Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe, 1942-1989
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Dealing with Dictators: The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe, 1942-1989
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253019394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2016 |
| Pages: | 564 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Dealing With Dictators
The United States, Hungary, and East Central Europe, 1942â"1989
By László Borhi, Jason Vincz
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 László BorhiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01939-4
CHAPTER 1
Peace Overtures, the Allies, and the Holocaust, 1942–1945
In a forgotten episode of World War II, the United States and Great Britain chose to provoke a German invasion of Hungary (and Romania) in order to "spread the Germans thin" in Western Europe and facilitate the Allied landing in France in 1944. This decision appears to have been made without concern for the last remaining Jewish community in Europe, then numbering 825,000 people, or for Hungarian democratic elements. Allied planners expected that the Germans would need ten to fifteen divisions to occupy Hungary, troops that would thus be rendered unavailable for the fighting in Normandy. No calculation seems to have been made, however, to determine whether the removal of these divisions would actually make a difference in the success of the landing and the future course of the war, or whether these expected gains would outweigh the potential murder of almost a million people. According to Allen Dulles, the calculus was a callous one: for the sake of victory, "a few hundred thousand lives would not make a difference." In January 1942, under strong German pressure, the Hungarian government had agreed to send a Hungarian army to the eastern front. Shortly thereafter, the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, appointed a new prime minister, Miklós Kállay, in hopes of restoring Hungarian independence from Germany, and later that year they made secret peace overtures to the British and Americans. Soon Romania was sending peace emissaries as well, and by refusing to take advantage of these overtures the Allies missed a chance to disrupt the Axis and thereby to bring the war to an earlier end. The geopolitical consequence of this wartime diplomacy was, in the words of the historian Frazer Harbutt, that "Soviet domination of Eastern Europe ... had in substance been accepted by the governments of Britain and the United States by 1945."
Through an in-depth analysis of Hungary's secret peace talks with the Allies, this chapter will explore the relationships between Allied war strategy and the final phase of the Holocaust, the dilemmas of weak states in the definition of their national interests, and the moral choices great powers face in the coercion of smaller states. In Hungary in 1943 and 1944, American policymakers faced a dilemma that would recur in 1956: the defeat of a powerful aggressor, they believed, could be achieved only by placing a foreign population in mortal danger.
Small states in the international arena are like bottles floating in the sea: they may surface for a moment on a wave of history, only to disappear after the wave has subsided. Weak powers had their moments in shaping the history of World War II. Yugoslavia's anti-German stance forced Hitler to delay operation Barbarossa, which cost the Germans precious months of good weather and contributed to the German failure. In 1944 and 1945, the Red Army was held up in Hungary for eight months, which spared Austria the full brunt of Soviet occupation. Had Stalin been able to occupy Austria alone, the Soviet bargaining position in the Cold War would have been vastly enhanced. Yet the perspectives of small powers hardly ever figure into the "big picture" of international history, even though those perspectives may significantly modify our view of it.
Accounts of World War II do not mention the clandestine peace talks between Hitler's satellites and the Allies that took place in the neutral capitals of Europe. Had these talks, which held out the prospect of disrupting Germany's southern flank, been pursued with more vigor in early 1943, the war might have been brought to an earlier and possibly different end. We will never know for sure. Logically, these peace overtures ought to have been welcomed in London and Washington. With the exit of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, Hitler would have been deprived of crucial war materials including oil, bauxite, manganese, coal, and foodstuffs, not to mention the loss of the Balkans and much of Central Europe. Yet Hungarian and later Romanian and Finnish peace feelers were either not taken seriously or rejected outright. Numerous doubts arose. In order not to arouse Hitler's suspicion, the Hungarians chose obscure envoys whose identities were hard to verify. British and American officials were often unsure whether these envoys genuinely represented their governments or were instead spies or provocateurs anxious to sow seeds of doubt among the Allies. Was the enemy using these secret peace overtures to stay in power? And what if Stalin found out? Negotiating a surrender behind the Soviets' backs might prompt Stalin to seek his own agreement with Germany, a prospect that in light of the Hitler-Stalin pact remained distinctly plausible. The first peace feelers were thus coolly received.
