the sociology of knowledge; Dennis (Dénes) Gábor, the physicist who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on holography; Arnold Hauser, famed for his work on the sociology of art; Michael (Mihály) Polányi, the physical chemist turned political thinker and philosopher; amateur historian Béla Menczer; and the trio of émigré Hungarian economists who would later rise to the peerage—


Thomas (Tamás) Balogh, Nicholas (Miklós) Káldor, and Péter Tamás Bauer—all of whom moved to England during the 1930s (as indeed did Tibor Scitovsky, who was a student at the London School of Economics between 1935 and 1938). Architects Ernő Goldfinger and Kálmán Kónyi-Hajnal, as well as pianist-composer Louis (Lajos) Kentner, also came during the same period. The nuclear physicist Leo Szilárd worked in London between 1933 and 1939 before moving to the United States, where he joined the Manhattan Project, working on developing the atomic bomb. Goldfinger was the first architect of the modern functionalist movement to set up a practice in Britain. Kentner, widely recognized for his interpretations of Liszt and Bartók, was also a greatly respected teacher. The young Georg (György) Solti made guest appearances as a conductor in London and Oslo in 1938–39, before leaving Budapest to spend the war years in Switzerland (having worked mainly in Germany and the United States, after the war he took up an appointment as music director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. After being dismissed in 1933 from his post as professor of sociology at Frankfurt, Mannheim was offered a temporary post at the London School of Economics, but in fact stayed on until his death in 1947. In 1938 he was admitted as a member of the Moot, an informal circle of intellectuals, where he became friendly with T.S.Eliot. The following year he was asked by the BBC to present a series of radio talks on sociology. Balogh was to hold a chair at Oxford,387 Káldor at Cambridge, Iványi-Grünwald lectured at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London, while Gábor, who had been working for Siemens in Germany since 1927, moved to the research laboratories of the British Thomson-Houston Company before joining the staff of Imperial College in the University of London in 1949. After fleeing from Germany in 1933, Polányi was from 1933 to 1948 professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester and for the next ten years held the chair of social studies before being elected senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford (1959–61). He too was accepted into the Moot circle in the early 1940s. One long ambition of Hungarian foreign policy was to establish a Hungarian Department within the University of London, to counterbalance the strong Czech influence there. It did not achieve that, but teaching in the Hungarian language commenced at the School of


Slavonic and East European Studies with the appointment of Miklós Szenci as lecturer in 1937, a post he was to hold for ten years. During the inter-war years and even during the Second World War there were several Hungarian painters and graphic artists who were working and exhibiting in London. Best known was the royal portraitist Philip Alexius László de Lombos (born Fülöp Laub), who had become a British citizen in 1914 (he died in 1937). József Bató and László Kézdi-Kovács also had minor reputations. A substantial proportion of the Hungarian émigrés in London were of Jewish descent, and not a few had fled there to escape Hitler’s Germany. Many of them were to find their homes on and around the hilly prominence of Hampstead, which provided sanctuary for many another notable European refugee. At one time or another Lajos Bíró, Alexander Korda, György Tarján, Thomas Balogh, József Bató, Karl Mannheim and—the exception who proves the rule—Count Mihály Károlyi were among the Hungarians who resided here. A fair number of the 1956 exiles were also to settle there.

PART III Illusions and Disappointments

182

British-Hungarian relations between 1938 and 1941 have hitherto been largely unmapped territory for Hungarian historiography. Monographs and other studies dealing with the inter-war period have not paid adequate attention to the 36 months in question, and have only summarized the period.388 Even if they had a wider scope, sources had not been or could not be properly explored. For other reasons too, they had to make do with incomplete information.389 The record is also patchy when one turns to the work of British historians and politicians, diplomats and specialists. Without denying its merits, the most often cited study, Macartney’s monograph on Hungarian history of the inter-war years,390 originally appeared close to half a century ago. The sources it employed, as well as Macartney’s conclusions drawn from them, are here and there insufficient. The memoir literature has proliferated, but one must handle the reminiscences of even the most meticulous of authors with due circumspection.391 There are also deficiencies to be found in wellwritten works published in recent years, including some that omit any use of the British archival sources.392 This needs to be pointed out, since so many documents from the period in question have now passed into the public domain at the Public Record Office under the ‘50-year rule’, and even some confidential documents originally restricted for longer periods (generally 75 years) have been declassified. An abundance of new material is therefore accessible. Indeed, the sheer volume of source material is now so great that it is physically impossible to read or scan it all. Still more important is the way in which the historians interpret their material and how they write and present it. Sparse as the literature Anglo-Hungarian relations of 1938–41 may be, the peace feelers that the Hungarians began to put out towards Britain, primarily from 1943 onwards, have been given much closer attention.393 The interest of British historians in the history of the Second World War is quite astonishing. This is a matter not only of a steady stream of book after book from well-established scholars, but also of works by younger and talented aspiring historians. Among these, however, Anglo-Hungarian relations receive at best sporadic mention. Although the interest in books on the Second World War is comparably large in Hungary too, British readers have a very different historical

184

perspective. This is why in the present book I have included topics that until now have received little or no attention. Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic and international relations from March 1938 to April 1941 were marked by illusions and disappointments on both sides. From 1938 onwards, as the chance presented itself for Hungary to regain territories that had been lost under the provisions of the Trianon Peace Treaty, there was a palpable expectation, not just in some Hungarian political circles but among part of the educated middle classes and even other strata in society, that they might count on support from Great Britain. That illusion persisted, albeit in modified form, even as the political and military influence of Germany, and its ideological and economic penetration of the country, increased and took ever greater hold on the country. This brought the issue of Hungary’s independence to the forefront. Some took the view that Britain might provide an effective counterweight to the pressure from Hitler’s Third Reich. That was based primarily on the immense resources of both manpower and materials on which the British Commonwealth could draw, and on the calculation that the United States would enter the war, sooner or later, on the side of Great Britain. Although those expectations were not unfounded, not many Hungarians shared them. Among politicians they included, first and foremost, Pál Teleki, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, Bethlen, Eckhardt, Rassay, Sigray and Endre BajcsyZsilinszky, along with a broader group of like-minded allies in high finance, and other professionals such as Ferenc Chorin, Lipót Baranyai, Gyula Szekfü, Sándor Pethö and György Barcza. Any illusions they may have nourished about Hungary being able to avoid overt German occupation were soon to be dispelled. They had hoped that Hungary might retain its independence in some way or another, with the help of the Anglo-Saxon powers. They may have had their illusions, but they do not deserve to be reproached for their hopes and sympathies for the British. Teleki and those who thought like him were largely right not to become profoundly disappointed. At worst, they felt a sense of sombre resignation or bitterness when they recognized that it was not British (and American) interests that were going to have the upper hand in the Danube basin during and after the war. The disastrous illusions were, rather, the ones nurtured by those politicians, officers of the General Staff, a large segment of the so-called Christian middle classes, and some intellectuals who chose the alliance with the Germans. They were convinced that Germany was going to

185

win the war. That faith cannot be regarded merely as a consequence of ‘Germanophilia’ or pro-German sympathies. It was fed by more serious motivations, mentioned in Chapter 7. Imrédy, Bárdossy, Werth, István Milotay, a majority of the ruling party, the civil service, Géza Féja, and the other rightwingers amongst the rural populist writers, like a great many of their contemporaries in Europe, believed that the Western democracies had become fatally enfeebled and lost for ever their role as world powers. That this was an illusion could not have been seen so clearly between 1938 and 1941. Even Teleki was not completely sure of a British victory in 1940. But more remarkable were the calculations of those who vigorously advocated alliance with Germany—Bárdossy above all (some even thought that if the fortunes of war were to desert Germany, then Hungary could switch to the winning side by a change of government). The disappointment experienced by Teleki, Bethlen, Chorin, Baranyai, Keresztes-Fischer, Rassay, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky and Barcza was in Hungarian society, or at least in the greater part of it. That experienced by Imrédy, Bárdossy and those of like mind concerned the supposedly invincible might of Germany. What did the British think about Hungary, what expectations did they have? As we have seen, the countries of the Danube basin gained interest for Great Britain in and after 1938. Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic and international relations grew in importance; the British government had certain ideas of what could be expected from Hungary. The essence of those notions consisted of the maintenance of Hungary’s neutrality. Here the efforts of Teleki in particular and of the Foreign Office figured largely. If there were any illusions about Hungary on the part of the British—maybe on the part of a small section of the British general public above all—they were not decisive. Those who had dealings with British foreign policy, above all in the Foreign Office, knew that Hungary would be able to keep to its neutrality and independence only for a time. Thus, when Hungary took the step of aligning itself to the Tripartite Pact in November 1940, the British were not caught off guard. Their disappointment with Hungary was not as profound or bitter as it was with Romania. Hungary’s diplomatic conduct between 1938 and 1941 was still able to command at least some respect, here and there, in the eyes of some Englishmen. It won more respect than the crudely opportunistic behavior of the Romanians (and, at times, the Czechs).

186

Yet in the end, needless to say, British policy was motivated primarily by Great Britain’s own interests. The goal was unequivocally the defeat of the German Reich. That was what defined and determined the place and role of Hungary in British foreign policy. Churchill, who was fundamentally well disposed to Hungary, and ready to show that sympathy even in difficult times, may have been disappointed by Hungary’s actions in April 1941. Even so, he was willing to keep Great Britain from making a declaration of war. Could he have harboured any illusions about Hungary’s subsequent conduct? Hardly so. Churchill realized very early on, in the summer of 1940, that Britain would need Russian help to defeat Hitler, and that the price to be paid might well be ceding some of Eastern Europe, at least temporarily, to the Russian sphere of interest. He would have preferred to save Hungary from that fate. Everything that happened subsequently—Hungary’s participation in the invasion of the Soviet Union, the British declaration of war, followed by Hungary’s declaration of war on the United States, through to the desperate peace feelers that were later put out by the government of Kállay—has to be seen as efforts in a situation in which Hungary was trapped ever since the spring of 1941. A diary entry made by György Barcza in Budapest during the early autumn of 1942 speaks volumes: I have had to accustom myself to this Axis climate, the whispering, the cautiousness, all the things that have changed. I had the feeling I was a castaway on another planet. I found hardly anything left of the old, free, gentlemanly Hungary. At best just its remnants and relics. But now that I have started to become used even to this, I frequently find myself thinking of those days in England; we may have lived in danger, but it was a human and free life within a splendid nation of a great race that endured hard times as one, with alacrity and determination. There was something there from which to draw strength and joy. But here?394

If Anglo-Hungarian relations between 1938 and 1941 were a period of illusions and disappointments, those illusions that remained after 1941 were gradually dispelled, and disappointment turned into disenchantment.

