Antal Czettler

Miklós Kállay's Attempts to Preserve
Hungary's Independence

As a result of unfortunate and erroneous decisions on the part of its prime minister, during the eleven months the Bárdossy government was in office, Hungary became embroiled in war with three major powers, the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States. Although the declaration of war on America could hardly have been avoided owing to strong German pressure, Bárdossy overstepped the bounds of diplomacy in stating to Pell, America's pro-Hungarian minister in Budapest, that Hungary was a sovereign state and had not been responding to German pressure, and when he said that she was finally burning her remaining bridges with the West. Bárdossy gave advance notice of the declaration neither to the Regent, nor to Parliament. Accordingly, when receiving the departing United States' chargé d'affaires, Howard K. Travers, on December 16, 1941, Horthy informed the Americans that, for his part, he regarded Bárdossy's declaration of war as invalid and unconstitutional. Through his conduct and his foreign policy the Premier had finally forfeited the Regent's confidence. Because of the country's isolation, voices in Horthy's immediate entourage urged that Bárdossy resign, and a government led by a politician committed to no particular side in the conflict be formed. To replace Bárdossy, Horthy appointed Miklós Kállay, a personal friend, chairman of the National Irrigation Authority, and a former minister of agriculture. Kállay enjoyed the trust of the anti-German, liberal-conservative and "Anglophile" (as contemporaries put it) circles gathered around Count István Bethlen. On the other hand, he had no previous experience of high office and could only hope that the Germans, even if they mistrusted him, would not oppose his appointment as prime minister. At the Regent's request Bárdossy tendered his resignation, and on March 9, 1942 the Kállay government was formed.

When forming his government Kállay had two objectives: the first was to protect Hungary's constitutional and parliamentary system of government against the Germans and the Hungarian extreme right-wing parties, and secondly to take the country out of the Axis camp and into that of Britain and America, whom he regarded as representatives of Christian civilization. In addition, under no circumstances did he wish Hungary to fall within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Before the collapse of Communism in 1989, the majority of the historians in Hungary accused Kállay of having no aim other than the preservation of the Horthy system for the postwar period. Even the comparatively moderate Gyula Juhász wrote: "Power had to be retained at all costs: this was the key issue in Hungary's wartime foreign policy".

In opposition to this, the former diplomat Aladár Szegedy-Maszák pointed out in his memoirs that Gyula Juhász, along with many other historians, identifies saving the régime as the main goal of Kállay's foreign policy, even though Juhász is unable to produce documentary evidence for this. "He forces the issue into the procrustean bed of Marxist-Leninist ideology. He considers the social class of Kállay and his associates to be the crucial thing, obstinately ignoring the fact that we were thinking not of the régime, but of the country". When they accuse the Kállay government of cowardice in its refusal to oppose the Germans openly, Juhász and historians who incline to his views consistently forget to mention that after March 19, 1944-the day the Germans occupied Hungary-those very events took place (for example, the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews) which Kállay's cautious foreign policy wished to avoid.

 

Kállay and the Hungarian right. Hungarian opposition to the "Final Solution"

Miklós Kállay's government was received with misgivings not only by the Germans and the Hungarian extreme right-wing parties, but also by the strong right wing of the Government party itself. Therefore, in order to secure a solid majority when Parliament voted its confidence, he was forced to make concessions to the right wing of the Government party (the Party of Hungarian Life). In his first speech to Parliament as Prime Minister, he declared that he would continue his predecessor's foreign policy, would continue the struggle against Soviet Bolshevism, and even that he would take a firmer stance against Bolshevism than Bárdossy had done. Concurrently, in order to counter suspicions on the right, he submitted a bill to the legislature for the appropriation of Jewish-owned landed property. According to his memoirs, he saw this bill as the first step towards land reform. At the same time, he professed faith in Hungary's Christian traditions and in the parliamentary form of government. His inaugural speech was received by the Government majority without particular enthusiasm. From this he concluded that he could not speak in public with complete sincerity and that he had to conceal his true aims.

