Reign of Terror by Valdemar Langlet

Author:Valdemar Langlet
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781783830275
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2013-08-21T18:30:00+00:00

THE FOURTH ACT:

The Hungarian Republic

THE Hungarian capital’s fate was sealed as we entered the New Year, 1945. Russian armies were in the process of surrounding it on three sides: east, north and south. The Arrow Cross government and its various administrative bodies – to the extent that they had been set up and come into operation – were evacuated towards the west and left Budapest more or less to its inevitable fate as a battlefield between the Germans and the Russians. Wallenberg and the Red Cross continued their relief and rescue work as far as possible in the midst of constant conflict with Arrow Cross gangs and street rabble, who could now give free rein to their violent instincts.

Meanwhile, behind the frontline, far to the east, something entirely new was coming into being: a democratic Hungarian republic had been proclaimed on 21 December in the city of Debrecen. This city, the third largest in Hungary, was not lacking in tradition. It was here the Hungarian Free State had been established under Ludvig Kossuth almost 100 years previously following a vote by a national assembly declaring the Hapsburg imperial family had forfeited the Hungarian crown. On that occasion the new form of government was short-lived. Before the year was out the Hungarian freedom corps had to lay down its arms, crushed between the conspiring military powers of imperial Austria and Tsarist Russia. Now the matter was of a different calibre. The Hungarian freedom movement which had endeavoured to break itself loose from dominance by Hitler’s Germany – something we have seen the Regent failed to achieve – now had on its side a new Russia whose triumphant divisions were occupying large swathes of the country.

Debrecen is the very centre of the Calvinist movement in Hungary, followers of the Reformed Church making up approximately one-quarter of the population. The majority of these live in this part of the country, regarding themselves as the most ‘genuine’ of all Magyars, direct descendants of the Ugrian tribes which more than a thousand years ago wandered into the country from the steppe lands beyond the Carpathian mountains.

In the course of time these people have hardly mixed with Germans, Slavs, Romanians and other nationalities who entered from north, south and west and settled on the plains along the Danube, and still today they are renowned for speaking the purest Hungarian in the entire country. Debrecen is their main religious and political centre, and it was the natural place for a popular movement bent on creating a Hungary free of German influence on democratic lines. Obviously, people there were, as everywhere else, split into different political parties – bourgeois, social democrats, communists – but who nonetheless were fully united in their view that the only possibility of rescuing the nation and rebuilding it lay in breaking with Hitler’s Germany and collaborating with the victorious Russians. Delegations from the various parties met and elected, similarly to what they had done in Kossuth’s day, a preliminary national assembly with the

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