Notes

1. Gál, István Magyarország, Anglia és Amerika különös tekintettel a szláv világra. Vázlatok a nemzetközi vonatkozások köréből [Hungary, England and America, with Particular Regard to the Slavonic World. Sketches from the Field of International Relations] (Budapest, 1945), p. 65. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. Shakespeare is said to have based the character of Prospero in The Tempest on Dee. 4. Entry for 13 December, 1815, in Széchenyi, István Napló [Diary] (Budapest, 1982), p. 63. 5. Entry for 15 April, 1822: ibid., p. 263. 6. The house at Chepstow Villas, Bayswater, where Kossuth stayed in London, is marked by a blue plaque. 7. See Jánossy, Dénes, A Kossuth-emigráció Anglidbán és Amerikában, 1851– 1852 [The Kossuthist Emigrés in England and America, 1851–52] (Budapest, 1940) and Gál, István, 'Dickens és folyóirata Kossuthról és Széchenyiről [Dickens and His Newssheet on Kossuth and Széchenyi]’, Filológiai Közlöny 1–2 (1970). 8. Jeszenszky, Géza, Az elveszett presztízs. Magyarország megítélésének megváltozása Nagy-Britanniában (1894–1918) [Loss of Prestige. Changing Views of Hungary in Great Britain, 1894–1918] (Budapest, 1986), p. 51. 9. Spectator, 20 October 1906, cited by Péter, László, 'Scotus Viator és a 'magyar kérdés' az első világháború előtt [Scotus Viator and the ‘Hungarian Question' before the First World War]’, in Péter, László, Gesta Hungarorum, Vol. 3. Történelmünk a Kiegyezéstől 1949–ig. Tanulmányok [Our History From the Settlement to 1949. Essays] (Zurich, 1990), pp. 84–5. 10. Ibid., p. 97. 11. Bandholtz, Harry Hill, An Undiplomatic Diary (New York, 1933), p. 34. 12. Nicolson, Harold, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1933), p. 34. 13. Romsics, Ignác, ‘A brit külpolitika és a “magyar kérdés”, 1914–1946’ [British foreign policy and the ‘Hungarian Question’, 1916–46]’, in


14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

Helyünk és sorsunk a Duna-medencében [Our Place and Fate in the Danube Basin] (Budapest, 1996), p. 78. On this, see Bán, András D., ‘Radomir király. Széphistória a Rothermereakcióról [King Radomir: a romance about the Rothermere campaign], “2000”, October 1990, pp. 56–60. A recent Hungarian translation (by Judit Zinner) appeared in ‘Lord Rothermere: Magyarország helye a Nap alatt. Biztonságot KözépEurópának!’ Rubicon 1 (1997), p. 35. Ibid. Bethlen, István Bethlen István gróf beszédei és írásai [Speeches and writings of Count István Bethlen] (Budapest, 1933), p. 189. Karsai, Elek (ed.), A magyar ellenforradalmi rendszer külpolitikája 1927. január 1.–1931 augusztus 24. [Foreign policy of the Hungarian counterrevolutionary régime, 1 January 1927–24 August 1931] (Budapest, 1967), p. 94. Semi-official communication of Iván Rubidó-Zichy to Gábor Apor, 31 May 1928: ibid., p. 179. On this, see Bán, András D. ‘Egy sajtómágnás sikertelen magándiplomáciája. Az angol-német megegyezési kísérletek kudarcához [A press magnate’s unsuccessful private diplomacy. On the failure of attempts at Anglo-German accord]’ Jelenkor, February (1993), pp. 156–63. For the history of the Hungarian Revisionist League, see Zeidler, Miklós, ‘A Magyar Revíziós Liga. Trianontól Rothermere-ig’ [The History of the Hungarian Revisionist League, from Trianon to Rothermere], Századok, 2 (1997), pp. 303–52. Seton-Watson, Robert William, Treaty Revision and the Hungarian Frontiers (London, 1934), especially pp. 7–10, 17–18 and 37-46. Manuscript Archive of the National Széchenyi Library, Budapest (hereafter OSzK KT), Géza Szüllő Bequest, Fond X/8. Copies of Lady Ethel Snowden's letters of 15 and 19 November 1934 to Lord Rothermere were passed to me by a Hungarian acquaintance of Stephanie von Hohenlohe who wishes to remain anonymous. I take this opportunity to express my thanks to that person. OSzK KT, Géza Szüllő Bequest, Fond X/29. Letter from László Bárdossy to Count László Széchényi, 6 August 1934, Hungarian National Archive (hereafter MOL), K-92, bundle 9, chapter 3. For the draft ‘Four-Power Pact, 15 July 1933’, see Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), FO 371/16690; a Hungarian translation is given by Halmosy, Dénes, Nemzetközi szerződések 1918–1945. A két világháború közötti korszak és a második világháború legfontosabb külpolitikai szerződései [International Treaties 1918–45. The key foreign treaties of the inter-war period and the Second World War] (Budapest, 1983), p. 327. Cited by Lukacs, Tibor Zs., ‘A revízió reménye’ [The hope of revision], Rubicon, 1 (1997), p. 38.

NOTES 189

29. Macartney, C.A., Hungary and Her Successors. The Treaty of Trianon and its consequences 1919–1937 (London, 1937). 30. Ibid., pp. 198–9, 246–50, 348–55 and 435–7. 31. A cartoon on the meeting was published in the 24 November 1937 issue of Punch, the British humorous weekly magazine. Under the heading ‘Yet One More Conversation’, this portrays the Lord Privy Seal seated somewhat apprehensively before a gesticulating Hitler, with a caption that runs: ‘The time has come,’ Herr Hitler said,/‘To talk of many things,/ Of might and right and swastikas/And triangles and rings./And why the world is boiling hot,/And whether Peace has wings.’ Lord Halifax: ‘But not about the Colonies.’ Hitler: ‘Hush!’ 32. For a more detailed discussion, see Watt, D. C., Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation of British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1965), especially pp. 44–5; Carlton, David, Anthony Eden (London, 1981); Rhodes James, Robert, Anthony Eden (London, 1986). 33. On this, see the report from Sir Geoffrey Knox to Halifax of 27 February 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22381. This was confirmed to me by Frank K. Roberts, with whom I had an opportunity to speak in London during the summer of 1994. 34. Butler, R. A. (Lord), The Art of Memory: Friends in Perspective (London, 1982), pp. 37–8. 35. The same incident, as related by Butler, is cited by Roberts, Andrew, ‘The Holy Fox’. The Life of Lord Halifax (London, 1970), p. 9. 36. Assessments of Halifax among his contemporaries and in British historiography are singularly mixed. He has been referred to as ‘a trimmer if ever there was one’, ‘unctuous’, ‘the wrong man at the Foreign Office’, ‘an admirer of Franco’, ‘a boring giraffe’, ‘Chamberlain’s Sancho Panza’, and much else. None of these attributes quite hits the mark, and some are totally undeserved. Cunning as a fox—that was Holy Fox. 37. For more on Cadogan, see, amongst others, Woodward, Sir E. L., British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 18–19. 38. For the text of Chamberlain’s speech, see Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939. Third Series I–IX (hereafter DBFP). London, 1949, Vol. 1, document no. 114. 39. On 5 November 1937 Hitler summoned a secret meeting with his top generals and admirals in the Reich Chancellery where he warned them to be ready for war in the near future. He also spoke of certain circumstances under which it might be necessary for Germany to intervene against Czechoslovakia and Austria. The notes of what Hitler said, made by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, Hitler's military adjutant and chief of the central section of the General Staff, are now known in the specialist literature as the Hossbach Memorandum.


40. Szegedy-Maszák, Aladár Az ember ősszel visszanéz…Egy volt magyar diplomata emlékirataiból [Looking Back in the Autumn of One’s Years…From the memoirs of a Hungarian ex-diplomat] (Budapest, 1996), Vol. 1, p. 199. 41. On the issue of Hungary’s image in British public opinion, see Gál, István, Magyarország, Anglia és Amerika…., p. 236. 42. See the London chargé d’affaire’s report to the foreign minister dated 8 April 1938, in Adám, Magda (ed.), Diplomáciai iratok Magyarország külpolitkájához 1936–1945 [Diplomatic Documents on Hungary's Foreign Policy 1936–1945—hereafter DIMK]. Vol. 2, A müncheni egyezmény létrejötte és Magyarország külpolitkája, 1936–1938 [The genesis of the Munich Agreement and Hungary's foreign policy, 1936-1938] (Budapest, 1965), p. 319, document no. 148. 43. Foreign Office Note, 29 March 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22376; Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 176, supplies a translated version differing slightly in detail. 44. Report of Sir Geoffrey Know to Sir Orme Sargent, 26 March 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22381. 45. Mernorandum from Sir Orme Sargent, 11 April 1938, ibid. 46. See Chiefs of Staff Sub-committee Memorandum, 22 March 1938, in PRO, CAB 27/627. The essence of the various proposals is summarized by juhász, Gyula Magyarország külpolitikája 1919–1945 [Hungarian Foreign Policy 1919–45] (Budapest, 1988), pp. 177–8. 47. Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 179. 48. See PRO, CAB 23/93 15(38), 22 March 1938. 49. On this, see Sir Orme Sargent’s Note of 17 March 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22380. 50. Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 183. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 185. 53. Ibid. 54. Memorandum of December 1942 from György Barcza to Prime Minister Miklós Kállay, Foreign Minister Jenő Ghyczy and Count István Bethlen, in György Barcza Bequest, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 11. 55. This same Barclay endowed a well-known prize at the Budapest Trotting Race in the 1920s. A son from Lady Vansittart’s first marriage was for a while in love with Churchill’s granddaughter, Clarissa, but the Vansittarts had no luck here either as the beautiful Clarissa eventually married Anthony Eden—admittedly only in 1952. 56. Colville, John, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1945 (London, 1985). 57. There is a case for regarding Vansittart’s deep-rooted antagonism to Germany as his main characteristic. In Berlin they even coined the expression ‘Vansittartism’ to denote this, so it is hardly surprising that

