Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 19. From the Successes of Revision to German and Russian Occupation (1938-1945). István Ihász

Every responsible, thinking member of interwar Hungarian society strove with every nerve in their body that the country succeed in a revision of the Trianon decision through peaceful means. After the great economic crisis following the short period of stability, this involuntarily channelled the factors, individuals and parties that defined politics, as well as Hungarian economic life, into certain ideologies. As Germany, a comrade in misfortune similarly mutilated by the Versailles Treaty, offered the only serious receiving market, the relationship between the two countries became tighter both in terms of foreign policy and the economic sphere. As a result of the above, there also began a kind of modernisation, primarily in branches of industry producing consumer items, the food industry and a few specialised industries (radio, motor train, electric bulbs), though branches whose development demanded capital stagnated. This upward-arching tendency was a part of the military economic activity which in Hungary was signalled by the announcement of the Győr Armaments Scheme (in 1938), which put an end to unemployment and which was designed to balance the tenfold strength of the Small Entente states. It was then that the balance in leading political circles between German and British-FrenchItalian orientation began to deteriorate, and when it began to be evident that partial success after twenty years of endeavour was thanks to German and Italian expansive diplomacy. At this time Europe was in a fever at the economic and military successes of German fascism. This state system did away with pluralism just as the Soviet experiment had, but the strength of the state was able to handle economic and social tension, formed protectionist measures for the workforce, through its massive building plans created mass employment and so on. The traditional Hungarian political elite, the leading role of which was only seemingly intact, in practice was increasingly compelled into compromise with this new Germany, now a great power and in the face of the rapidly growing might of the domestic extreme rightist National Socialist and Arrow-Cross movements. The latter of these was increasingly loud in its announcement that the answer to social tension was the solution of the "Jewish question". After the absorption of Austria in 1938, and under the ideological influence of fascist Germany, now directly upon our doorstep, a kind of identity crisis arose among and toward the ethnic Germans and Jews who had settled in previous centuries and who had been assimilated into middle-class national progress: some of the former turned against the interests of their chosen homeland and in establishing the Volksbund embarked upon their activities as Germany's fifth column. Meanwhile, attempts were made to expel the strongly assimilated Jewry from the national framework through racist, exclusion laws. Although deportation had already begun in the neighbouring states, official policy did not yet call for the expatriation of its Jewish citizens, but their rights became considerably limited as a result of and in order to reduce external German and internal extreme rightist pressure (1938, 1939, 1941).