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' IN HUNGARY from among the Hungarian forced labourers sent off from the mines at Bor, Serbia, In a Forced March356 to Germany.357 Dr Sayyid E Imam worked in Berlin as the Grand Mufti s representative before and during the war, and represented the powerful Muslim leader in Damascus in the 1960s, assigning Grützmacher to order 150 Ikarus buses from Budapest to Syria.358 356 Reference to the poem by Miklós Radnóti, “Erőltetett Menet”. One of Hungary’s most famous and popular poets, Miklós Radnóti was sent into forced labour after the German occupation in May 1944, to a labour camp near the Serbian town of Bor. With the Soviets approaching, the forced labourers were sent on a march in September towards Germany, under cruel conditions. The 35-year-old poet did not survive the march, and succumbed to the inhumane conditions near Győr. He wrote the poem “In a Forced March” while in Serbia. 357 For more on the fate of the forced labourers in Bor, see: Csapody 2014 János Nyerges was kept prisoner in and escaped from the camp at Bor, although his name was not included in the cited book, perhaps precisely because he escaped. It is interesting that a business relationship was established barely two decades later to further the interests of the surviving former forced labourer and those of the anti-Semite Grand Mufti. 358 ÁBTL 3.1.5. O-12344/7-a p. 175 Report, 22 July 1963 As one of the well-known propagandists of Hitlers Germany, Gustav Meissner was regarded in the 1940s as the most dangerous man in Denmark and had a direct interest in the coffee business of the company Rothfos mentioned previously. By the 1960s, however, he too was transformed into a ‘businessman and became a representative of Rothfos, which re-exported coffee to West Germany through Hungary. From the early 1960s, he travelled to Hungary on a regular basis as Emil Hoffmanns direct colleague. He and Hoffmann not only struck business deals together but also operated a joint newspaper publisher. As with Hoffmann, it was Meissner s self-published magazine that was one of the trumps that made Hungarian party leadership tolerate for years that he visited the country regularly. Making Kádár presentable overrode anything and everything else at a time when the old-new regime was eager to pursue a path of consolidation after the bloody retributions were over and done with. To achieve this, they did not shy away from using former Nazi officers accused of war crimes to build up their good reputation, right at a time when the Hungarian people who had fought for democracy and freedom in a revolution labelled a ‘fascist rebellion were brought to trial by the thousands as ‘fascist vermin. This 133