NOTES 191

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

German politicians did not harbour the warmest of sympathies towards him. Hitler himself mentioned him as the third of Britain’s ‘guilty men’, after Churchill and Hore-Belisha (the war minister from 1937). On this, see Trevor-Roper, H. R. (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk: His Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (London, 1953), p. 276. Royall Tyler, ‘Prospects for Hungary’, Memorandum of 10 May 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22375. Sipos, Péter,’Imrédy Béla csodálatos forradalma [Béla Imrédy's miraculous revolution], Rubicon, 10 (1996), p. 23. On this, see Varannai, Aurél Toll és bilincs. Egy liberális újságíró élete [Pen and Shackles: a liberal journalist’s life] (Budapest, 1989), p. 236. See Sakmyster, Thomas L., Hungary, the Great Powers and the Danubian Crisis 1936–1939 (Athens, GA, 1980), pp. 179–80. See Sakmyster, Hungary, p. 180 and Macartney, C. A., October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary 1929–1945 (Edinburgh, 1957), Vol. 1, p. 241. See Macartney, ibid. and Szegedy-Maszák, Az ember ősszel visszanéz…, Vol. 1, p. 11. See Macartney, October Fifteenth, Vol. 1, p. 243. F. N. M. MacFarlane’s telegram to the Foreign Office, 26 August 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22380. Ibid. Lord Halifax’s telephone message to Sir G. Knox in Budapest (an identical message was conveyed to Poland), 22 September, in Woodward, Edward L. and Butler, Rohan, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939. Third Series Volumes I–IX [hereafter DBFP] (London, Vol. 3: 1950). Also cited by Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 191. A, D. F. Gascoigne, Report to P. B. B. Nichols, official at the Foreign Office Southern Europe Department, 15 August 1938, in PRO, FO 371/ 22372. Report of the Hungarian minister in London to the Hungarian minister for foreign affairs, 18 September 1938, in DIMK, Vol. 2, document no. 363. DBFP, Vol. 3, p. 4, document no. 7. Sakmyster, Hungary…, p. 197–8. Note by Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, not dated but inferred to be from around the time of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, in Hohenlohe’s Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Box 1. DIMK, Vol. 2, p. 639, document No. 370. On the same matter, see also a Foreign Office memorandum with the title ‘Hungarian Minority in Czechoslovakia’, 28 September 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22373. Memorandum ‘Hungarian Minority in Czechoslovakia’, 28 September 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22373. See DIMK, Vol. 2, p. 685, document no. 428.


76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96.

97.

Ibid. DBFP, Vol.3, p.48. Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 192. Barcza, György Diplomataemlékeim. Magyarország volt vatikáni és londoni követének emlékirataiból 1911–1945 [Recollections of a Diplomat: from the memoirs of Hungary’s former envoy to the Vatican and to London, 1911–1945] (Budapest, 1994), Vol. 1, pp. 381–2. Cited by Lukacs, John The Duel Hitler vs. Churchill: 10 May–31 July 1940 (London, 1990), p. 25. Lady Asquith's account in the Daily Telegraph, 12 March 1965. A more extended quotation is given by Rhodes James, Robert, Churchill: A Study in Failure (London, 1970), pp. 336–7. For the whole speech, see Cannadine, David (ed.), Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Speeches of Winston Churchill (Boston, 1989), See DIMK, Vol. 2, p. 718, document no. 460. Ibid., p. 719. Report by the Hungarian minister in London to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 17 October 1938. DIMK, Vol. 2, p. 815, document no. 548. Mr D. Stephens, Notes of a Conversation with Mr H. J. Bruce on Conditions in Hungary, 17 October 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22372. House of Commons Statement by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 14 November 1938. Oral answer by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 19 December 1938. See PRO, FO 371/22380. For Noble’s note, see the previous document. Ibid. The details are given in Knox’s report of 19 December 1938 to E. M. B. Ingram, head of the Foreign Office’s Southern Europe desk, in PRO, FO 371/22375. See Romsics, Ignác (ed.), Bethlen István emlékirata 1944 [István Bethlen's Memoir 1944] (Budapest, 1988) and the verbal communication of Erzsébet Bethlen (Pál Teleki’s secretary) quoted in Romsics, Ignác, Bethlen István. Politikai életrajz [István Bethlen: A political biography] (Budapest, 1991), p. 276. Gascoigne’s report to Halifax, 7 February 1939. PRO, FO 417/39. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 403. That liking may have stemmed from the fact that one of his ancestors took part in the fighting that led to the recapture of Buda Castle from the Ottoman Turks in 1686. See the reference to this in a private letter from György Barcza to Foreign Minister Csáky, 29 April 1939. MOL, K-64, batch 79, 1939–parcel 2–335/res. pol. Thanks are due to Miklós Zeidler for bringing the letter to my attention. O’Malley’s Report to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 8 November 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23116.

NOTES 193

98. See DBFP, Vol. 4, p. 254, document no. 253, and Macartney, October Fifteenth …, Vol. 1, p. 337. 99. Report by Knox to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 15 March 1939, in DBFP, Vol. 4, p. 265, document no. 274. 100. Barcza, Diplomataemtékeim…, Vol. 1, pp. 407–8. 101. According to some writers, Tilea also paid calls on Sargent and Vansittart, who were not exactly noted for their warmth of feelings towards Hungary. See Rose, Norman, Vansittart: Study of a Diplomat (London, 1978), p. 233. In any event, Cadogan took him in to see Halifax as well, 102. Cited by Colvin, Ian, Vansittart in Office (London, 1965), p. 295. 103. Minute by Cadogan, 18 March 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23060, cited by Lukacs, John, The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 (New Haven, CT, 1976), p. 57 (footnote 24). 104. Cited by John Lukacs, Last European War…, p. 36 (footnote 23). 105. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 411. 106. Letter from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 4 April 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, p. 144, document no. 59. 107. Halifax Papers, in PRO, FO 800/318. 108. The Romanian foreign minister’s London visit, 23–26 April 1939, in PRO, FO 434/6. Minutes of the discussions between Gafencu and his British interlocutors are in DBFP, Vol. 5, pp. 295–315. 109. Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 348. 110. Ibid., p. 353. 111. On Horthy’s visit, see F. F. Clively’s Memorandum on the Meeting on Anglo-Hungarian Economic Relations, 12 May 1939, in PRO, FO 371/ 23109. 112. On this, see Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, 30 May 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 285–6, document no. 172. 113. Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 352. 114. On this, see Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 11 June 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 309–10, document no. 186. 115. See telegrams from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 14 June 1939 in: DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 314–15, document nos. 191 and 192. 116. Report by O’Malley to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 3 July 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23116. 117. Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 351. 118. See note 116. 119. Cover note from Sargent, 13July 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23116..


120. Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 31 July 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 395–6, document no. 250. 121. See Auer, Pál, Fél évszázad [Half a Century] (Washington, DC, 1971). 122. Selected passages from the notes are cited by Tilkovszky, Lóránt ‘Magyar látogatók Churchillnél 1939 nyarán’ [Churchill’s Hungarian visitors in the summer of 1939] (1994). 123. Ibid., p. 32. 124. See Auer, Fél évszázad…, p. 201. 125. Letter of Leopold Amery to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 3 July 1939, in PRO, FO 800/318. 126. See Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs on the discussion with Churchill, 14July 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, p. 64, document no. 229 and also Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, pp. 255–8. 127. See Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, pp. 469–70. 128. ‘Memo’ by László Szabó, Hungarian military attaché in Rome, concerning his talk with Mussolini, 1 May 1939, in Zsigmond, László (ed.), Magyarország és a második világháború. Titkos diplomáciai okmányok a háború előzményeihez és történetéhez [Hungary and the Second World War: Secret diplomatic document Nos. on the antecedents to and history of the war] (Budapest: 1966), pp. 207–9, document no. 96. 129. Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 358. 130. Hungarian translations of the letters are given by Zsigmond, Magyarország és a második világháború…, pp. 213–14, document nos. 99– 100, and also by DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 378–9, in the footnote to document no. 240. 131. Entry for 24 July 1939 in Ciano, Galeazzo, Diary 1937–1943. The Complete, Unabridged Diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1936–1943, ed. Miller, Robert L., Pugliese Stanislao G. and Gibson, Hugh (London, 2002), p. 253. 132. See Note of State Secretary Weizsäcker on Sztójay’s instructions, 24 July 1939, in Ránki, György, Pamlényi, Ervin, Tilkovszky, Lóránt and Juhász, Gyula (eds), A Wilhelmstrasse és Magyarország, Német diplomáciai iratok Magyarországról 1933–1944 [The Wilhelmstrasse and Hungary: German Diplomatic Documents on Hungary 1933–1944] (Budapest, 1968), pp. 414–15, document no. 236. 133. For a detailed account of the interview between Hitler and Foreign Minister Csáky, see note by Otto von Erdmannsdorf, the German minister in Budapest, in Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, pp. 418–23, document no. 241. 134. The quotations are taken from the previous reference. 135. Letter of Jenő Ghyczy, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Political Department, to György Barcza, 7 September 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp.

NOTES 195

136.

137.

138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

154.

