Responsibility of WW2 Allies in Hungary’s Nazi occupation
March 21st, 2019In the leading online left-wing liberal news site, a historian accuses a colleague of trying to whitewash Hungarian leaders of responsibility for the Holocaust, by suggesting that the occupation in March 1944 was provoked by the Allied powers in clear disregard for the fate of Hungarian Jews.
On Index, Ferenc Laczó, a historian at Maastricht University accuses László Borhi of trying to acquit the Hungarian authorities of their responsibility for the deportation and murder of at least 400 thousand Hungarian Jews. Laczó finds Borhi’s claim (see BudaPost March 20) that the Western allies provoked Hungary’s 1944 invasion by Nazi Germany a tendentious misinterpretation of facts. He acknowledges that the Allies put their military interests before helping Jews, but this, Laczó believes, is business as usual in times of war. He accuses Borhi of trying to reduce the role the Hungarian state played in the murder of Jews, by suggesting that the Allied powers share responsibility for the Hungarian Holocaust. While the deportation of Jews happened under the Nazi occupation, Hungarian authorities actively participated in the persecution of Jews, while the US and Great Britain had no such role, Laczó argues.