Gábor Murányi
Twice a Victim
Iván Lajos, a Forgotten Historian, who
Predicted German Defeat in 1939
Should Hitler's Reich start a war, it would necessarily lose it. That
was argued two and a half months before the outbreak of the Second World
War by a historian barely known beyond his home town in southern Hungary.
Within a month his book was seized, and what he eventually got out of it
in 1944 was thirteen months in Maut hausen concentration camp. Not long
after his liberation, Iván Lajos (1906-1953?) was carried off by
Soviet State Security. He was a brave man, and it was presumably his support
for a Habsburg restoration that caused all his problems.
[...]
Lajos published his first book, Ausztria-Magyarország különbéke
kísérletei a világháborúban (Austro-Hun
garian Attempts to Conclude a Separate Peace in the Great War), in 1926,
while still a student, and followed that up with a work just about every
other year. The most important was undoubtedly the 1935 IV Károly
élete és politikája (Charles IV: His life and policy),
which ran to over five hundred pages. But it was this barely a hundred
pages long pamphlet that assured him a national reputation , the Grey Book.
[...]
Lajos devotes ten sober chapters arguing that, if Hitler's Reich starts
a war that war will be lost. Hungarian public opinion is adressed through
a large number of quotations. Tens of thousands of copies of Hitler's Mein
Kampf were sold in Hungary but few readers noticed that Hitler declares
outright that he would conquer the eastern territories and reduce their
inhabitants to subjection. Iván Lajos also evoked a 1933 lecture
by Benno Graf, who was once reckoned an authority, in which this ideologue
of Hitler's Reich, whose name no one remembers any more, expounds that
this "hating, small, miserable, Balkan Hun gary" has no claim
on the Germans living there since anything worthy of the name of culture
is truly German, therefore what is "German cultural soil ought to
become a land of the German Volk as well."
Iván Lajos provides many more quotes to show that Hungary was
one of the objectives of German Lebensraum expansion and then goes on to
deal with Germany's chances of winning the war. He declares the Blitzkrieg,
much vaunted by German propaganda, to be a pipedream. He argues that the
Soviet Union, a much boosted war potential, stood in the way of the conquest
of the eastern territories. Overcoming and occupying that huge country
would prove impossible. Follow ing the failure of the Blitzkrieg, there
would be an anti-German alliance between the Soviet Union and the British
and French, who still entertained illusions that peace could be preserved.
Arguing from history, Lajos also predicted that in the war America would
be forced to abandon the isolationism of almost two decades, and that America's
entry into the war would unambiguously tip the balance of power in favour
of the Allies.
[...]
"I Am Asking for the Floor" was the title under which Iván
Lajos published his last political writing in the early spring of 1946.
"It is as a sad Cassandra that I now confront public opinion,"
he wrote as an apology for what he had maintained in the 1939 book which
had defined his fate, freely admitting that what he had said would not
have allowed one to predict that the Reich would be able to carry on for
so long although its essence, that the Allies could not be defeated in
a Blitzkrieg and that the Americans would enter the war, had come about.
He also admitted that he had been surprised by the pharisaical cynicism
which had prolonged the war, that is by the fact that Hitler had concluded
a pact of eternal friendship with the powers that be in Russia whom he
had abused so much.
This reminder of the Molotov-Ribben trop Pact was obviously somewhat
uncautious in a Hungary occupied by the Soviet Army. One cannot tell whether
this was later added to the catalogue of his sins, nor do we know anything
about his activities in the post to which he was appointed in the Ministry
of Education.
[...]
In December 1945, a Russian major called on him in his Budapest home
and suggested a friendly talk in the major's Hunyadi tér billet.
At the major's request, this was repeated on several occasions. He was
always fetched by car by an interpreter called Natasha. On June 17th 1946,
Natasha once again invited him to a friendly chat with the general. The
next day Natasha called on him by car at the appointed time and we have
not clapped eyes on him since.
Iván Lajos went missing at the age of forty. His brother has
written numerous letters since, asking for help: in 1946 to Ferenc Nagy,
the Prime Minister, and to Gyula Szekfu[yacute], the historian, at that
time Ambas sador in Moscow, in 1947 to the Legal Aid Service of the Foreign
Ministry, in 1948 to Gyula Ortutay, the Minister of Education, in 1956,
once again to the Legal Aid Service of the Foreign Ministry, in 1962 to
the Foreign Section of the Hungarian Red Cross, in 1964 to the Soviet Embassy
in Buda pest, to Bishop János Péter, the For eign Minister,
and Géza Szénási, the Di rector of Public Prosecutions.
He did not receive a single meaningful answer from any official source.
In 1955, however, he received an anonymous letter which revived hopes for
years. The typed message read:
I have arrived recently. I spent much time with your brother. He is
reasonably well in body but there is something wrong inside. He speaks
of kings. Take good care of him when he gets home. He regrets having meddled
in politics! He too will be home by January. True, his hair is white, but
he is in reasonable health. He'll have to spend some time in a nursing
home! A former Staff Officer.
The family later took a different view of that anonymous letter. In
the mid-sixties a dentist, who had returned to Tamási, cal led on
them and told them that Iván Lajos had died in 1953 in the Gulag,
in Kara ganda, in Kazakhstan. He had not met him, but his source was impeccable,
he said.
Gábor Murányi
is on the staff of Heti Világgazdaság, an economic
and political weekly.