499–500, document no. 371 and also Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 261. Letter of to György Barcza to Jenő Ghyczy, 15 September 1939, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 523, 525, document no. 395 and also Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim …, Vol. 2, pp. 262–5. Report by A.D.F. Gascoigne to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 21 July 1939, in PRO, FO 417/40 and, in the same context, Gascoigne’s report to the Foreign Publicity Department, 18 July 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23111. Cf. Gascoigne’s report to the Foreign Publicity Department, 18 July 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23111. See Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, p. 413, document no. 234. See the telegram from Foreign Minister Ribbentrop to Otto von Erdmannsdorf, the German minister in Budapest, 1 September 1939, in Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, p. 432, document no. 251. Memorandum of Mr Selby, British Policy in Respect of Hungary, 21 September 1939, in PRO, FO 371/23116 Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 366. Entry for 11 September 1939, in Ciano, Diary…, p. 275. See note 141. See Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, pp. 445–6. This is cited in Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 375. A fuller account is given by Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 453 and Vol. 2, p. 277. The same three points can also been found, in English, in a footnote attached to Barcza’s Report to Csáky of 9 February 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 4, p. 693, document no. 529. For the quotation, see DIMK, Vol. 4, p. 694, document no. 529. Note by F.K. Roberts, 10 February 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24429. See letter of O’Malley to P.B. B. Nichols, official at the Foreign Office Central Europe Department, 25 February 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24429. C.A. Macartney, ‘Memorandum on Hungary’ (61 pages), undated, in PRO, FO 371/24429. Ibid., p. 10. Telegram from O’Malley to the Foreign Office, 8 May 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24430. See DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 728–9, document no. 562. Also cited by, among others, Barker, Elisabeth, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War (London: 1976), p. 64: Juhász, Gyula, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája 1939–1941 [Foreign policy of the Teleki administration 1939– 1941] (Budapest, 1964), pp. 89–90; and Czettler, Antal Teleki Pál és a magyar külpoli-tika 1939–1941 [Pál Teleki and Hungarian Foreign Policy 1939–41] (Budapest, 1997), p. 80. On this, see PRO, FO 417/42 and FO 371/24427.


155. Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 6 March 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 728–9, document no. 562. 156. Képviselőházi Napló, 1939–1944 [Parliamentary Record, 1939–1944], Vol. 5. Budapest, 1940, 60. 157. Note of F.K. Roberts, 12 March 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24427. 158. Ibid. 159. Note of Robert H. Bruce Lockhart, 26 May 1940, in PRO, FO 371/ 24427. 160. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 393. 161. Discussions of H.M. Government’s accredited representatives in the countries of South-East Europe, 8 and 11 April 1940, in PRO, FO 434/ 7 and FO 371/24902. 162. Telegram of Somers Cocks to the Foreign Office, 19 April 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24429. 163. For the quotation, see Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 396 and also Elisabeth Barker, British Policy…, p. 64. It is also cited in DIMK, Vol. 4, pp. 769–70, document no. 584. 164. See Baranyai’s personal communication to Macartney in Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 396–7. 165. For more detail, see Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 397, footnote 1. 166. See ibid., p. 397. 167. Quoted in ibid. 168. See Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 106. 169. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 397–8; DIMK, Vol. 4, p. 772, document no. 587; and Czettler, Antal Teleki Pál…, p. 108. 170. See entry for 24 April 1940 in Halder, Franz, Kriegstagebuch. Tägliche Aujzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939–1942 (Stuttgart, 1962–64). 171. Ibid. 172. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 398–9. 173. Telegram of Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen to the Foreign Office, 22 July 1940, in PRO/FO 371/24903. 174. Foreign Office Telegram to O’Malley, 15 August 1940, in PRO, FO 371/ 24903. 175. Telegram of O’Malley to the Foreign Office, 1 May 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24430. 176. Note of Roger Makins, 4 May 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24430. 177. See Pelényi’s letters of 17 April 1939 to Teleki and Csáky, in Pelényi, John, The Secret Plan for a Hungarian Government in the West at the Outbreak of World War II’, Journal of Modern History, June (1964), p. 173. 178. Ibid., pp. 173–5.

NOTES 197

179. On the plan for a Hungarian government in exile, see the above-cited article by Pelényi and also Borbándi, Gyula, ‘A Teleki-Pelényi-terv nyugati magyar ellenkormány létesítésére [The Teleki-Pelényi plan for setting up a Hungarian Provisional Government in the West]’, Új Látóhatár 2 (1966). Details from the latter are drawn on in Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, pp. 278–83. 180. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 17 May 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 138, document no. 22. 181. On this, see Pelényi Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 1. 182. See entry for 10 June 1940 in György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 8. 183. F.G.Redward, press attaché at the British legation in Budapest, prepared a memorandum on the subject for the Foreign Office on 19 April 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24429. 184. Cited by Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 105. 185. Letter of the Hungarian minister in London to Mr Orme Sargent, 18 April 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24430. 186. Note by F.K.Roberts, 20 April 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24430. 187. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 473. 188. Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 284–5. 189. For the text of the letter, see PRO, FO 417/42; it is also appears in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 117, document no. 1 and (in Hungarian translation) Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 288. 190. For the English original, see DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 117, document no. 1 and (in Hungarian translation) Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 288. 191. See Pimlott, Ben (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940– 45 (London, 1986), p. 9. 192. O’Malley was temporarily suspended from his duties in the Foreign Office in 1926 for suspected foreign exchange speculation. He was reinstated as a counsellor in 1927. 193. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, pp. 469–70. 194. Ibid., p. 470. 195. The letter is quoted in Lukacs, The Duel, pp. 160–1. 196. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 28 July 1940. DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 231, document no. 115. 197. See the report of Sir Reginald Hoare to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 1 July 1940, in PRO, FO 434/8. 198. See the report of Sir Reginald Hoare to Foreign Secretary Halifax, 2 July 1940, in PRO, FO 434/8.


199. Report of the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 11 July 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 326, document no. 189. Also quoted by Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 409. 200. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 23 July 1940 in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 349–50, document no. 214. 201. See the footnote to DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 364, document no. 226. 202. See the note on this by F.K.Roberts, 10 August 1940, in PRO, FO, 371/ 24428. 203. Ibid. 204. See Pimlott, Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 212. 205. Letter of Mr Bruce to Mr Speaight at the Foreign Office, 28 August 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24428. See there also Sargent’s note on his conversation with Barcza. 206. See Juhász, Gyula, Magyar-brit titkos tárgyalások 1943-ban [Secret AngloHungarian Talks in 1943] (Budapest 1978), p. 22. 207. Hansard, Vol. 365, 40; see also PRO, FO 434/8 and The Times for 6 September 1940. The passage is also quoted by Macartney, October Fifteenth …, Vol. 1, p.426. 208. PRO, FO 434/8. See also Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 426. 209. In a memorandum about Anglo-Hungarian relations that was prepared for Prime Minister Kállay in late 1942, Barcza felt it was worth noting the following about the British response to the Vienna Award: ‘British public opinion, society and even certain elements in the government, the For. [eign] Off. [ice] excepted, were of a different opinion. They were so indignant about the ‘black ingratitude’ and ‘vile perfidy’ of the Romanians that on more than a few occasions they expressed to me their pleasure that we had succeeded in regaining part of Transylvania, though even in these circles there was concern that at a suitable moment the Germans would present the bill for their support.’ See György Barcza, Memorandum on Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations, 1938– 1941, p. 32, in Barcza Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 11. 210. See also Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 417–18. 211. See Lord Mottistone’s letter of 25 August and Lord Londonderry’s of 27 August 1940 to Sir William Goode, in PRO, FO 371/24426. 212. See PRO, FO 371/24426. 213. Note by F.K.Roberts, 4 September 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24426. 214. Telegram from O’Malley to the Foreign Office, 9 October 1940, in FO, PRO 371/24428. 215. Report on conversation between O’Malley, British minister in Budapest, and Csáky, Hungarian minister for foreign affairs, 9 October 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 645, document no. 410. 216. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 481.

NOTES 199

217. See DGFP, pp. 224–6, document no. 130; also Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse …, p. 534, document no. 356. 218. Ibid. The correct version and the source of the misquotation are discussed by Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 439–40. 219. See Czettler, Teleki Pál…, p. 198. 220. See Czettler, Teleki Pál…, pp. 200–1. 221. Cited by Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 245. See also Czettler, Teleki Pál…, p. 206. 222. Record of Hitler’s conversation with the Hungarian prime minister, Count Teleki, in the presence of the German foreign minister and Count Csáky in Vienna, 20 November 1940 in DGFP, pp. 632–6, document no. 365; also Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, p. 549, document no. 366. 223. Ibid. 224. See Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, pp. 246–7. 225. Report by O’Malley, 21 November 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24431. 226. Note by Cadogan, 30 November 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24431. 227. Report from the Hungarian minister in London to Foreign Minister Csáky, November 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 765–6, document no. 504. 228. Diary entry for 20 November 1940, in Ciano, Diary…, p. 397. 229. Telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to Foreign Minister Csáky, 22 November 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, 736, document no. 485. 230. See PRO, FO 371/24431. 231. Letter of William Strang to Sir William Goode, 1 December 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24431. 232. Telegram of the German minister in Budapest to the German Foreign Ministry, 30 November 1940, in Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, pp. 552– 3, document no. 367. 233. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 776–7, document no. 517. 234. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 16 December 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 779, document no. 521. 235. Barcza, Diptomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 479. 236. Ibid. 237. Ibid., p. 480. 238. Report from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 18 December 1940, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 784, document no. 526, note 62. The statement is also quoted by Macartney, October Fifleenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 464–5 and Czettler, Teleki Pál…, pp. 241–2. 239. Ibid. 240. Letter from Cadogan to Barcza, 28 December 1940. See DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 796, document no. 535. 241. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 802–4, document no. 541. 242. Letter from Cadogan to Barcza, 30 January 1941, in PRO, FO 371. See also DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 844–6, document no. 561.


243. Ibid., p. 846. 244. See PRO, FO 371/24428. 245. Ibid. The quotations are cited by Romsics, Ignác, Helyünk és sorsunk a Dunamedencében [Our place and fate in the Danube Basin] (Budapest, 1996), pp. 109. 246. See Report from O’Malley to Roger Makins, 29 October 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24428. 247. Czettler, Teleki Pál…, p. 243 misinterprets the reasons behind Halifax’s replacement, although the source to which he refers is reliable and accurate. Halifax was not just no supporter of appeasement policy in December 1940 but had already turned against this in September 1938, even before the Munich Agreement. From March 1939 he had been strongly opposed to any form of conciliation with the Germans. 248. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 833–43, document no. 559. 249. For the quotations: ibid., p. 840. 250. Ibid., p. 841. 251. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 7 February 1941. DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 861, document no. 570. 252. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 864–5, document no. 572. 253. Ciphered telegram from the minister for foreign affairs to the Hungarian minister in London, 12 February 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 865, document no. 573. 254. See DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 875, document no. 580. 255. Ibid., p. 876. 256. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 883–8, document no. 588. 257. Notes of Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki to the Hungarian ministers in London and Washington, 3 March 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 893– 902, document no. 594. 258. Ibid., p. 893. 259. Ibid., p. 896. 260. Ibid., p. 899. 261. See DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 903, document no. 595. 262. See DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 930–3, document no. 621. 263. Ibib., p. 931. 264. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, pp. 297–302. Czettler, Teleki Pál…— citing Macartney as his authority—incorrectly dates 14 March as the day on which the letter was written. Again using Macartney’s book as his source, he gives a completely misleading idea of the letter’s contents. Teleki did not write what Macartney and Czettler quote him as writing. Admittedly, Macartney gave Barcza’s memoirs as his reference, but the author possesses a copy of Teleki’s letter, from which it is quite clear that Barcza misquoted what was written. Teleki is likewise misquoted in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 986, document no. 674, footnote 328, which uses a

NOTES 201

265. 266. 267. 268. 269.

