The Hungarian delegation in Moscow

On 1 October 1944 three Hungarians flew into Moscow on a journey of which neither the government in Budapest nor the German Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary knew anything. The delegation was led by Colonel General Gábor Faraghó, a former military attaché in Moscow who spoke fluent Russian. He was accompanied by the diplomat Domokos Szent-Iványi and Count Géza Teleki, son of the former prime minister Pál Teleki. They had been sent by the Regent, Miklós Horthy, with authority to negotiate an armistice with the Soviet Union. It was the first direct attempt by Budapest to take Hungary out of the war that was addressed to Moscow rather than to London or Washington.

Two years of looking for a way out

Hungary had been fighting on Germany’s side since June 1941. After the destruction of the Hungarian 2nd Army on the Don in January 1943, the prime minister, Miklós Kállay, began, with the Regent’s knowledge, to seek contact with the Western Allies. His emissaries talked to the British and Americans in Istanbul, Bern, Stockholm and Lisbon. In September 1943, in Istanbul, a Hungarian diplomat even conveyed to the British a preliminary agreement to surrender, which was to take effect once Allied troops reached Hungary’s borders. The calculation was simple: Budapest wanted to surrender to the British and Americans, never to the Red Army. The Western Allies, however, could not guarantee that their troops would be the first to reach the Danube, and since the Casablanca Conference the principle had been unconditional surrender to all three powers.

The Germans knew about these contacts. On 19 March 1944 the Wehrmacht occupied Hungary; Kállay had to take refuge in the Turkish legation, and real power passed to the Reich plenipotentiary, Edmund Veesenmayer. The government of Döme Sztójay placed the country’s economy and army at Germany’s disposal, and within less than two months the Hungarian administration and gendarmerie deported more than 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. From April American and British bombers also appeared over Budapest. Horthy remained Regent, but for several months there was little he could do.

August: the Romanian example

The situation was transformed by King Michael’s coup in Romania on 23 August 1944. King Michael I had Marshal Antonescu arrested, Romania went over to the Allies and declared war on Germany, and soon afterwards on Hungary as well. The German front in the south collapsed, and the Red Army moved into the passes of the Southern Carpathians. In Hungary this was taken as a warning: having changed sides, the Romanians could hope to recover northern Transylvania, which Hungary had received in 1940 under the Second Vienna Award.

On 29 August Horthy dismissed Sztójay and appointed a government under General Géza Lakatos. The new prime minister halted the deportation of the Jews of Budapest, which had been planned for the end of August, and was to prepare the way out of the war. Yet the government included Germany’s men, and the general staff and most of the officer corps were pro-German and anti-communist. At conferences in Buda Castle on 7 and 10 September the generals argued to the Regent that an armistice with the USSR would be a betrayal of an ally and would let communism into the country. The Council of Ministers rejected the idea of an armistice. Horthy therefore decided to act behind the cabinet’s back, with a small circle of confidants that included his son, Miklós Horthy Jr, who ran the so-called office for leaving the war.

The Náday mission and the route through Slovakia

In September Horthy tried once more to bypass Moscow. On 22 September General István Náday flew to Italy, accompanied by an escaped British prisoner of war, Colonel Charles Howie. At Allied Mediterranean headquarters Náday met General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Allied Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean. The answer he brought back was unequivocal: Hungary could conclude an armistice only with all three powers at once, and therefore also – and in practice above all – with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the Red Army was already on Hungarian soil. In the territories annexed in 1938–1940 its units had been fighting since the end of August, in northern Transylvania. Troops of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front entered Hungary within its Trianon borders around 23 September. The first town taken was Battonya, and on 26 September the Germans and Hungarians were driven out of Makó. On the edges of the Great Hungarian Plain, near Arad and Oradea, heavy fighting was already under way.

Moscow had to be reached across the front line. The intermediary was Count Ladomér Zichy, a landowner of left-wing views whose estate lay in Slovakia. During the Slovak National Uprising Zichy had made contact with Soviet officers attached to the insurgents, who promised to get Hungarian envoys through to the east. The delegation left Budapest on 28 September. Its members travelled separately, covered part of the way on foot and crossed into the insurgent-held area of central Slovakia. From there an aircraft took them to the Soviet side, and on 1 October they landed in Moscow. Faraghó carried a letter from Horthy to Joseph Stalin, in which the Regent wrote of Germany’s responsibility for the war and asked that the country be spared. The letter, however, said nothing about unconditional surrender.

