Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
‘FABULOUS’ IN HUNGARY - Sympathetic journalism
FABULOUS SPY GAMES available on his work as an agent prior to 1956, but he was approached as early as November and tasked with making contact with people of Hungarian origin working for western intelligence agencies operating in Vienna.353 After 1960, the most important task assigned to Rojkó, reporting under the cover name of ‘Reményi’, was to keep Emil Hoffmann and his contacts under surveillance; he primarily gained their trust as a journalist, but he would also assist them now and then in making business deals. 353 ÁBTL 3.1.5. O-12344/7-a p. 240 Recommendation, 12 July 1963 354 ÁBTL 3.1.5. O-12344/7-a p. 168 Report, 9 July 1963 355 Robin - Schwanitz 2014, p. 14-15 In 2015, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressly stated at the World Zionist Congress that Hitler had originally only wanted to chase Jews away from Germany. It was the Grand Mufti who talked him out of this option, reasoning that all these exiled people would flee to Palestine. His statement sparked widespread outrage all over the world. With help from Rojkó, Hoffmann introduced two friends of his to Hungarian economic and political circles: Gerhard Grützmacher and Gustav Meissner. Both had Nazi records. Grützmacher, who had been visiting Hungary since 1963, told Rojkó that “he had been a member of Hitlers personal guards from 1933, although he was not that zealous a Nazi.”354 He worked in close cooperation with ‘Fabulous’ and they were committed to supporting developing countries with the intention of establishing economic ties with the Comecon countries to that end. It was often easier to penetrate the markets of developing nations through socialist countries, as we saw with the example of the Kenyan coffee business, so it was probably this incentive and Hungarian foreign trade politics receptive to re-exporting that led them to try their luck with their enterprises in Hungary. But it was not only intermediary trade they wished to connect to, they also wished to bring in orders to Hungarian industry. Although “he was not a Nazi”, Grützmacher already had close ties to the men of the infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in the 1960s. According to recent research, the Grand Mufti played a major role in Hitler’s decision to exterminate Jews.355 Husseini actually participated actively in persecuting and killing Jews: In 1943, for example, he recruited the Muslim corps of the Waffen SS in Bosnia personally, a unit that slaughtered 1,000 people at Crvenka, Serbia, 132