270.

271.

272. 273.

274.

275. 276. 277. 278. 279. 280.

manuscript retained by Domokos Szent-Iványi, the head of Teleki’s private cabinet, as its authority. This is a striking example of how a single erroneous or inaccurate publication can lead to mistakes and the drawing of false inferences. In this case, it seems likely that the chain of errors stems from Barcza. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 470 and Czettler, Teleki Pál…, pp. 261–2. Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 300. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 485. Ibid. For minutes taken by Hewel, chief counsellor at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of the interview between Sztójay, Hungarian minister in Berlin, and Hitler, 29 March 1941, see Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, p. 560, document no. 372; for Sztójay’s report to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 27 March 1941, see DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 966–8, document no. 652. For the text of the letter, see Szini, Miklós and Szűcs, László (eds), Horthy Miklós titkos irásai [Secret Writings of Miklós Horthy] (Budapest: 1962), document no. 54. An English version is given by Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 475–6. For minutes taken by Hewel, chief counsellor at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of the interview between Sztójay, Hungarian minister in Berlin, and Hitler, 29 March 1941, see Ránki et al., A Wilhelmstrasse…, pp. 562–3, document No. 373. See Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 299; Czettler, Teleki Pál…, p. 279; and Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 476. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 29 March 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 971– 2, document no. 657. Ciphered telegram from the minister for foreign affairs to the Hungarian ministers in London and Washington, 30 March 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 980–1, document no. 664. See Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 304 and Czettler, Teleki Pál …, p. 294. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, pp. 468–9. Macartney gives a personal communication by Barcza as his source. Note of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 15 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26615. See Macartney, October Fifteenth…, Vol. 1, p. 485. See Pritz, Pál (ed.), László Bárdossy a Népbiróság előtt [László Bárdossy before the People’s Tribunal] (Budapest, 1991), p. 123. More significantly, O’Malley would almost certainly have reported this alleged 1 April conversation to London, but no trace of such a report is to be found in the British Public Record Office. O’Malley did make reports about the setting up of an émigré Hungarian government on


281.

282.

283. 284. 285. 286. 287.

288. 289.

290. 291.

292.

293.

294.

295. 296.

297.

both 23 and 26 January 1941 (see PRO, FO, 371/26602), and these telegrams are cited by Juhász, Magyar-brit titkos tárgyalások…, p. 23. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, 29 March 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 991– 2, document no. 681. See Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája…, p. 251 and Czettler, Teleki Pál …, p. 305. In Czettler’s view, the telegram’s ‘pessimistic contents’ may have exacerbated the prime minister’s depression. That is a possibility. See Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, pp. 301–2. Ibid., Vol 1, p. 482. Ibid., Vol.1, p. 446. Note by Frank Roberts, 6 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26615. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 5 April 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 1006–7, document no. 699. See DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 1,008, document no. 700. Note by Alexander Cadogan on his conversation with the Hungarian minister to London, 9 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26603. This is cited in Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, pp. 302–3. Telegram from Cadogan to O’Malley, 6 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/ 26607. On this, see the ciphered telegram of 6 April 1941 from Palairet, the British minister in Athens, to Foreign Secretary Eden, who was then in Cairo, in PRO, FO 371/26607. Ciphered telegram from the minister for foreign affairs to the Hungarian minister in London, 7 April 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 1,107–8, document no. 707. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the minister for foreign affairs, 6 April 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 1,010, document no. 703. Note from the British minister in Budapest to the Foreign Office, 7 April 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, pp. 1018–19, document no. 708 and telegram from O’Malley to the Foreign Office, in PRO, FO 371/26630. Miklós Horthy’s proclamation of the attack on Yugoslavia, 10 April 1941, in DIMK, Vol. 5, p. 1030, document no. 717. In July 1941, Count István Bethlen wrote to Tibor Eckhardt, who had finally managed to reach the United Sates not long before: ‘Eden wanted to declare war on us at the time of our intervention [i.e. joining in the German attack against Yugoslavia], but Churchill would not allow it. That too confirms Churchill had insight into our impossible position’, in Tibor Eckhardt’s Posthumous Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 2. Rhodes James, Robert (ed.), Churchill Speaks: Winston S. Churchill in Peace and War. Collected Speeches, 1897–1963 (Leicester, 1981), p. 746.

NOTES 203

298. Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War, Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance (London, 1950), p. 148. 299. O’Malley’s wife, Ann Bridge, wrote about Teleki’s death in her novel A Place to Stand (1953), the setting of which is Budapest in the spring of 1941. 300. See Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája…, p. 254. Essentially the same declaration, with different wording, is given by Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 500. 301. Note of Robert Vansittart to the Foreign Secretary, 17 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26603. 302. See PRO, FO 371/24431 on this point. 303. There is no significant, in-depth biography or other serious academic study of him. Sipos, Péter, Imrédy Béla és a Magyar Megújulás Pártja [Béla Imrédy and the Party of Hungarian Renewal] (Budapest, Akadémiai, 1970) bears the marks of the shortcomings of Marxist-inspired historiography. 304. On the first, see Sipos, Imrédy Béla…, especially p. 57 and also Sipos, Péter, ‘Imrédy Béla csodálatos forradalma [Béla Imrédy’s miraculous revolution], Rubicon 10 (1996), p. 24; on the latter, see Varannai, Toll és bilincs…, p. 236. 305. See Varannai, Toll és bilincs…, p. 238. 306. The article was evidently seen as important by the Foreign Office as the Southern Europe Department went to the trouble of filing a copy, in PRO, FO 371/22380. 307. Sipos, Imrédy Béla…, p. 57. 308. Memorandum by Sir R. Glynn on his conversation with Imrédy, 5 September 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22381. 309. Note by A.N. Noble, 21 October 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22381. 310. Sir Geoffrey Knox’s report to Ingram, head of the Foreign Office Southern Europe desk, 6 October 1938, in PRO, FO 371/22381. 311. Ibid. 312. So much for the authenticity of what was put in the Daily Telegraph article. 313. Entry for 20 January 1939, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 8. 314. Following the entry about the previously quoted conversation, Barcza throws in a couple of jokes. One of them goes: What do they call Imrédy in London? I’m ready. The other: Imrédy thinks he’s the Tisza [i.e. the river, but also the surname of a dynasty of leading Hungarian statesmen], but he’s actually just the Zagyva [a tributary of the Tisza, but also meaning ‘muddled’]. 315. Letter of Pál Teleki to György Barcza, 11 May 1940, in Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 284. 316. Pál Teleki’s letter to john Keyser, 13 February 1939, in PRO, FO 371/ 23109. 317. Report by O’Malley to Lord Halifax, 23 April 1940, in PRO, FO 417/42.


318. See Czettler, Teleki Pál…, p. 55. 319. When Csáky paid an official visit to Berlin in January 1939 in order to introduce himself, he wore a new ‘Hungarian’ diplomats’ uniform. It was a copy of the German uniform. Barcza noted sarcastically: This whippersnapper Csáky, who in plain language can only be called stunted in stature and a nonentity to look at, imagined that by putting in an appearance in a military-style uniform with a Germanic peaked cap he would instantly acquire a stately aspect. He told me himself that a person in civilian clothes simply vanished amongst the tall, uniformed Germans, and that was why he had brought in the new Hungarian diplomats’ uniform. He added that of course wearing it could only be justified in the Axis states, whereupon I reassured him that I would be unwilling to show myself in such a get-up in London even if ordered to do so, because there they would just laugh at me to my face in such a cross between the apparel of a lift boy and a cinema doorman’ (Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 400). According to one anecdote, when Teleki became prime minister and saw Csáky for the first time in his ‘uniform’, he said, gods! If you put that on one more time, I’ll fire you on the spot’ 320. ‘A téveszmék is történeti tények. Beszélgetés Kosáry Domokossal’ [Wrongheaded ideas are also historical facts: a conversation with Domokos Kosáry] Magyar Hírlap, 31 May 1997. 321. Letter of Teleki to Barcza, 12 March 1941, in Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 300. 322. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 446. 323. Entry for 5 October 1941, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, GA, Box 8, and also Bán, András D., ‘György Barcza —Naplórészletek, 1938–1944’ [György Barcza—Diary excerpts, 1938– 44], 2000, March 1996, p. 43. 324. Bárdossy had major gastric problems, which were common knowledge among the Budapest intelligentsia. One diarist of the era, Imre Csécsy, noted that Bárdossy was called ‘Gastric’ Savonarola behind his back, a sort of pun (the word sav in Hungarian means acid, as in ‘gastric acid’). 325. Report of O’Malley to Roger Makins, 25 March 1941, in PRO, FO 371/ 26620. 326. See Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 1, p. 486. 327. Barcza wrote his memoirs as an émigré in Switzerland, which explains the obvious ‘slippage’ over his dating: in May 1941 Hungary was not yet a belligerent party. 328. See DDHFP, Vol. 5, p. 1,214, document no. 867. 329. Az 1939 június hó 10-ére hirdetett országgyőlés képviselőházának naplója [Proceedings of the House of Deputies of the National Assembly called for June 10th, 1939], Vol. 10. Budapest, 1941, p. 305.