In March 1942, Regent Horthy, a former admiral in the Austro-Hungarian navy, realizing that Germany might lose the war, dismissed his pro-German prime minister, László Bárdossy, and charged Miklós Kállay, known for his moderate political views and firm anti-German stance, with "restoring" Hungary's "freedom of action." Hungary was the first of the German satellites to move slowly and cautiously toward extricating itself from Hitler's alliance. Its example would soon be followed by Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria. The stakes were no less than national survival. Ending another war on the losing side could lead to a repetition of the disastrous Treaty of Trianon, which had deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its prewar land and population. The only way out of this predicament was to surrender to the British or the Americans. Initially, Hungarian leaders ruled out the option of surrender to the Soviet Union, since they, like the vast majority of Hungarians, considered the prospect of Soviet occupation as undesirable as an invasion by the Nazis. Kállay and the few others who were privy to the plans for defection, however, were playing a dangerous game. Hungarian territory had to that point escaped the fighting, but betraying Hitler could provoke an invasion by Germany and all that German occupation had meant elsewhere on the continent. Nevertheless, the anti-German segment of the country's elite favored a withdrawal from the war, an option that despite all its dangers and pitfalls seemed essential to the country's survival as an independent entity. Hungarian leaders hoped to convince the Anglo-Saxons that they had had no other choice than to align with Germany, and that Hungary would be useful in the upcoming struggle against Bolshevism, which the West could not afford to lose. By surrendering to the British and the Americans, the Hungarians sought to avoid invasions by the Germans and the Soviets, as well as to hold onto the territories they had recovered in the early stages of the war. Such hopes were fueled by a rumor that the British and the Americans were about to open a second front in the Balkans, allowing them to beat the Red Army into central Europe.
These Hungarian secret maneuvers were to end in disaster. On March 19, 1944, German tanks rolled into Budapest and removed its relatively independent government. Deportations of Jews, which Kállay had refused the Germans, soon began; democratic elements were rounded up. Hitler designated Hungary Festung Europa and ordered the Wehrmacht to fight to the death in order to protect the Reich from the Bolshevik onslaught. In the last year of the war, one out of every ten Hungarians was killed. Whether this tragic ending was inevitable has been disputed ever since. Kállay has been reproached for his alleged vacillation and even duplicity in dealing with the Allies. He has been portrayed as a weak, irresolute leader whose personal failures led to his country's tragedy. But research done in British archives in the 1970s suggests that London's dealings with the peace feelers from Eastern Europe may have concealed ulterior strategic calculations that were inimical to the survival of large numbers of people. Evidence from U.S. archives is even more revealing in this respect. Had the Hungarians known the Allies' purpose in negotiating with them from mid-1943, these talks might have not have been pursued. In fact, the story behind the secret talks reveals what could turn out to be a highly controversial chapter of Allied diplomacy in World War II.
"A BASKET OF ORCHIDS": THE AMERICAN IMAGE OF HUNGARY
Under German pressure, Hungary declared war on the United States on December 12, 1941. Nevertheless, the head of the American diplomatic mission to Hungary, Herbert Claiborne Pell, believed that many Hungarians remained sympathetic toward the United States and viewed it not as an enemy but as a friend. Horthy surprised Pell's spouse with a basket of orchids, which the State Department took as a gesture of open sympathy toward the United States and an act of defiance toward the Axis. Pell later recounted that he and his wife were showered with manifestations of kindness. Pell's predecessor, the Roosevelt appointee John Flourney Montgomery, had been impressed with the baroque ways of the Hungarian ruling classes and described his post as a bastion of Western civilization to which the West owed much of its security. Not all agreed with such flattering views: Allen Dulles, who headed the American intelligence service (OSS) in Switzerland and was in charge of dealing with Hungarian envoys (even procuring gas for his car from one of them), was irritated by the Hungarians' tendency to demand exceptional treatment by virtue of the fact that "their table manners were better" than their neighbors'. At the same time, he acknowledged that they were past masters of obstruction and passive resistance, which could provide the Allies with important military benefits.
U.S. intelligence assessments of Hungarian attitudes found that aside from most of the Christian middle classes, the Schwabian segment of the peasantry, and a large part of the officer corps, the majority of Hungarians disliked the Germans, while many in the aristocracy and the higher clergy were pro-British and anti-Russian. In German-controlled Europe, Hungary enjoyed by far the greatest internal liberties. The OSS pointed out that although the country was kept under supervision and control, liberal and socialist opposition parties continued to function, British and American books continued to be translated and sold, people were still allowed to listen to foreign radio stations, and domestic press reports on developments in enemy countries were still available.
"THE ANNIHILATION OF USEFUL ELEMENTS": THE UNITED STATES AND THE DILEMMA OF SECRET TALKS
The first cautious steps to establish contact with the Allies were made in 1942. Horthy, who was known for his profound antipathy toward the Soviet system, feared a communist conspiracy to overthrow all existing institutions. His entourage shared his views, thus the option of surrendering to the Soviet Union was ruled out. Dulles, who understood the Hungarian dilemma, noted that the Hungarians did not want to risk a German invasion, but feared Russian occupation even more than another Trianon.
The Hungarian leadership assumed that the West understood their difficult predicament and would count on Hungary's help in the inevitable struggle against Bolshevism. But a key figure in the effort to break with the Axis, Aladár Szegedy-Maszák, who would become Hungary's first minister to the United States after the war, wrote that Hungarian diplomacy had overestimated the importance of the Danube Basin for the Western powers. The Hungarian minister in Lisbon, the wealthy industrialist Andor Wodianer, thought that his country would be in the first line of defense, while Tibor Eckhardt, the highly influential Smallholder politician who was sent to the United States in 1940 to assure Roosevelt of Hungary's pro-American sentiments, claimed to have convinced his American friends of the need for a powerful Hungary to help "balance the Soviet Union."
