Hungary declares war on Germany

At the end of December 1944 Hungary had two governments. In the west of the country, still in German hands, power was held by Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Arrow Cross, who had been prime minister since mid-October and, since the beginning of November, also “Leader of the Nation”, and who waged war at Hitler’s side to the end. In the east, occupied by the Red Army, a Provisional National Government headed by Colonel General Béla Miklós had been operating for a few days in Debrecen. This second government, set up with Moscow’s consent and under its supervision, declared war on Germany. Some Western chronologies give the date as 31 December. Hungarian studies, however, date the government’s resolution itself to 28 December 1944.

A country that failed to leave the war

Hungary had long been trying to leave the Axis camp, but ineptly. At the beginning of October the regent, Miklós Horthy, sent a secret delegation under General Gábor Faraghó to Moscow, which signed a preliminary armistice on 11 October. The regent’s proclamation of 15 October, however, ended in disaster: the Germans were prepared, they kidnapped Horthy’s son, and the Arrow Cross coup brought Szálasi to power. The overwhelming majority of the Hungarian army fought on at Germany’s side. Only a handful of senior officers went over to the other side – among them Béla Miklós, commander of the First Army in the Carpathians, who crossed the front line on 16 October, and the Chief of the General Staff, General János Vörös.

Meanwhile the Red Army was advancing deeper into the country. After the heavy fighting of October (the Battle of Debrecen), the 2nd Ukrainian Front occupied the whole eastern part of the Hungarian Plain, and in November and December it approached Budapest. By 26 December Soviet troops had closed the ring around the capital, and on 29 December, after the deaths of the Soviet envoys, the siege of Budapest began. Almost half the country’s population was already under Soviet occupation, and Moscow needed a Hungarian authority that could conclude an armistice, administer the occupied territory and supply the army.

Debrecen: the assembly and the government

The shape of the new authority was decided in Moscow. At the beginning of December Béla Miklós, Vörös and Faraghó, together with Hungarian communists from the emigration, discussed it in the Soviet capital; the composition of the future cabinet was agreed in an inter-party arrangement under Soviet supervision. On 12 December communist activists arrived in Debrecen from Moscow, among them Ernő Gerő and Imre Nagy. Two days later a preparatory committee was formed, which issued an appeal “To the Hungarian Nation” and called for the selection of delegates.

These were not elections in the ordinary sense. Delegates were chosen by mass meetings and by the national committees that sprang up in towns and villages after the Red Army arrived, often under communist influence. According to Hungarian studies, some 1.5 million people took part in the selection in some form, although nearly five million were then living under Soviet rule. The Provisional National Assembly met on 21 December 1944 in the oratory of the Reformed College in Debrecen – the same city in which Kossuth’s revolutionary parliament had sat in 1849. Of the 230–231 delegates, 90 belonged to the Hungarian Communist Party, 56 to the Independent Smallholders’ Party, 43 to the Social Democratic Party, 16 to the National Peasant Party and 13 to the Civic Democratic Party, while a dozen or so were non-party. The assembly proclaimed itself the sole embodiment of the sovereignty of the Hungarian state. Béla Zsedényi, a non-party law professor from Miskolc, was elected its chairman.

The next day, 22 December, the assembly elected a 23-member political committee, which formed a government that same day. Its composition was carefully balanced. Béla Miklós became prime minister, János Vörös minister of defence and Gábor Faraghó minister of food supply – three colonel generals, the highest rank in the Hungarian army, who in October had heeded Horthy’s call for a ceasefire. Their names were meant to persuade the officers and men still fighting on the German side, as well as the population of western Hungary, that the new authority was not exclusively communist. Count Géza Teleki, son of the former prime minister Pál Teleki, also joined the government as minister of religion and education.