NOTES 205

330. Horthy grounded his decision on Law XVII/1920, paragraph 2, under which the Regent was empowered to dispatch troops outside the country’s frontiers provided he sought ex post facto consent from the government and parliament at the earliest possible opportunity. 331. Ciphered telegram from the foreign minister to the Hungarian minister in London, 3 April 1941, in DDHFP, Vol. 5, p. 1,000, document no. 689. 332. Ciphered telegram from the Hungarian minister in London to the foreign minister, 4 April 1941, in DDHFP, Vol. 5, pp. 1002–3, document no. 693. 333. Entry for 12 December 1941, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 6. 334. Entry for 16 January 1942, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 6. 335. Barnett, Corelli, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1984), pp. 465–6. Also cited by Bell, Philip M.H., John Bull and the Bear. British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (London, 1990), pp. 4–5. 336. Royal Institute of International Affairs, Archives, Lectures 8/683. 337. For more on the Foreign Research and Press Service, see Brewin, Christopher, ‘Arnold Toynbee and Chatham House’, in Bosco, Andrea and Navari, Cornelia (eds), Chatham House and British Foreign Policy (London: 1994), pp. 137–161. 338. Review of the Foreign Press 1939–1945. European Neutrals and the Near East. Series B, vols 1–13 (London and Munich: 1980), 339. See Bán, András D. (ed.), Pax Britannica. Brit külügyi iratok a második világháború utáni Kelet-Közép-Európáról, 1942–1943 [Pax Britannica: British foreign affairs documents on Central and Eastern Europe after World War II, 1942–1943] (Budapest, 1996). 340. On these matters, see PRO, INF 1/264. 341. Cantwell, John D., Images of War: British Posters 1939–1945 (London, 1989). 342. See PRO, INF 1/264. 343. In August 1944, Churchill said to Duff Cooper, ‘Well now, Duff, God knows how many posts I have put you in, and you’ve made a mess of every one of them. Singapore may not have been your fault. But what a rumpus you made at the Ministry of Information!’ Churchill on Duff Cooper, 29 March 1944, in Bruce Lockhart Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 3. 344. Bell John Bull…, p. 18. 345. Butler, David and Butler, Gareth, British Political Facts 1900–1944 (London, 1994). 346. See Silvey, Robert, Who’s Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research (London, 1974), pp. 120–1.


347. Note of Sir Robert Vansittart to the Foreign Secretary, 17 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26603 [cf. Ref. 300]; see also Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim…, Vol. 2, p. 307. 348. Note of A.P.Ryan to Sir Walter Monckton, 4 June 1941, in BBC Written Archives, 830/37. Cited by Bell, John Bull…, p. 21. 349. See Baron István Splény, ‘Hungary and Great Britain: Foreign Trade Relations’, The Statist, 16 September 1939. 350. Data supplied by the Secretariat of the Hungarian National Bank, for The Statist, 16 September 1939. 351. Ibid. 352. Ibid. 353. Ibid. 354. Cited by Lukacs, The Last European War…, p. 407 (footnote 66). 355. Quoted by Hornyik, Miklós Angol pázsit. Balkáni néprajzi kalauz [English lawn—An ethnographical guide to the Balkans] (Budapest, 1996), p. 53. 356. Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre-Eugène Chronique politique 1934–1942 (Paris, NRF, 1943), p. 109. Cited by Lukacs, The Last European War…, p. 524. 357. Whitcomb, Philip W. (trans.) France during the German Occupation, 1940– 1944: A Collection of 292 Statements on the Government of Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval, 3 vols (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1958–59), Vol. 3, p. 336. Cited by Lukacs, The Last European War…, pp. 524–5, footnote 66. 358. Churchill, Winston S., The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm, 2nd edn (London, 1949), p. 201. 359. Letter of Count Antal Sigray to Winston Churchill, 12 October 1940, in PRO, FO 371/24428. 360. As asserted by Bakách-Bessenyey himself to Jenő Thassy, according to the latter’s oral communication to the author. 361. One has in mind here, above all, the pronounced differences of view that arose between Churchill and Halifax during the early summer of 1940, before the British evacuation from Dunkirk. 362. Kosztolányi, Dezső ‘Londoni levelek [Letters from London]’, Pesti Hírlap, 28 September 1927. 363. Letter by Dezső Kosztolányi to his wife, London, 4 November 1931, in Kosztolányi, Dezső Levelek—Naplók [Letters and Diaries], eds Réz, Pál, Kelevéz, Ágnes and Kovács, Ida (Budapest, 1996), p. 634, Letter No. 1, 122. 364. Kádár Pukánszky, Jolán, A Nemzeti Színház százéves története [The Century of History of the National Theatre] (Budapest, 1940), Vol. 1, pp. 468–9. 365. See Pálffy, István, George Bernard Shaw Magyarországon (1904–1956) [GBS in Hungary (1904–1956)] (Budapest: 1987). 366. Az Est, 2 December 1928, cited by Pálffy, George Bernard Shaw…, pp. 149– 50. 367. Vámbéry, Rusztem ‘Fabianizmus’, Századunk, February (1929).

NOTES 207

368. Csécsy, Imre ‘Magyarország—angol szemmel’ [Hungary, through English eyes]’, Századunk (1934), p. 398. 369. Imre Csécsy, ‘Előszó [Preface]’, in Baldwin, Stanley, Mi angolok [We English] (Budapest, Századunk, 1939), p. 6. 370. Letter of Lajos Hatvany to Gyula Földessy, Oxford, 11 November 1939, in Hatvany, L. (Mrs) and Rozsics, István (eds), Hatvany Lajos levelei [Letters of Lajos Hatvany] (Budapest, 1985), p. 184. 371. Cs. Szabó, László Doveri átkelés Nyugateurópai helyzethép [Crossing at Dover: an overview of the situation in western Europe] (Budapest, 1937), p. 110. 372. ‘Magyar író Angliában. Válasz Siklós Istvánnak [Hungarian writer in England: a response to István Siklós],’ in Cs. Szabó, László Hülö árnyékban [In a Chilling Shadow] (Berne, 1982), p. 231. 373. Szerb, Antal, A világirodalom története [A History of World Literature] (Budapest, 1973), pp. 595–6. 374. Szerb, Antal, ‘Az intellektuális költő [The Intellectual Poet],’ in Kenyeres, Zoltán (ed.), Esszépanoráma 1900–1944 [A Conspectus of Essays 1900–1944] (Budapest, 1978), Vol. 3, pp. 504–27. 375. Entry for Entry for 27 June 1938, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 8. The excerpt is quoted in Bán, András D., ‘György Barcza—Naplórészletek, 1938–1944’ [György Barcza —Diary excerpts, 1938–44], ‘2000’, March 1996, p. 38. 376. The manuscript was lost for years, only resurfacing decades later to be published in 1986. 377. Leigh Fermor, Patrick, Between the Woods and the Water. On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (London, 1986), p. 40. 378. Lengyel, Balázs, ‘Angol tanú’ [English witness], Újhold-Évkonyv, 2 (1987), p. 359. 379. Ibid., p. 360. 380. On the Hungarian government’s appreciation, see the letter of György Barcza, Hungarian minister in London, to Cadogan, 12 April 1941, in PRO, FO 371/26620. 381. Héthelyi changed his name to Leslie Harvey, later settling in Jamaica, where he later became a government adviser. He died in London in September 1997. 382. The story of Ferenc Rentoul (born Goldmann), long-time head of the BBC’s Hungarian section after the war, is amusing. One day a policeman rang at the door. ‘Do you have a wireless?’ he asked. ‘Because if you have, then I must confiscate it right now. Hostile aliens are not allowed to have a wireless. You might be able to send signals to German fighter planes.’ ‘I am a refugee mysetf,’ said Rentoul, ‘and I haven’t the slightest intention of sending any signals. My wife, on the other hand, is English, and she listens to the news several times a day. You can’t leave her


383. 384. 385. 386. 387.

388. 389. 390. 391. 392. 393. 394.

without a wireless.’ The bobby pondered for a minute then came up with a solution to the knotty problem. ‘All right, then. We won’t take the wireless away, but on the strict condition that only your wife is allowed to switch on the wireless. You are not permitted so much as to touch it’ (See Sárközi, Mátyás, ‘André Deutsch 80’, Magyar Hírlap, 20 December 1997.) Mikes, György [George] ‘Siklóstól Londonig [From Siklós to London], in Papucsban [In Slippers] (Budapest, 1987), p. 9. Mikes, George, How to be Seventy. An Autobiography (London, 1982), p. 157. Ibid., p. 110. Básti, Lajos, Sziréna. Novellák, tárcák, rajzok [Siren. Short stories, feuilletons, sketches] (Budapest, 1942), p. 107. Family legend has it that when Balogh was offered a peerage in 1968 he danced around the room chortling merrily ‘I’ m a lo-ord, I’m a lo-ord!’ See Sárközi, Mátyás, ‘Műemlék kerület’ [Monument district], Magyar Hírlap, 6 March 1993. Juhász, Magyarország külpolitikája… Juhász, A Teleki-kormány külpolitikája… Macartney, October Fifteenth… Barcza, Diplomataemlékeim… Czettler, Teleki Pál… Juhász, Magyar-brit titkos tárgyalások… Entry for Entry for 18 September 1942, György Barcza’s Diary, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Box 8. The excerpt is quoted in Bán, András D. ‘György Barcza—Naplórészletek, 1938–1944’ [György Barcza —Diary excerpts, 1938-44], '2000’, March 1996, p. 47.

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SECONDARY PUBLISHED SOURCES BOOKS Baldwin, Stanley, On England (London, 1926); Hungarian translation: Mi angolok [We English] (Budapest, 1939). Bán, András D., (ed.), Pax Britannica. Brit külügyi iratok a második világháború utáni Kelet-Közép-Európáról, 1942–1943 [Pax Britannica: British Foreign Affairs Documents on Central and Eastern Europe after World Warll, 1942– 1943] (Budapest, 1996). Barker, Elisabeth, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War (London, 1976). Barnett, Corelli, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1984). Básti, Lajos, Sziréna. Novellák, tárcák, rajzok [Siren. Short Stories, Feuilletons, Sketches] (Budapest, 1942). Bell, Philip M.H., John Bull and the Bear. British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Saviet Union, 1941–1945 (London, 1990). Birkenhead, Earl of, Halifax. The Life of Lord Halifax (London, 1965). Brewin, Christopher, ‘Arnold Toynbee and Chatham House’, in Bosco, Andrea and Navari, Cornelia (eds), Chatham House and British Foreign Policy (London, 1994), pp. 137–61. Bullock, Alan L., Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (London, 1963) Butler, David and Butler, Gareth, British Political Facts 1900–1944 (London, 1994). Camrose, William E.B., British Newspapers and Their Controllers (London, 1947). Cantwell, John D., Images of War: British Posters 1939–1945 (London, 1989). Carlton, David, Anthony Eden (London, 1981). Carr, Edward H., Britain: A Study of Foreign Policy from the Versailles Treaty to the Outbreak of War (London, 1939). Çelovsky, Boris, Das Münchner Abkommen (Stuttgart, 1958). Colvin, Ian, Vansittart in Office (London, 1965). Czettler, Antal, Teleki Pál és a magyar külpolitika 1939–1941 [Pál Teleki and Hungarian Foreign Policy 1939–41] (Budapest, 1997). Dirksen, Herbert von, Moscow, Tokyo, London: Twenty Years of German Foreign Policy (Norman, OK, 1952). Feiling, Keith, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946).