The response abroad to the new Premier's speech was not unequivocal. The greater part of the press in Britain and America interpreted it as signalling continuation of Bárdossy's foreign policy; the Germans, on the other hand, received it with misgivings, since despite all its anti-Bolshevik rhetoric the speech deviated somewhat from the national socialist phraseology used by politicians in the Axis countries. Kállay's anti-Bolshevik statements were based on heartfelt conviction, he thought he could counter German mistrust by means of his anti-Soviet speeches. Also, since he was not completely clear as to the close character of the alliance between Britain, America and the Soviet Union, he believed that the leading Western politicians would forgive him such utterances, since in the first half of 1942, with German forces advancing towards the Volga and the Caucasus, it was impossible in Central Europe to pursue an anti-German policy without risking the nation's existence. His later moves were made more difficult by these very statements: as leading circles in Britain and America saw it, Kállay changed his policy only when confronted with German defeat. The British historian C. A. Macartney correctly remarks that these leading circles accepted at face value Kállay's statements in the spring of 1942, and did not believe him when he, sincerely, sought links with Britain and the United States.

The Germans viewed the formation of the Kállay government with mistrust from the outset. During talks with Sztojay, Hungary's minister in Berlin, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop declared in early March 1942: "This change of government in Hungary is totally incomprehensible to us". Initially there was no great friction between the two states with regard to it. When, on account of increasing tension between Hungary and Romania, Kállay visited Hitler at his headquarters in June 1942, the talks passed off in an atmosphere which was polite although not especially cordial. It was as a result of German demands for a radical solution of the Jewish question that the first serious conflict between Hungary and the German Reich occurred.

An ominous change in the German attitude to the Jewish question, an attitude that was radical from the very beginning, was signalled by Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on April 26, 1942. In this he urged the immediate, complete and necessary solution of the Jewish question throughout Europe and, in tones harsher than those he had used hitherto, named the Jews as the number-one enemy of peace and order in Europe. For some months after this speech the Germans made no approach to the Hungarian government on the settling of the Jewish question. Kállay learned of the German intentions only from the reports sent by Sztojay, but did not respond to them. Only on October 14, 1942 did Deputy State Secretary Luther instruct Dietrich von Jagow, Germany's minister in Budapest, to explain to the Hungarian government the reasons which had compelled the Führer to adopt a radical solution to the Jewish question. According to Luther, the Hungarians were out of step with Germany and other European countries desiring regeneration. Luther therefore demanded the following from the Hungarian government:

1. The Jews to be completely eliminated from cultural and economic life by ongoing legislation.
   
2. The government's measures to be facilitated and the people enabled to dissociate itself clearly [from the Jews] by the immediate introduction of yellow stars to be worn by all Jews.
   
3. Preparations to be made for expatriation and transportation of the Jews to the East.

Minister Jagow handed over the German note to Deputy Foreign Minister Ghiczy on October 17. Kállay replied only six weeks later, on December 2, 1942. In his answer, handed over by Sztojay, he rejected, in refined diplomatic language but firmly, the German request for the segregation of the Jews. In early 1943 the Germans repeated their request, but, once again, it was rejected.

The Kállay government's firm stance was praised after the war by Jenő Lévai in his Fekete könyv (Black Book) on the tragedy of Hungarian Jewry.

The Jewish question was also discussed during Regent Horthy's visit to Hitler and Ribbentrop at Klessheim on April 16 and 17, 1943. When Horthy rejected German demands for a radical "solution" of the Jewish question and declared that he would not permit the murder or destruction of the Jews, Hitler made it clear that this was not necessary and that they just needed to be placed in concentration camps. Ribbentrop, on the other hand, said that the Jews had to be exterminated. The above statements are highly important, since they belong among the very few sources in which those directing German policy clearly state that by "Final Solution" they meant the physical extermination of the Jews.

Both Horthy and Kállay rejected the German proposals for the "solution" of the Jewish question. And however negatively pre-1989 Hungarian historians attempted to portray the foreign policy of the "Horthy-Kállay régime", one thing they could not hush up, something to which historians in the post-Communist age will hopefully attach appropriate emphasis: German demands concerning the Jewish question produced no effect right up until March 19, 1944. After Horthy's Klessheim visit of April 1943, Hungary was no longer considered a friendly country by the Germans. On May 3, 1943 Ribbentrop instructed Minister Jagow "not to contact Herr Kállay without express instructions to do so, and on no pretext whatever to maintain contact with him socially".

