Papers and Documents relating to the Foreign Relations of Hungary, Volume 2, 1921 (Budapest, 1946)

Editor's foreword In English

XV yet for the time being it still seemed questionable as to when and how the Soviet Union, the principal ideological adversary of Nazism, would assume its part in overthrowing Hitlerism — the Soviet Union, which the Western Powers had excluded from the settlement of Central European questions even at the time of the Czech crisis and the Munich agreement. From the outlines of the world coalition and from their own appreciation of the situation, the editors of this work were enabled to draw the logical conclusion that it would not be Germany which would dictate the post-war settlement. In the publication of this book, the underlying idea was that it was not German diplomatic, political and scientific circles, not German public opinion, which should be informed about Hungarian problems which would evidently arise again after the second world-war, but the opposite camp, the coalition whose mission was to put an end to the imperialism of the totalitarian powers in the interests of world peace. It was thus that this collection of documents published by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs appeared principally in the English language (all the documents in the Hungarian language in the archives of the Ministry were published in English translation)

, in spite of the fact that in the meantime the war had broken out and that Hungary was under increasing German pressure. The only concession as regards language was that documents in other generally-known languages, French, German and Italian, were left in their original texts. When the Germans expressed their surprise at the publication being in English, it was replied at the suggestion of the editors, that English being the most widely-spoken language, this would make it accessible to the greatest number of readers. When the first volume appeared it was planned that the succeeding ones should be published annually, so that the Hungarian diplomatic documents would appear regularly after an interval of some twenty years. It was unfortunately impossible to keep to this arrangement, because with the outbreak of war personal contact between the two editors of the first volume became impracticable, correspondence at first difficult and uncertain and later impossible, so that the collection of part of the material for this volume fell to the undersigned alone. This not only meant considerable additional work as a result of it being impossible to divide the work between the two editors, as was done in the case of the first volume, but in the course of the work of collecting and selecting the material it emerged that the year 1921