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Fenyo, Mario D., Hitler, Horthy, and Hungary: German-Hungarian Relations, 1941– 1944 (New Haven, CT, 1972) Gál, István, Magyarország, Anglia és Amerika különös tekintettel a szláv világra. Vázlatok a nemzetközi vonatkozások köréből [Hungary, England and America, with Particular Regard to the Slavonic World. Sketches from the Field of International Relations] (Budapest, 1945). Gilbert, Martin, W.S.Churchill Finest Hour 1939–1941 (London, 1983). Halmosy, Dénes, Nemzetközi szerződések 1918–1945. A két világháború közötti korszak és a második világháború legfontosabb külpolitikai szerződései [International Treaties 1918–45. The Key Foreign Treaties of the Inter-war Period and the Second World War] (Budapest, 1983). Hornyik, Miklós, Angol pázsit. Balkáni néprajzi kalauz [English Lawn—An Ethnographical Guide to the Balkans] (Budapest, 1996). Jánossy, Dénes, A Kossuth-emigráció Angliában és Amerikában, 1851–1852 [The Kossuthist Emigrés in England and America, 1851–1852] (Budapest, 1940). Jeszenszky, Géza, Az elveszett presztízs. Magyarország megítelésének megvál tozása NagyBritanniában (1894–1918) [Loss of Prestige. Changing Views of Hungary in Great Britain, 1894–1918] (Budapest, 1986). —Bethlen István. Politikai életrajz [István Bethlen—A Political Biography] (Budapest, 1991). —Helyünk és sorsunk a Duna-medencében [Our Place and Fate in the Danube Basin] (Budapest, 1996). Rose, Norman, Vansittart: Study of a Diplomat (London, 1978). Rothermere, 1st Viscount, My Campaign for Hungary (London, 1939) —My Fight to Rearm Britain (London, 1939) —Warnings and Predictions (London, 1939) Sakmyster, Thomas L., Hungary, the Great Powers and the Danubian Crisis 1936– 1939 (Athens, GA, 1980). Seton-Watson, Hugh, Eastern Europe between the Wars 1918–1941 (Hamden, CT, 1962). Seton-Watson, Robert William, Treaty Revision and the Hungarian Frontiers (London, 1934). —Britain and the Dictators: A Survey of Post-War British Policy (London, 1939). Silvey, Robert, Who’s Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research (London, 1974). Sipos, Péter, Imrédy Béla és a Magyar Megújulás Pártja [Béla Imrédy and the Party of Hungarian Renewal] (Budapest, 1970). Strang, Lord, The Foreign Office (London, 1955). Szerb, Antal, A világirodalom története [A History of World Literature] (Budapest, 1973). Szini, Miklós and Szics, László (eds), Horthy Miklós titkos irásai [Secret Writings of Miklós Horthy] (Budapest, 1962). Taylor, A.J.P., Beaverbrook (London, 1972).


Trevor-Roper, H.R. (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk: His Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (London, 1953). Watt, D.C., Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation of British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1965). Watt, D.C., How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938– 1939 (London, 1989). Woodward, Sir E.L., British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, Vol. 1 (London, 1962).

ARTICLES ‘A téveszmék is történeti tények. Beszélgetés Kosáry Domokossal’ [Wrongheaded ideas are also historical facts: a conversation with Domokos Kosáry], Magyar Hírlap, 31 May 1997. Bán, András D., ‘Radomir király. Széphistória a Rothermere-akcióról’ [King Radomir: a romance about the Rothermere campaign], ‘2000’, October 1990, pp. 56–60. —‘Egy sajtómágnás sikertelen magándiplomáciája. Az angol-német megegyezési kísérletek kudarcához’ [A press magnate’s unsuccessful private diplomacy. On the failure of attempts at Anglo-German accord], Jelenkor, February 1993, pp. 156–63. —‘György Barcza—Naplórészletek, 1938–1944’ [György Barcza—Diary excerpts, 1938–44], ‘2000’, March 1996. Borbándi, Gyula, ‘A Teleki-Pelényi-terv nyugati magyar ellenkormány létesítésére’ [The Teleki-Pelényi plan for setting up a Hungarian Provisional Government in the West], Új Látóhatár, 2, 1966. Csécsy, Imre, ‘Magyarország—angol szemmel’ [Hungary, through English eyes], Századunk, October 1934. Gál, István, ‘Dickens és folyóirata Kossuthról és Széchenyiről’ [Dickens and His Newssheet on Kossuth and Széchenyi], Filológiai Közlöny, 1–2, 1970. Lukacs, Tibor Zs., ‘A revízió reménye’ [The hope of revision] Rubicon, 1, 1997. Lengyel, Balázs, ‘Angol tanú’ [English witness], Újhold-Évkonyv, 2, 1987. Pelényi, John, ‘The Secret Plan for a Hungarian Government in the West at the Outbreak of World War II’, Journal of Modern History, June, 1964. Sárközi, Mátyás, ‘Műemlék kerület’ [Monument district], Magyar Hírlap, 6 March 1993. —‘André Deutsch 80’, Magyar Hírlap, 20 December 1997. Sipos, Péter, ‘Imrédy Béla csodálatos forradalma’ [Béla Imrédy’s miraculous revolution], Rubicon 10, 1996. Szerb, Antal, ‘Az intellektuális költő’ [The intellectual poet], in Kenyeres, Zoltán (ed.), Esszépanoráma 1900–1944 [A Conspectus of Essays 1900– 1944] (Budapest, 1978), Vol. 3, pp. 504–27.

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Tilkovszky, Lóránt, ‘Magyar látogatók Churchillnél 1939 nyarán’ [Churchill’s Hungarian visitors in the summer of 1939], História, 8, 1994. Vámbéry, Rusztem, ‘Fabianizmus,’ Századunk, February 1929. Zeidler, Miklós, ‘A Magyar Reviziós Liga. Trianontól Rothermere-ig’ [The history of the Hungarian Revisionist League, from Trianon to Rothermere], Századok, 2, 1997, pp. 303–52.

216

Index

Almássy, Count Kálmán, 155 Amery, Leopold, 11 Anschluss, vii, 22–53, 70, 75, 130 Anglo-German Naval Agreemen 1935, 20 Anglo-Hungarian trade, 157–61 Apafi, Prince Mihály, 1 Apor, Baron Gábor, 15 Apponyi, Count Albert, 6 Arrow Cross Party, 36, 38, 39, 60, 63, 80, 161 Asquith, Lady, 45 Astor, John Jacob, 153 Attlee, Sir Clement, 45 Auer, Pál, 67, 68, 126 Axis Powers, 75, 104, 105, 106, 109 Az Est, 131, 132, 134, 166

Beaverbrook, Lord, 153 Beneš, Edvard, 84, 97, 109 Bessarabia, 94 Bethlen, Count lstván, 13, 15, 16, 90, 119, 171 Bethlen, Prince Gabriel 1 Bíró, Lajos, 174, 179 Blackwell, Joseph Andrew, 4 Bled Agreement, 37 Boldizsár, Iván, 173 Bolshevism, 167 Bowman, Isaiah, 13 Bracken, Brendan, 152 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 97, 153, 154, 163, 168, 175, 176, 177 British Ministry of Information, 127 Browne, Edward, 1 Bruce, Hamilton, 48 Buday, György, 177 Burckhardt, Jacob, ix Butler, R.A., 24, 34, 85, 97, 127

Babits, Mihály, 169, 170, 171 Baden-Powell, Robert, xxi 137 Baldwin, Sir Stanley, 20, 34, 167 Balkan Commission, 16 Balogh, Thomas, 179 Bandholtz, General Harry, 8 Baranyai, Lipót, 86 Bárdossy, László, 141–8 and passim Barcza, György, ix, 32, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 55, 67, 73, 78, 79, 80, 93, 96, 106, 108, 111, 115 145, 172, 186, 185 Básti, Lajos, 176 Battle of Britain, 91, 162

Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 24, 25, 33, 34, 41, 42, 66, 85, 99, 105, 106, 108, 122, 123 Chain Bridge, 173 Chamberlain, Sir Neville, 20, 22–5 27, 43, 44, 45, 49, 59, 152 Churchill, Randolph, 67, 69

217


Churchill, Winston, vi, ix, 19, 20, 23, 34, 45, 56, 67, 68, 93, 95, 98, 125 141, 153, 162, 185 Cincar-Markovic, Aleksander, 114 City of London, 11, 161 Civic Radical Party, 167 Commonwealth Conference, 1937, 147 Congress of Vienna, 1815, 10 Cooper, Duff, 27, 46, 152 Coward, Noel, 177 Crete, 123 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 95 Croatia, 124 Csáky, Count István, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 72, 83, 87, 97, 99, 103, 104, 108, 113 Csécsy, Imre, 167 Cs. Szabó, László, 168 Cvetkovič, Dragiša, 117 Czechoslovak National Committe, 82, 96 Daily Express, 152, 153 Daily Herald, 106, 152 Daily Mail, 12, 13, 17, 106, 152, 166 Daily Mirror, 106 Daily Telegraph, 31, 38, 58, 106, 131, 132, 134, 135, 149, 152 Dalton, Hugh, 93, 97 Danzig corridor, 18, 19, 67 Darányi, Kálmán, 25, 35 Darvas, józsef, 173 Dee, John, 1 Deutsch, André, 176, 177 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 101 Dickens, Charles, 5, 169, 170 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 161, 162 Eckhardt, Tibor, 16, 67, 77, 119, 120, 171 The Economist, 36, 129, 149, 169 Eden, Sir Anthony, 22, 34, 45, 101, 111, 122, 126, 147, 149