The parties received a few ministries each. The communists took agriculture (Imre Nagy), trade (József Gábor) and social welfare (Erik Molnár). The Smallholders got foreign affairs (János Gyöngyösi) and finance (István Vásáry), the Social Democrats justice (Ágoston Valentiny) and industry (Ferenc Takács). The ministry most important for the future – the interior – went to Ferenc Erdei of the National Peasant Party, a politician close to the communists. Control of the police and the administration was to be of enormous importance in the years that followed. In December 1944 itself, however, only three of the twelve ministers were communists, and the prime minister was a general who as recently as 1941 had received the Knight’s Cross from the Germans for the campaign in Ukraine.

The declaration of war

The government’s first task was to take Hungary out of the war on Germany’s side. As early as 23 December the cabinet approached the Soviet side about an armistice and appointed ministers Gyöngyösi and Vörös to negotiate. The Allies, however, required – as they had earlier of Romania and Bulgaria – that Hungary not only stop fighting the USSR but also take up arms against Germany. Romania had declared war on the Third Reich immediately after the coup of 23 August, and Bulgaria on 8 September, the day the Red Army entered its territory. For Hungary this was a condition for opening armistice talks.

On 28 December 1944 the Provisional National Government resolved to declare war on Germany and asked the Allied powers for a ceasefire. The background was obvious: since March 1944 the country had been under German occupation, in October the Germans had overthrown the regent, and Hungary had become a battlefield. The gesture was above all of political and legal significance. The Debrecen government had no army it could send against the Wehrmacht; most Hungarian divisions were still fighting under German orders, and tens of thousands of soldiers had already been taken prisoner by the Soviets. The first Hungarian units on the Soviet side – among them volunteers from Buda – did not go into action until 1945, and then only on a small scale. For Moscow, however, the declaration mattered: it made it possible to present the occupied territory as a country allied with the anti-Hitler coalition and to burden it with obligations towards the Red Army.

Two governments, two wars

For several months, therefore, Hungary was formally at war on both sides of the front. Szálasi’s government did not recognise Debrecen, and its offices were scattered across western Hungary. On 21 December, the day the assembly opened, the “Leader of the Nation” himself moved his seat from Farkasgyepű in the Bakony Forest to Kőszeg near the Austrian border. Hungarian divisions defended Budapest and western Hungary alongside the Germans, and in the besieged capital Arrow Cross militias were murdering Jews on the banks of the Danube. The provisional government, by contrast, had authority only where the Red Army stood, and could do little about the violence of Soviet soldiers against civilians, the requisitioning, or the deportation of thousands of Hungarians for forced labour in the USSR. It was a government recognised by the Allies, but dependent on the Soviet command in every practical matter.

Place in the war

The declaration of war opened the way to an armistice. A delegation of the provisional government – Gyöngyösi, Vörös and the state secretary István Balogh – flew to Moscow and there, on 20 January 1945, signed an armistice agreement with the USSR, Great Britain and the United States. Hungary returned to its frontiers of 31 December 1937, losing the gains of the Vienna Awards and its acquisitions in Yugoslavia; it undertook to field divisions to fight Germany and to pay 300 million dollars in reparations – two-thirds to the USSR and the rest to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Implementation of the armistice was overseen by an Allied Control Commission under the Soviet chairmanship of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. Fighting on Hungarian territory continued until April 1945: Budapest fell in February, and the last German units left the country after the failed offensive at Lake Balaton. Szálasi fled to Austria, was handed over to Hungary and executed in March 1946.

In the spring of 1945 Béla Miklós’s government moved to ruined Budapest, carried out a land reform and prepared parliamentary elections. In November 1945 they were won decisively by the Independent Smallholders’ Party, and Zoltán Tildy became prime minister. Communist control of the interior ministry and the police, together with the presence of Soviet troops, nevertheless allowed Mátyás Rákosi’s party gradually to seize power in 1947–1949. The government formed in Debrecen and its declaration of war on Germany ended Hungary’s participation in the war on Hitler’s side, but at the same time ushered in a period of Soviet domination that determined the country’s fate for decades to come.