When Hungary remained unyielding over the "solution" to the Jewish question, we can be certain that she was not acting out of opportunistic motives. Kállay rejected the German demands as early as autumn 1942, at a time when the Wehrmacht was still along the Volga and when the defeat of the German Reich could hardly be predicted with complete certainty. Nor was the decisive role in this issue played by a desire to win the sympathy of the Western powers, since the wartime policy of Britain and the United States did not encourage the belief that the West attached particular importance to saving the Jews. Horthy, Kállay, and a significant part of the Hungarian political élite simply regarded as inhuman the confinement to ghettos and deportation of Hungary's Jews, native or refugees, not to mention what might happen to them later.

[...]

The Kállay government's peace feelers in various neutral capitals

On instructions from Prime Minister Miklós Kállay, who up until the end of July 1943 was acting Foreign Minister, exploratory talks first began in Stockholm, between Andor Gellért, press attaché at the Hungarian legation, and Francis Cunningham, secretary at the American legation. As a result of these discussions, Gellért handed the American the Hungarian Foreign Ministry's proposals in November 1942. These consisted of the following three points:

1. If the troops of the Western powers reached the borders of Hungary, the Hungarian armed forces would not resist them.
2. Hungary would not increase co-operation with the Germans and would oppose additional German demands.
3. Hungary would send no more troops to the Soviet front, would gradually bring home the units there, and withdraw them from the battlefield.

The importance of the Stockholm formula lies in the fact that this was the first time the Hungarian government framed the Hungarian position for the purpose of negotiations to be set in motion with the Allies. Cunningham forwarded these proposals to Washington with favourable recommendations, but for many months no reply came from the State Department. The Hungarian government was thus compelled to conduct exploratory talks through other channels. Accordingly, links with the British, too, came to prominence.

Right up to the spring of 1943 contacts with the British were made difficult by the inflexible attitude of the Foreign Office. Since Britain's declaration of war on Hungary in December 1941 (in response to Soviet pressure), every Hungarian approach had received the answer to the effect that as long as Hungary was fighting against Britain's Soviet allies, she could count on neither the sympathy nor the understanding of the British government. This attitude was modified and moderated on the basis of a memorandum of February 23, 1943 by Frank Roberts (head of the Foreign Office's Central Department) which had an impact on the March 10, 1943 communication Foreign Secretary Eden sent to Secretary of State Hull and Foreign Minister Molotov of the Soviet Union. In this document Eden stressed that Hungary had succeeded in preserving its independence to a greater degree than any of the satellites in southeast Europe. It had a comparatively strong, democratic opposition, the basis on which were the peasant and social democratic parties. There was an opposition of the right as well, one with which Bethlen had links, which was led by nationalists and anti-Germans. Cardinal Serédi, the Prince-Primate, had publicly condemned Nazi ideas. After this Eden listed three conditions which, in his view, Hungary had to observe:

1. The Hungarian government should send no additional reinforcements to the Eastern Front;
2. At the appropriate time the Hungarian government must declare that it will not send troops to the Eastern Front;
3. In the event of an invasion of South-Eastern Europe by the Allies, Hungary would have to announce beforehand that it would not offer resistance and would open its borders to British, American and Polish troops.

Although it praises the role of the Hungarian Churches and the opposition, Eden's communication does not give the impression that Prime Minister Kállay (with Regent Horthy in the background) was behind those endeavours which aimed to bring about a break with Germany.

Kállay's speech to a Government party rally on May 29, 1943 evoked a favourable response from the British. In his address the Prime Minister placed strong emphasis on the European, Christian character of the Hungarian people, and on the independence of Hungarian foreign policy, or, to use his own term, its "autonomy". Making reference to German demands for a radical solution to the Jewish question, he declared that "Hungary would never permit herself, any more than in the past, experiments irreconcilable with her Christian culture and morality, nor deviate from those humane principles which she has practiced throughout her history in racial and denominational questions." This speech provided the guidelines for Hungarian foreign policy right up until the German occupation. For the opposition, István Bethlen, Károly Rassay and Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, among others, expressed their satisfaction.