Eliot, T. S., 178 Erdei, Ferenc, 173 Erdmannsdorf, Otto von, 69, 93, 108 Esterházy, Count János, 52 Evening Standard, 34, 41, 69, 142, 152 Fabian Society, England, 67 Financial News, 41 First Jewish Law, 1938, 26 Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), 149, 150 Four-Power Pact, 18, 19 Franco, General, 142 Függetlenség, 97, 150 Gábor, Dennis (Dénes), 177 Gál, István, 26, 171 Galsworthy, John 165 German invasion of Yugoslavia, ix Goldfinger, Erno, 178 Gömbös, Gyula, 17 Goode, Sir William, 99, 107, 173 Gower, Sir Robert, 18 Greece, 123 Györ Programme, 26 Halász, Gábor, 169 Halder, General Franz, 88 Halifax, Lord Edward, 22, 24, 25, 30, 34, 42, 58, 64, 95, 98, 99, 111, 162 Harmsworth, Edmund, 14, 15 Hauser, Arnold, 177 Héthelyi, László, 176 Herczeg, Ferenc, 14, 16 Hevesi, Sándor, 166 Hitler, Adolf, 22, 24, 30, 36, 37, 44, 60, 61, 70, 77, 93, 103, 117, 128, 174 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 34 Hoare-Belisha, Leslie, 27 Hodza, Milan, 7 Hohler, Sir Thomas, 107 Hordósy, Iván, 16, 17, 18

INDEX 219

Horthy, Admiral Miklós, 14, 35, 37, 43, 51, 56, 85, 87, 89, 123, 143, 166 Horthy, Miklós, Junior, 62 Hudson, Robert, 71 Huizinga, John, vi–vii Hungarian Board of Foreign Trade, 155 ‘Hungarian cause’, 15 Hungarian election, May 1939 viii Hungarian Fabian Society, 166 Hungarian Foreign Ministry, viii Hungarian Life Movement, 55 Hungarian Life Party, 55 Hungarian National Bank, 36 Hungarian National Party, 52 Hungarian occupation of Ruthenia, 56–59, 64, 78 Hungarian oil fields, 79 Hungarian PEN Club, 165 Hungarian Quarterly, 170 Hungarian revisionism, 79, 81, Hungarian Revisionist League, 15, 17 Hungarian Students’ Union, 168 Hungarian-Yugoslav Treaty of Friendship, 108 Hunyady, Sándor, 160 Huszár, Károly, 8 Huxley, Aldous, 168 Ignotus, Paul, 175 Illyés, Gyula, 173 Imrédy, Béla, 128–8 and passim Interdepartmental Committee on Economic Assistance to Central and South Eastern Europe 31 Iványi-Grünwald, Bela, 177 Jewish Law, 176 ‘Justice for Hungary!’ campaign, 15 ‘Jewish question’, 115, 137 Káldor, József, 173, 178 Karinthy, Frigyes, 168 Károlyi, Count Gyula, 89

Károlyi, Count Mihály, 97, 179 Kiss, Ferenc, 166 Klebelsberg, CountKunó, 163 Knox, Sir Geoffrey, 32, 49, 134 Kónyi-Hajnal, Kálmán, 178 Korda, Alexander, 34, 174, 179 Körmendi, Ferenc, 175, 176 Korniss, Gyula, 171 Kosztolányi, Dezsö, 164, 165 Kovács, Imre, 173 Kristóffy, József, 143 Krúdy, Gyula, 165 Kunder, Antal, 155 Lamotte, Károly, 155 Láng, Lajos, 6 Laval, Pierr Lawrence, D.H., 168 League of Nations, 16, 19, 50, 137 Leeper, Allen, 16 Leigh Fermor, Patrick, 172 Listowel, Lady, 73, 134, 149, 152, 172 Little Entente, 28, 32, 36, 40, 130 Lloyd George, David, 11, 20 Lockhart, Bruce, 113 Londonderry, Lord, 27, 69, 70, 99, 107 Loraine, Sir Percy, 85 Low, David, 142 Lukacs, John, 59 Macartney, C.A., 80, 123, 150, 153, 167 Magyars, ethnic, 13 Magyar minority, Czechoslovakia, 17, 42, 75, 109, 133; Romania, 67; Transylvania, 80 Voivodina, 120 Magyar National Socialists, 41 Magyar Nemzet, 91, 150, 171 Magyarság, 150, 166, 171 Magyarság, 97 Makins, Roger, 83


Manchester Guardian, 99, 106, 175 Mann, Thomas, 165 Mannheim, Karl (Károly), 177, 178, 179 Mansfield, Katherine, 168 Markos, György, 173 Marosy, Ferenc, 26 Maugham, Somerset, 151, 160, 168, 170, 175 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 5 Mikes, György (George), 153, 176, 177 Milne, A.A., 169 Ministry of Information, 151, 152, 153 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 74, 104 Moore, Sir Thomas, 42, 43, 45 Moot circle, 178 Móricz, Zsigmond, 165 Morning Post, 31, 130 Mottistone, Lord, 99 Munich Agreement, 45, 46, 48, 109, 110 Mussolini, Benito, vii, 18, 19, 45, 47, 70, 85, 99, 142 Národni denník, 13 National Federation of Hungarians (Free Hungarians), 175 National Socialism, viii, 40, 50, 163, 167 National Socialist Party, 19 National Unity Party, 51 Near and Middle East Society, London, 16 Nemzeti Újság, 98 Nemzet, 176 Népszava, 166 New Europe circle, 11 ‘New Order’, 101 New Statesman, 41, 175 Nicolson, Harold, 9 Noble, A.N., 48, 50 Northern Bukovina, 94

Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie, 171 Nyugat, 164, 165, 167, 168 Observer, 149 Odescalchi, Princess Margit, 173, 173 O’Malley, Sir Owen St Clair, 55, 56, 66, 74, 80, 81, 83, 99, 100, 104, 105, 173 Orczy, Baroness Emmuska, 174 ‘Pact of Steel’, 70 Paget, John, 4 Pallavicini, Count György, 52 Paris Peace Conference, 1919 8, 11, 138, 147, 169 Pasvolsky, Leo, 151 Pelényi, János, 89, 96 Pelényi—Teleki scheme, 90 Pester Lloyd, 65, 83, 98, 150, 175 Pesti Napló, 166, 175 Pétain, Marshall H P, 161 Picture Post, 142 Póka-Pivny, Béla, 16 Polányi, Michael, 178 Post-war Foreign Advisory Committee, 138, 151 Powell, Michael, 175 Pressburger, Emeric, 174 Prince of Wales, 172 Public Record Office, 181 Quin, Edgar, 4 Radio Petöfi, 177 Rákóczi, Prince George I, 1 Rákosi, Jenö, 6 Reményi-Schneller, Lajos, 155 Rémond, René, x Renouvin, Pierre, x Révai, András, 175 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 37, 61, 69, 72, 77, 93, 103, 104, 118, 162 Roberts, Frank K., 82, 91, 97, 123 Romania, 31, 113

INDEX 221

Romsics, Ignác, 11 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 23 Rothermere campaign, 14 Rothermere, Lord, 12, 13, 17, 106, 165, 176 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 147, 153 Royal Society, London, 1 Rubidó-Zichy, Baron Iván, 14 Russell Clerk, Sir Georg 8 Sargent, Sir Orme, 28, 33, 67 Schmidt, Paul, 104 Seton-Watson, R.W., 5, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 21, 150 Shakespeare, 164, 165, 166 Shaw, George Bernard, 166, 168 Sidney, Sir Philip, 1 Sigray, Count Antal, 79, 181 Simon, Sir John, 19 Sino-Japanese conflict, 101 Slovak Diet, 57 Smallholder and Social Democratic Party, 63, 67, 68 Smith, Adam, 4 Smuts, Jan, 11 Snowden, Ethel, 17, 18 Solti, Georg, 178 Soviet Union, 33 Splény, Baron István, 155 Stalin, Jozef, ix, 142 Strang, William, 29, 33, 85, 107 ‘Stresa Front’, 20 Sudetenland crisis, 29 Sudeten Germans, 42, 133 Sunday Chronicle, 91, 151 Sunday Times, 39, 40, 131 Swedish Legation in London, 128 Szabó, Zoltán, 173 Szálasi, Ferenc, 39 Századunk, 166, 167 Szapáry, Countess Erzsébet, 173 Széchényi, Count Ferenc, 4, 5 Széchényi, Count László, 17

Szenci, Miklós, 179 Szerb, Antal, 168, 169, 170, 171 Sztójay, Döme, 26, 101, 103 Szüllö, Géza, 17 Tábori, György, 175 Tábori, Pál, 175 Tarján, György, 153, 179 Teleki, Count Pál, 136–43 and passim Thirty Years’ War, ix Tierney Clark, William, 5 Tilea, Virgil, 58, 59 The Times, 13, 31, 58, 74, 106, 109, 126, 152, 170 Toynbee, Arnold, 20, 149 Transylvania, 1, 60, 66, 67, 95, 98, 111 ‘Transylvanian Question’, 21, 64 Treaties of Locarno, 1925 10 Treaty of Trianon, vii, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 31, 45, 63, 67, 78, 166, 183 Tripartite Pact, 101, 103, 105, 107, 114, 117 Turkey, 31 Tyler, Royall, 79 Új Magyarság, 91, 150, 166 University of Debrecen, 163 University of Pest, 163 USA, 144 USSR, 144 Vámbéry, Rusztem, 166, 167 Vansittart, Sir Robert, 33–6, 73, 123, 127 Vas, István, 169 Versailles Treaty, 20 Vienna Awards, 48, 49, 64, 78, 84, 98, 103, 109, 110 Waugh, Evely Wehrmacht, 88, 117 Weiss Manfred, Works, 88 Weizsäcker, Ernst von, 71, 103


Wells, H.G., 165 Werth, General Henrik, 86, 119 Wesselényi, Miklós, 1 5 Windsor, Duke of, 34 ‘Wondrous Stag movement’, 135 Yugoslavia, 32 Yugoslav-Hungarian Treaty of Eternal Friendship, 140 Zarek, Otto, 171

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