Hungarian occupational troops in the Soviet Union
Preface translator.
This material has a background. For some time, the Hungarian media, close to the ruling party today, have been actively rethinking historical events of the Second World War. It is not difficult even to guess the main thematic areas: revisionism, the presentation of Hungary as a victim of aggressors, and even more - the emphasis on the crimes of the Red Army. And somewhat unexpectedly, by the last anniversary of the events on the Don, which marked the collapse of the 2nd Hungarian Army, there was a polyphony that Hungarian soldiers not only fought heroically, but also defended national interests in the USSR.
This approach was particularly piqued by the fact that the Hungarian Prime Minister V. Orban was at the peak of the campaign (he read headlines like “Hungarian soldiers on the Don fought for the Motherland”) visited Moscow to negotiate a revitalization of economic relations. Nevertheless, “active rethinking” did not go unnoticed, which confirms this material. I ask you to pay attention to the status of historians who represented Russia at the meeting described below, as well as the presenter’s words: there is no longer any reason to hide evidence from the archives of the occupiers in the archives. Special thanks to the Hungarian historians who opposed the trends in the coverage of past events.
Based on archival documents
5 March 2013 in the club Kossuth was the presentation of a series of documentary books “Hungarian occupation forces in the Soviet Union. Archival documents 1941 - 1947 "(editors: Tamas Kraus - Eva Maria Varga, publisher Bp. L'Harmattan). The collection was presented by: historian Peter Shiposh; historian Vasily Stepanovich Khristoforov, head of the Office of Registration and Archival Funds (URAF) of the FSB of Russia, head of the Center for Publication of Sources on the History of the 20th Century; esthetic Akosh Siladi; historian Andrei Nikolaevich Artizov, archivist, head of the Federal Archival Agency; historian Gabor Dioni.
Below we publish a transcript of Peter Shiposh's speech.
Nowadays, the situation can be traced to an excursion into the history of the Hungarian participation in the Second World War, especially in connection with the tragedy of the 2 Army in the bend of the Don. One after another, monographs, studies, diaries, memoirs, photo albums and other works in a similar genre. The most important feature for them is to justify the military policy of the Horthy regime and its apologetics, vulgo - whitewash. To reveal the scope of sources that serve as tools for argumentation, there is no need for long-term research. It is enough to carefully study the speeches of the Hungarian political and military leaders in the critical 1941 year, especially in the spring and summer months. A common feature of these documents is that the authors unanimously declare Hungarian participation in the war against the Soviet Union in the capacity of, so to speak, the national interests of Hungary. Infantry General Heinrich Vert, the chief of staff of the Hungarian army, wrote in his memoirs that participation is required "for the sake of the territorial integrity of the state, as well as the security of the state and social structure, our Christian, on a national basis, world view, commits to this Union, we have finally decided on the Axis countries, and our further territorial expansion depends on this. ”
The head of the government, Laszlo Bardoszi, though he was not alien to the views of Heinrich Vert, was tactical for opposing voluntary offers of participation. His opinion was shared by Miklos Horthy. The head of state and the prime minister thought it was necessary to wait for the German signal to enter the war, because in that case, you could ask for reciprocal concessions. But the Germans just did not want to make proposals, because the only territory they could promise as a reward was Banat, which Romania claimed as well.
The stalemate between Berlin and Budapest was resolved by the bombing of Kashi. (Kosice, now a city in Slovakia - translator). A city in the north of Hungary, as is known, 26 June 1941 was bombed by unmarked planes, it was impossible to determine the identity of the group of attacking planes, the secret remained undisclosed to this day. Bardoshi considered that the nationality of the planes bombing Kashsh is not so important. He believed the main thing that the Hungarian headquarters agreed with the Germans version, according to which the planes attacking the city are Soviet, and this proves that the Germans want the entry of Hungary into the war. So, here it is a long-awaited sign, further fluctuations are no longer the place. For joining the war it is definitely impossible to bring the argument that the Soviet Union would pursue an aggressive policy against Hungary. Moreover, from Moscow to 1940-41, with unambiguous gestures they made it clear that they intend to have good neighborly relations.
There is no doubt that participation in the war was not related to any Hungarian national interests. There is hardly a more reliable witness than one of the most important politicians of the era, Istvan Bethlen. In his memoirs, written in June 1944, he condemned Hungary’s 1940-41 foreign policy with bitter words. He believed that the Hungarian policy "began a series of fatal blunders by joining the" Tripartite Pact ", when, without any serious need and reciprocal benefits, we joined such a union, which was created to resolve issues between world powers. And this made the first step in the direction of disaster ... ".
Speaking about joining the war against the Soviet Union, Bethlen rejected propaganda, “which was concerned with drawing the ghost of Bolshevism on the wall to draw us into war. Bolshevism is undoubtedly a danger to all of Europe, but not the call of a little Hungary to sacrifice the color of the nation in order to divert this threat from Europe. ” Beetlen saw the national goal to “re-sew the country cut into pieces. Unfortunately, in June of 1941, we deviated from this axiom of national policy, and again we will bitterly redeem the mistakes made. ”
Hungarian historiography, which studies war against the Soviet Union, primarily focuses its attention on the battles of the Hungarian army on the Soviet-German front, and is barely interested in the activities of the Hungarian occupation forces. Since the autumn of 1941, as part of the Western and Eastern Occupation Group, 90 thousands of Hungarian soldiers solved occupational tasks in an area of about 500 thousands of square kilometers in the territories of Russia and Belarus. Occupation meant the so-called "military use" in the rear, practically hunting for partisans.