The Germans did not react to this speech by Kállay. However, it was noticed at the British Foreign Office, where, in a memorandum he drew up for Foreign Secretary Eden, Dennis William Allen of the Central Department stressed that Kállay's chief aim was the preservation of Hungary's national life and independence, and that the Hungarian government regarded a parliamentary system as the main basis for this national life.

As a consequence of these British opinions, secret Anglo-Hungarian negotiations were started which led to what later became known as the Sea of Marmara Agreement. Before discussing this, mention should also be made of the talks conducted in Switzerland by György Barcza, formerly Hungarian minister to London, and György Bakách-Bessenyey, Hungarian minister to Bern, with Van der Heuvel ("Mr. H"), a British diplomat, an American diplomat Royall Tyler and Allen Dulles, head of the American secret service, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA). Barcza represented the Hungarian opposition groups centred around Count Bethlen, while Bakách-Bessenyey negotiated on behalf of the Hungarian government. It may justly be asked why it was necessary to spend months negotiating with the Americans when, at precisely the same time, talks were continuing between British and Hungarian representatives in Istanbul. Kállay explains this, saying that the leading Anglophile circles in Budapest took the view that the Americans viewed certain issues with more sympathy and with less bias than the British, since they were not bound by the Paris Peace Settlement, nor were they tied by the twenty-year alliance with the Soviet Union, concluded in the first half of 1942. It was for this reason that-through Andor Wodianer, its envoy to Lisbon, and with Archduke Otto Habsburg as a go-between-the Hungarian government contacted the Americans, and, through the representative in Lisbon of the Polish government in exile, British diplomats as well. In his memoirs Szegedy-Maszák expresses the opinion that the feelers put out in Istanbul, Berne, Lisbon, and Stockholm had a joint purpose: during the initial period the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, for the purposes of exchanging information, was trying to establish ongoing contacts with persons who were willing to do this, in the hope that sooner or later it could raise matters to the level of policy.

Barcza's and Bakách-Bessenyey's negotiations went on for months, right up until the German occupation, but they brought little in the way of tangible results. The British and American representatives demanded repeatedly that Hungary break with the Germans at the earliest opportunity. This the Hungarian government did not dare to undertake, since it understood full well that such a move would provoke German reprisals, the deportation of the country's political élite, the dispatch to the front of the inadequately equipped armed forces, and, last but not least, the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. The British and American negotiators showed little understanding of these fears on the part of the Hungarians, and the negotiations were basically unsuccessful. The sole tangible result was the arrival by parachute in Hungary of a three-man American mission on March 17, 1944. Although this mission reached Budapest with the help of Hungarian counterintelligence, by then Hungary had been occupied by the Germans.

[...]

Despite the fact that Secretary of Legation László Veress concluded a concrete preliminary armistice agreement with Knachbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador, in September 1943, more or less up until the German occupation, leading liberal-conservative circles in Hungary placed their hopes in America, mainly on account of the consistent and seemingly principled policy that President Roosevelt had pursued during the first years of the war. Were there real grounds for these hopes, or was it all simply wishful thinking?

It is difficult to answer with a simple yes or no. Roosevelt was an idealist adhering to Wilsonian principles, but he was also a power politician whose thinking was often almost Machiavellian. In addition, he had to take into account American public opinion. Because of the pact with Hitler in August 1939, most Americans were for a long time mistrustful of the Soviet Union. After Hitler's attack on it on June 22, 1941, and especially after the great Soviet victories later on, this mistrust gave way to a genuine pro-Soviet euphoria. The strongly left-wing (in American parlance "liberal") press constantly proclaimed the heroism of the Soviet people fighting alone against the Germans. News agencies under Soviet influence possessed huge funds, and branded papers trying to warn public opinion about Soviet expansionist plans as "fascist" or "pro-Nazi". According to Ciechanowski, the Polish minister in Washington, Soviet propaganda and Soviet infiltration became an enduring phenomenon in the American press from late 1942 onwards. Stalin, who had ordered the extermination of millions of Ukrainian peasants, was benevolently restyled "Uncle Joe".