The talks

In Moscow the Hungarians dealt with representatives of the Red Army and the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, but the key decisions were taken by Stalin and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. The talks stalled from the outset. Faraghó was authorised to sign only a “preliminary armistice”, that is, a halt to Soviet operations in Hungary, with the armistice proper to follow later, at some unspecified date. Horthy still hoped that the Western Allies would manage to enter the country from Italy through Yugoslavia. The Soviet side, by contrast, demanded what it had earlier demanded of Romania and Bulgaria: a break with Germany, a declaration of war on it and active participation in the fighting. The talks were suspended for several days and resumed only around 5 October, when the delegation received new instructions.

On 8 October Faraghó was handed the Soviet preliminary terms. The next day Winston Churchill flew into Moscow with Anthony Eden, and according to some historians this helped the Hungarians, since Stalin wanted to appear before his British guests as a moderate victor. The terms of the armistice with Hungary were also discussed at Stalin’s and Churchill’s table. On 11 October Faraghó signed a preliminary armistice agreement on Hungary’s behalf. Hungary was to withdraw its troops and administration from the territories it had occupied since 1937 – southern Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia, northern Transylvania and the Yugoslav Bačka – return to its Trianon borders, break off relations with Germany and declare war on it. An Allied Control Commission was to oversee the fulfilment of the terms. The evacuation of the occupied territories was to begin within ten days.

The Germans are watching

The delegation’s secret did not last long. Veesenmayer had informers in the Lakatos government, and German intelligence was following the contacts of people in Horthy’s circle. By the beginning of October Berlin knew that talks were under way in Moscow, and Veesenmayer was recommending that the Regent be removed. According to most accounts, from 20 September a unit under SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was in Budapest, preparing a strike against the castle and the Regent’s people. On 11 October, the day the agreement was signed in Moscow, Veesenmayer met Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the far-right Arrow Cross party, and told him to prepare to take power. German armoured units were being brought into Budapest.

Horthy’s own preparations were poor. He did not arm the workers, as the opposition united in the Hungarian Front had asked, and on the loyalty of the army he trusted the assurances of the generals who only in September had been advising him against an armistice. Passing word of the ceasefire to the commanders in the field depended on the Chief of the General Staff, General János Vörös, whom the Regent did not entirely trust. The commander of the 1st Army, General Béla Miklós, maintained his own contacts with the Soviet side.

What came next

A few days after the preliminary terms were signed, Horthy decided to act ahead of schedule. At noon on 15 October Hungarian radio broadcast his proclamation announcing that Hungary was requesting an armistice. The same day the Germans and the Arrow Cross responded with a coup: the Regent’s son was kidnapped, and the following day Horthy himself abdicated in favour of Szálasi and was taken to Germany. The armistice negotiated in Moscow never came into force. The overwhelming majority of the Hungarian army fought on at Germany’s side; only General Béla Miklós and some of his soldiers went over to the Soviets.

Faraghó stayed in Moscow. The Arrow Cross stripped him of his general’s rank. In December 1944 he joined the Provisional National Government formed in Debrecen, in the part of the country occupied by the Red Army, as minister of supply. The government was headed by Béla Miklós, and Géza Teleki became its minister of education. On 20 January 1945 representatives of this government signed the armistice proper with the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States in Moscow, on terms close to those of October.

Place in the war

Faraghó’s mission was Horthy’s last attempt to take Hungary out of the war as Romania and Bulgaria had done. It showed that after the debacle in Romania and the German withdrawal from the Balkans even one of the most anti-communist leaders in Europe saw talks with Moscow as the only way out. At the same time it exposed the weakness of his position: the Regent was acting in secret from his own government, without the backing of the army and under the eyes of the Germans, who had learned their lessons from Italy and Romania. As a result, instead of shortening the war in Hungary, the Moscow talks hastened the Arrow Cross seizure of power, and for half a year the country became the battlefield of one of the hardest campaigns of the war’s final phase, including the siege of Budapest at the turn of 1944 and 1945. For the roughly 200,000–250,000 Jews still living in Budapest, the coup that followed the failure of the armistice meant a new wave of persecution, death marches and killings on the banks of the Danube.