You can learn about the behavior of the Hungarian units from a witness such as Josef Goebbels, Hitler's confidant. The propaganda minister of the 18 empire, on May 1942, wrote about the battles taking place in the Bryansk forest area: “Hungarian formations are fighting south of this region. They need to occupy and pacify one village after another. When the Hungarians declare that they have patientized one village, this usually means that there is not a single resident left. ”
It would be a serious mistake to say that we are talking about individual cases, and from the Hungarian side there were no massacres of civilians. Hungarian partisan hunters regularly collaborated with German troops. The sergeant of the gendarmerie detachment testified to this:
"In 1941, I joined the 32 / II. Battalion, and with this unit in October 1941 entered the Soviet territories of military operations ... We changed the German battalion, and the German command entrusted the task of fighting our partisan detachments ... B On December, the German command sent 1941 to the battalion for questioning about 80-s of Soviet citizens, after which they should be destroyed. The interrogation of Soviet citizens took place in a prison building ... as Soviet citizens did not testify, they were subjected to terrible torture. This I know from there that shouts and groans came from the prison building. Together with the firing squad we surrounded the Soviet citizens and took them to the place of execution.
When we reached the craters near the railway tracks from being hit by bombs, the captain ordered the Soviet citizens to undress. Some did not obey the order, these people were stripped by members of the firing squad, while beating them brutally. The members of the firing squad were slamming Soviet citizens into the craters ... ”
In the Soviet Union, 1942-1945 worked as an Extraordinary State Commission “to establish and investigate the atrocities of fascist German invaders and their accomplices and the damage they caused to citizens, collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR”. The CPG on the basis of the testimony of 250 thousands of witnesses only for the killings made up 54 thousands of protocols, and on damage - about 4 millions. The unbelievers of Thomas are forced to believe in the authenticity of the documents only because the falsification of such a huge amount of material or any other manipulation with it is simply impossible for technical reasons and is inconceivable. The documents contain reliable descriptions of the killings of family members, relatives, friends and colleagues, soldiers and prisoners of war, eyewitness accounts of atrocities. Each protocol is also a charge.
Testimonies, speeches, letters of surviving Soviet and Hungarian citizens, prisoner of war files and other documents reveal the terrible details of the activities in which Hungarian soldiers in the absence of men mobilizing into the army with almost unimaginable cruelty were physically exterminated mainly by the masses of Soviet civilians, old men, women children as well as prisoners of war. It is no coincidence that the local population a decade later still keeps the memory of the actions of the Hungarians, and on the occasion reminds them of the visiting Hungarian researchers and tourists ... Let pars pro toto quote two documents. “According to the final report of the Extraordinary State Commission of 28 in March of 1945, only in the 12 districts of the Chernihiv region did Hungarian soldiers kill 38611 of peaceful Soviet citizens. The center of the massacres was the town of Shchors, where in prisons, parks, and forests — before large pits for mass graves dug by persons executed for execution — after the most horrible tortures many thousands of people were executed. In many places, burning was a frequent method of execution. The victims were mostly old men, women and children, but the babies were also killed along with their mothers. And Shchors was just one of the places to be executed. ”
Honved Ferenc Boldizhar (company 46 / 1.2., Field mail 115 / 20) in his diary described just one of such “heroism”, which he was also proud of: “When we entered the village, I set fire to the first three houses myself. We killed the men, women, children, burned the village. They went on ... Our magnificent hussars set fire to the village, the third company set fire to rockets. From there, we went on reconnaissance. During the time we spent in reconnaissance, the hussars burned six villages ... ”
The disclosed documents make ad act such assumptions, such relativization, such wording as excuses like “on the one hand - on the other hand”, that “in a war excesses and atrocities are inevitable,” that “one can only talk about a limited number of undisciplined soldiers”, “ such incidents are the inevitability of war, ”etc. Based on archival sources, we can determine that the Hungarian units in the captured Soviet territories between 1941 and 1945 carried out genocide. On the pages of the presented collection of documents reveal to us the "Hungarian chapter" of the Nazi genocide. These crimes as crimes against humanity will never be forgotten.
The genocide committed by the Hungarian royal army on Soviet territory has not yet been the subject of scientific research and the conclusions drawn from them. In this regard, a vacuum has been formed, which cannot be justified by the lack of sources even before the disclosure of Soviet archival data. For Hungarian researchers, the documentation contained in the Archive of the History of the State Security Services and the Military Historical Archive would be available. A surge of interest in the topic in both Hungary and the Soviet Union paralyzed the political and ideological shackles and made it impossible. Party and state bodies have found the idea of touching upon the facts of massacres and robberies in the Soviet territories too delicate and stirring up passion, which inevitably would have generated intentions to investigate Soviet crimes in Hungarian territory. Therefore, a taboo was imposed on this entire subject area so that the crimes of the past did not lead to the creation of tension in relations between the Soviet Union and the newly-minted Eastern European allies.
Access to the Soviet archives opens up opportunities and prospects for historical information about terrible and insidious crimes, which previously could only be hoped for. Moreover, the petty reasons connected with the current policy about the expediency of investigating historical events have been put to scrap.
This collection of a kind of innovative. Its creators did a great job on the sea of documents by researching them, selecting, organizing, translating and creating the necessary for the interpretation of the scientific apparatus. Undoubtedly, the base of facts of this collection will not cause undivided joy and approval in certain circles of public opinion, journalism, historical science. But still open the curtain of silence, behind which there is always darkness.
Afterword translator. So that the reader can better understand what trends in the modern presentation of the story were spoken by the speaker, I will point out once again the earlier translated materials from the Hungarian media.
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