Of course, there were far-sighted persons in the American élite such as Sumner Welles, John F. Kennan and William C. Bullitt, who viewed this pro-Soviet mood with concern. During the course of 1943 Bullitt, who had served as ambassador in Moscow and then in Paris, warned the President in a number of letters about the dangers of Soviet expansionism and Soviet ambitions for a world Communist revolution. He pointed out not only that the Soviet government had annexed territories on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, etc.), but also that it would try to annex Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, that with Benes's help it would try to create a satellite state out of Czechoslovakia, and that it wanted governments in France and Italy after the war that would be under Communist influence. As Bullitt saw it, the best way to obviate this danger was for British and American forces to conquer Europe before the Russians, who were still fighting along the Volga, could do so. It would be an illusion to believe that this goal will be achieved by landings in France, wrote Bullitt, who went on to propose that after the recruitment of Turkey, Axis power should be broken by way of the Balkans; Poland should be liberated by crossing Hungary and Romania, and in this way prevented from becoming a Soviet satellite. (This plan accorded with Churchill's thinking and that of Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British general staff.)

Bullitt's repeated warnings remained cries in the wilderness. The President reacted to his memoranda saying that Stalin was working purely for the security of his own country. If America gave him what he wanted and didn't ask anything from him in return, then out of a sense of obligation he would not try to annex other countries.

Roosevelt's foreign policy should be discussed in detail, a policy motivated by personal feelings. On account of Britain's progressive exhaustion during the last two years of the war, Roosevelt, as the leader of the world's strongest military power, played a decisive role not only in authorizing the course the war was to take, but also in shaping the postwar order.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, was not naive, as legend has it, nor, as his detractors proclaimed after the war, did he sell out Central and Eastern Europe to the Russians. According to John Lukacs, he was a plain-speaking American patrician who did not like complex problems and who tried to avoid lengthy negotiations. He believed in the magic of personal encounters, and thus thought that he could work this magic on any foreign statesman with whom he was negotiating.

His world-view was one-sided: it was "liberal" and progressive. The gist of the American "liberal" world-view was an unconditional belief in progress: the standard-bearer of this was the United States. Stalin's cruel purges and his extermination of millions of kulaks were condemned at the time; as a result of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union he became an ally of the West, the mass-murders were forgotten, since after the outbreak of war Stalin appealed to Russian national feeling and reopened the churches that the Bolsheviks had closed. The conclusion was drawn, from this and from the dissolution of the Comintern, that the Russian dictator was no longer striving for world revolution nor world conquest, but that he was leading Russia towards some kind of distinctively Russian "New Deal".

In the first months after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, Roosevelt and Churchill started out with the assumption that Russia would emerge weakened from the Second World War, and thus the Pax Americana proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter would determine the new postwar world-order. This view was modified by the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and during the campaigns that followed. This change can only be partly attributed to the pro-Soviet, progressive mood in America. The other decisive factor was the new strategic concept worked out at the so-called Trident conference held by the British and Americans in Washington in May 1943. At this conference, the Mediterranean strategy proposed by Churchill, Bullitt and Britain's Chief of Staff Sir Alan Brooke was finally rejected and all available British and American forces were held in reserve for the cross-Channel invasion, the Normandy landings. General Eisenhower, the commander of the American forces in the Mediterranean, and Robert Murphy, a diplomat assisting him, continued to consider a Balkan landing useful, but the President and the American high command blocked the implementation of this Mediterranean strategy. As a result of this change, Roosevelt gave up his plan for a global Pax Americana. In its stead the theory of the "four policemen" was born, according to which world peace would in the future be kept by America, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China.

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Antal Czettler,
a historian, has lived in Switzerland since 1976. His field of research is Hungarian foreign policy in the inter-war period. An earlier book was on Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki; another on Miklós Kállay's premiership (on which this article is based) came out in Budapest this year.