The misperception that the British were interested in beating the Soviets to the Danube was rooted in flawed assumptions about Hungary's geopolitical significance. Dulles's regular interlocutor, the diplomat György Bakách-Bessenyey, took for granted that the Anglo-Americans would not allow the Soviets to control "this geographically important area, the gateway to Western Europe," because to do so would be more inimical to their security than German domination. Hungary's influential minister in Stockholm, Antal Ullein-Reviczky, led himself to believe that his country was in a "key position from the perspective of the British Empire[;] its survival and security was a British interest." Long after the war had ended, Kállay argued that British and American influence would have prevailed in the Balkans had Hungary been used as a base.
Hungarian peace feelers first approached the Americans in the fall of 1942, mainly through Turkey. They carried the message that the Hungarian army would not resist an Anglo-American invasion. The OSS and the State Department differed in interpreting these overtures. Whereas the OSS tended to take them seriously and was ready to take advantage of the opportunity they presented, the State Department refused to deal with them. Dulles was eager to explore the proposals for informal U.S.-Hungarian talks to "foil the Nazis," although he was aware that a variety of perspectives had to be considered in the U.S. response, including the general policy toward Eastern Europe and, more importantly, U.S.-Soviet relations. Therefore, with OSS director William Donovan's support, he sought policy guidance from the State Department regarding these peace feelers. It is important to point out that the OSS was not in a position to pursue foreign policy without the explicit approval of the State Department, and that the State Department was ultimately guided by the military considerations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
In January 1943, the Second Hungarian Army was destroyed near Voronezh, which gave Hungary a strong impetus to explore the possibility of exiting the war. Unfortunately, the Allies adopted at precisely this moment the principle of unconditional surrender, which made it all but impossible for a German satellite to defect from the Axis. This formula was meant to signal to the Soviets that the United States and Great Britain would not enter into a separate deal with Hitler or any of his allies and to drive home to the Germans that there would be no promises or commitments to them this time. Moscow also insisted on this inflexible formula, but only while there was still a realistic chance for the Western powers to occupy Eastern Europe. Stalin wanted to make sure that Hitler's satellites surrendered to no one but Moscow. Dulles had personal experience of how the Conference of Casablanca had made it difficult to subvert the Axis; he therefore recommended that U.S. propaganda should differentiate between the main Axis powers and the ones that had cooperated with the Germans under constraint. He believed that while unconditional surrender should be required of the former, the lesser satellites should be allowed to negotiate in case they were ready to scale down their military and economic cooperation with the Axis. They were not then in a position to turn against Berlin, but, he argued, they might soon be able to sabotage the German war effort.
The American stance on unconditional surrender was more rigid than the British stance. In December 1942, Hungary had offered to send a government official to Ankara to discuss terms of surrender with the United States. And though the American embassy there was eager to follow up on this proposal, which they believed to be sincere, the State Department refused to do so because of the presumed sensitivities of the Kremlin. Although assistant secretary of state Adolph Berle supported the idea on the grounds that the British secret service was also conducting talks, he was overruled. A Romanian sounding in early 1943 was also disregarded out of deference to the Soviets. The industrialist Max Auschnitt informed the OSS that if Romanian independence was guaranteed by the Russians and that guarantee were backed by the United States, the Romanian Conducator, Ion Antonescu would be willing to join the United Nations. The State Department stopped U.S. representatives from dealing even with Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi, who was clandestinely negotiating with the British in Turkey. The U.S. embassy in Ankara was instructed to avoid doing or saying anything that could damage the joint war effort, a stricture that applied to U.S. intelligence representatives as well. It was not that Kállay's overtures were considered insincere or insufficiently daring. An Abwehr agent informed the OSS that Hitler, who had found out about Budapest's maneuverings, was "mad" at the Hungarians and believed that once he could get rid of Kállay he would be able to deal with the "traitors."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dealing With Dictators by László Borhi, Jason Vincz. Copyright © 2016 László Borhi. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Peace Overtures, the Allies, and the Holocaust, 1942-19452. Cuius Regio, Eius Religio: The United States and the Soviet Seizure of Power3. Rollback4. 1956: Self-Liberation5. Reprisals and Bridge-Building6. The Dilemmas of External Transformation7. "The Status Quo is Not So Bad": Détente8. Nixon, Carter, and the Kádár Regime9. "Love Towards Kádár": Reagan and the Myth of Liberation10. 1989: "Together We Liberated Eastern Europe"ConclusionBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
In the voluminous secondary literature of the Cold War, Borhi has found important new ground. Borhi's research in the American and Hungarian archives is thorough, [and] impressively, he has succeeded in placing Hungarian-American relations within the larger topic of Eastern Europe, correctly paying significant attention to economic issues.