Hungarian Troops in World War II: The Bitter Truth of Archival Documents and an Attempt at Revision

Abstract

This study analyses how Hungarian historiography reflects the revision of the results of the Great Patriotic War. From the position of the ideas of totalitarianism, Hungarian historian Krisztián Ungváry equals the roles of Nazi Germany and the USSR played in World War II, thus equating the two regimes. A number of Hungarian historians distort the role of the Hungarian occupation army in the genocide on Soviet territory and falsify the history of the partisan war, ignoring the peculiar annihilative character of the Nazi war in the East. Ungváry completely overlooks the fundamental differences between the fates of German and Soviet prisoners of war. This study aims to provide a brief overview of the reasons for this distorted approach. The second part of the publication mostly focuses on the falsification of sources and the neglect of objective statistics. The neglect of documents from Russian archives in national Hungarian historiography, caused by misunderstood patriotism, is capable of not only splitting public opinion but is also very distant from the principles of academic scholarship.